More things about library work, plus bonus! copyright issues!

Shall we talk a bit more about libraries? I know you're always so interested to peer behind the curtain and see the discussions going on, between professionals, between professionals and the public, and between the public and the public about the fate and future points of the library. And it's not just about the foibles of e-books, either.

For those of us still looking for work, or recently out of work, or recently out of school and looking for work, a plea from those on the search committee to stop and take time to craft a good cover letter, as doing so will make you stand out from the other candidates, many of whom have done sloppy cut-and-paste jobs, are talking about things not related to the job they're applying for, or are otherwise disqualifying themselves from the job and making it so they don't get to an interview. For some examples of what got someone at least to the interview stage, Open Cover Letters is offering, with details redacted so that personally identifiable information doesn't appear.

Seperendipity is not quantifiable, or why Statistics, no matter how well kept, will always only provide Lies, and occasionally Damned Lies, about what happens in a library. (The idea of adding narrative is an interesting one. Maybe we should try it out here where I am.)

A grizzled and embattled veteran of administration and the trenches shows how Corporate Culture and Status Quo are wrecking, trashing, and otherwise crushing the dreams of those who enter the profession with idealism and theory, and while she's fought to a satisfying conclusion and winning more of the battles than not, I don't think everyone manages to get to that point in their own job. Organizational Inertia is a hope-killer all by itself, and if you've got the wrong kind of manager or management system, that only adds more onto the pile.

Librarians and libraries should be looking toward the future, even as they struggle with that crushing Inertia that wants them to stay where they are and keep doing what they do. A set of eight articles, with diverse viewpoints about the future of libraries, many of which have been linked to elsewhere and will be discussed further down this posting.

For example, look at how many other services do at least some part of what a library does. What does a library do when several tools are available to have readers figure out what they want to read next? Those algorithms are improving every day, too, and not just in books - Netflix offered a prize for anyone who could demonstrate an improvement to their recommendation process that improved accuracy and fit by 10 percent. At least two teams (I think) met the threshold, and the better team won the prize. And there are also the factions, jockeying for position and each proclaiming their way is the True Way out of the darkness and into continued relevance. As with anything where there are opinions to be evaluated or money to be made, though, recognize that the lenses you are viewing the world through are tinged with colors, rose or otherwise - ones that suit the manufacturer and promoter of those lenses and not necessarily the person looking through them. Or ones that are really blinders, tailoring themselves so as only to let through things that reinforce what the viewer already believes in or shows interest in.

You can have people telling us that our devotion to certain formats are becoming more obsolete with time, and that we haven't been able to leverage ourselves into the new formats, either, on the way to explaining that when the great value of a library is that it has things available locally, the advent of being able to obtain a permanent copy of information and entertainment from anywhere in the world at the speed of a download is going to screw you badly. The suggestion there is for the library to remake itself into being the place where unique things, relevant to the community, are produced, stored, and then served to the wider world, so that when it becomes trivially easy to access anything produced (commercially or not), in whatever format your device reads, the library still has purpose. (And there will still always be that part of a library that serves the people who can't or don't join up with the digital train, but they will become increasingly smaller as devices get better and cheaper. Until then, we have bootstrap tools to get people into the world.)

For example, negotiating a deal such that the library can own and distribute content to its users on the library's terms, not the vendor's (It's what you do after you Just Say No to Freegal or another such thing.) Or trying to stay away from an appeal to sentimentality about what the library was and focusing on what the library is and will be, when pitching the case for continued funding. Or having less space for stacks and more space to access database resources (hopefully owned, rather than leased).

We can take a look at some people talking in fields related to the library, and see how their ideas might apply to our own field. We can test the hypothesis that search is what everyone uses, even on a library website, and see whether or not it's true.

We can do this, assuming that we don't decide to spike the message by piking the messenger(s) or sticking our fingers in our ears and shouting how much we don't want to hear criticism from the outside. (Both links agree with this idea, and are not examples of the kinds of conversations or behaviors to avoid, by the way.) Instead, we could be changing the definitions of what it means to be learning or a learning organization such that we actually can keep up with the trends, experiment a bit, and run a fully successful library, rather than having a couple days a year to get all that knowledge crammed into our heads for us to promptly forget.

And just for fun, here at the end (bravo, you!), explaining an e-reader to someone such as Mr. Charles Dickens, and The CDC uses a zombie outbreak to make a point about emergency preparedness.

Oh, one more thing. a clear and affirmative poster describing rules in the library. We can all do something like that, can't we?

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A sidenote, but one of importance, as it involves a question that many of us brush up against in out lives as artist, remixers, and content adapters and creators. The setup - Kind of Bloop, a chiptune-flavored remix of the tunes on the Miles Davis album Kind of Blue. The project comes through with funding, all is good, and then... the person holding the copyright for a photograph that was the inspiration for the cover of the Kind of Bloop album sued the Kind of Bloop project for copyright infringement. The album cover in question is a pixel-art, de-resolutioned version of the iconic photograph gracing the cover of the Kind of Blue album. (The musical covers themselves had been licensed from the copyright holders) The producer of the album settled out of court for $32,500, a far cry from the hundreds of thousands of dollars in damages sought by the rights holder for the DMVA infringement claimed, but still, more than most people are worth at any given time. This is why it's so easy for rights cabals to collect settlements from those they accuse of infringement - the fines for not being able to defend it will bankrupt someone, period. Thus, there's already a perverse incentive to settle on any claimed infringement rather than go through with it.

But wait - what about fair use? Well, fair use is not strictly defined. There are some tests for it, based on court decisions, which entail examining:

• The purpose and character of your use: Was the material transformed into something new or copied verbatim? Also, was it for commercial or educational use?
• The nature of the copyrighted work
• The amount and substantiality of the portion taken
• The effect of the use upon the potential market

The hinge appears to be on "transformative". At what point is a new work sufficiently transformative from an old work as to qualify for fair use? Well, nobody knows. You have to do it, and then get sued for it, to find out.

As it later turns out, even had he asked for permission to pixelate the picture, the person holding the copyright would have refused, considering it a corruption of his pure photograph. Which is hiss right to do, even if it makes him appear more of a [bad word] than otherwise for saying so.

And a lot of this wouldn't be an issue if we didn't keep getting copyright term extensions every time some famous icon is about to have their copyright expire. On the original term, it's likely the photo would have been in the public domain, and the whole problem would have been avoided.

So, what do you know about copyright and what exemptions you have to it? And isn't it about time that we stopped having to decide matters of fair use solely by suits, threats thereof, and court cases?

And then, the regular news post - 5-9 July 02011

Greetings! Up top, some helpful things about us humans that might help us avoid chaos in our lives - identify those small things that, if gone undone, result in chaos spilling outward...and then make sure all the little things get done. Avoid Keystone Demise. (Which I am not very good at at all.) If, however, you're easily distractable (like we are), there may be some tools to help keep someone focused on their computer. Very useful for writers or others who really need to get tasks done and avoid the siren song of other places.

Wonkette provides us with pictures of someone claiming the Tea Party Label selling shirts that proudly declare the wearer a racist. The intent, I'm sure, is to skewer the idea that Tea Partiers are predominantly white and like to do things like hand effigies of the President, but I'm not sure that "racist" is a term that can be reclaimed like that.

Out in the world today, After revelations of their illegal actions in hacking a telephone and deleting voice mail messages, along with a laundry list of other illegal activities, the owner of the News of the World has announced it will be closing. This does not necessarily mean he will escape charges for his role in the malfeasance and deeds of his subordinates.

Domestically, after a court puts its foot down on the matter of immediate repeal of Don't Ask, Don't Tell, the Pentagon says they'll suspend its enforcement. Considering that, theoretically, there's still the repeal coming down the pike, why doesn't the Pentagon say "Convenient excuse, we're not challenging it, and everyone who complains, we'll blame the courts"?

The state of Texas executed a citizen of Mexico charged and convicted of a capital offense without allowing the Mexican citizen consular access, a violation of treaties the United States is a signatory to. This being Texas, where the governor has given voice to the idea of secession from the Union and is a frequent Tenther and is polling quite well for the Republicans in 2012, despite not running for the office, this is not, perhaps, unexpected, but the potential damage done to United States citizens in other countries is significant. Furthermore, the Supreme Court split 5-4 along ideological grounds on staying the execution, with the five conservatives allowing it to proceed despite the lack of consular access. Now, there is an excuse to deny consular access to U.S. citizens in countries that would appreciate having the excuse. The conservative movement seems more than ready to assert American exceptionalism in all the wrong ways, including the conservatives on the court.

The dangers of allowing the police to raid first and then justify their arrests later - a religious practitioner gets raided on suspicion of drugs, is arrested for possessing things that are legal to possess. If they can't get you on what they came for, they'll try to get you on something else and justify it later.

A study from Cornell University indicates that about half of the people who are using government programs to better their lives (or at least stave off the drowning for a bit) will deny to a researcher's face that they're using government programs. Some of them are tax credits (which count, if you stop and think about it for a bit, because they're financial incentives to get people to do certain socially-beneficial things), but even those on programs where there are clear payouts deny they use government assistance. "Keep your government hands off my Medicare", indeed.

The state of Minnesota is entering its second week of a government shutdown. Budget differences bring it about, and continue to stop either side from coming to a deal. The longer things go along, the more likely the problems are going to get worse. Perhaps to avoid a similar situation, the President indicates his sacred cows are not sacred at all and probably haven't been since he was elected.

Last out, a cult leader and his followers are alleged to have killed a four year old child because they feared he was gay.

In technology, Mr. Scalzi points out the benefits of having your own domain - permanence and persistence in the age of fads is a nice happy thing. Which probably suggests if/when LJ/DW platforms finally go up and/or under, I should have a back-up plan to migrate over to a domain and hosting to continue with the posting.

Dot. Dot. Dot.

Staying in there, however, an interesting post about various ways of "banning" a user non-publically to try and induce them to go somewhere else and stop trolling. In the discussion, opinions about whether those forms are effective and whether or not they give too much power to moderators and other appointed/elected representatives to control the user population.

And then, research indicating that increased on-line social networking is not contributing to a dearth of off-line social networking, and may in fact, be increasing certain types of off-line activism.

The last mission of the Space Shuttle lifted off from Kennedy Space Center in Florida, which will retire the program until the completion of a new rocket and orbiter device, with mission time on the ISS to be done by lifting off with Russian space vessels.

Finally, the Internet knows more about you than you are probably comfortable with, and someone with the right tools and persistence can probably figure out where you are just from what you send for the Internet to work. If you really have to be sure nobody knows where you are, use an anonymizing proxy on every device you have that connects to the Internet, always. And stay off of Facebook - it will introduce privacy-damaging features to you without notifying you and requiring you to opt-out, rather than opt-in.

In opinions, a revisiting - if the government were really serious about putting people back to work and growing the economy, it would reinstate the WPA as FDR did - government employment for people to do jobs that nobody in the private sector wants to do, building things that will last, documenting generations for researchers, and otherwise teaching people trades and skills they can then use when the economy recovers to get employed in the private sector.

Elsewhere, LZ Granderson tells parents to control their children, because all the people around brats and their permissive parents are not amused or enjoying them. A favored method in the United States, spanking, carries several problems around the use of force and children, but is also a method for sending a strong message about life choices.

Mr. Solway puts together many sentences about how much everyone knows the current administrator is an incompetent and that the country is far off the track of greatness...but provides no evidence to support his position. This is the kind of piece that would be red-penned to hell and back for going about it the wrong way in primary school. Similarly, Mr. Prelutsky makes what could be an attack about large expenditures in a down economy into sounding like a petty political and partisan attack because someone else is living better than they are, obscuring his point with large amounts of bitter.

Mr. Sowell makes a small point - reality often has no bearing on talking points and politics - but misses the implications that indicate that point cuts not just against his opponents, but his allies, because the entrenched positions that his allies have are likely as devoid of reality (or are also supported by Statistics in addition to Lies and Damned Lies) and evidence.

Last for tonight, an engaging read about a Christian attempt at a role-playing game that still has the role-playing, but takes all of the good bits and lessons that could be learned from RPGs out in favor of didacticism. To the point where there are no positive effects to doing bad...and really, no way to make a bad choice at all.

Oh, and who owns the copyright on a picture a monkey takes?

Five questions, part two.

alphaviolet asks the following:

1. If you could create a new U.S. political party, what would it be like?

Probably no less ideological than the current contenders, but it would at least be ideologicaly oriented toward, say, not mortgaging the country to special interests, paying off debts and running surpluses, simplifying the laws and the tax codes so as to make it less confusing and less exploitable, codifying the rights of women, children, LGBTQAI people, and other expressions, and trying to basically run it more on common sense and attracting very smart people with a determined public interest. We'd probably call it the Liberal Elites party just to tweak the noses of the people who believe the conutry should be run by people as smart or dumber than they are, just because they hold the same dogmatic beliefs.

I don't know how that translates into a platform. Or maybe I'm cribbing from something like Marxism and jus tweaking some details. Either way, the party would have to have a strong contingent of actually-liberal liberals, just to pull the discussion out of the zone where being a centrist means you're accused of socialism.

2. What's your sense of humor like?

Deadpan and pun-filled. To a lot of other people, I'm playing the straight man who drops in one-upmanship in the pins department or otherwise doesn't react a whole lot. Although, I'm also involved in a lot of physical comedy and big silliness when I'm trying to get other people to laugh, but mostly, my sense of humor appreciates the value of a good pun and the ability of the straight-man role in keeping the joke.

3. What's your favorite website?

Aside from my own blog and social media presences, I don't know if I have a favorite website. I have lots of places where I can go, but they're all equally important.

4. If you had a day in which you could spend time alone and do whatever you wanted, what would you do?

Right now? I'd probably be desperately trying to catch up on all the games I need to play or finish. Or Imight go out and add to my letterbox stamp collection. Or I could read. Lots of possible things. But I don't expect any of those kinds of days to be coming along any time soon.

5. What is your favorite place to spend time outdoors?

I'm not much for "outdoors"-outdoors where there's all the nature and stuff. That said, if I'm going to be in the outdoors, I prefer to be near water. The sound of water on the move is pretty nice, but I also like waterfalls with big thunderous sounds.