SOPA, PIPA and The Business 

Posted on by Fiona

Today, January 18, is a day of widespread Internet blackouts to oppose Protect IP Act and Stop Online Privacy Act, PIPA and SOPA in the US. Just about every post from every country in my RSS reader this morning is discussing this topic. Global Voices has a particularly good post on the issues, and importantly, the post is available in 6 different languages.

I recently returned from vacation, including a week in Los Angeles. I attended a TV show taping, visited Warner Bros studios, hung out at the Santa Monica pier (as seen in any number of TV shows), went to the movies, and spent much of the week on buses and trains reading The War for Late Night by Bill Carter. I am an unashamed fan of The Business. And a librarian who believes in equitable access to information, globally, to all.

One of the most interesting aspects of Carter’s book is the idea of Late Night being a symbol of the problems in media: the divide between the television business as it has always been, tied to ratings and advertising dollars, and new business, embracing a new on-demand, timeshifting culture:

“For Conan, the change he had made in his career had taken on the trappings of religious conversion. He had seen the future; there was no going back. “Everybody is facing the complete transformation of our business,” he said. “You can resist and fight it or you can go with it. I’m saying go with it. Let’s see where this goes.” (Carter, p. 404)

The Hollywood Reporter posted an astonishing article on Monday, Why Hollywood Is Losing the Public Relations War on Piracy (Analysis). The article is a surprisingly honest critique of how media companies have got it wrong in framing the debate on copyright infringement. An argument we hear most is that downloading costs jobs in Hollywood, yet:

“Making an argument on jobs might seem like a winning political one in a tough economic climate. But increasingly, the tech sector is seen as the engine of economic growth in this nation. Hollywood’s estimates of piracy’s economic damage have been picked apart by observers, but more importantly, arguing about the economic sufferings of one industry sector rings hollow as another industry sector thrives.”

We are beginning to see fractures in the PIPA/SOPA debate – former supporters jumping across to oppose the proposed bills, and Internet media companies not joining forces with the big studios. Beyond this issue, there is a larger shift with more shows making clips and full shows available online. Had The X-Files been around now, maybe we wouldn’t have spent all our time in the 90s defending websites against Cease and Desist notices *

Perhaps we need to broaden to who and how we lobby and engage on these issues. Seeing the debate as openness vs big business isn’t productive. We now see some individual shows, agents, and artists embracing the Internet as a way to build audiences, and new sources of advertising revenue. Is there a role for librarians in this? If your library has a celebrity or author champion, or READ posters, it might be interesting to know if they are aware of this proposed legislation, and their position on it. Reach out, and start talking.

 

* I had a very popular fansite in the late 90s. There is debate about whether it actually impacted a minor storyline on the show. It was featured in Yahoo! Internet Life magazine, the Official X-Files Magazine, and a number of newspapers. None of those publications still exist, nor does the website.

Why “What I didn’t learn in library school” doesn’t really matter, with a caveat 

Posted on by Fiona

Librarians are very good at making lists, especially of all the things that we did not learn at library school.

LIS curricula is a special interest for me – I work on projects in a number of countries where LIS is dated or simply non-existent, and I am interested in how they can develop researchers and modern curricula. Earlier this year, I met with groups of LIS students at two different schools in the US to hear more about their hopes and fears as they were about to join our profession. And I have also been in library school more times than most, graduating with three LIS qualifications. This year I’ve also been on the other side, doing some sessional work at my alma mater.

I’ve seen a number of trends come and go already in my time in the profession. Remember when we were all encouraged to learn how to code, or get MBAs to learn marketing and how to make libraries leaner and more entrepreneurial? Or when academic librarians were required to have a second degree? (Although this still mostly applies at some universities in the US).

The issue with library school, as I see it, is that there is such an endless combination of topics and specialisms that could be offered, if only for time, money, student numbers, and hindsight. There will always be more to learn. There will always be content that while in school, seemed relevant – but then times change, or you move into a different aspect of library work and you need something different.

Librarianship is the ultimate extensible profession. We have been given the knowledge and tools to learn for ourselves throughout our career. Whatever you are doing now, you may not be doing in 5 years time.

This is not to say that I think library school doesn’t need updating or to adapt regularly – it does. Make the most of your time while you are there, but once you graduate, the rest is up to you, with some help from your employer. Learn from other disciplines if the topic you want is not offered in library school. Attend short courses. Go to conferences. Follow research in different disciplines. Listen to podcasts or iTunesU. Make your own learning.

A caveat. There is one topic that is becoming central to the way libraries operate, and which I would like to see more curricula devoted to: licensing and its impact on access to information in libraries. Will libraries continue to purchase content in the future, or just license? How can librarians at every level advocate for equitable access when acquiring materials? How can we improve our understanding of licenses and develop stronger negotiation skills? While licensing is the ‘now’ topic, underneath this are fundamentals critical to being a successful librarian at any time: advocacy, negotiation, equitable access.

So long as you have grounding in the fundamentals, everything else can be built from there. We have a great, flexible profession. Make it yours.

Systems/layers: research and writing workflow 

Posted on by Fiona

Meredith has a great post on her research workflow over at Information Wants to Be Free. My research needs are a little different now that I am no longer working in an academic library. When I had access to scholarly databases everyday from my desktop, I was reading the literature far more regularly than I do now, and in a more systematic way. I was writing for publication more then, too. Yet with a major project coming to the end of its first stage next year, there will be a lot of writing to do on methods, impact, and results for a variety of publications. To get prepared, like Meredith I’ve been working on systems and processes to do this in an efficient way.

Workflow: Notes, draft text, calls for papers -> Scrivener. Web clippings and references -> Zotero. Mobile reading -> import Zotero references to Mendeley. Produce finalised article: ?

Scrivener I recently purchased Scrivener to manage all my writing projects in 2012. In addition to articles for the literature, I will also be writing a number of presentations and web content. Scrivener will allow me to write in small chunks so that I can easily reuse and rearrange content.

Zotero I have used Zotero to generate references for previous publications, but in recent years my library has become scattered, full of duplicates, broken links, and unsorted content. You can see the sorry mess at my Zotero user page. I undertook a project recently to reorganise everything but it is a slow process. Like many librarians, I have broad interests, and so my references range from UX to design, economics, development, and so on.

Mendeley I have been syncing Zotero to Mendeley so that I can use the iPad app, but while my Zotero library is so disorganised this is less than productive. I do really like Mendeley’s auto-renaming feature, fantastic for all those databases that think 1.pdf is a good filename. Zotero has this feature too, via a plugin, but it’s not as neat as Mendeley.

I rarely annotate PDFs, but I do have GoodReader and Mendeley installed on my iPad. I do use the highlights feature in Kindle. Quotes and additional references often end up in Evernote.

I had heard it said in the past that the sign of a good research paper is mostly original content, with fewer references as you keep writing and moving towards more original content in your papers. I have found this in my work – my first conference paper had about 30 references (!), my most recent journal article 5. On the flip side, I find this means I lack a good system for finding and reading new research not only to use in future papers, but just for current awareness. Here Twitter joins my workflow, as I follow users like DFID_Research (R4D) to pick up new papers on development topics.

What I am unsure of yet is how all of this will come together when I sit down to write next year. It strikes me that there are too many tools in my workflow. In the past, I have produced articles with Word and Zotero in a fairly linear process. With Scrivener in the mix, and not having tested the reference manager support option yet, I am not sure at which point I will have to jump out of these tools and over to Word. 52 Tiger discusses this problem.

A good topic for discussion, Meredith! I’d be interested to hear how people keep everything organised over time. I find it difficult to stay disciplined enough to tag every new item and to correct the metadata before something is filed away.

Gender and the semantic web 

Posted on by Fiona

Not including cancelled talks, 100%ofall #swib11 speakers are male with ~1/3 female participants Congrats to #gender #fail :-( via @nichtich
@nopiedra on a conference in Germany on semantic web in libraries.

I don’t want to overly criticize this conference, as I don’t have more information about it than this tweet. I am not the kind of woman to go around counting the number of women presenting at conferences. However, strategies to be inclusive of gender, new professionals and newbies (to new concepts) are a good thing in my book. Diversity is important, especially when it comes to emerging concepts and practices in the profession. I see this in my day job, working with library communities around the world to communicate better and to be more inclusive.

This blog has really fallen off the semantic web/linked data track, mostly because my interests have changed but also because keeping up was becoming a challenge. My strongest interest lies in working to communicate ideas, technology and practices in a way that is engaging to non-techies, and new professionals. I enjoyed the pieces I wrote for FUMSI, Library Journal, and Internet Librarian International on these topics a couple of years ago, and of course this blog.

Reader, perhaps this is just the kind of motivation I needed to get back into the topics that started this blog in the first place.