We held a nice big party for them today, and I had the chance to grab the mic and present them with a small gift–blank books bound in the original orange carpeting from our library. (Long story, inside joke, you had to be there.)

But before presenting the gift, I couldn’t resist a short speech. Here’s more or less what I said:

Carol and Paul, thank you so much for your work here. I have learned a great deal about leadership from both of you. First, I admire the way you treat all your colleagues with trust and take joy in working with us. Second, I admire the way you keep our mission in mind at all times: to support and enable teaching and learning at this college.

I could have gone on more about this, but I think what I said gets at the heart of what I think a good leader does. With trust and a clear sense of mission, there’s no need to mirco-manage. No need to claim credit or appeal to your own authority.

There’s more to making a good leader than trust and mission, but I’m not sure you can lead without those qualities. They are qualities I hope to cultivate more in myself.

But for today, limericks.

The class had me going back to this great Metafilter thread from 2007 on great poems re-written as limericks.

The site that occasioned the MeFi post has not survived on the web, but what I remember are the Metafilter community contributions in the comments. My favorite one is from “bibliowench” (also known as my wife, Shanon):

In Xanadu, there was this guy
Built a pleasure dome for which to die
It had rivers to Hades
and mad singing ladies
and then – oh man, I am so high

Other favorites of mine from that long thread (which is very mixed, in terms of quality and lulz) are:

The death of a comrade from gas,
Led young Owen to cry out, “Alas,
this is nasty and gory,
there’s nothing of glory,
and Horace talked out of his ass.”

which is by MeFi member Abiezer, and this one from MeFi member Wolfdog:

“Poor Mariner, ruined and wrecked
Are you wiser for taking your trek?”
“Yes, I learned not to cross
Any old albatross
That happens to poop on my deck.”

I couldn’t think of one at the time, but today at lunch I did my version of Auden’s “Musee des Beaux Arts.” If you don’t know it, you may want to read the original poem first–it’s one of my favorites. Here’s my limerick:

Old Breugel got suffering right;
For Christ, crucifixion’s a fright,
But for everyday Joes,
Onward life slowly goes.
Icarus’ flight and his plight? Out of sight.

If you’d like to play along, dear reader, I welcome your efforts in the comments here.

Various companies have reported that most e-books are still being read on laptop and desktop computers, and there are a lot of people who aren’t going to be able to afford to buy a new gadget anytime soon—among them, myself. I also think it’s important not to assume that everyone who uses the iOS has an always-on Internet connection. The digital divide is real, and it’s growing wider, not narrower, as far as I know. I’d hate to see books fall into it and not make it back out.

This makes me think that the digital divide may or may not be growing wider, but it’s growing more granular. As more and more aspects of our culture have a digital dimension, there are more and more ways to get confused, fall behind, and so on. And as more technology assumes an always-on or always-connected state to be the natural state, it becomes easier to have digital cracks in the sidewalk to jump over if you aren’t willing or able to pay for that kind of connectivity.

That’s not to take attention away from the real digital divide, when a lack of access to or proficiency with technology affects a person’s life on a basic level in terms of employment or participation in political, cultural, or social spheres. But it’s interesting to think of the digital divide as having not a long tail but a great middle.

[Also, the rest of the India, Ink. post, E-reading application showdown, part 1: Annotations, is interesting in a somewhat different way, as she charts out the different ways that many of the more popular e-reading applications handle annotations, and what that means for the reading experience.]

Ipswich, Mass. — June 2, 2011 — EBSCO Publishing (EBSCO) and The H.W. Wilson Company (Wilson) have merged in what is being viewed by the companies as an ideal match. This combination of organizations will allow the strengths of each to benefit existing and forthcoming products & services.

Instructions to libraries:

1. Put all your eggs in one basket.
2. Put all your money in that same basket.
3. That probably wasn’t all your money, was it? Put more money in the basket.
4. Realize that maybe you are interested in other things besides those eggs in that basket.
5. Realize that you can’t afford new eggs if all the money plus most of the rest of the money is already in the basket.
6. Realize that they aren’t your eggs anymore, if they ever were.

At the core of Agrippa is a long poem by science fiction author, William Gibson. The poem appeared only as a computer program on a floppy disk. When run, the program would display the poem scrolling slowly up the screen. The reader had no way to pause, stop, or go back. Once the poem had ended, the computer program would erase the disk, destroying itself.

As with all works of art, the intentions of Gibson and his collaborators are open to interpretation. It seems highly unlikely, though, that they were trying out a new business model for selling electronic books to libraries.

HarperCollins isn’t so avant-garde as Gibson and Agrippa–their e-books will self destruct after 26 checkouts rather than one.

Librarians, particularly librarians at public libraries, are not happy about this. An eBook User’s Bill of Rights has been drafted and widely circulated. There’s talk of boycotts. There’s a hashtag, #hcod for “HarperCollins, OverDrive,” with OverDrive being the ebook distributor for HarperCollins e-books.

A month ago, prompted by an earlier discussion of publisher’s views on digital rights management (DRM) and ebooks, I asked Library Society of the World members to consider a thought experiment:

You are an executive at one of the largest trade publishers in the world, Harper & PenguinMifflin House. The CEO wants a vision of DRM & library circulation of ebooks for 2021 that is both realistic and optimized for the publisher’s interest. Go.

Eventually, I answered my own question. You can read it on FriendFeed, but I wanted to repost it here so I’d have it on my blog (with minor edits). Here’s my hypothetical executive in 2021:

For our average trade publication, we can’t live without DRM, or every reader’s club in the world would buy a maximum of one copy. Forget smash YA hits, since teens are notoriously casual about copyright. We could look to deflect criticism and resentment by outsourcing the implementation and policing to an industry organization as the music labels have done with the RIAA (with much success). I’d rather see us work with retailers and consumers to come up with DRM which is only evident when someone is trying to make an unapproved copy, and which seems fair to the average person. I also think that it wouldn’t kill our company to try other approaches with new authors, niche audiences, and so on.

As for libraries, I think once we get the DRM figured out, the library strategy will fall into place. Right now, I envision smaller libraries paying per-use (i.e., per “checkout”), while larger libraries will want to just have a flat yearly payment for unlimited access. We can calibrate the per-use payment to ensure we meet revenue goals, so that bestsellers might circulate at a discount while other new and specialty books may be at a premium. It will be important that we make our books available on many types of devices to maximize circulations. We will need to work closely with libraries to prevent abuse by their patrons–smaller libraries will be highly motivated to comply to avoid incurring per-use charges from people outside their service areas; larger libraries will have no such disincentive. Perhaps library cards will need to be regulated more closely, like state IDs.

My friend, Marianne, had a different, more hopeful take on the subject which you can read on that FriendFeed thread or on her LiveJournal. I hope that Marianne’s vision is closer to the truth, but I fear that my vision is.

HarperCollins posted an Open Letter to Librarians on their suddenly ironically-titled blog, “Library Love Fest.” OverDrive also responded publicly with A message from OverDrive on HarperCollins’ new eBook licensing terms.

Comments on the OverDrive post often start or end with “thank you.” Comments on the HarperCollins post tend to include words like “absurd,” “destroy,” “greed,” and “unrealistic.”

It’s quite a coup for HarperCollins to seem more absurd to librarians than Overdrive.

I read (or at least skimmed) Nicolas Negroponte’s book Being Digital when it was published in 1995. I remember little of it, but his hard and sharp distinction between atoms and bits is something I still think about often. When you are dealing with atoms, you are dealing with physical items that have mass and volume and need to be shipped and have a cost of manufacture for each item. With bits, you are talking about information which has virtually no mass or volume, and the price of duplication and distribution rounds down to nothing.

Historically, publishers had to balance their interest in atoms and bits, in paper objects and information or expressions of ideas. As Robert Darnton says in his classic essay “What is the History of Books?”, “Little is known about the way books reached bookstores from printing shops. The wagon, the canal barge, the merchant vessel, the post office, and the railroad may have influenced the history of literature more than one would suspect.”

When we start to deal with books primarily as bits, we realize that many of the conventional ideas and expectations for books fall away. We assume that it makes sense to loan someone a book and then have them return it. We assume that if we want many people to be able to read a popular book simultaneously, we need to buy mulitiple copies of that same book. We assume that books last a certain amount of time, given normal use. We assume that we pay for a book once, after which it becomes our property to do with as we please. We assume that there is a period where a book is in print where we can purchase it from the publisher, and then ever after the book is out of print, and available in differint degrees of rarity from used book sellers. We assume that when we no longer need a book we can sell it to someone else. We assume that fairness might mean there is a limit as to how many library books a person may use at once. We assume that purchasing a book for a library makes it available and useful to any literate person who visits the library. We assume that books have a natural and intuitive interface. And so on and so forth.

Every one of those assumptions is based on the premise that a book is an object made of atoms.

ANTAGONISTIC BOOKS: Danger from zach gage on Vimeo.

It’s probably obvious that the physical properties of the book inform what we assume about how they work. Perhaps less obviously, many of those assumptions are based on a history of cultural norms, laws, and unwritten agreements.

Now that it is a fact that books are not necessarily made of atoms, all these assumptions can be re-examined. The cultural norms surrounding books are in play, and authors, publishers, bookstores, librarians, and readers all have an interest in setting those norms in a way that is to their advantage.

When books are bits, the norms and laws are set and enforced by computer code. In yet another book from the 1990s, Lawrence Lessig’s Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace (first edition, 1999; “version 2.0″ was edited with group participation on a wiki and finalized at the end of 2005) made the case that the Internet is not the wild, unregulatable electronic frontier that many idealists believed it was. Instead, it is a world where every step is regulated by computer code. Code can encourage and enable freedom and openness and sharing or it can set checkpoints and barriers at every turn. Regardless, the way things work online is goverened less by physics and almost entirely by computer code.

We can build, or architect, or code cyberspace to protect values that we believe are fundamental. Or we can build, or architect, or code cyberspace to allow those values to disappear. There is no middle ground. There is no choice that does not include some kind of building. Code is never found; it is only ever made, and only ever made by us….[A] a code of cyberspace, defining the freedoms and controls of cyberspace, will be built. About that there can be no debate. But by whom, and with what values? That is the only choice we have left to make. — Lawrence Lessig, Code 2.0, from Code is Law

We assume that the way we find things is the way things have to be. We are not trained to think about all the different ways technology could achieve the same ends through different means. That sort of training is what technologists get. Most of us are not technologists.

But underlying everything in this book is a single normative plea: that all of us must learn at least enough to see that technology is plastic. It can be remade to do things differently. And that if there is a mistake that we who know too little about technology should make, it is the mistake of imagining technology to be too plastic, rather than not plastic enough. We should expect —and demand—that it can be made to reflect any set of values that we think important. The burden should be on the technologists to show us why that demand can’t be met. — Lawrence Lessig, Code 2.0, from Is-ism

I don’t blame HarperCollins for trying this out. They know that some of the norms they have depended on for their business model–the need for libraries to buy many copies of popular books, the fact that books wear out with use–are no longer true with ebooks.

They also know that some of the norms that worked against their business model–primarily the doctrine of first sale and fair use protections–are similarly up for re-negotiation. They are looking for ways to protect sales, explore new payment models, and retain control. That’s what they do. That’s their job.

It doesn’t mean that librarians and readers have to like it, or accept it. I do think it’s time we stopped being surprised by it.

Surely many of the people who work in publishing have values similar to librarians, valuing the propagation of information, the sharing of literature, the place of books in society. But publishing is a business, and most publishers these days are parts of enormous media conglomerates. HarperCollins is part of Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. I think that libraries must respond to particular instances like this on business terms. If the contract isn’t satisfactory, we shouldn’t sign it. And we need to tell the vendor, and our patrons, and fellow librarians why we didn’t sign it and how we are doing our best to balance providing people what they want with creating a responsible, sustainable future for libraries and the people who use them.

Similarly, I admire the impulse behind the eBook User’s Bill of Rights, particularly its opening statement that all ebook users should have “the right to use eBooks under guidelines that favor access over proprietary limitations.”

I’m less sure what it means to say that users should have “the right of the first-sale doctrine extended to digital content, allowing the eBook owner the right to retain, archive, share, and re-sell purchased eBooks.” Since that first sale doctrine seems to depend on the existence of an object made of atoms which can be sold, lent, etc., it can only apply metaphorically to ebooks. What kind of code would create a first sale doctrine for bits? A way to “loan” an ebook so that the instant the patron checks it out, the library’s copy is deleted and not restored until the patron “returns” it? A liberal application of the first sale doctrine would lead to libraries simply posting links to the bits they “own” for public dissemination, a practice which few publishers would be able to stomach.

I think we need to look at what we value in current legal code, such as fair use and the first sale doctrine, and find new ways to lobby for those values to be expressed in code.

As an academic librarian, I have been a little shy about writing about this issue. This particular instance seems to be up to the public libraries to handle, and they seem to be handling it fine without my comment.

Rather than trying to say what public libraries and librarians should do, I’d suggest they look at what has happened with academic librarians and the Big Deal from commercial journal vendors. Once you go down that road of ceding choice and control to the publishers, it is extremely difficult to claw your way back.

Our mission, should we choose to accept it this time, is to advocate for code and norms that enable and encourage access to publications for whomever wants it; preservation of the cultural record; a system that works well for libraries large and small and for all people who can’t afford to buy all the books they might want to read or consult.

On a separate page, create an annotated bibliography for 3 sources that you feel would not be appropriate as research sources. Follow the same model as you would for your real annotated bibliography, but in your annotations, explain why this source would not be suitable. “Suitable” does not mean “off-topic.” Instead, it means there is something about the source itself that would not make it an effective piece of evidence.

I think this is a nifty idea in the way it explicity notes that “on topic” doesn’t mean “suitable.” As librarians, we could use this technique not as a written assignment, but as something to do as a group with a list of results from a database. In throwing out some of your results, you could give students a model as to how to think about what makes a “good” source. You could list all the reasons that you are throwing things out: published in 1843; in Russian; 1/8 of a page; in USA Today; even the abstract is so thick with jargon or technical terms that you can’t read it; aimed at children; etc., etc.

There is something about the negative example that sticks in the mind. Shanon told me that she does other, similar “Bizarro World” assignments, like having students write the worst possible introductory paragraph. (My entry would be something like, “Since the dawn of time, man has searched for a way to legalize marijuana. In today’s society, they don’t like illegal drugs, and pot is no exception.”) She asks them to write something full of cliches. They then read their papers out loud and students raise their hand at every cliche. (She says that students carry this practice forward informally through the semester, so she has to be very careful not to use cliches in lectures.)

By gently stigmatizing this bad behavior as “bizarro,” we might build students’ confidence and help students avoid the most egregious mistakes or lapses when looking for sources. There is still the harder work of sorting out the best or most useful sources from the ones that remain, but it seems to me that a student who can quickly recognize the bizarro when she sees it can then spend more time on more likely sources.

About a month ago, I had a fight with my friend and co-worker, Jessy (that would be Library Shenanigans and the History and Future of the Book Jessy). It was a rather polite, librarianly fight over the importance of academic library collection size.

At our small private liberal arts college library, when we give tours someone inevitably asks how many books we have. In the last seven years that I have worked at the library, our usual answer was “about five hundred thousand.” At a meeting last month, one of Jessy’s and my colleagues said that she’d done a little investigating in the catalog, and the number she came up with was closer to eight hundred thousand. She didn’t have all the information in front of her, though, so it was hard for her to answer our questions. 800K what? Item records? Non-serials item records? Did that include electronic books? Websites in the catalog? It wasn’t entirely clear.

I was in a bit of a Mood that morning, so I came out with something like “we should just say ‘a lot’ and refuse to answer that question. I feel like I could say ‘fifty thousand’ or ‘five million’ and get the same reaction from most people. If it has the books you want, a tiny collection is fine. If it doesn’t have the books you want, an enormous collection is inadequate.”

Jessy disagreed strongly. She pointed out that if you are researching a literary figure on the edge of the canon, you will be lucky if our library has a single critical biography, while a large research library might have several published over the last fifty years. She made the case that while sharing and ILL is great, even greater is being able to go to the stacks in your own library to get the books that you need. A library with multiple millions of volumes is more likely to have the books you know you need as well as the ones you don’t know you need until you see them on the shelf.

And on a normal day, I agree with Jessy. I think of the phrase “more is different” which I associate with Clay Shirky and Here Comes Everybody, though a quick Google search shows that he likely got the idea, directly or indirectly, from physicist P. W. Anderson’s 1972 article with that title. Regardless, I think it’s true that a collection of 2+ million books is not simply bigger but different in ways that are hard for me to articulate. But that wasn’t a normal day when I felt fighty about this issue, and the things I felt fighty about are like sand that I can’t quite get out of my shoes. Here are some of the things that are bothering me:

• Isn’t it weird that a collection can go from about 500,000 volumes to about 800,000 volumes just based on someone running a report?
• I think when people ask “how many books do you have,” they are thinking of books on the shelves. But in recent years, we have added electronic books in collections like Early English Books Online and Eighteenth Century Collections Online which means we own digital copies of darn near everything published in England from the time of Caxton to Lyrical Ballads. (The number is around three hundred thousand books, so perhaps that’s our collection growth right there in those two products).
• If you want to do research or teaching at my college on England in the 15th through 18th centuries, the previous bullet point should make you very happy. If you aren’t one of those few people–if you study a different time period or geographic region–that’s 300,000 books that you don’t really care about. As far as you are concerned, the library hasn’t grown at all with those additions. Yes, nobody uses all sections of the library, but in the past if you had heard that the library had added 300,000 volumes, you could bet that at least a few would be in your area.
• There’s ownership, as in physical stuff you own that sits on a shelf or in a drawer and where the doctrine of first sale holds. And there’s ownership as in digital stuff you paid for where you have some kind of perpetual access gauranteed by a contract. And there’s access as in digital stuff you have contractual access to now, but if you don’t sign next year’s contract or if the company decides it just isn’t interested in hosting it anymore the stuff will disappear as far as you are concerned. And there’s access in terms of stuff that you don’t have any kind of contract for but you link to anyway because it is useful but it could disappear at a moment’s notice. When people ask “how many books do you have,” do they realize they are just asking about that first bit? And do they care? And how do they interpret the answer?

Now, in her post Sergio Rivera-Ayala’s Book Strikes (out) Again, Iris has published the fact that the IP addresses of the two comments signed “Verga Parati” (or “Dick for you” in Spanish) point to two different institutions that Sergio Rivera-Ayala was associated with. It’s circumstantial evidence–there’s no way to know exactly who was trying to minimize the problems with the kind of sock puppetry that started the whole thing, or who was using hostile and obscene Spanish words for a fake name. But the IP addresses pointed to a connection in the Waterloo area (where Rivera-Ayala was visitng at the time) while the second came from a UC Riverside VPN address (where Rivera-Ayala was employed at the time).

Now Iris gets a new fake email pimping Rivera-Ayala’s book supposedly from Tamesis Books. It’s not. It’s a fake. And this time, she can tell exactly who it’s from: sriveraa-fr09.artsfaculty.uwaterloo.ca.

So. Yet more evidence suggesting that Sergio Rivera-Ayala is a liar and a fraud. I’m shocked.

I mailed the second check, this one for $1,463.84. That plus our first check of $2,543.44 and my mom’s matching funds of $195 comes to our grand total of $4,202.28. If you want to track the check, the USPO Certified Mail tracking number is 7008 0150 0000 1925 4604.

Shortly, I will be generating a list of random numbers that will determine the winners of the prized that people have donated. I expect to contact prize winners by email tonight or tomorrow.

Thanks again to everyone who supported this. Mary Hunt at the LFPL Foundation says she’ll keep us posted on how the money was used, but it might be quite a while, as they want to use it just for things that the insurance doesn’t cover, so they need to wait to see how that goes.

It should be LSW.LFPL@gmail.com (I had google.com. I don’t work at Google. I am a doofus.)

The “Donate” button worked fine, obviously–there’s no way I would have received over $3,500 via Paypal if it didn’t–but if you tried to go direct to that email address, it hiccuped.

At this point, if you feel moved to donate, I encourage you to go to the Louisville Free Public Library Foundation page and donate there. They have a PayPal button of their own, or you can mail them a check.