Dec 1st

The Dismissal of Miss Ruth Brown has left me wondering if there was one primary reason for her dismissal, or if it was a combination of several issues. At first I thought it was a censorship issue, meaning Miss Brown would not censor library materials. Farther into the book I thought it might be a race issue, and once I got to the end of the book I thought it might be a gender issue. Certainly all of these issues played a role.

I think censorship was more of an excuse than a reason is this story. The town made a big deal about a few magazines in the library, but even after Miss Brown was fired, the library renewed their subscription to those magazines. It was just more politically correct to attack someone for being a “commie” than to attack someone for standing up or themselves, or for standing up for civil rights.

The race issue was a volatile one, and I do find it a little bit surprising that Miss Brown took such a strong stance, given where she grew up and where she lived. Certainly she was well read which contributed to her position. I am surprised at how much action she took. It is one thing to have a position on an issue. It is entirely another thing to stand up for your position, as Miss Brown did. Taking a black woman to her all white church and taking black friends to a drug store were very bold steps.

I don’t know much about the politics in this period of American history. I think there are a lot of undercurrents at work that I might not know about, it was striking to me how similar McCarthyism is to the patriot act and the current atmosphere. People were asked, and may have been willing, to give up some rights for the appearance of security (them from communism, us from “terrorists”). I think this did play a role. Under normal circumstances people may have been more willing to stand up for Miss Brown, but the political atmosphere was volatile, and the witch hunt may have turned on her supporters, so many kept quiet.

When Miss Brown was questioned about her actions, she refused to answer some questions, except in writing, and she was very bold in her answers. She did not fold under pressure, as a woman would be expected to do. I think that the fact that this woman would not fall in line as expected was really what upset people.  

Ultimately, I think the issue was that Miss Ruth Brown did not conform to the expected norms of her town. She didn’t act the way either a woman or a white person was expected to act.  Since she was a single woman, she was a little more vulnerable than a man or even a married woman may have been. She certainly was brave, and I think it is great that her story has been told.

Nov 24 video post

So obviously my internet issues have been resolved. My brother has been paid in beer, and internet life is back to normal here. I’m just glad I have him to help me, and that I don’t have to sit on the phone with tech support when I have a problem to solve. No matter how much I think I know about technology, somehow things are more complicated than I anticipated, and I have to call in the tech expert. This really makes us all beholden to them in a lot of ways.  Which might be a topic for another day. Anyway…

When I first started watching the Kindle video, I was very surprised at the way the DOJ was handling the Kindle pilot study. I kept thinking, if the universities don’t have any impaired students, how can they be violating their rights? But then the speaker from the DOJ talked, and it all became much more clear.  Essentially the DOJ had a problem with the Kindle, but didn’t have any way of making Amazon make the Kindle accessible. The DOJ seemed to hope that the universities would put pressure on Amazon, which in turn would convince Amazon to change. If the universities say they won’t buy the Kindle if it is not accessible, Amazon would be more likely to listen. Sad that money is what motivates companies to make accessible materials, but there it is.

I didn’t realize that the Kindle was inaccessible before watching this video. But since it does not have a talking menu, it would be hard for someone who is visually impaired to get to the text-to-speech function. And what seems silly to me is that there is technology out there to make the Kindle accessible, and Amazon is just not doing it. I don’t know what the reasons are for that, but I would be curious to find out. Is it just that Amazon doesn’t realize that the device is inaccessible? Is it that they don’t care? Or is it that the market share of visually impaired people is small enough that it doesn’t make financial sense for them to develop the technology?

The academic library video made me think a lot about digital management in the future. Who is going to be responsible for archiving and preserving all the digital data that is produced? Who decides which data is worthy of being saved, and which data is just fluff? And how will it be cataloged? Will it be searchable? Will there be a universal search catalog? If there is not, how will people find what they need?

In addition to that what will happen to print resources? Will there be major publications like journals or textbooks that will not be in print at all? What happens when those companies go out of business? Is the company responsible for maintaining those digital resources forever, or is someone else, like a library? At least with print material there is the physical print left behind.

These are all really big questions. And there may be answers for some of them that weren’t discussed here. But one thing seems clear. Until there are good answers, librarians need to keep on top of these issues, in order to help patrons find the information they need. The more uncertain the future, the more people will need experts who know more about what is going on. In some ways it seems that librarians will be in demand even more than they are now, but in slightly different ways. We will have to know where all that digital information is, how it is stored, and how to access it when it is needed.

Nov 24th readings

Ironically, for this week’s lecture, my internet went out on me while I was trying to watch the videos. So I guess that makes the point very clear about accessibility of e-resources. I have the readings taken care of, and my summary written up, since I could do all that without internet. Now I’m in a coffee shop (being a consumer) posting my article.   

Happily my brother is in IT, and he is working on getting things up and running for me. My thoughts on the videos will be coming shortly…. (I hope)

The readings this week were a refreshing change. We have read some articles in the past about the supposed demise of libraries. These articles had a more upbeat outlook.

The Leckie and Hopkins article focused on 2 of Canada’s large central libraries. One thing that struck me was “it is extremely important as a place where individuals can sit in quiet study and reflection, often for hours, without the pressure to act as consumers that is so pervasive in other sorts of spaces.” (354) I have never thought of libraries in quite this way, but it absolutely makes sense. Sometimes I choose to read or study at a coffee shop or big box type book store because they are closer to home or have longer hours than the library. When I go there I always feel that I should buy something in order to “pay for” the time I spend in the store. Having a free public space without they pressure to buy something is important for so many people. Some people just try not to be “consumers” all they time. People who are using the library to find a job while they are unemployed are much more likely to use the resource if they don’t feel they have to spend any money to use it.  More people can feel like they belong at the library if there is no financial pressure while you use it.

The Freeman article focused on academic libraries. It talked about how to design, or re-design, libraries to make them effective spaces in today’s academic world, as well as making them adaptable to the uses of the future. I agree very much with what the author has to say. Libraries that can change with the times will be much more relevant than libraries that can’t keep up. It is hard to predict what library users will want in the future, but as long as libraries strive to provide what patrons need they will continue to be an important part of the academic life.

Government Docs, Libraries and Democracy

Looking at the titles of the reads for this week, I didn’t think I would find them very interesting, but to my surprise I did.  The Nerves of Government: Government Communication, the Welfare State and Technology especially caught my interest. This article seems to be from the 1980s, although I didn’t look up the exact publication date. As I was reading, I kept thinking about all the information we were given by the government on weapons of mass destruction. This was information that we could not verify independently, we just had to take the governments word for it. And while I can’t say for certain that the government provided that information in order to sway the public’s opinion, I find it highly likely. Which made me think about where can we, as private citizens, get information of this type if it doesn’t come from the government?

This also made me think about some of my parenting techniques. I may, on occasion, only tell my children certain facts I want them to know. For example, I can tell them that eating all that Halloween candy will rot their teeth, and thus, they can only have 1 piece after dinner (leaving more for me after they are asleep!) But what I don’t tell them is that they could simply brush their teeth after eating candy, and their teeth will be just fine. By selectively telling them the truth I can control what they do much more easily. My children don’t have the ability to research topics like oral hygiene themselves (they are only 6 and 4) and so they have to depend on the information they get from me. 

In the case of my children, in many ways I do know best, and I can make decisions for them. My goal in selectively giving them information is to get the results I want, with minimal resistance. However, I do not believe this is the role of the government. How can we, as citizens, make informed choices about topics like WMDs when all the information we can get is controlled by one (possibly biased) source?

The CWD article touches on this in some ways. The article discusses whether web sites contain information that is “needed by individual citizens to make private decisions or take private actions” (67). Or if perhaps the government provides information that “facilitates citizen assessment of agency policies and performance” (68).

The difference here is that the first quote would be referring to the type of information the government was providing in the WMD situation. Basically, the government is telling you these are the facts. They are absolutely true; you’ll just have to trust us. They don’t give dissenting opinions, they don’t show how the information was collected, or with what certainty the results are produced. In the second quote, you have the government providing information, as well as dissenting opinions, sources, information on how tests are run and what the results actually mean. In this way a person can draw their own conclusions, and even give the government their own opinion on the “facts” presented.  I would hope that all the information provided by the government was of this second type, but I have my doubts about that.

The last article was a little bit different. It was discussing the Federal Depository Library Program. It talks about keeping electronic records of government documents. For me this article raises a lot more questions than it answers. I am interested in how digital data can be preserved, and how we can know that it is uncorrupted.  I know this is a topic we touched on earlier in the class. I hope that we can talk a little bit about it in the lecture this week.

Nov 10 readings

The readings this week gave me a lot of information about copyright and IP that I didn’t know before. I wanted to comment on 2 topics.  In Revising Copyright Law for the Information Age the author, Jessica Litman, talks about how copyright applies to digital media, and what types of changes should be made to the law in order to encompass digital media. She says “Copyright makes sense as an incentive if its purpose is to encourage the dissemination of works, in order to promote public access to them” (175). She points out that the current copyright law protects author’s and publisher’s rights by allowing them to control making copies of the work. Authors’ and Publishers’ compensation is based on the number of copies sold, thus the author (or publisher) needs to tightly control the copies of the work. If someone copies the work and gives it away or sells it, the author is not getting paid.

This system is not ideal for digital media. It is much easier for an end user to copy a digital work and send it to someone else. The author argues that as long as people are not distributing items for a profit, or as long as they are not interfering with the author making money, copying and disseminating works should not be considered copyright infringement. The problem is determining when something an individual does is causing a problem. A new compensation structure would need to be set up as well. If compensation was not tied to the number of copies sold, it would make personal use copies less of an issue.

In some ways the traditional system of compensation makes sense. If the work is good, more copies sell, the author gets paid more. This is similar to wait staffs’ wages being based on tips. If the service is good, they get paid more, if the service is poor, they get paid less. This both rewards excellence and discourages poor performance. However, most jobs don’t work this way. I didn’t get paid by each successful assay I ran in the lab. I got paid a salary and I was expected to perform well all the time. What if authors were paid a salary? Then the question is how do the publishers make their money? The author does not address this point, and I’m not sure what the answer is.

Telling Tales out of School deals with a case of scientific IP. The author briefly touches on the difference between science conducted in an academic setting and science conducted in an industrial setting. I’ve worked in industry, and the corporation does everything it can to claim ownership to everything the scientist does or even thinks of while working for the corporation. I even had to sign agreements that I would not work for another company, in the same field, for a specific amount of time after I left the company.

Science conducted in academia is supposed to be more open, free and public. The main issue of academic ownership in the article is related to the right to publish first. Publish or perish.  This made me think of Professor Hector DeLuca here at the UW.  Professor DeLuca is considered THE source on vitamin D. He holds many patents, although I’m not sure how many are personally owned and how many are owned by WARF. Another thing I don’t know is where did the money come from for those projects that the university profits from? Were they public grant money? Were they private donations? I would think that would make a difference on who could patent the work, and who could profit from it. I’d be interested to learn how sources of grant money ties into patents.

There are 2 spin-off companies based on work created in, or inspired by his lab. The first company was originally named Lunar. Dick Mazess started this company based on a project he was moonlighting on (thus, Lunar). He designed a bone densitometer, it is an instrument used to detect bone mineral density which is important information for osteoporosis diagnosis. The story I heard floating around the UW was that Hector DeLuca’s lab did all this great work on Vitamin D, and someone said “Great, but now what are you going to do?” And Dick Mazess thought about that, and decided he would build a bone densitometer. I don’t know if that is actually how the story unfolded, but regardless there is a link between Professor DeLuca’s work and Dick Mazess’ work. In an industrial setting the bone densitometer work could never have been spun off of the vitamin D work, but in an academic field it can be. Which makes me wonder, who does own what in academics. The bone densitometer was worked on in Dick Mazess’s spare time, in his garage, without University funding, so it seems to be pretty clear that it is his invention, even though he used Hector DeLuca’s vitamin D work as his starting point.

The case of the company called Bone Care is a little different. Bone Care is a small pharmaceutical company that was started in Madison. Bone Care licensed several compounds from WARF that were discovered in Hector DeLuca’s lab. Bone Care developed one into a successful drug. The compound is called doxercalciferol, its brand name is Hectorol (after Hector DeLuca, although I hear he doesn’t like that the drug is named after him). The drug is a vitamin D analog, and it is used to prevent osteoporosis in patients undergoing renal dialysis. I’m very curious how all that IP works in this case. WARF owned the rights to the compound, and Bone Care licensed it from WARF. Does that mean that Bone Care “owns” the compound, or that WARF owns it, and Bone Care has the rights to use it? Where did the original funding come from when the compound was discovered? And can a chemical compound be owned? Or is it only the uses the compound can be put to that can be owned? I’ll have to do some more checking into this to see if I can find some more answers.