DIY Librarian

The Chronicle of Higher Education’s Wired Campus blog reports on a concrete example of scholarly collaboration formed through blogging, presented at ALA midwinter. I wasn’t at ALA for the presentation, but it’s interesting to see an example of scholarly blogs at work, after alluding to their growing impact in my discussion of the popularization of science.

A commenter notes that this kind of informal communication is nothing that hasn’t been happening in other forms for years - but the public nature of blogs brings a new dimension to such communication.

When big corporations produce content (or more likely, package and market content), that content is clearly under copyright and must be protected by heavy-handed measures from “pirates”.

But when the public, perhaps embracing marketing for digital cameras and web photo services that tells them to unleash their creativity, decides to produce and disseminate their own content, corporations turn around and snap up that content. To use in ad campaigns selling the “real” and “genuine”, no less.

That’s what is happening, according to an article in the Washington Post:

Under the banner of “intellectual property,” record labels warn you not to bootleg their songs. Hollywood studios warn you not to download their movies. Intellectual property has lately seemed the concern of corporations trying to protect the artist from the grabby public.

But in an increasingly user-generated world where the public is the artist, sometimes it’s the big boys who get grabby. And the questions that arise are about ownership, but they are also about fairness, and changing culture, and ultimately, the search for authenticity.

I just hope that these stories don’t scare people away from Creative Commons licenses. While some of the content used without permission was posted with a CC license, other content was not and thus “all rights reserved” by default. The corporations ignored both CC licenses and traditional copyright.

A CC license doesn’t mean you don’t have any rights to your content. It means you have decided to allow certain uses, as defined in the license. For example, DIY Librarian uses a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. You are welcome to republish my content as long as I get credit, you don’t alter it, and you’re not making money off of it. It’s win-win: you get to use my content, I get recognition and a wider audience. You want to use something I made in an ad campaign, you need to talk to me. I want to make sure anything I create is used appropriately and that I am fairly compensated, and I have the right to refuse other uses.

Yesterday I wrote about the popularization of science and the role it plays in scholarly communication. Technology can make popularization easier than ever. One example is the proliferation of academic lectures on YouTube, as reported in the Chronicle of Higher Education (free online article).

Easier does not mean easy. The article quotes Michael L. Wesch, an assistant professor of cultural anthropology at Kansas State University, on making online videos:

The thought process is very different, which I actually think can be very valuable. I mean we think a lot about how to present our work in writing, and I think when you shift into thinking about how to present this work visually, it actually forces you to think through things in new ways.

science is so very specialized now, that anyone outside of the exact area needs a popularized view

Popularization of science is not merely a dumbing down of scientific ideas for a lay audience, but an essential part of scholarly communication, writes Christina Pikas at Christina’s LIS Rant.

My library serves an interdisciplinary research institute, and this kind of popularization is essential. We have a brown bag seminar series where our researchers essentially popularize their research for their colleagues in other departments. I produce a feature highlighting a recent article by one of our researchers that appears on our bulletin board and our web site. I regularly scan news feeds looking for items of interest to our researchers in the popular press - and researchers have responded asking for a citation to the original source so often that I now include citations and links along with the news snippets.

I’m not sure if my library collection includes popularizations on the “sciencey end of the continuum,” though, and if it does I’m sure we don’t market them enough.

Part of the reason we don’t purchase these popularizations is that they are probably already owned by the main university library system. We are not part of that system, but we try not to duplicate their holdings except for heavily-used items. I’ve often thought that we should do more to make our patrons aware of materials in the main library system that are related to population. They are well-served by their subject liaisons, but there are probably materials of interest in other subject areas, especially if they are collaborating with researchers from other departments.

Feed2JS has posted a personal ad. Adam Levine is hoping that someone out there will take over maintenance and improvements for Feed2JS.

Finding Feed2JS when my library was developing a blog was a lifesaver. We knew that most of our patrons would never go to the blog site or subscribe to the feeds, so getting the blog content onto sites they were visiting was critical. We have installed Feed2JS on our server and use it to put content on our library web site, as well as on web pages on our parent organization’s site.

I hope that Feed2JS finds a good match!

Here’s an opportunity for SLA members to share ideas with colleagues at the Social Science/Museums, Arts and Humanities Open House at SLA 2008:

Call for Posters: Building Bridges with Collaboration Tools

The Social Science Division and the Museum, Arts, & Humanities Division invite proposals for a poster session to be held during the DSOC & MAHD Joint Open House at SLA 2008 in Seattle, Washington. The Open House and Poster Session will be held on Sunday, June 15 from 8:00-10:00 p.m.

In keeping with the SLA 2008 conference theme, “Breaking Rules, Building Bridges,” the theme for the poster session is Building Bridges with Collaboration Tools. Proposals should focus on the use of collaboration tools (blogs, wikis, etc.) in libraries or information work. Posters may include examples of collaboration tools in use, innovative ideas for future uses, comparisons of available tools, or any other idea relevant to the theme.

The poster session will be a relaxed and informal time to share ideas with your colleagues. We welcome proposals from any SLA member, new or experienced, and especially from students. In the event we receive more qualified submissions than we can accommodate, members of the two sponsoring divisions and student members will be given priority.

Proposals should be submitted by March 1, 2008 via e-mail to murray@pop.psu.edu or mail to Tara Murray, Population Research Institute, Penn State, 601 Oswald Tower, University Park, PA 16802. Please include a title and description of about 250 words, and your name, institution, e-mail address, and address. Proposals will be reviewed by a committee for relevance to the theme and quality. We will notify applicants of our decision by April 1, 2008.

Compare these two headlines, both reporting on the same survey:

• Nearly half of all adults play video games (PC World)
• Many parents avoid video games with kids (Washington Post)

Meanwhile, The Wired Campus reports that video games can promote health and peace.

I find it interesting (not surprising, though) that so many parents avoid video games. I was introduced to video games by my dad. This was back before the Xbox, back in the days of the VIC-20. My dad even wrote a game to teach my little brother how to use a joystick, a skill he apparently thought would be useful. I am sure that if the internet existed back then, my dad would have introduced us to that too.

In a recent piece in Library Journal, Terence Fitzgerald urges librarians to develop more of a sense of play in their work. I feel like I have that sense, and I wonder if it comes from growing up with computer games. To me, the computer was always something to try things out on, to experiment with. Gaming teaches you to play, to pick things up and try them out, to try to hack the system. Far too often, I see people who are afraid they will “break” the computer by playing with it. In most of my jobs, I’ve become a default Microsoft Office “expert”, but I didn’t get that way because I took lots of Microsoft training. I got that way by playing with the software when I couldn’t get it to do what I wanted.

I don’t believe video games can change the world, but I do think a sense of play, and a sense of DIY, can’t hurt the up-and-coming generation.

Oh, and thanks Dad!

Twelve students at St. Lawrence University in New York are living in the wilderness of the Adirondack Park as part of the “Adirondack Semester” program (NY Times). Every other week, they make an excursion to a nearby town for supplies. According to the Times article, necessities included doing laundry, visiting the library, and for some, a visit to a yarn store. [via The Kept-Up Academic Librarian]

It’s kind of ironic that my last post was about a very different kind of unplugging, and yet I find the concept of abstaining from modern life quite appealing.

Around this time last year, I wrote about how getting cable internet service at home changed my habits. At the time, I was using a desktop computer in a corner of my office/guest bedroom/sewing room, so while my connection was much faster, it was still rooted to one spot in the house, and only one person could use it at a time.

Now, we have made the next big step of setting up a wireless network, which it seems has made just as big a change in our computer habits. First, we can both be online at the same time, which means we aren’t rushing to finish up whatever we’re doing as quickly as possible. Second, the connection is portable, so I use it for different things. For example, if I’m cooking and need to look up a recipe I found online, I just set the laptop up on the dining room table. (I won’t bring the laptop in the kitchen because I’m a messy cook.) Third, I keep my laptop in a corner downstairs, where I spend more time, so I’m more likely to turn it on and chat with my brother while watching TV, or blog about something I read in the paper while I’m eating breakfast. (Obviously this isn’t happening much with this blog, but more so with the blog I contribute to for my local newspaper’s web site.)

And perhaps most importantly, we have become those people who log on to sports web sites while watching the game. I’ve always wondered who those people were, and now I know. They are us.

I thought we would just use it to monitor games we weren’t getting on TV, but yesterday during Superbowl 41.5, we had the game on TV and the stats on the laptop.

DIY Librarian is back up and running, with a new look. Let me know what you think of it.

Sorry if old posts showed up in the RSS feed while I was working. I was fixing some bad coding before I remembered that editing posts makes them show up in the feed again.