Internet Archive video

It's been quiet around here for a long time, but I thought I would share this short documentary.


Internet Archive from Deepspeed media on Vimeo.


This film, directed by Jonathan Minard, is "focused on the future of long-term digital storage, the history of the Internet and attempts to preserve its contents on a massive scale."

It includes "a tour of the Internet Archive's headquarters in San Francisco, the book scanning center, and the book storage facilities in Richmond, California."
And boy does it ever pose some interesting and big questions about libraries, access, and preservation! Environmental sustainability, too: the headquarters heats itself with energy from the servers! That is awesome.

Cloud Computing and Far-Reaching Implications for Cloud-Data Ownership Rights

It's been a while since we've posted here, but I've just come across an article at Wired Magazine that I thought would be of interest to us as librarians and general keepers and guardians of information in the age of digitization, file sharing, and cloud computing.

By great coincidence, our last post here was also about Cloud Computing (thanks, Amy!).

But I'm hear to talk about the dark side.

Full article: Megaupload Case Has Far-Reaching Implications for Cloud-Data Ownership Rights, by David Kravets.

Early in 2012, you may have read about the seizure of the domain Megaupload.com. To oversimplify, the seizure took place amidst allegations that the site encouraged copyright infrigement.

"The problem lies in the fact that there is currently no clear process for owners to retrieve property that federal prosecutors effectively seized when they shuttered the file-sharing and cyberlocker service, " writes Kravets. That is, the owners of stored files - individual people around the world, as well as individuals storing files on behalf of larger organizations - have no way of accessing files and data that they may legitimately own and which does not violate any copyright.

"The Electronic Frontier Foundation... is representing one of Megaupload’s users in a lawsuit against the government that could set a precedent for cloud users in general," says Kravets. In this case, the plaintiff has gone to court seeking the return of high-school sports videos that are the property of his company. He maintains that the files he stored at Megaupload are the only existing copies -- they were his back-up after his own computer crashed.

There are also issues of privacy, of course, as the Court may determine that owners can only retrieve their data after it's been checked by outside parties for copyright-infringing materials. And libraries are famous for protecting patrons' privacy.

Kravets again: "So far, federal prosecutors are proposing a process that would make it essentially impossible for former Megaupload users to recover any of their legitimate data."

Imagine if libraries storing legitimate data in the cloud were to lose access to that data. Imagine that no other copies of that data existed, for whatever reason: spatial or financial hardship, failure to regularly update old hard-drive files with new versions stored in the cloud, on-site computer crashes, any number of reasons, really. Where would such cloud-computing libraries be then?

Scary.

Access Service Excellence and Freedom of Information

For the last seven or eight years, I have spent most of my winter holidays in Eastern Europe. The countries of Eastern Europe are interesting and beautiful for their ancient pasts and natural features, and also for their more recent history as former communist countries.

I don't want to get into my own politics here, but I will say that regardless of my feelings towards Communism in theory, I - like most people - do have a problem with how it has been applied in practice in most places so far, where corruption has run rampant, and people have been forced into nominal equality through fear and through the governments' limiting of access to knowledge and information.

This winter, I visited the Baltic States. One of the places I saw was Grūtas Park, in southern Lithuania. Here is a picture I took of the small "Library" display inside one of the Park's indoor museum areas:



I've seen a lot of libraries, but this "representational" library, with its propaganda and purposefully limited selection, made me think a lot about how the Soviets were so successful in the sciences, and in the technical arts, but did not allow for much individual expression, and blocked any studies that might have a negative affect on peoples' view of the State. This included all sorts of arts and literature, as well as things like sociology, psychology, you name it. And how can any culture truly be deemed successful, or at least advancing apace, when it does not have those things?

So, what does all of this have to do with Access Services? Everything!
Something so fundamental to our work, but that is nonetheless easy to forget in our day-to-day working activities, is that we are professionally responsible for facilitating access to knowledge and information.

In 2010, we tend to take free access for granted. We have the internet, we have a vast network of libraries; we have among our patrons undergraduate students who had not yet been born when the Soviet Union was dissolved!

Now that we all feel very old (ahem!), we should think about what this means for us, especially in terms of Service Excellence. As we serve our patrons, helping them get the materials that they need, we should always keep in the back of our minds the idea that this freedom - both the patrons' freedom to seek knowledge, and the library workers' freedom to help grant access to that knowledge - was not always thus, and in some parts of the world remains elusive still.

So, that's my two cents. Now, where will I go next year....