Confessions of a Mad Librarian

If you have a Twitter account and are fairly active on the micro-blogging service, you’ve likely heard the news:

That’s right. Every public tweet, ever, since Twitter’s inception in March 2006, will be archived digitally at the Library of Congress. That’s a LOT of tweets, by the way: Twitter processes more than 50 million tweets every day, with the total numbering in the billions.

Hip hip hooray? Well, actually, reaction has been mixed in some quarters with lots of questions: who will have access to the content? Under what circumstances? Can users opt out? What exactly are “public tweets” versus private ones? Should Twitter have asked permission of its users? Is this sort of thing covered by the ToS? How do we know the information won’t end up being used outside of LoC? Reasonable questions, all.

My initial personal reaction was of the hip hip hooray variety, but the privacy questions (as prompted by some privacy advocates and academics) did come to mind. As I wrote briefly in a small email list, “This is a very interesting development. When I signed up for Twitter a year ago, I considered the openness of it and decided to treat it as a public space, i.e. nearly anything I said might be findable by just anyone else (like my blog), and I should use it accordingly. This isn’t to say I’ve been responsible w/ every tweet …” And for me, saving and making tweets available for research is analogous to the web archiving that the Internet Archive has done for nearly 15 years now.

But there are others who feel differently. And to try to understand why … I figured I would ask people about how they feel about the deal, and about Twitter in general. Voila, a Survey Monkey questionnaire. While I was involved in social science research long ago, it was long ago. The survey isn’t meant to be have validity or yield statistically significance results. I don’t even want to think about the margin of error. But if you participate, you will be doing me a great favor in learning more about how users approve privacy in regards to social media.

Please click here to take the survey.

For some more information about the Twitter donation of public tweets to the Library of Congress, is a small interview by Matt Raymond of LoC on C-SPAN:

There is so much to keep track of on Twitter (I’m @miss_eli, btw), but this managed to get caught in the filter.
An infographic explaining why using pirated movie content can be preferable to authorized content (i.e. DVDs) showed up on BoingBoing last month. (Another version here.)
Now there is a similar graphic for audible books, showing why DRM doesn’t work when trying to check out an audio book from the local library.
Actually, the graphic specifically cites the Cleveland Public Library. To be fair, the graphic is focused on OverDrive, which is a system used by (according to the co.) 9,000 public libraries. And I am presuming that there is a fair amount of … exaggeration for humorous effect. I’m hoping it’s not nearly as frustrating for most users most of the time to download and hear audio book files “checked ou”t from the library. (I’m not an audiobooks person, inexplicably, so I’ve never tried to get a library audiobook file).
But … is there a disconnect here? When people have to go through a fair bit of rigamarole to get access to digital materials in the library … do they blame the technological middlemen or the library? Or does the library get lumped in with the technological middlemen? Do patrons shrug it off or does it affect how they feel about their library as a whole? And should libraries do “something” about it?

To start this, I am going to be entirely self-serving by quoting myself:

California has a large, well-organized state library, which maintains a catalog of material that the state has published, with information on how it can be accessed by other agencies and the public. A recent report on current efforts of state governments to provide permanent public access (PPA) to electronic information found that the state of California has made only inconsistent efforts to preserve access to digital information, despite the attempts of the state library: “Due to limited staff and other resources, it is often difficult for the state library to capture many electronic government documents.”
In a May 2003 catalog of California state publications, there was an entry for an e-commerce report published and placed on the state government Web site in PDF format in 2000. According to the catalog entry, the publication is out of print, but the PDF file was still accessible on the Web via IA. However, the PDF has since been removed from IA’s server.
In effect, the state of California is relying on a private nonprofit to provide public access to public information.

From “From Ephemeral to Enduring: The Internet Archive’s Role in Preserving Digital Media”
Apparently, not much has changed from 7 years ago:

Posting documents online was meant to increase the public’s access to the workings of government, but it’s actually having the opposite effect. For years now, official government records created electronically have been vanishing. And while a June 21, 2009 University of California press release makes mention of “the wholesale disappearance of information,” no one seems to be able to quantify the extent of losses.
“The problem is, I don’t think anybody has done a scientific evaluation of exactly how many electronic-only documents of California state government are disappearing,” David Cismowski, the State Library’s bureau chief for library services, e-mailed on Jan. 7.
…
None of this is new. In fact, the deletion — accidental or purposeful — of state e-records has been going on a long time. This is made clear by examining two state reports, both released in August 2004. Ironically, despite the fact that they’re nearly six years old, the reports represent the most recent studies of the loss of government e-records.

– From “Official state records are disappearing”
I’m glad the California Digital Library has stepped up to the plate with a crawl of the ca.gov domain. I’m glad the California State Library is still trying to keep track of state gov docs. And yet, I suspect it’s not enough, that these efforts are like taking two regular-sized funnels and heading off to Niagara Falls.
Are crawls and catalogs enough? Can a repository model? Is there a way we can make gov docs have the same shelf-life as messages in Gmail? Or is this much ado about nothing and CA is comparable to other states in their retention and access to born-digital government information?

It’s the 1st Annual World Fair Use Day. May it be the first of many …

Released yesterday:

October 13, 2009 • SACRAMENTO, CA РThe California Library Association (CLA) has just announced a resolution calling on Congress to dramatically revise the up-for-renewal USA PATRIOT Act, passed hurriedly in the weeks following the 9/11 attacks.
Librarians have been front-line opponents of certain provisions of the PATRIOT Act since its passage. The Act has made it possible, under Section 215, for the FBI to request and obtain library records for large numbers of individuals without reason to believe they are involved in illegal activity. This jeopardizes the basic ethics of the library profession, expressed in the Library Bill of Rights of the American Library Association.
Expanding on the American Library Association’s PATRIOT Act resolution last July, the CLA resolution goes further to address imminent First and Fourth Amendment concerns with Section 505. This provision grants the FBI broad authority to sidestep constitutional safeguards though use of National Security Letters to obtain information.
CLA Intellectual Freedom Committee chair, Mary Minow, a leading expert on library law, said, “It’s past time for the blatantly unconstitutional aspects of this legislation to be removed from the books, and now is the opportunity for Congress to act.”
Two sections of the PATRIOT Act are currently up for reauthorization, with sunsets at the end of December 2009, and librarians across the country see this as an opportunity to correct those provisions that attack basic civil liberties. CLA’s resolution calls for Congress to allow Section 215 to sunset, to amend Section 505 to “include a clear exemption for library records,” and in general to intensify Congressional oversight of the use of the Act.
CLA Resolution on 2009 Reauthorization of the USA PATRIOT Act (PDF – 481k)

From Kumar Percy Jayasuriya of Georgetown Law Library via GOVDOC-L:

You may have heard that some law librarians have drafted a petition to ask the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts to enhance the search features of PACER (the database of federal judicial information) and to make it free for GPO depository libraries.
On September 11 Erika Wayne of Stanford Law Library, Terry Martin of the University of Texas Law Library, and I will deliver the petition to the AO’s office as well as staff members from the Judiciary Committee, Appropriations Committee, and Senator Lieberman’s office. Please take this opportunity to join hundreds of librarians and such legal notables as Jonathan Zittrain, Eugene Volokh, Tim O’Reilly, Mitch Kapor, Ellen Miller, and many others in this effort to update PACER.
As government documents librarians, please consider lending your voice to this effort to create more open government.
Please feel free to write any personal comments if you sign the petition. From the petition web site you can read some of the insightful comments and additional requests individuals have submitted when they signed. We invite your input.
You can sign here: http://www.thepetitionsite.com/1/improve-pacer
You can also see the number of people who have signed (830 as of this writing) and see the list of names along with any comments submitted.
Also, we recently posted a summary to our PACER spending survey on our Legal Research Plus blog. The finding are available at:
http://legalresearchplus.com/2009/08/28/pacer-spending-survey/