I could listen to these 18 seconds of audio all day. I snipped it from a talk Glenn Greenwald gave at the University of Missouri under the namesake title of his book Liberty and Justice for Some.
Modify the public library into an institution that can become one of the right methods for modifying other institutions.
Ruminating on what it will mean to manage a library catalog that is capable of representing, capturing, & supporting the aliveness of the network of nodes at work within it, I keep getting stuck on the importance of trust in a functional community of sharers. Trust is key. Trust is the holy grail for a group of people to cooperate, collaborate, converse successfully with one another. Everyone trying to build productive communities online can hardly talk about anything but trust or reputation management/development. Conveying our credibility to relative strangers has become serious business.
It seems so obvious that people who share resources, through the process of sharing over time, learn to trust each other, making sharing more and more easy as time goes on, which allows for growth and innovation of how and what they share together. Coworking communities who begin by sharing desks wind up sharing their networks and creating opportunities for and with each other. The people who bring their dogs to the same field that I take my dog to for play & exercise have come to share cars, tools, dinners, advice, ideas, dog care, etc. Cohousing, Skillsharing, collaborative consumption models of all kinds are taking off. Libraries could emerge as keystone species in such an ecology, or as unecessary, considering self-organized groups could be out-librarying the library.
Does the library’s way of sharing build trust among borrowers, among the community? My first thought is that it is has built a system that intentionally bypasses any need for trust among members–that’s its big feature. The system builds trust in/of the institution, even at the cost of promoting suspicion of other borrowers. Library members trust the library to catch the cheaters, and the library staff and system commit to attending to the cheaters–the people who keep stuff too long, or damage materials, etc. (This may be analogous to the deficit model of libraries Dave Lankes has begun talking about, where no one can do anything extra good for the system, they can only maintain status or do something bad.)
I wonder if this could be otherwise, if the catalog’s biggest feature might be a bug. This way of operating seems to skew our perception of the public. Library employees can grow hostile and suspicious toward their members. But the cheaters are outliers (and really I hate to even call them cheaters because so much of what they do wrong is pretty innocent/understandable, which means it ought not to require punishment/forgiveness); the vast majority of borrowers comply with the system. The vast majority of people carrying out activities afforded by the system are trustworthy, but that trustworthiness is almost invisible. We all have hopefully accepted that circulation stats on their own are mostly stupid and meaningless, but could they be contextualized to become some kind of trust quotient–a way to showcase how often things go right and how everyone shows so much good, responsible behavior? Could we design our system to make trustworthiness visible? Read the rest of this entry →
The Iowa City Public Library has just launched a new local music project, where the library has negotiated directly with bands to make their music available for download through the library’s catalog. The library paid the bands for their albums, and the musicians agreed to let library members download unlimited amounts of DRM-free music for free.
The Ann Arbor Public Library is also providing unrestricted, DRM-free music to its members. It offers Creative Commons licensed music through the digital music publisher Magnatune. Both of these solutions are an exciting step in the right direction.
But there is still more to do.
I like Iowa City’s DIY approach, forging relationships directly with local bands, and I think we (libraries) should all adopt and improve on this model. I also think we should link our local music catalogs together in a way that lets the cream of our local crops register in other locations, so we’re sharing out, allowing for a greater degree of discovery. But the library says they paid an average of $100/album and I’m not sure that satisfies me. One of their points when promoting this service to library members is that the musicians got paid. I pay bands more than $100 for a single performance at the library. Musicians and writers are told that they should be willing to give their songs or their books away for free because it will get them exposure which will lead to gigs, which pay. They are then told by venues that they should be willing to play or speak for free or cheap because it will get them exposure, which will lead to album or book sales. We can’t keep passing the buck like this, expecting other people to pay for the creation of stuff we value.
We can’t be afraid of money. We need money. I think library systems should of course be providing access to cultural content, but I don’t think the message should be: don’t worry; we’ve got this. I think libraries could be pioneering a serious conversation about how we, as a society that values creativity and culture, can sustainably produce and share our creations with each other. If not libraries, who?
This is another decree from Saint Douglas Rushkoff in his book Program or Be Programmed, which is a nice thin book that everyone should read.
I want to get our tongues out of our cheeks when we talk about piracy. Librarians should not be scared of or threatened by piracy. We have no professional obligation to identify with or protect the establishment, the record labels, publishing houses, or software firms who think pirates are eating their profit margins.
I’m not worried about how piracy threatens business models. I’m worried that we are moving from a system where corporations exploit writers and musicians and artists, to a system where we all exploit ourselves and each other, which doesn’t actually change the system or redistribute power. Rushkoff makes the point that when we insist on consuming content for free, when we ignore the value of the time and energy spent on the things we read and watch, we create a system where ads fund everything, playing right into highest hopes of the most powerful companies. “By encouraging us to devalue and deprofessionalize our work, these companies guarantee a mediaspace where only they get paid.”
I want libraries to represent a genuine alternative, a way to access content that nudges us toward a new social contract, a more sophisticated understanding around the use and exchange of digital content. What if the DPLA, for example, invited musicians & others to upload their content in a way that linked it with a way to pay the artists directly, preferably using an alternative e-currency that can be biased toward the people creating the actual value. What if libraries provided a network with no access restrictions, but lots of cues about social and cultural value, and how to be good to one another. We’ve lived our entire lived in such a locked-down, highly controlled media environment that we’re uncritically enjoying this newfound freedom and openness. I’m not suggesting we do anything to chill the beautiful anarchy of exchange, but couldn’t we invite a little more conscientiousness? I could imagine a band posting a 30 second video on their DPLA download page saying We’re an independent group, we have to pay ourselves and pay the good people who help us, we all work hard and we think this album is worth X, but PWYW to download it, including nothing.
Apple and Google and Verizon own us if we can’t agree to value each other’s labor. Let’s own ourselves. (Dear libraries, we could use some help becoming an autonomous, commons-based society.)
We’ve got our first blurb in support of our Public Praxis class. It’s from Rolf Hapel, the head of the truly innovative Aarhus Public Libraries in Denmark.
I share the vision of Tom Gokey and Meg Backus of the public library of the 21th century as a “Democracy Machine”. One of the most important tasks for library enthusiasts and workers is to explore the many possibilities of that vision. I could think of no better way of doing so than attend one of Gokey and Backus’s library classes at [the Art School in the Art School].
Rolf Hapel
Head of Aarhus Public Libraries, Denmark
Currently engaged in creating the new main library “Urban Meidaspace Aarhus” and the Danish Digital Library
In class today we talked about Scraper Bikes as an example of a library that does not bear much resemblance to a library. By organizing a group around the bikes they own, they promote creativity (they style their bikes, they make their own music), education (both formal K-12 and P2P), responsibility, self-respect (you must ride in style), community–and together they’ve created a world for themselves that meets important needs. All of these needs can be understood as information, as can all of the resources that fulfill those needs. So this is not some lofty far-out library moon colony, this is library terra firma. The way that Scraper bikes engage the members opens up knowledge, values, and opportunities that individually, these Oakland kids may not find widely accessible.
Tina pointed us to a bike club made in the Scraper Bikes image that meets out of Mundy Branch library. The Post-Standard just covered it last month, and it looks cool enough that if you’re someone with spare money, bikes, time, or mechanical know-how, you might really want to contact the Mundy Library. Or see the blog one of its organizers keeps. Note the Ask Me Anything About Bikes post. That could be something to bookmark. Read the rest of this entry →
Public Praxis is an autonomous course offered through the Art School in the Art School (1003 East Fayette Street, Apartment 8, above the Spark Art Space) where we try to build the library of the future. We meet at 1pm (for about 3 hours or so) every Saturday starting Jan 28, 2012. If you’re interested in joining the class (or the work we’re trying to do) sign up here. Or send us an e-mail at backus [dot] meg [curly pig's tail] gmail [dot] com, or thomasgokey [curly pig's tail] gmail [dot] com.
We will post more info (syllabus, schedule, readings etc.) shortly.
For more on the need for a networked, autonomous accreditation system, see our Public School NY course description.
Spark is a CBC radio show and blog out of Toronto that is too excellent and thoughtful to be called a show about technology, but it’s about technology. And trends. And us.
Jon Kalish, who did the npr story on libraries and hackerspaces for Weekend Edition talked with Nora Young for a Spark episode on “Library Hacking, Niche Publications, and Enlisting Online Influencers.”
From the script for this segment:
JK TX 13: She is. Backus works at a public library near Syracuse, New York and she teaches a course with her artist husband at Syracuse University called Innovations in Public Libraries. And lest you think that she’s not serious about innovating, check this out. Backus brings her dog in to the library and let’s people in need of interaction with the animal kingdom check the dog out for a few hours as you would a book.
NY TX 13: Get out!
JK TX 14: Not only that, her library has a half-acre of open land, so she spearheaded a move to turn it over to the public, which now farms it.
NY TX 14: That’s too much.
I was interviewed as part of an NPR Weekend Edition story by Jon Kalish called libraries making room for hackerspaces (Saturday Dec 10).
A hackerspace is people owning something together, sharing resources, sharing knowledge, valuing curiosity and creativity, engaging in productive inquiry. If one can see beyond the specific tools populating the traditional physical space, libraries and hackerspaces look a lot alike. The resemblance is more than a resemblance; a hackerspace is really just a library by another name.
There’s nothing scary or criminal about the term hacker. A hacker is a person who enjoys exploring the details of programmable systems and stretching their capabilities, as opposed to most users, who prefer to learn only the minimum necessary. Using the science/engineering concept of a black box, where only inputs and outputs are visible, not the internal workings, the hacker wants to open the box. The hacker further insists that if you can’t open it, you don’t own it. So in the way that libraries have always existed to understand the world better, to explore how stuff works, to illuminate the inner components of any area of interest, they have always been hackerspaces. Furthermore, as institutions owned by the public, libraries should not be black boxes. We should all be able to look inside and collectively tinker with the inner workings of these places.
The message of the library is that we can learn, we can become aware. We are not forced to remain in the dark. And while becoming aware is an important achievement, I think the public space of a library affords much more; I think it can provide options for activity that can enhance human agency.
Read the rest of this entry →
Wouldn’t it be smart for public libraries to stop paying the rotten cable/telecom companies for Internet service, and start providing access through systems built to preserve privacy, net neutrality, etc.? Of course it would.
Isaac Wilder was one of the winners at ContactCon, blessed by Reverend Billy and given $10,000 to kick off an IndieGoGo campaign. He is one of the directors of the Free Network Foundation, an organization committed to the tenets of free information, free culture, and free society. The networks they build are distributed and decentralized: less spying, more resilience.
They needs startup funds. Send a few dollars their way so that we can become customers of a better ISP.
Below I’ve copied what they mean by a free network. See their statements page for more. They’re good people; I’m cheering for them. Read the rest of this entry →