Early August Update

It has been over two months since my last post so I thought I would briefly write once again. The summer has seen me work on a number of projects, undertake some travel and read quite a few books. I’m thinking that I may review the direction and emphasis of this blog as a matter of fact. Before I alter course, I think I will post reviews of some of the books I’ve been reading. Stay tuned for more posts as August progresses.

The Hot Docs Doc Library

For four or five years, I have been an avid attendee of the Hot Docs Documentary Film Festival held annually in Toronto in late April and early May. Their sheer variety of films and topics available at the event can feel overwhelming but I usually walk away having learned something new and seeing interesting techniques in film making. As with many other film festivals, some fraction of films shown will become more wildly available on either television or cinemas but it is hard to know which ones are “see it here or never!” versus “see it here or in theatres in a few months.” During this year’s festival, I learned about a new project called the Hot Docs Doc Library where you can see a wide variety of Canadian documentary films for free.

According to the site, this project was supported partially through the federal government’s Canadian Culture Online Strategy program. The leadership of the Department of Canadian Heritage in supporting films like this deserves to be supported. As a librarian, I would like to see the library have better organization. It is difficult to search the films or even easily figure out how many there are (my guess is close to three hundred films, including shorts). In the future, I look forward to seeing more Canadian films posted here and seeing how the site evolves over time. Perhaps the administrators of the service will consider taking on librarians and educators to further develop and expand the site.

Launch of the iSchool Institute

In the knowledge economy everyone is a volunteer, but we have trained our managers to manage conscripts.” – Peter Drucker

I had the pleasure to attend the launch of the iSchool Institute tonight and take in Euan Semple’s stimulating lecture. As I understand it, the Institute is part of a broader effort to change the role of the Faculty of Information and increase its impact on the public. The Institute will continue providing continuing education courses that formed the core operation of its predecessor, the Professional Learning Centre, but it will also deliver periodic public lectures such as the one I attended this evening. It was also mentioned that the Institute may develop a consulting service to provide expert advice on information issues to the broader Toronto community and beyond. These are exciting changes – I wonder if these plans were inspired by the Rotman School of Management (which is across the street from the Faculty of Information) which has had a consulting arm called Impact Consulting Group.

Public lectures by leading experts in information work is one part of the Institute’s work that I am particularly excited about. Tonight’s lecture was given by Euan Semple, formerly head of knowledge management at the BBC, on the topic, “Organised Chaos: Social Networks and Enterprise Change.” This was a wide ranging talk about how to use social media in the enterprise/business/organizational setting. As an Anglophile, I was particularly interested in Semple’s metaphor for the tension that IT policies experience when faced with social media tools; at one extreme is the highly managed traditional approach (aka the Milton Keynes style, the UK’s most infamous planned town) versus the organic and open ended approach (aka the  Cotswolds village style). One case study from the BBC was particularly interesting to me. When faced with staff blogging and other social media experimentation, the response was to create an internal wiki where interested staff collaborated and wrote the policy, BBC Guidelines on Employee Weblogs and Websites. I get the impression that engaging staff in the process ultimately made this a more relevant and successful policy. Engaging staff in the creation of an internal policy document underscores why social media and tools matter. Ultimately, social media is not about technology, it is about changing (hopefully for the better!) how people work.

Near the end of his talk, he referred to two recent articles in the British press that really underscore the fact that social media has arrived in every sense of the word. The BBC has mandated all new staff be literate and skilled in using social media tools such as Facebook and Twitter (BBC tells news staff to embrace social media). Likewise, there is a similar directive for the British spy agency MI5: MI5 dumps spies who can’t use Facebook and Twitter.

Toronto Public Library’s Beta Website Invites Your Comments

As one of the most heavily used public libraries in North America, the Toronto Public Library is an important institution in the library community. I often use the Library’s resources online and visit branches and always feel good about my experiences. Recently, I started following TPL’s announcements on Facebook just to see how the institution is making its presence felt in that area. It was through Facebook that I learned that TPL is launching a new website which you can know see in beta. I’ve taken a screenshot below to preserve what it looked like in March 2010:

I see several interesting contrasts with TPL’s current website. The overall size of the site is bigger; it goes “over the fold” in my browser. It strikes me as a much more intense Web experience compared with the current site, but absolutely nothing wrong with that. I also see a much greater emphasis on events; you can see that Globe & Mail writer Margaret Wente has a talk at TPL in April and that the library is participating in an event called “Keep Toronto Toronto Reading Festival.” The centre block of the site – which highlights new items in the collections including children’s fiction – reminds me of the University of Toronto Library website that also highlights recent items. Overall, the site’s design looks like it will be more dynamic and there is a higher chance of seeing new and interesting information here every time I come to visit. Access to the collections, catalogue and other library programs is still clear to me. The site is friendly and I would have to give it high marks. You can read about the planning and thinking behind the redesign on the TPL’s Web Team blog. The Web Team is to be commended for their extensive communication and efforts to consult with users in this process.

On a different note, I also came across some statistics on TPL’s performance in 2009 and the data is impressive. For anybody that thinks that public libraries are losing popularity or are failing to deliver the services and collections people want, these kind of statistics really counter that way of thinking. According to a January 19, 2010 press release, the Toronto Public Library had a record year of usage in 2009:

• The number of materials borrowed (over 31 million) jumped by 5 percent over 2008
• People visited the library’s 99 branches 17.5 million times, up 8.5% from last year
• eTitles (including eBooks, eAudiobooks and music files) were borrowed 88% more than in 2008
• In-branch computer use increased by 11.5%

Get the book on Net Neutrality

Last fall, I successfully defended my master’s thesis on net neutrality and now I’m happy to report you can read it online. It is about 160 pages long and focuses on how the debate over net neutrality has evolved in Canada and the United States. Net neutrality can be understood as a set of principles that require Internet service providers to provide access without interfering in content, applications used or user activity. It has been a political issue since 2005 and remains unresolved to this day. If you haven’t followed the issue at all so far, here’s your chance to get up to speed. It might be developed and expanded further into a traditional book at some later point.

Download my book on net neutrality here

The Printed Word Meme

There’s a meme going around the blogosphere lately encouraging people to read printed works. I gather that it started a few days ago on the East Side Bride blog which had a post declaring a pledge to read the printed word; this was then reported on LISnews where I read about it. On one level, I like the idea since reading books tends to be a different kind of reading experience compared to online reading. Yet as a technophile and as someone studied book history and print culture, it does seem odd. Sure, I’ll read news articles on my iPhone but whenever I have a longer journey, by train or plane, printed books are still preferred.

Johannes Trithemius (1462-1516), wrote a famous letter in praise of scribes but these ideas were circulated using the printing press.

On a different level, this strikes me as somewhat similar a famous letter penned by Johannes Trithemius (1462-1516) called, “In Praise of Scribes” (De Laude Scriptorum) praising the scribal production of books over printing. Yet this widely disseminated letter was printed to enable to it to be spread more quickly. So, the printed word meme can be seen as part of a longer tradition of efforts to protest in favour of older communication technologies using newer means. This is a common trend that one can observe over time. Clean breaks between different communications technologies are rare; older methods continue to persist long after new means are invented. That said, new communications technologies are new and often have dramatic effects. For the effects of printing, Elizabeth Eisenstein’s book (The printing revolution in early modern Europe) remains a classic; for the effects of the Internet and related technologies, I like Clay Shirky’s book, Here Comes Everybody.

Studying the Canadian Securities Course

Earlier tonight, I started a course to prepare me to take the Canadian Securities Course offered by the Canadian Securities Institute (this is the Canadian equivalent of the US Series 7 exam offered by the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority). As I understand it, passing this exam is a professional/legal requirement for those that want to sell stocks and mutual funds in Canada. That is not why I am taking it though. As I am currently doing information management consulting for an investment management firm (and I’m deeply interested in economics and want to understand how “the market” works better), I’ve decided to take this course to deepen my understanding. Tonight, we covered some basics of the stock market very quickly such as an overview of derivatives, currency trading and the business cycle. I found the business cycle aspect of tonight’s session to be the most interesting and accessible section.

In conducting some background research into the course, I found it interesting (and frustrating) to see how tightly information about the course is controlled. None of the libraries I consulted in my area had any materials relating to the CSC; neither the official textbooks published by the Institute nor any study aids for those wishing to deepen their understanding. The closest I came to finding any information about it was some posts on the Red Flag Deals website of people offering to sell their old textbooks. I suspect this may be a broader Canadian trend. I recall walking through a British bookshop once and noticing a plethora of titles offering to explain how to pass or even garner excellent grades on the UK Civil Service exams; as far as I can tell, there is nothing like that for the equivalent exams in Canada.  Perhaps this post (and possibly some following it) will serve to address this lack of information on how financial services people are licensed and what they actually have to study before they can be unleashed on the markets.

Not even Saudi Bookfairs are free of oppression

From the Economist, we learn:

FOR decades Saudi Arabia’s religious police have enforced a rigid separation of the sexes in public places. Plain-clothes agents of the Committee for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice, as the religious police are known, patrol streets, parks and shopping centres, intervening to scold offenders, strike them with switches or haul them off to be disciplined by ordinary police. At last year’s annual book fair in Riyadh, the capital, they arrested two male visitors for the crime of ikhtilat, or “mixing”, after they asked a female novelist to sign her book. Other cases have ended more tragically, with the death of suspected lovers during high-speed car chases.

Such restrictions continue to amaze me. I wonder at all the Suadi authors and readers that are unable to connect to these archaic laws- their publishing industry must be suffering considerably. This whole incident makes me more curious about how Saudi libraries operate. I wonder if libraries in the country are equally restrictive? In any event, the country’s natural resources will run out at some point. Perhaps then the economic fallout from lack of women’s education will make itself felt. A modern society simply cannot be free and prosperous when half the population is denied education, mobility and other opportunities.

Seth Godin is wrong about the future of the library

Seth Godin thinks that the future of the library is far from bright. His post from yesterday is short so I’ll quote it in full:

What should libraries do to become relevant in the digital age?

They can’t survive as community-funded repositories for books that individuals don’t want to own (or for reference books we can’t afford to own.) More librarians are telling me (unhappily) that the number one thing they deliver to their patrons is free DVD rentals. That’s not a long-term strategy, nor is it particularly an uplifting use of our tax dollars.

Here’s my proposal: train people to take intellectual initiative.

Once again, the net turns things upside down. The information is free now. No need to pool tax money to buy reference books. What we need to spend the money on are leaders, sherpas and teachers who will push everyone from kids to seniors to get very aggressive in finding and using information and in connecting with and leading others.

This reminds me of a presentation I attended last year at the CLA conference in Montreal by Ken Haycock. He was speaking about the challenges of advocating for public libraries and the downside of advocating the view that libraries are solely about information. He pointed out that there are often several other public bodies that essentially exist to give information to the public, for example public health authorities educate the public about safer sex practices or the dangers of drug abuse. If memory serves Haycock suggested that public libraries would do well to focus on their community building function. Holding the focus on provision of resources is not going to work well.

As you might understand, the library blogosphere has been up in arms about this post. From my experience of using and working with libraries, Godin’s criticism misses a lot of what libraries offer. For one, he completely ignores (or doesn’t care about?) all the resources offered by academic libraries; manuscript books, archives, special collections and powerful research databases. If you’re doing serious humanities research, trying to do it without a library or archive is not going to work (i.e. your dissertation/book/article will be awful!). In the public library environment, Godin’s post ignores all the programming that libraries offer including assistance to immigrants, literacy tutoring and Internet access. Joyce Valenza asks, “Is Seth saying that we need librarians, but not traditional libraries?” Hmm, possibly.The Analog Divide blog agrees with Valenza in saying that libraries are in trouble when one of the world’s most popular business bloggers makes this kind of criticism. Alas, the critique also misses much of what the world’s with-it librarians have been up for the past +5 years.

Book lovers beat security theatre, again

Due to some recent terrorist activity, there were security measures announced on December 28 by Tranport Canada that further restricted what airline passengers could bring on flights. Somebody didn’t think through the restrictions very well and it appeared, briefly, that books and magazines might be barred from flights. As Carolyn Wood, executive director of the Association of Canadian Publishers, commented about these measures in a Globe & Mail article:  “We’re used to governments fearing books for their content. But what is it here? Is it their explosive capability?” Quite right. Indeed, it reminds me of a certain haunting quote by one of the 20th century’s most brutual dictators, Joseph Stalin, “Ideas are more powerful than guns. We would not let our enemies have guns, why should we let them have ideas?”  Happily, the inadvertent ban was reported on January 5 but it was reversed by January 6; Books permitted on U.S, bound planes.

These kind of poorly thought out security measures really annoy me. I’m doubly irritated in this instance because this has happened before. In 2006, there were security measures introduced in the UK that restricted carry on luggage and that included books. Based on some quick research with the Google News Archive, this really came to a head in August 2006. However, the restrictions have since been done away with. It puzzles me why these restrictions are put in place only to be done away with shortly afterwards. It would appear that history, even very recent history, is not learned in air security circles. Books are not a security threat, leave them alone already!

Some of the other reactions to the December 2009 air travel restrictions take a different approach. A Canadian author, Mary Soderstrom, protested the measures which restricted books but allowed all manner of IT devices by starting a Facebook protest group. The group is called: Stop Dumbing Down: Allow Books on Airplanes. In the US, there has been intense criticism about the measures on Twitter. Here are three particularly good reactions: No books in flight; Reading is dangerous to national security; Protecting you so much you never want to travel ever again and; TSA: Theatrical Security Association. The last quote hits on the idea that these security measures create the illusion of security but likely do little but waste money and time.