It is banned books week in the United States (September 26- October 3) , always a good opportunity to recall the importance of the profession’s commitment to freedom of expression and intellectual freedom more generally.

According to the Banned Books Week website, the tradition started in the early 1980s and has only grown since. The American Library Association has also put together a good Banned Books website. I have often thought that a course dedicated to reading banned books would be a great educational experience.  In fact, some books that have been challenged frequently in the USA (e.g. To Kill A Mockingbird and The Lord of the Flies) were required reading in English while I read others (e.g. 1984 by George Orwell and Brave New World by Aldous Huxley; we like dystopian fiction here in Canada; “The Handmaid’s Tale” by Margaret Atwood was assigned reading and also good) for book reports with the enthusiastic support of teachers. I am also delighted to report that Google Books has put together a Banned Books website too. In reading through the list of books mentioned by ALA, I was surprised to see that the education authorities in Toronto sought to ban “The Lord of the Flies” in 1988.

There has been some interesting activity in the ebook sector lately that I have been following with great interest. For the time being, I think that e-readers are best suited for reading journalism (e.g. I often read the New York Times and the Globe & Mail on my iPhone), but less suited for longer form works. Perhaps my views would change if I used the Kindle, but Amazon has yet to make it available outside the United States but I think it unlikely.

Cory Doctorow, noted for providing his books for free through his website (as well as writing great columns on technology and blogging at BoingBoing), observed in a recent interview that he doesn’t think novels work in e-readers. He argues that the sort of sustained reading necessary in the case of novels doesn’t work well with ebook readers. I would tend to agree, but somehow, I still want e-readers (with print on demand publishing existing to give them competition) to succeed for pragmatic reasons. Packing 5-10 books into luggage for a trip is difficult and heavy.

Likewise, students at Princeton University have not embraced the Kindle enthusiastically. As the Daily Princetonian reports, Kindles yet to woo University users, students are not pleased with the device. One student summarized his experience by saying: “It’s clunky, slow and a real pain to operate.” One particularly interesting objection to use of the Kindle in the academic or research context is the lack of page numbers which makes it difficult to cite passages. I don’t know exactly which audience had in mind for developing the device, but research and academic users needs do not appear to be well served thus far. Despite the problems, I think Princeton is to be commended for its efforts to run a pilot test of the technology.

This September 20, 2009 article in the Toronto Star – A tale of two countries’ libraries – is a great read. It shows how successful Canada’s public libraries are and the quotes from Faculty of Information Senior Fellow Wendy Newman are not to be missed. I count it a blessing that no Canadian library I know of is in danger of being shut down.Here’s a quote to get you started on the article:

Contrary to what you might have heard, libraries are not in a terminal state of decline, “they’re not even sick,” says Wendy Newman, a senior fellow at the University of Toronto’s faculty of information, formerly library sciences, now known as the “I School.”

“Libraries are back big-time, they’re having a renaissance.”

Circulation was up 27 per cent this summer across Ontario’s 330 systems and 1,000 branches. Toronto, already the largest system in the world with 99 branches, is expanding with two more.

“We’re not intimidated by the future at all,” laughs Shelagh Paterson, executive director of the Ontario Library Association.

This is good news by any measure and it is great to see these facts acknowledged in the Toronto Star.

This week witnessed a major development in open access as a number of major American universities agreed to support open access through the Compact for Open-Access Publishing Equity. As I understand it, this move would mean more support for projects such as the Public Library Of Science journals where funding comes from author fees (according to an article referred to below, such fees are quite rare) or other types of support, rather than subscription fees to a conventional publisher.

Here is a quote from the Compact’s website:

Scholarly publishing is going through a transformation as a result of digital means of communication, coupled with the financial predicament of libraries. With the most recent economic downturn, access to scholarly articles, so important to research progress and public advancement, will no doubt suffer.

Open-access scholarly journals have arisen as an alternative to traditional subscription scholarly journals. Open-access journals make their articles available freely to anyone, while providing the same services common to all scholarly journals, such as management of the peer-review process, filtering, production, and distribution. Since open-access journals do not charge subscription or other access fees, they must cover their operating expenses through other sources, including subventions, in-kind support, or, in a sizable minority of cases, processing fees paid by or on behalf of authors for submission to or publication in the journal.

You can also read an open access article that explains this development in further detail: Equity for Open-Access Journal Publishing. I love the idea of open access and the potential it offers to support greater learning and scholarship. The article linked to above delves into the economics of open access, including the problem of moral hazard. Currently, five universities are signatories to the Compact: Harvard, Dartmouth, Cornell, MIT and UC Berkeley.

Library and Archives Canada is consulting with the library community. To view the survey and participate, consult the website that the Ontario Library Association (OLA) has created for the consultation. The consultation document does not appear to require membership in the OLA specifically. It is good to see the organization consult as it charts new directions. Daniel J. Caron, Librarian and Archivist of Canada, has also written a letter describing the challenges the organization faces and some of its plans for the future.

I would like to see LAC (or some other organization in Canada) consider copying some of the great ideas implemented in the United States and UK. Let’s look at a few quick examples:

• The British Library created an excellent sound archive.

• The Library of Congress has a number of good projects underway including Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers and an interactive, game-like service called myLOC that the collections and the buildings of the Library.

Canada need not copy those projects specifically, but they are a good starting point if one is looking for inspiration.

In last Saturday’s Globe & Mail (Septemer 12, 2009), Peter Nicholson wrote on the implications of how information rich our society has become. As President of the Council of Canadian Academies, Nicholas comes to the debate from an academic position. Unfortunately, there was not much in the way of examples or data from an educational or research context in the essay.

Much of the essay reuses familiar examples and confuses the significance of rise of amateur production on the Web. Several of the examples and points made in the pice have been covered elsewhere and in greater detail. The claim that the Web’s “cult of the amateur” is killing expertise strikes me as odd. ‘Amateur’ production on the Web is often of different category than professional production. I would very much disagree that the “market for depth is narrowing.” Indeed, one could argue that there are now many more depths – or niches – than before.  The market for depth is broadening and deepening by many measures. For example, how many types of medical research are there now compared to 1980? Further, given the costs of doing accurate, high quality, ethical research, I doubt that “amateurs” are likely to take that over soon.

Nicholson does make a good point on the economics of this information transformation. As he writes, “But economics teaches that the counterpart of every new abundance is a new scarcity – in this case, the scarcity of human time and attention.” Librarians and other information professionals are poised to take advantage of this scarcity. Navigating through information and managing the information we already have remains critical.

My first efforts to build websites around 2000 involved opening up Notepad and writing plain HTML. This approach does teach structure, but it is incredibly limiting. Writing out HTML by hand may work for a simple personal website, but it is not an option for any kind of organizational website. For any large or complex website, one must use Imagine the difference between building a deck with power tools versus traditional tools, only greater! Using a powerful CMS (content management system) also makes some of the work more rewarding. Rather than handcrafting tasks again and again, it can allow one to focus on high level design issues.

I choose Drupal because it was open source, free and has a strong community of users and developers beyond it. Many libraries also use it and so I have got started. My web host has the option to install Drupal in a matter of few clicks and away I went in starting to use it. Drupal is by no means the only game in town however; here is a good overview of 10 CMSes including WordPress, Drupal and Joomla!. Like WordPress (which powers this blog), Drupal supports many plugins to add additional features and I very much appreciate the option to customize like that.

What’s the nuts and bolts of teaching yourself Drupal? I like to combine experimentation with a guide. I am reading and working through the examples in Using Drupal book from O’Reilly. Then I have the Drupal installation on my webhost that I can test things on. To structure my experiments, I am recreating the structure (and some of the content) from a library website. I am still working my way through the learning curve, but it is going well.

If you subscribe to this blog by RSS, please switch to using the new Feedburner RSS. You can also choose to get email notification of new posts, if you prefer that. I’m all about offering options.

The government of Canada is holding copyright consultations with the public until September 13. I am pleased to see that the official government website allows for comments and some social functionality; you can view the most read comments and the most recent comments easily. The topics covered by the consultation – Copyright and You, Test of Time, Innovation and Creativity, Competition and Investment, and Digital Economy – bear some similarities to the CRTC’s spring eConsultation on ISP practices. Looking through some of the comments, I was pleased to see people comment in favour of expanded fair dealing (that’s the approximate Canadian equivalent to the U.S. concept of “fair use”) and protection for the public domain. I would also compliment the designers of the commenting system – there are moderators for each area and background documents to help citizens get up to speed. You can also attend townhall style meetings to comment on this issue in person and read transcripts of the nine sessions already held.

Librarians, information professionals and anyone with a stake in the digital economy should pay attention to copyright issues. As the economy shifts more and more toward services and intellectual production, copyright becomes a central issue. It wasn’t always this way. I recall a lecture that Michael Geist gave where he remarked that copyright was regarded as something of an esoteric aspect of commercial law in the 1980s; that is certainly no longer the case. Copyright is a balancing act that needs to take account of the needs of creators to obtain compensation and users to access those materials. Arguably, recent changes in copyright law (especially in the United States) have tilted the balance too heavily toward content owners and creators.

Many Canadian librarians and associations have been active in speaking out during these copyright consultations. The Canadian Library Association’s Copyright Working Group has argued for stronger fair dealing, critiqued digital locks, and that a “notice and notice” regime for ISPs should be adopted (rather the the “notice and takedown” procedure used in the US). The Ontario Library Association has also produced a guide to help librarians understand what the implications of copyright reform to their professional duties. Karen Adams, speaking on behalf of the Canadian Association of Research Libraries, spoke at the Winnipeg round table and public hearing back in August. Of course, there are many more contributors out there; this is simply a sampling.

What did I learn in doing research? I knew that there was a proposal to adopt protection for digital locks (digital locks prevent one from accessing content on media such as DVDs and making a backup copy, for example). Making it illegal to circumvent digital locks would have harm the ability of disabled persons to access materials. Copyright reform affects everybody, so take a few moments and learn about the issues. Then, if you are so moved, communicate your views to your Member of Parliament or comment through the online consultation system.

John Dupuis, science librarian at York University, is working his long running blog series “My Job in 10 Years” into a book. Dupuis has been working on this series since 2005 where he started to reflect on trends in collections. The series reflects on changes in publishing, the physical space of the library and advocating for the role of libraries in the university context. As we approach 2020, Dupuis argues that print books will still be produced but journals will change by moving from the concept of issues to simply publishing individual articles. There are many good points to the articles and blog posts that John has written over the past several years. The collections collection is an important one – as the free Web gets better and better, how and what should be bought? If the academic publishing industry goes the same way as newspapers, then few publications will be available for purchase at any rate.

While we all wait for the book, you can read an article version of the idea from York University’s repository.