By Andrew K. PaceAmerican Libraries Columnist
By Andrew K. Pace
American Libraries Columnist
Head of information technology,
North Carolina State University Libraries,
Raleigh
andrew_pace@ncsu.edu
September 2007
You might think from this month’s title that I was going to go on again about open source software. Sorry to disappoint if that is what you wanted; happy to oblige if you feel like you’ve had your fill of the growing reach of open source library applications and all the new vendors making a business out of free software.
Actually, I was thinking about intellectual freedom this month—my own and the impact of the internet on it. I’m thinking mostly about the freedom of expression that the Web has allowed. To some, the Web represents the great equalizer, with blogs as the ultimate democratic form of soapbox, commentary, and debate. But then I thought, are they really? Sometimes I feel more afraid than free.
“Are we on the record?” That’s one of those cool questions I never thought I would hear myself ask; I certainly never expected anyone to ask it of me. I consider myself a columnist. And though I like to joke that a columnist is just a journalist without all those inconvenient restrictions (i.e., integrity, accuracy, fairness), I do take the journalistic aspects of my role very seriously—in print and on my blog.
All it takes is someone calling that integrity into question with an accusation of favoritism, unfair treatment, or—worst of all—inaccuracy, and I can really get my back up. Was I being fair? Was I expressing a professional opinion or an unbalanced judgment? Am I free, as a columnist, to say what I think or should I err on the side of simply providing the facts? I’ve never been censored by an editor, but I have learned to walk a line between accusation and innuendo. I often hide meaning among the lines of text so that a clever observer can read between them.
There was a time when addressing an audience in person—something I do at least once a month—that all one had to worry about was the occasional cell phone ringing. Now instead of asking the audience for technological silence, it’s not uncommon to ask, “Is anyone blogging this?”
I’ve never minded my being blogged, either live or with the benefit of hindsight and a little thought. But I will admit that I have pulled punches, lightened an opinionated stance, or left out potentially embarrassing details in a story when I knew that someone might be jotting it all down for some bizarre mixture of historical obscurity and future accessibility.
Clifford Lynch of the Coalition for Networked Information was once asked a question about preservation of the digital record. He astutely remarked on the irony that all the stuff we wish would disappear has a tendency to stick around forever, while the content we want to preserve is in danger of disappearing. Lynch added that CNI sometimes fields requests from people asking to remove something immature or naïve they once wrote on a discussion list (and which likely keeps popping up as an embarrassing reminder when ego-surfing on Google). Of course, the answer is, “No, sorry.” Sometimes it would be nice to take back some of the speech we’ve regretted freely expressing.
Many people know the story of Waskar Ari, the native of Bolivia who was hired by the University of Nebraska at Lincoln after completing his PhD at Georgetown. Ari’s research—which focused on issues of race and nationalism in Latin America and comparative work on the American civil rights movement—raised suspicions at the Department of Homeland Security, and his attempts to obtain a visa were blocked for two years.
Ari’s situation drew widely publicized complaints from scholars, and the university sued the government. Intellectual freedom eventually won the day, but not without a prolonged struggle.
EBSCO and LexisNexis are among the first database firms to make blogs part of their news indices; others are sure to follow—perhaps to a point where an editorial from the New York Times might be nearly indistinguishable in search rank from Billy’s Boisterous Blog (don’t look for it; I made it up). Despite the chaff that distracts some blog detractors from the bountiful wheat, there is a lot of freedom out there and most of it is freely available; the blogosphere is intellectual freedom writ large. But as in other contexts, we must sacrifice a little security for that kind of freedom.
“Imagine a library that collected all the world’s information about all the world’s books and made it available for everyone to view and update. We’re building that library.” No, that’s not a mission statement from Google, it’s a quote on the Open Library website, a project started at the Internet Archive to collect all the data it can about the world of books, scan as many of them as possible, and open the whole thing up for free. The entire project hinges on a staff of seven and the dedication of volunteers who can input data, contribute MARC records, and link it all up to the full text of books from Project Gutenberg and the Open Content Alliance. It sounds a little like WorldCat plus all the best freely available e-books. There’s one hitch, though: OCLC will not share its records since its “business model depends on charging for the data that we wish to give away for free,” Open Library’s FAQ states.