i’m doing some thinking on this and will post about it soon. in the meantime, lemme know what you think.
the ebook user’s bill of rights
every ebook user should have the following rights:
the right to use ebooks under guidelines that favor access over proprietary limitations
the right to access ebooks on any technological platform, including the hardware and software the user chooses
the right to annotate, quote passages, print, and share ebook content within the spirit of fair use and copyright
the right of the first-sale doctrine extended to digital content, allowing the ebook owner the right to retain, archive, share, and re-sell purchased ebooks
i believe in the free market of information and ideas.
i believe that authors, writers, and publishers can flourish when their works are readily available on the widest range of media. i believe that authors, writers, and publishers can thrive when readers are given the maximum amount of freedom to access, annotate, and share with other readers, helping this content find new audiences and markets. i believe that ebook purchasers should enjoy the rights of the first-sale doctrine because ebooks are part of the greater cultural cornerstone of literacy, education, and information access.
digital rights management (DRM), like a tariff, acts as a mechanism to inhibit this free exchange of ideas, literature, and information. likewise, the current licensing arrangements mean that readers never possess ultimate control over their own personal reading material. these are not acceptable conditions for ebooks.
i am a reader. as a customer, i am entitled to be treated with respect and not as a potential criminal. as a consumer, i am entitled to make my own decisions about the ebooks that i buy or borrow.
i am concerned about the future of access to literature and information in ebooks. i ask readers, authors, publishers, retailers, librarians, software developers, and device manufacturers to support these ebook users’ rights.
these rights are yours. now it is your turn to take a stand. to help spread the word, copy this entire post, add your own comments, remix it, and distribute it to others. blog it, tweet it (#ebookrights), facebook it, email it, and post it on a telephone pole.
to the extent possible under law, the person who associated CC0 with this work has waived all copyright and related or neighbouring rights to this work.
i saw this image on reddit a few days ago.
i believe this.
in 2011, shutting down the ISPs in a country is the equivalent of spiking all independent media stories, prohibiting most telephone calls, and limiting the postal service.
and if you haven’t heard about psiphon, have a look. i know a lot of you are pretty techy when it comes to this stuff.
last week there was a shitastic infographic making the rounds to help women determine what type of techy broad they are. my response (on ye olde twitter and facebook machines):
dear women in tech, i love you. i do not care about your hair, your purse, or who your dream man is. let’s take over the world. now.
and i meant it. we need to move forward, now.
to remedy my disgust, i recently watched Sheryl Sandberg‘s TED talk. she has three pieces of advice that i think everyone, even those of us in a “women’s profession” can benefit from.
sit at the table
make your partner a real partner
don’t leave before you leave
i think it’s worth 15 mins of your time.
so let’s all do ourselves a favour, and just be awesome. the world can handle it.
* nope, not a post about how newpapers are filed in libraries, how newspapers are part of library collections, nor about libraries in newspaper organizations…
i used to work at the Montreal Gazette. i worked in the newsroom for about 8 years. i started off making photocopies and delivering faxes in my CCCP tshirt (the newsroom manager didn’t worry too much about dresscodes, so long as i was dressed) and ended up compiling the scoreboard pages til the wee hours (while dealing with crank calls from editors phoning me for the cricket score for “team birdy num-num”).
it was a tremendous experience. i worked with many awesome folk, and every day was different because, ya know, that’s what it’s like in the news biz.
the 1995 referendum (with a livestream of the newsroom).
Princess Di’s death (dump everything planned for the front section and update coverage between editions. at 5pm she had been in an accident, by sports final, she was… dead?).
9/11 (well, that was just crazy. did everything that day including drive a reporter’s car to his house in the plateau because he was en route to NYC with a photog and he would have gotten a ticket outside the old gazoo bldg).
thanks to working in a newsroom, i am also most productive between 10pm and 2am, comfortable with crazy deadlines, and a stickler for the usability-side of the media (note: if the index has an inaccurate page for Ann Landers, your boss will be pissed. and if you mess up the Expos boxscore in the scoreboard page, don’t bother showing up the next day.)
i have a deep affection for the media, and especially newsrooms.
before leaving the Gazette i said that the only job i wanted there was publisher, but it’s hard to get that gig straight from copy clerk. i used to joke that i was going to start a competing newspaper in Montreal and hire away all of the best people from the Gazette. i didn’t want to do this to force the Gazette under, but because competition is healthy, and the Gazette was infinitely better when the Montreal Daily was competing against it for subscriptions. if you’re the only anglo daily in a city, there’s no reason to bring your A game, is there?
BEFORE YOU YELL AT ME… the folks at the Gazette up til now have been trying to bring their A game. but the entire concept of media is all over the place right now and old industries have a hard time adjusting. now i’m not for propping up these industries so that they don’t have to change. screw that. if libraries can move from huge tomes chained to desks to producing open access resources for the world, everyone else can learn a new trick too. but i do think we can’t dismiss the concept of the newspaper simply because “everything is online now”.
good newspapers aggregate and curate information for their local readers. they simplify or enhance, when required. they think about the local population when going through the sked. the go out in the local area and solicit feedback from people. they are the record of a place, a time, a citizenry.
good newspapers and good libraries have a helluva lot in common. i have always thought we should be working together more closely. how can we do this?
It is probably safe to say that emerging technology is a topic that is amply covered in our professional parlance. There are journals, magazines, blogs, social networks, conferences, workshops, and courses devoted to the many aspects of emerging technology that impact the way we deliver resources and services to our user communities. So in putting together this special issue on emerging tech, we were tempted to cast our net widely and collect stories that highlighted the best and most innovative examples of emerging tech in use in Canada’s libraries today. After all, who doesn’t love being regaled by tales of the newest, shiniest technologies they have never heard of?
Not the two of us, surely. We are both on the early-adopter end of the spectrum and we both sport our “geek” badges proudly. We have been known to get excited about everything from the newest gadget to the latest W3C specification (HTML 5, anyone?). So we would be the first to admit that emerging technologies are exciting, fun, and most importantly, what make us love our jobs. However, the very last thing we wanted to do was pull together an issue on emerging tech that focused JUST on the tech. Not only would such an issue be outdated the moment it hit your doorstep (such is the pace of technology development), but such an issue would also miss the point pretty spectacularly. The point? That emerging tech is as much about people as it is about the technology itself. It’s about what technology enables people to find, do, learn, create, share, and accomplish.
For this issue, we’ve pulled together a slate of articles that highlight some thoughtful ways in which libraries are harnessing emerging technologies to enable their user communities to accomplish all those things. Cecily Walker kicks things off with her discussion of what should be one of our most important considerations when thinking about how our users interact with us, regardless of whether the touch-point is virtual or in person, with her article entitled A User Experience Primer. In Building Communities with Large Group Methods and Social Media, Ryan Deschamps provides insight into some ways in which libraries can truly position themselves as community builders and enablers by borrowing ideas and practices from the world of social media. John Fink takes a growing trend in academic libraries and applies a technology to assist in the solution in his article, Using a Local Chat Server in your Library. Rob Zylstra and Stephanie Thero show us how they used a very user-centred approach to developing for a brand new technology to respond to community needs in their article, Libraries Evolve to Stay Connected: Building the YourLibrary iPad App. And finally, in Livres numériques : Le papier est la meilleure plateforme, Patrick Lozeau reminds us that the sky may not be falling when it comes to printed books.
We hope this issue leaves you with plenty of thoughtful ideas about how you can use technology to enable your community to find, do, learn, create, share, and accomplish.
i have the good fortune of attending Books in Browsers at the Internet Archive (also known as the “fathership” – assuming the “mothership” is the Library of Congress). the conference was attended by librarians, publishers, authors, developers, and other people who are interested in making sure stuff that’s written gets read.
one of the presenters is none other than Erin McKean. if you haven’t seen her TED talk yet, i’ve embedded it below. one of my all-time faves.
Erin’s new project is called wordnik.
Wordnik is a place for all the words, and everything known about them.
in her presentation she explained that since dictionaries try to cover the most useful words for the largest group of folks, they frequently leave out the newest and rarest. Wordnik does the opposite. essentially it is a crowdsourced dictionary (including real-world sentences) that aims to have all of the words in the English language. amazing. a context-driven dictionary? i think i’m in love.
but the best part? IT HAS AN API. (and soon there will be an iOS SDK.)
yay Open Access Week!
McGill Library will have a bunch of announcements out this week about initiatives we’ve been working on – so follow the twitter stream.
we also partnered with CARL to produce this quick video introducing OA concepts.
i’m thrilled to be the facilitator for LibraryCamp Monterey at Internet Librarian 2010.
last year’s camp was a great success (pic above), and can we get a round of applause for the Info Today peeps for making librarycamp part of their regular conference schedule?
here are the details:
who: anyone who can make it
what: librarycamp/unconference/generally awesome gathering of librarylanders
when: october 23, 2010 from 9:30am to 12:30pm
where: Monterey Public Library, 625 Pacific Street, Monterey [map with directions from conference centre to library]
why: because it will an opportunity to learn from each other – be ready to get your think on
how: maybe we just need the 5 Ws for this…
if you have any questions, leave a comment, shoot me an email or tweet me @jambina
that library was created in 2006 when i was starting my MLIS – and all the zigzagging that involves, and then it went on to follow me through my first year as a liaison librarian (and the ZOMG WHAT AM I DOING I DON’T KNOW ANYTHINGness), and now my current gig (and the OHAI ROADMAP-LESS JOB).
basically, it was out of control.
i would use it to track items that i needed for both personal (home-buying information, health information for friends n’family, the awesome exploits of friends, etc), and professional reasons (research, professional development, future-thinking things that get my bass thumping).
the “to read” folder was filled with 100+ items that i, ummm, was never going to read.
the folders were a disaster and i didn’t use tags to it was 39 kinds of chaotic.
so now i am rebuilding it from scratch. and i am relieved. i’m sure it will again get bloated and out of control, but for now, i feel more efficient with it. and i have vowed to use the notes feature to scribble things to myself, and to make better use of folders and tags.
and to always be a fan of zotero, because it really has made oh-so-much of my life easier.
*errrr, i backed it up first, then nuked it. i ain’t no dummy.
