SIVACRACY.NET

Michael Madison offers his thoughts on libraries:

I’m not a professional librarian, and I didn’t train at library school or in IS, so I don’t have a professional librarian’s sense of mission. I like libraries. But I have to ask some questions — both in order to make some sense of where Google (and Google Print) fits, and to figure out what a “real” fair use argument looks like.

If there is an “essence” of library, then: Can a library charge a membership fee and still be a library? Can a library charge a fee for borrowing materials and still be a library? Can a library not have an index or a catalogue and still be a library? Is a library a thing? Is a library a physical place? Is a library a practice?

My gut tells me that “libraries” are things and places and practices, all at the same time, and that membership and borrowing fees and absences of catalogues are all acceptable. Maybe the common thread is that the library maintains some permanent inventory of informational material, such that people are expected to return anything they use, and they are expected to return it intact. In social science speak, libraries play certain institutional roles in the information ecology; librarians, as custodians of those roles, manage their boundaries. But a library doesn’t need to be a physical place; we have offline digital “libraries” and online “libraries.” Maybe boundedness is the key element: for reasons of space and time and subject matter, libraries don’t collect everything — they are, in principle, selective, and a “librarian” does the selecting.

Is this really “essence of library,” taken from the librarian’s perspective? It is if we use our definition of “librarian” extremely expansively. We all build our own “libraries” of books and music, and of course the Betamax litigation gave us the ugly “librarying” neologism for videocassettes. I am my own librarian. If so, then “essence of library” isn’t a helpful construct, I think, since it trivializes the professional discipline that we call librarianship. Better, instead, to set aside the “essence of library” construct and to adopt a different perspective altogether. I don’t mean to disparage hardworking librarians, but I do want to suggest that the category “library” is better understood from the standpoint of how information users and consumers experience information works, in collections and otherwise, rather than from the standpoint of those who collect, present, and manage the works. That perspective unifies my colloquial use of “library” to talk about my bookshelf, and the publicly-managed collection of books and DVDs down the street, and university collections that don’t admit the public. As an information user or consumer, I regard anything that I experience as a subject matter/space/or time-limited collection of information works as a “library.”

What does that have to do with Google, and what does it have to do with fair use?

As far as Google Print is concerned, it turns the question around. In addition to asking “What is Google doing?,” we also ask: “How do we experience the material that Google Print is creating?” (This takes me back to Siva, whose work is all about celebrating how network technologies expand opportunities to experience information. P2P, for example, undercuts the experiential sense of libraries in the sense that we no longer regard the universe of information works as fixed and bounded.) Do we experience Google Print content as we experience other collections that we regard as libraries, or do we experience that content as we experience the Web — a functionally unlimited aggregation of data? Right now, the answer to that question has to rely on intuition and speculation. My money is on the second option, but in the end: who knows?

And as far as fair use is concerned, I don’t think that this sort of analysis is distracting at all; I think that it gets at the heart of the problem. As a copyright lawyer I’m always skeptical of characterizing an argument as an “authentic” or “real” form of argument. Copyright is too plastic (to borrow someone else’s word), and it operates at too many levels, for all that. “Google is doing what a librarian does” is a perfectly valid form of fair use argument — the case reporters are filled with fair use decisions that are framed this way — even if at the end of the day I think that the argument likely fails on the merits. Non-lawyers who encounter the fair use statute are tempted, understandably, to treat the text as filled with magic words (and as improved by magic words supplied by the Supreme Court, like “transformative”). The magic words are almost uniquely unhelpful, either as guides to what courts actually do, or as guides to what courts should do.

Michael was kind to write more in response than I had time to yesterday. I have made the argument, here for instance, that we have experienced a remarkable expansion of lay librarianship since the advent of the cassette tape. This has had profound effects on our expectations and our experiences. We rule our own soundscapes and mediascapes. We make our own soundtracks. Our media laws and tools should and often do reflect this profound change over the past 40 years.

But that is a different thing than saying the mere presence of archives and indexes in private spaces functions like libraries do or that non-librarians act as librarians. Again, I wish I had the time to explore this further. I have a journal editor or three breathing down my neck right now. They are probably reading Sivacracy and saying "if he has time to blog, why isn't he done with that article!" And they would be justified.

Anyway, I appreciate all the feedback. I will write more on this in the coming weeks. Promise. Meanwhile, I will continue to link to responses I find around the blogosphere.

Any librarians want to take Michael up on his questions? Write to me and I will post the responses.

Meanwhile, here is Carlos Ovalle (not a real librarian after all!) responding to Michael:

Now, the “What is a library?” question is one that is often discussed, obviously, in this field, as is the related question “What is a librarian?” In general, I think, the broader sense of information use and uses can be used to term something a “library,” but there isn’t really a consensus. Colloquially, of course, we all consider all kinds of things libraries, including personal collections and so on. In the more traditional sense, there are many types of libraries- special, public, academic, etc. These include private libraries and for-profit libraries. Now, there are unifying aspects of “librarianship” as it pertains to librarians, although they’re not quite absolute across the different areas of the profession. They’re probably best exemplified by the American Library Association and its values. There are also information professionals who have little to do with libraries as such. For example, we offer a number of courses involving information technology, human computer interaction, accessibility and usability, and so on. Some professionals consider what they do librarianship, and some don’t. Take a look at a recent librarian.net post about what Jessamyn does all day, which in a brief paragraph mentions that she doesn’t consider herself a librarian, a divide between professionals and paraprofessionals, and popular media portrayal of librarians. My perspective is probably best shown in my letter to the Texas Library Connection list. I have an MLIS, but I don’t consider myself a librarian. (Sorry, Siva. ^_-) I think that what a professional librarian does is different from what I do in my day to day activities.

No, I don’t think there is a simple “essence of a library” definition, particularly in the sense of a physical place. Some disagree. I don’t believe a library is defined by a librarian selecting materials, but I do believe there are practices that make a library a library. There’s lots of literature about the subject- I’ll see what I can dig up when I get a chance- but I don’t see an overwhelming consensus for a set definition. The commonalities, I think, the actual “essense” is best shown in shared values. Our values do tend to focus on the users, the people that use the services we work with.

In a rhetorical argument, or in the court of public opinion, yes, I think it would be useful to Google to be considered a “library,” merely because of the weight of the word and generally positive associations with the word. Even so, though, not all libraries can take advantage of copyright exemptions. For-profit libraries can’t, as an easy example. That’ s one reason I don’t think it matters- from a library exemption argument- whether or not Google is considered a library. Given Google’s recent behavior about this particular case, if the letter to Library Law is accurate, I don’t think it should be termed a library. Google’s service may be akin to a library’s service, but I don’t think calling Google a library in this case would really be beneficial or fair to libraries. Again, if the contract Google had with the universities was different, there’s a very good chance I’d back them. Generally, I really admire Google- just not in this instance.

Philosopher/print culture dude Steven Chabot in Toronto writes:

This point itself is of real importance. Perhaps we don't even experience libraries any more as libraries. With this paradigmatic shift from print culture to digital culture, our experience of the media itself will be changed. Can we say that a print culture library, right from the National Archives or the Library of Congress to the small corner outfit, operates in the same manner as a manuscript culture library, like that at Alexandria?

It is clear that, as much as I love the aesthetic and physical qualities of books, they are going to be digitized one way or an other. I want traditional libraries to be relevant, they have a nostalgia, but that is not going to stop digital culture. So the questions remains: if "libraries" are going to become, in the future "a functionally unlimited aggregation of data", how are we going to keep them respectable and open? Traditional libraries are themselves seen as agents of the public trust, and so should these new digital endeavours. If Google is going to make a "library", then there is nothing to stop them, or some other entity, from doing so, because it is going to happen. We can't stop progress, but we can police it in a way that keeps it from extraordinary levels of corporate and government control.

All we can do as a society is uphold the ideals of freedom of access and a healthy "information ecology" as we make the transition from print to digital culture. "Fair-use" would have to help this ecology to grow and grow in a healthy manner, regardless of whether Google Print is the soil or something else, because it is going to happen either way.

Anyone else?