Here’s the logo for the PanAm Games that I definitely don’t have permission to use!

Yes, they are looking for a volunteer Digital Asset Librarian to “manage and maintain TO2015′s digital media library.”

Don’t worry…a library degree is not required (or even mentioned!).

Key responsibilities:  manage discovery and collection of all TO2015 digital media assets, assign and maintain metadata architecture, develop digital workflows, other responsibilities as assigned. Ability to speak French and Spanish desired. And lots of other things too.

Wow, it sounds like a job you’d want a librarian doing.

I live with a digital asset librarian.  His job is one that requires a lot of thoughtfulness, a lot of consultation, and a lot of patient teaching. Surprise! Good metadata is not something that’s widely appreciated, though the end results (hey, you can totally find what you need!) usually is. His job is a lot of work…for instance, a full time job (you can read about it here). The fact that he is paid and will stay in this position for the foreseeable future is a really good thing for the organization.

No hours or length of this ‘contract’ are specified…but with that list of responsibilities this can’t be a quick gig. This person is not tagging and uploading content under the supervision of a librarian à la everyone’s library school practicum ever. This poor librarian-of-a-sort will be will be reporting directly to the Director of Communications Operations. 

Does the PanAm games actually care at all about maintaining a digital asset library? It doesn’t seem like it, so why are they posting for this position? Who are they imagining will apply for this ‘job’ and then stick it out?

This is so obnoxious. My urge towards rhetorical flourish makes me want to add words like infuriating, offensive, disgusting, ridiculous etc., but I really don’t want to waste any more time thinking about this/possibly having to justify my hyperbole.

PS Makeda has also pointed out that while PanAm videographers and photographers are also volunteer positions, the mascots will be paid. Good thing the job also requires a sense of humour. 

I’m certainly not, but I do have some feelings other than glee.

I really, really hope this wasn’t about the $5000 of public money he spent on Spanish lessons.

Shout out to all the librarians getting professional development money. I do. That means some combination of student tuition and government money pays for hotels and meals as well as conference registration fees. There’s no sweet private sector kick-backs, save the occasional drink ticket via ProQuest (but then you still have to stand in that bar line!) , but as my partner who works in the proper-public sector and never gets funding for any PD stuff reminds me, I am dang lucky. LAC collects materials in a lot of languages. It don’t think it’s absurd for someone who speaks English and French to seek out Spanish next. And I’m not entirely convinced it’s awful for us to pay for it.

But more importantly: if he’s stepped down over $5000 in mis-spent education money then we have lost this battle. It means he will never step down because:

• he put into place a Code of Conduct that was somewhere between Big Brother and Monty Python in its outrageousness
• he consistently said there weren’t enough skilled people to work at LAC, while getting rid of said people
• under his watch, LAC closed interlibrary loan services despite having one of the most unique collections in the country
• LAC seems to have abandoned its goal of becoming a Trusted Digital Repository
• he trumpets a digitization strategy that sounded like it was from 1999
• have you heard that equally compelling social media strategy?
• etc.

So: I’m not sure why he stepped down, but given the way the Experimental Lakes Project, the Department of Fisheries and Oceans, Environment Canada, and National Research Council have all be eliminated/renamed/broken lately, I’m skeptical that Caron was fired for having ‘the wrong vision.’

James Moore has publicly stood behind LAC’s ‘modernization.’ More importantly he’s a Tory cabinet minister. Who will be chosen to run LAC next? Surely someone who can fall right into line.

I’m not convinced LAC needs a librarian at the top. You’d never know it from the way we talk (and talk and talk and talk) about our importance at conferences, but there are people other than librarians who understand the values of librarianship, and some of them are also good at managing large organizations (there are librarians who are good at this too, of course).

What we need is an advocate, and I have very little hope that we’ll get one.

Here is the call for proposals. We’re interested in presentations on tech-in-the-library quite broadly. Are you repurposing software? Wading into text mining? Teaching your users to print in 3D? Enhancing your distance ed support? Work at a university? College? Public library? Hospital library? Special library (solo librarians, I know you’re doing something cool)? We want your talks!

Look over the call, then send me an email if you have any questions about how your brilliant idea might fit into Superconference. Don’t worry about the 75 minute session blocks. We can pair you up, no problem.

I’m pretty sure this is the biggest library conference in Canada. It’s big! And Toronto is fun! Yup, even in February.

(Now I am an old employed person and I scramble to watch screeners and post about them beforehand.)

Here is my shortlist of urbanist-related (loosely) films. Myself and Marco Avolio will be reviewing some of them on the Spacing blog in the next few weeks. 

(But God, just GO SEE EVERYTHING)

TIP  just because something has gone rush (i.e. sold out) doesn’t mean you won’t get in–they set aside a lot of industry/media tickets, and there are always people who don’t show. So: stand in line! Stand in line and don’t look at your phone! Wicked people stand in line for movies. 

PS: Students & seniors see movies free during the day.

As the cliche goes, the people I met (many from OCUL!) were the highlight of the conference (did you know that Hampshire College has a Critical Social Inquiry Librarian? She is awesome.) The program itself was excellent.  Most of the sessions I attended were on some combination of information literacy and scholarly communication, and my notes are here. 

I didn’t realize how public-service focussed ACRL was. There was very little on e-resources, licensing, or library tech. Our own session, meant to showcase ‘technology-related innovation in the library‘ felt not-quite-properly pitched to the audience, though I think it went well:

I did manage to spend a couple of hours at THATCamp, the Humanaties and Technology unconference full-day extravaganza. In the afternoon my group wrote a short pitch document on why faculty should be interested in undergraduate publishing.  One group put together a Digital Humanities eBook in an hour. Another  spent all day working on an information literacy MOOC (not sure where the notes on that are). It was a very productive format.

(OCUL: this must happen here.)

And now here’s a picture of chicken and waffles. Love u, America.

Is this a much-needed tool for organizing communities? Yes! Is the Market 707 patio (their first Toronto project) a worthwhile thing to contribute to? Absolutely!

But if your ‘vote’ is contingent on getting financial backing, then it’s not a democratic process, it’s just crowd-sourcing. There are only certain neighbourhoods that are going to be able to do this. Fine, that’s how it goes. Can projects be proposed and funded in low income neighbourhoods? I guess so. But if the locals can’t fund the project, then how much say will they get? 

That doesn’t mean it’s not a perfectly legitimate way to do get.shit.done in a city that spends all of this time going back-and forth about plastic bags, non-existent subways, and Hero Burger. It’s merely the branding that makes me uncomfortable. 

PS: 1% of funds gathered from successful projects goes into the Projexity Improvement Fund, “driving revitalization to areas of the city that need it most.” That’s cool.

Minister Moore was accused of being ‘Orwellian’ in the House of Commons, and of using Doublespeak on Twitter. Pretty grand accusations, but they’re coming with context.

History comes up a lot in these conversations; preserving our history is after all the mandate of LAC, though one they seem less and less interested in. 

The second kind of history at play here is the more recent history of the Conservative Party squashing dissent, cutting off funding for programs and services that do not line up with their ideology, of being the party of groveling, weak backbenchers, the party with an Accountability Office who won’t give its own Parliamentary Budget Officer access to budget documents. This is the party that cancelled the long form census because it was ‘too intrusive,’ instead suggesting that a voluntary census could be statistically valid.

Anyway, I could go on…

To read a government organization’s code of conduct and see such tidbits as:

“As public servants, our duty of loyalty to the Government of Canada and its elected officials extends beyond our workplace to our personal activities”

and

 “LAC employees may be asked by third parties to teach or to speak at or be a guest at conferences as a personal activity or part-time employment. Such activities have been identified as high-risk to LAC and to the employee with regard to conflict of interest, conflict of duties and duty of loyalty”

is, with recent history in mind, pretty chilling.  While LAC’s draconian code of conduct may have been developed outside of any government oversight, it sure sounds familiar.

I appreciate the minister’s willingness to engage on Twitter last night, but let’s be honest – he basically just said “you’re an idiot and that’s not my problem” over and over again.

May I suggest that the Heritage Minister MAKE this his problem?

1) “Hi Blogger, we’re really surprised to hear this criticism. Can you please point us to the specific volumes and series where you found these issues so we can take a look?”

2) “Hi Blogger, we acknowledge there were some issues. We did an overhaul of our editorial process in 2010 and have modified the way the books are bound to make them sturdier. We would be happy to send you a couple of volumes from our 2013 catalogue so you can see these changes for yourself. If you agree these are improvements, we would appreciate a follow-up blog post.”

3) “Hi blogger, we know the price of our product seem expensive. We serve a niche market, and balancing the desire to make books accessible with the need to be sustainable is difficult. Please take a look at our 2012 annual report to see where that money goes.”

4) “Hi world, This blogger has also written scathingly about 8 other small presses, and we don’t believe these criticisms are valid. That said, we always welcome feedback from our readers and the libraries we work with. If you yourself have concerns about any book published by Press X, please take a moment to Contact Us!”

Here are some good ways not to respond:

1) Trolling the Chronicle message board, posting over and over again about your press’s credentials without ever responding to specific question as if you’ve never been on the internet (here)

2) Suing Dale Askey, Assistant University Librarian at McMaster University (here, here, and here). CAPAL, the PLG-GTA, and McMaster (who are also being sued by Mellen, amazing)  have all written statements  on why this is a really bad, unfounded idea (in case that wasn’t obviously).

If you haven’t been following this story like a crazed person (guilty) but want more, here’s the actual notice of action against Dale and here’s Mellen’s own curious policy on publishing with them.

Now look, Mellen Press. I’ve worked retail. I know the customer is not always right, and sometimes they are flat-out jerks with a chip on their shoulder. Dale is not that customer, and he also has a lot of allies (become one here!) who are probably the only people in the world who buy your books. I would like it if this story ended with you retracting the suit and making some major changes, but your self-destructive tendencies make that seem unlikely.

Still, after reading this I joined in on what turned into a bit of a mean-spirited pile on. I don’t think we scored librarians any points, although I think we were clearly in the right.

John Degen, an author and Ontario Arts Council worker, wrote a pretty scathing post about the OLITA resolution passed at last Friday’s AGM, a resolution I was  proud to throw my weight behind (read it here).

I don’t think (surprise!) that Twitter did justice to the response I wanted to give so John, or whoever, here is what I have to say about your post, the OLITA resolution, and Access Copyright:

(But first of all, heck yes librarianship is political. I hope this doesn’t come as a surprise to too many people.)

Degen disputes several of the resolutions clauses out-right, without explaining why he disagrees that students are broke, supreme court rulings on fair dealing give more leeway to educators, or that Access Copyright treats technology restrictively.

He then goes on to say:

What the resolution rather studiously does not point out is that when schools, colleges and universities decide to forgo licensing for copyright-protected content, millions of dollars in legitimate royalty payments to Canadian writers disappear

There’s not a lot of room for argument here, because I dispute that Access Copyright represents “legitimate royalty payments.” The structure of Access Copyright is bad. They spend a lot of money to collect a lot of money, very little of which actually goes to writers.

At one point in our incessant Twitter squabling Degen argued: “last time I checked, Spacing expected their copyright to be respected.” Spacing is an urban issues magazine. I am the books editor for this publication.

(Just in case you were looking for an answer, John, yes, I do expect people to follow copyright law when using Spacing. But copyright is obviously nuanced…if it wasn’t we wouldn’t need to have too many discussions! If you want to photocopy an issue of Spacing and sell it…there will be a problem. If you want to photocopy an article for your class, the law has come down squarely on your side, regardless of how Spacing’s editors and writers feel about it.*)

Fair dealing is real. This doesn’t mean I can photocopy twenty copies of his novel and pass them out to students so that they don’t need to buy their own. That’s obviously an extreme example of infringement, but Degen’s arguments take everything to an extreme. In another blog post he argues that yes, teachers should have to pay 30 licensing fees if they want to teach a news article in their current events class. First of all, what would be the logistics of putting this sort of mind-numbing bureaucracy into action? If handing out a single newspaper article to your class is not covered under fair dealing–what the heck is?

Degen’s issue is with the law itself–he doesn’t seem to believe in fair dealing, period. And if that’s the case then his argument is really, “the legal system is bad and doesn’t compensate authors properly, so underfunded libraries should be threatened with law suits until they pay more for content they have already legally acquired.”

(But yes, he’s right that the OLA and OLITA websites do not do a great job of explaining our membership…so hi, I’m one of them.)

* My guess is that they would feel pretty good about it –they are heavily invested in urban advocacy issues, and the article might just generate some new subscribers!

Given the size of this study, there were a lot of interesting findings. One that stuck out to me was the fairly significant decrease in the use of primary sources. They don’t do a lot of analysis of this finding, but it strikes me as a pretty big deal!

Why would this be?

 An obvious reason is that secondary sources are easier to get. In a section entitled “Constraints on research progress,” time pressures and lack of money were named as the top two complaints (with licensing restrictions right behind).

I don’t have any historical comparison, but is it possible that today’s students have less time to dig around and less funding to travel to primary sources? But Gen Y students were less likely to travel to other libraries than (current) older student too.

On Wednesday, I developed a second hypothesis. I was at the “Re-Visioning Public Services” Unconference at Wilfrid Laurier University, and our group was battling with the question “How do we convince students of the benefits of good vs. quick research solutions?”

Over and over again, we found ourselves coming back to the assignments students came to us with. Quite often they are instructed to simply “find three peer-reviewed sources” on their topic. This search, coupled with the students’ terror at correctly citing their found sources, takes up so much room in their head! Their goals are daunting, but ultimately simplistic, and the result is that quick research solutions make sense both on their own terms, and the terms of their instructors.

With web-scale discovery services, finding three peer-reviewed articles on a topic is not a process so much as a single task. There’s no pouring over abstracts and indices, no shelf hunts, no databases-to-try checklist. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but it does change the meaning of “research” for a lot of students—a lot of undergraduate students, some of whom will soon be graduate students, expected to research much more deeply, thoroughly, and extensively, having always come to acceptable resources easily.

This is (thus far) 100% speculation on my part, but I don’t think completely unfounded. Perhaps I need to nab a few peer-reviewed sources of my own before I say any more!