Phoenix envy

In the 'cities are broke' category, I learned about (via cryptogon) serious budget problems in Phoenix, which is forced to cut 10's of millions of dollars from its budget. This article doesn't give any details specific to library cuts, but based on what other city agencies are losing, I'm sure it won't be pleasant.

This is also the first article for which I'm finally adding tags. I don't know why I never bothered to before. Probably because 2 people read this blog. Anyway, maybe I'll go back and add them to some older articles as well.

There's not always money in Philadelphia

I learned of the inevitability of the closing of Philadelphia's libraries on October 2 via a library listerv I subscribe to, and after looking into it very briefly I realized the problem goes well beyond just libraries. Serious cuts to fire and police services, not to mention garbage pickup and daycare (after living through this for 6 weeks here, I can only imagine if it became permanent - even though these are just cuts and not a total cancellation).

I was drawn to the story because it relates to libraries, which I think are an essential and fundamental part of any city - they serve as active cultural centres and also repositories of a community or society's cultural memories. They also often act as a key gateway to information for many people, from books & CDs to internet service. However, it's clear that the city of Philadelphia has problems beyond just access to information, and when you're cutting police and fire, I can understand that it's hard to justify keeping libraries open. I don't know enough yet about the details of the situation, so I don't have any real commentary or insight to offer, but it is a shame that any city would reach the point of cuts to so many essential services. It is frightening to think how much the loss of these services will hurt the quality of life for the people of the city. I wonder how widespread this sort of situation is across the United States.

For the record, here is a more or less complete list of what's being cut.

Open Book Alliance

I’ve recently signed up to receive updates from the Open Book Alliance, which is basically a consortium of libraries, companies and authors’ organizations opposed to Google’s possible dominance of book digitization. On their site they had a pdf of a presentation given that illustrates some of the more glaring scanning and metadata errors that have appeared so far in Google’s massive scanning project. Some of them are absolutely incredible, and in my opinion strong evidence of why we can’t rely on a private company and unskilled scanners – instead of librarians – to digitize and classify millions of books. And while I am a fan of the many of the products Google produces or has bought, and the convient integration of multiple platforms, I'm starting to become wary of doing so, especially as my information sharing is increasingly being stored on and filtered through Google servers.

Anyway, here's the presentation. It's worth checking out:
http://people.ischool.berkeley.edu/~nunberg/GBook/GoogBookMetadataSh.pdf

Whachya readin' for?

Time for your Friday-morning digital book fix. I really think this struggle for control is one of the fundamental issues surrounding e-books, since this is probably where a lot of people will start getting their books from, once e-readers get their iPod equivalent. Issues of privacy & content control are huge, and because of the role books play in distributing ideas and information, they affect book publishing in ways other industries - including music - don't have to deal with as much. These issues are too important to be left to the control of private companies, much less one private company (Google).

Maybe an alternative model would be just the digital equivalent of the way libraries work now - Google, Amazon, etc, 'publish' e-books and do what it is they want to do, but then individual libraries or library systems can purchase access to, or subscribe to, whichever books or whichever database they want. There are endless possibilities as to how it could be done. This way, as a 'reader' I can download my books from Toronto Public Library, in the same way I physically pick them up now, but it's TPL who will have the record of what books I, the individual, the consumer, the patron (however you choose to classify the person) have been reading. They have this information now, but are pretty responsible with destroying it, so it's nothing new that a library would be able to keep track of what its patrons are reading. Judging by the ALA's passionate response to the US PATRIOT Act, librarians take privacy issues pretty seriously, and I'd certainly trust a public library with my reading records more than a private company.

Regardless, it's interesting to see what the Open Content Alliance has to say about the issue.

Anyway, here's the article that got this all started:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/8200624.stm

More on books

I've just started reading Umberto Eco's On literature. I managed to get through about 5 pages last night before it was time to make dinner, but so far it's pretty compelling stuff. He's talking about the importance of literature and language, not just as hobbies but as serious cultural elements, and Eco has been pretty interested in technology and its role in literature for a while, so I'm curious to see what he'll have to say about that later on. I guess I'll have to wait until I've read a little more until I can comment further

Oh, and in case anyone's thinking it I'm aware of the irony of using a google-owned blog to criticize it for its monopolistic control on the spread of information, so please don't bother pointing it out.