 I am here to introduce Jessamyn West. Many of you may be aware of her because she has that librarian.net blog. She kind of grabbed that URL, but 1999, so she's had that for a very long time, one of the first librarians to blog. She's the author of Without a Net, Librarians Bridging the Digital Divide. This is in the Necklace Collection, and I would highly recommend you read this book because it tells how librarians are working with our patrons. It tells the story. There's some Kansas stuff in here, the Kansas Libraries on the Web Project featured lots of other things. But we brought in Jessamyn, originally to talk about the bridging the digital divide, but then with some of the work she's doing and it started doing, the presentation turned into open libraries, and I think she's got a lot of great information to share. So thanks, Jessamyn. Thanks. Let me know if you guys can hear me in the back. Everything I'm going to talk about has links to stuff on the Web. Like Cindy, I talk really fast, and I talk about a lot of different things, and what I'd like is for people to just be aware of what the stuff is. If there's specific items you want to dig more into, librarian.net, slash talks, T-A-L-K-S, slash Necklace. And you guys say Necklace, right? Not Necklace, or somebody asks. And I was like, I don't know. I just read it on the Internet. But it also includes my slides that have all my notes in a variety of formats. So if you want to follow along or you want to go check out the hard exhibit, it's really nice in the back. And catch up later. That's super. But like Heather said, my plan originally was to talk about the digital divide, which is a project here and here to my heart, or the topic here and here to my heart. And one that I'll basically talk about anyhow, whether people want me to or not. People are like, oh, the libraries and everything on the Internet. I'm like, oh, you are in for a treat. But this year, and I'll sort of start with the slides, this year has changed a bunch of things. You are, again, changed a bunch of things in the library world in ways that are kind of a big deal. And one of my favorite things about being a librarian is it's a very exciting job that other people don't think is very exciting. And so I'm going to talk about some of the things that I think make it really exciting and some of the things that I've been doing this year that I think may be exciting to you. So we'll see. Moving on. I have a bunch of different jobs and one of them is only just barely working in a public library. I live in a small town in the middle of Vermont with about 4,500 people. I'm the intrepid part-timer at my library, which means when somebody's out sick, I live walking distance from the library and I go fill in and everybody's like, who are you? I'm like, I've lived in this town for seven years. But I mostly fill in there. What I mostly do in my town is I teach people how to use computers. We have a drop in time, five hours a week. I sit in an open lab and anybody in town who has problems with computers, they just come in and ask. Sometimes we help them. Sometimes we tell them they actually need professional help. Sometimes we tell them to go to their library. Well, we've got computer guys in town, right? But sometimes you need to know, is this a problem I actually need to pay a guy for or can you type some stuff and fix it? I work for MetaFilter.com, which is a massive group blog. There's a couple people from MetaFilter here. It's just a discussion forum on the web. People talk about stuff. We have a questions and answers part of the site where people can ask questions, receive answers in a very informal, hive mind kind of way. If you're more curious about that, look me up, free accounts for librarians. I volunteer email support at Open Library. If you don't know what Open Library is, I will be talking more about that. And I've got a blog and I write stuff and I go and talk to people about my blogging and writing other stuff. So I always go Googling around to find public domain images that I can use for these talks so that anybody who wants to repurpose my talks is not going to wind up going to jail for the copyright violations that we're all worried about. So I Google Exciting Library, which is a terrible thing to do with Safe Search Off. And a bunch of stuff in a training manual. This is a library training manual from 1921. It's linked on my list of links. You can find it in Open Library. You can probably see it, but it says, ideal home traveling library. And the caption that was under this in the book was, I don't remember, something, something, you know, Bookmobile. But the quote was, someday this handle will have its own permanent structure. Which I was like, hey, we go, you know. And yes, now that when we're talking about libraries of the future, we're talking less and less about new permanent structures and we're talking more and more about the cloud virtual services 24-7, this, that, and the other. And don't get me wrong. I love the permanent structures. I'm just saying that when we're envisioning the future, it's less and less of what we were thinking about and only 80, 90 years ago, that was the dream. So like I said, exciting. And so, you know, you talk about pop-up stuff and things that have less and less permanence. And for enduring institutions, that becomes a very challenging mechanism. But at any rate, I'm excited to be a librarian partly because I'm excited, but also because library culture over the last year, even a whole bunch of stuff has happened, which I'm going to sort of talk about and do a little bit of a recap. Looking at what's been happening in the last calendar year, making media comments interested in braille calendars in check. You can use those pictures to be whatever you want, including segues into calendaring stuff. So a couple of slides that are just talking about what I'm talking about when I talk about this past year. A couple lawsuit type things and things that I like to say kind of went our way. So May 2012, Georgia, Georgia State won, or they mostly won the lawsuit about e-reserves. If you're not familiar with this, they were putting lots and lots and lots of stuff online for kids to check out and publishers said, you know, that's not fair use. You're just stealing from us. We're going broke. We can't feed our children. And I don't know why you hate publishing. And it turned into this drama, drama, drama thing. And Georgia State mostly won, but especially they mostly won by people saying, this is really exactly what fair use actually is, is letting kids study stuff that you wrote. That's what educational means in school, et cetera. And there was some really funny sort of snark on the internet. Brandon Butler, who's from ARL, Association of Research Libraries, his quotation was, Oxford University Press reported a billion dollars in sales last year, 180 million of that was profits. Is that what a publisher on the verge of collapse looks like? And Oxford University Press is appealing this year and they're unlikely to make. But it was interesting. And don't get me wrong. I love publishers. I just want them to work with us to be reasonable. This is not me being like publishers at all. So, journals of the Modern Language Association. This was in June of 2012. They changed their author agreements to leave copyright for all of the MLA journals in the hands of the authors and allowed them to share them in digital repositories. Swall change didn't really even make that much of a ripple, but it's kind of a big deal because the Modern Language Association is kind of giant. And they're deciding it's time for them to walk the talk. Oh, we want to be more reasonable about copyright, or we want publishers and writers and everyone else to be more reasonable. Let's see how open access destroys our business. And it probably actually doesn't. Okay, moving on. Basically they're saying, hey, if you value the culture, the culture now includes sharing. Oh, and we're the Modern Language Association. October 2012. This was the big deal. Authors galed, again, I love authors. I want them to be happy, but this was a problematic lawsuit where they went after Hockey Trust. If you're not familiar with Hockey Trust, it's a giant companion of digitally available documents that uses sort of various levels of access depending on what your institutional affiliation was, but a lot of the Google skin stuff winds up indexed and keyword searchable in Hockey Trust, which I think doesn't have a the in it. So I don't know how to pronounce anything, basically. So the decision made was also these uses, making it searchable, making it indexable, making it available to print disabled users was all determined to be fair use under the U.S. copyright law. The decision specifically mentioned transformative uses, like making an index. So you can't even get at all the documents if you're just some schmo like me who doesn't have an institutional affiliation, but you can use a keyword index. You've probably seen it on Google with the snippet view and stuff like that. Hockey Trust is a larger version of this, but basically they're like, it's totally okay for people to index your copyrighted stuff. Sorry, you know. And there was sort of more stuff and it also paved the way for other digital repositories to do similar things because now there's a legal decision that says we actually think this is maybe kind of okay. And the thing about Hockey that's so appealing from a rights holder perspective is that they're really good in the access control thing. Like I don't know about your libraries, but some of the libraries I'm in, we have kind of these databases and they're behind a password wall and you're supposed to type in your password or your library card number. But really, if you ever had a library card at that library, that will work to get into these database, online databases forever because all it's doing is matching the pattern of the numbers on your library card. You guys are all more sophisticated than we are in Vermont, aren't you? Because I've been able to get into databases, I have no right to be able to get into because I have the pattern for the library card number of the town. Hockey does better than this and they have sophisticated levels of access control. They do proxy pass-through stuff so that you authenticate at your own individual university and so they're serious business about not having hackable URLs where people can get at the stuff. The password is part of what they provide. So some users get access, other users get different access and all the stuff is behind the password at some level or another. UCLA, streaming. This was in November 2012. The Association for Information, Media and Equipment. Not an organization I knew a lot about. They had a lawsuit against UCLA who was streaming copyrighted content behind password walls for students through like a Moodle-like environment. So courseware, within courseware. Not only was this lawsuit dismissed, see my little circle, it was dismissed with prejudice and with prejudice means quit asking. So it looks like that's probably not going to also go anywhere which opens the door for more educational institutions to stream content to students because there's now firm decisions saying at least in these cases if your case is like this case we think this is legal which is also sort of important. They talked a little bit about other discussion about whether a streaming copy actually fixes a piece of content in a new way which was an interesting nuance to copyright and a lot of this is kind of above my head legal, legal, legal stuff but you know, we won is something I do understand. And it's also an access issue similar to HathiTrust because this all happened inside the content management system wasn't available on the live web and it was a sophisticated password system that decided what was and was not okay. This was probably my favorite one of all of them. It's hard to pick a favorite, right? But this was February 2013 in response to a we the people petition. You know that thing the government does where they're like, make this list. You only have to get 25,000 people. Oh, you're all making lists about legalizing marijuana. Let's make it 50,000 people. But now it's 50,000 people and people are still getting their petitions heard and this was a we the people petition. They've got 60,000 signatures. Federal agencies with more than 100 million in research and development expenditures. So we're talking big guys here. Have to develop plans to make the results of the publicly funded research available to the public in a year, 12 months. So for a lot of people, they're like 12 months. You can make all the money you want to make in 12 months. We've all heard about the long tail. How much money are you really making way out here? And how much does the public actually deserve the stuff they paid for from you the government? Court said, yeah, right. And so it's not just hippies like me. It's people like the government who really feel like this is a good idea. So that's gratifying in its own way because it's happening at high levels from people you've heard of. As much as I love my library, me making a stand about having to show jobs and I'm going to use the title of the movie and the newspaper isn't really going to make big ripples with the copyright people, but stuff like this actually does. This was getting talked about in October, but the decision was in March. Kurtzank, another word I'm not sure I can pronounce, versus Wiley. Wiley who you've heard about. Basically, this was a lot about first sale. If you guys don't know about Kurtzank, he's a dude in America who went and bought cheaper versions of textbooks in other countries and then sold them in this country. Cheaper textbooks brought them here, sold them, made money. Wiley was like, that's totally against the rules. That's our money to make. Kurtzank was like, no, it's not. And then they bought and then Kurtzank actually went. And a lot of people were really worried. Libraries were really worried because this is the first sale thing. You bought it, you bought it, right? That's a thing we get. If we're the library, we bought it. We get to put it in the book sale. We get to make the exhibit out of it. We get to lend it to people, which is really important and a whole bunch of other stuff. So people were wringing their hands and like, it's the end of first sale. Other people were like, ah, it's the end of us being able to make any money, starving children. Ultimately, Wiley is still in business and this decision did not go their way, which I think is okay. So bam, first sale continually upheld makes us happy. Things are going pretty well. A couple sort of funny things that have happened fairly recently. You guys know the MPAA, right? Motion Picture Association. American, eh? American. American. Okay, great. I just know there are the people who told me I couldn't see movies when I was little and now I'm like, what was all the fuss about? But there are the people who tell you that you can't say we're showing jaws in the newspaper. They say you can show a scary movie about a shark on Martha's Vineyard and hope your patrons can clue into what it actually is because of reasons. So even the MPAA has been acting kind of weird. They basically sided with the author's guild to, there was the, you know, digitizing part of Google's digitizing thing. They went after universities in Google and their fair use activities being like grump grump grump. This is going to be the end of everything for the MPAA, grump. So we were like, well, that's what they do for a job. But then this very funny story, the Ravens, I hear they're a popular football team in America. And they had a logo. One of their original logos was kind of designed by a fan. And all the fan wanted was like a football helmet and like some tickets to the game and the Ravens were like, maybe, but we're going to put it on our jerseys anyhow, but then rar. And so they wound up fighting about that. They changed their logo, super. But every now and again, there's promotional stuff, old Ravens stuff that shows up with the old Ravens logo on it. And the dude who designed it and didn't get paid or a helmet or anything gets kind of mad. Long story, slightly shorter, the MPAA was suddenly like, that dude's going to get mad at us. Or other people could get mad at us, movie makers. Basically putting non-copyrated images in our movies. We could be in some huge trouble if this was true. And so all of a sudden they were like, it's fair use. The MPAA says it's fair use. And so now you've got to believe there's something in the water. Because when the MPAA is starting to argue fair use as a defense for their own stuff, we're suddenly feeling that maybe this is the sea change we've been looking for. So the MPAA, this is a funny article, actually talking about MPAA, suddenly in support of fair use, for no reason. And then recently, very recently, April 18th, so last week, Viacom, another giant mega corporation we've probably heard of, and then YouTube, another giant mega corporation that you've possibly, this is so hard for me, right? Like, do I want the mega corporation on the left and the mega corporation on the right to win? But basically Viacom came out and lost their suit against... Yeah, the higher court rejected Viacom's attempts to sue Google for the immense copyright violations that we all know happen there. But basically they have a long legal argument that I recommend reading if you're into that kind of thing. Where Google's like, look, we try to take it down when you tell us to take it down. It's not really that cool of you to have robots telling us to take down stuff that's not copyright violations just because your children are hungry. And let's talk about this, like, two giant mega corporations. So Viacom's suit was upheld, which is good news for all of the sharing people on the internet who would like to do this and not worry about robots that are like, I think I heard three seconds of a Beyonce song in that video so now you can't use YouTube anymore. Which I think is a thing a lot of us are worried about. So there's a lot of agitating about fair use specifically. This is a great thing if you haven't seen it. It's linked on the list. It's an ALA. Kind of help you make a fair use evaluation. Obviously the only thing you can really use to make a fair use evaluation is winning a lawsuit in the courts. But there's a lot of very good best guesses you can do. I'll talk sort of briefly about it, but I really feel like this year is the tipping point, which is why it's very exciting. So ARL has a very nice collection of slides. They did a fair use guidelines for academic and research libraries. Realistically, other people can use and adapt, but they got money from, I don't know, Sloan and Mallet and a whole bunch of people. They made a big set of best practices for fair use. They made it available on their website and they're going on like dog and pony shows with slides. This is a slide of a slide. Basically talking about sort of why it's important and their main point is it enables admission. It is our mission. So serving knowledge, we have to access copyrighted work. Sorry, it's true. And the fact that the world of technology changes means that we have to be able to shift that stuff into other formats, into other places, and archive it and preserve it for the future. I don't know why I'm even telling you guys this. You all know it. But ARL knows it and they're going on the road sort of talking about that. So as more and more of this content is digitized, you could just insert my entire hobby horse about the digital divide here. A lot of what we're talking about now is access, who's got the passwords and how they can get to it, and equity of access. Can everybody who has access get to it? So fair use and libraries give us stuff like the Digital Public Library of America which was going to have a fancy launch in Boston last week and instead had a soft launch online which is worth clicking around and it's very interesting. I like the idea of the Digital Public Library. I like the people who work on it. I think their heart is in the right place. But in many ways the Digital Public Library of America is a library for libraries. It's kind of a discovery layer for vast access content. And the one thing they don't do which my dream of the Digital Public Library of America would have done is allow me to search by rights. Like I want to search the free stuff that I have access to and that's not as surfaceable. I mean you can tell priorities by what people put on this main page, right? There's an awesome map. There's an awesome timeline. None of that stuff loads on my, you know, Pope's and phone connection in Vermont. It's beautiful, but I want to search by rights and I can't, which is too bad. So then there's open library. Now, in the wake of the terrible stuff that happened here in Schwartz, there's a whole bunch of people who have stepped up and said, you know, we've got to sort of continue his legacy. People talk about Aaron's army or whatever, but he helped build a lot of really cool things and had his heart in a place that I think a lot of us would like to be in. And I love all my jobs, but I thought what I really needed to do is have a project that was library-ish and that was free and open access-ish. And so I basically contacted Open Library, which is a project that Aaron helped build at the Internet Archive. You've probably heard about it. They have tons and tons and tons of stuff online, but the website's kind of hard to use and complicated and the search doesn't work like you'd like it to. So everybody thinks it's, you know, everybody loves it because they mirror what they dream about onto it because it feels like it's not maybe quite there yet, which is fine. So I don't know how much you know about the Open Library, but I know some people there and I contacted them and I'll talk a little bit about what they actually do in case you don't, if you know exactly what they do, check the email for a couple of minutes. But basically the Open Library allows, in addition to the other stuff they do, lending of e-books. You know, e-books. Like you guys lend. Only they do it slightly differently and I'll talk a little bit about it. And to anyone in the United States. I think even more than the United States, but I can guarantee the United States. So you can read a book online with a single click. And when I say a single click, I mean like one click, I overdrive inflated for, you know, advertising single click. Like you click a thing, you're reading a book about portal rights. It's awesome. You can borrow books with a couple more clicks. I'll draw your attention to the red circles, but I'll also draw your attention to the far red circle. So you can borrow this book from Open Library. And I know what you're thinking. And you don't have to pay or anything. It's free, free light, free speech, and all the other free things you like, kittens. But this book is published in 1993. And I know what you're thinking. Like copyright, I don't remember if it's 1927 or 1926, but I know 1993 is definitely in copyright. So what's the deal? How does this work? That is not legal. Is it? And so basically the way Open Library functions is they have partner libraries. Partner libraries like you've heard about. Like the Boston Public Library. We really hear a partner library with thinking about it. So Boston Public Library, for instance, has a book about porcupines. It doesn't really search. It's a kid's book from 20 years ago. They take the book, scan it. Internet Archive has scanners all over the place. They put it on the shelf, and they don't search the physical copy of the book. They take the digital copy. They upload it to the Internet Archive. They wrap it in a little bit of Adobe digital rights management stuff. It's a topic for another day, complicated. So that they search one copy of this book at a time. And instead of searching it to anyone in Massachusetts, they search it to anyone in the world. You know, I saw them talk about it at Massachusetts Library Association Conference, and I was like, is that illegal? And they're like, are lawyers think it is? And we have lawyers. So let's see. And in the meantime, there are books along, loading e-books to people. And mostly, I was talking a little bit about this at dinner last night. In many ways, it's a ghost ship because there's not really anyone running it for the most part. There's not like a collection development person. They just get what they get, and it's fairly random. And well, I'll talk more about that in a second. So you can library in there. The items at OpenLibrary have mark records available. If you need to like pick up a mark record or two, or a couple million, there's an API and you can get mark from the OpenLibrary and you can just have it because some libraries have decided to just share their mark records. Is that legal? Probably? We don't know. We've got a decent working relationship with OCLC. So it's not, we're not doing it in secret. I'm not telling you like, I don't tell anybody. Anyone can see this on the internet. So mark records, you can have those. Interacting with people. So a lot of people are like, oh, that's cute, Jess, and then your little website, you and your six friends, check out eBooks, you can pirate. I'm like, no, seriously, we're signing up 700 new users a day. A day? People have made a million lists. We've circulated 67,000 eBooks. We've got 18,000 new members in the last 30 days. 28 days, sorry. So it's popular. But then the big question is, yeah, that's great. How many librarians work there? And the answer's kind of none. Or the answer's kind of a hundred, because it's a wiki, and so anyone can edit it and la, la, la. And one of the things that I found when I started doing support there, which was probably in February, I probably answered 1,000 emails helping people use things, is that there's no one running the thing. Brewster, who actually had the entire internet archive, kind of runs this. But they had a project manager, they got a grant, and then I don't know what happened. People left. There's allegations that, who knows, their internet can't believe it. But there's nobody kind of in charge. There's mailing lists. There's a community. There's a wiki, and you can edit most of the stuff on the site, but not all of it, which is interesting to me, because of course, I want to edit the one page or not. But basically, a lot of the stuff is happening either on a volunteer basis or other places in the internet archive. Scanning happens through the book projects. The dev stuff happens on the same server. And when I signed up in February, no one had actually answered a support email in six weeks. It's kind of a secret. That might be kind of a secret. Because I love it there, so I don't want to be like, ah, honestly, there's a lot of these things that, you know, the tech part kind of operates like it operates, until it doesn't operate and all the emails I'm getting, I love the Google Translate phone app. You know, we get emails in Portuguese, we get emails in Spanish, we get emails in Chinese, we get emails in Afrikaans, we get emails in all these languages. I use Google Translate, I write back and I send a translated version in my English version. A lot of times what they're asking is, do you have books in Afrikaans? Do you have books in Portuguese? And the answer actually is, yeah, we totally do. But it's not so easy to find and you have to kind of explain to people how to do it. Or you get people who can't log in. Or you get people who are having digital rights management problems. It's like a funny joke of my life that I'm like this total copy fighter and I spend a lot of time now telling people, okay, you've got to like now reinstall and reauthorize it with your password and then, you know, and the Linux true believers are like, I can't believe you even support this. And we're like, well, we try not to make the perfect the enemy of the good. But it's a challenge because figuring out just how imperfect things can get before they're actually bad is what I spend a lot of my late nights talking about. So a couple other statistics. We get about 40 to 50 emails a day. So it's not that many. I mean, I answer them usually when I'm working at Metafilter or just when I'm hanging out. They're not all like super challenging. But often they're about the same small set of things. And a lot of the people are people I recognize. They're not so good with email. They're not so good with computers. They downloaded a book and they don't know where it is. Normal stuff that you've heard about. And so the project is awesome. But the reality is there's still human beings who still need to learn how to use the project. And I sort of feel like in that situation and probably in many other situations, we could be doing better, I guess. And I think we're trying to make eBooks real to people. We have to kind of know a few things. So Wikipedia is always the example. It's like Wikipedia that anybody can edit. But as much as you can edit Wikipedia you can't edit the structure of Wikipedia. Someone's got the passwords and that someone isn't you. And it's not me. If I decide I want Wikipedia to look different I can maybe style it with a script or style it with something else. But anyone can't totally edit Wikipedia. And then you read those articles where it turns out most of Wikipedia has been edited by like 1,500 dudes. And suddenly you're like, oh, so much makes sense to me now. But it's the encyclopedia that everybody can edit sort of. And there's levels of access that we don't really talk about that much because they mostly don't matter. But in situations like open library, in situations like our library, in situations like eBooks, who's got the passwords to do how much actually sort of matters a lot. The thing about digital content is there's always, almost always going to be passwords involved. Someone's going to have passwords but someone else is going to have root. Root meaning you can actually like get at the stuff underneath. So, you know, there's some people who have keys to the library. It's like my easy example. But you all know who's got the keys to the library in most cases. Whether or not they're going to let you use it is a completely different question. But we sort of know that. But who has a case to Twitter? Like, I don't even know, right? Some dude. And how would you even find out? Send email to it? Have you ever tried to send email to Twitter for tech support? I get responses from them like a month later. Like, oh, you just clicked this. And I'm like, number one, that didn't work. Number two, it's a month later. Like, that's not even tech support. It's just, I don't even know what that is. What's the word? Like, you know, security theaters, when you go through airports, there should be some like tech support theater where you pretend that you're being responsive. But, you know, I'll try turning it off and turning it on again. It's Twitter. It's all good. That is not in my notes. So the thing I like about the library festival is that everybody's got the same level of access. There's us who are sort of behind the desk and users who are on the other side of the desk. But it's democratizing in more ways than just we know who has the keys and we don't have the keys. And the people who have access, with the keys, are answerable to more people than just the shareholders and just the free market, which I think is very good news. And their job is usually to increase that access to the extent that they can without letting you all live in the library. Although, anybody has a library that someone could live in? Call me. That's like my next goal. My post middle age. My midlife crisis goal. My library to live in, you don't live there. So you don't get this, right? You don't have this verified super patron. Patrons are just patrons and people have to lump it. And of course, some people don't like that and they're like, I'll just buy it at Amazon, whatever. So they can always come back when it turns out Amazon is not solving a problem for them and find a book from 40 years ago and we'll check it out for them and forget that they were ever mean to us. So this is especially important in sort of the world we're in where buying books is pretty much as easy as stealing them in some ways. By stealing, I don't mean like, I mean like going online and Googling the EPUB version of the thing and downloading it or torrenting it or whatever. We don't really talk about it that much. It's not that relevant to our business model. It's only important to understand the relative levels of hassle that people have to get in to do a different thing. So stealing digital content is kind of this new thing. And you don't have to agree with me ideologically. Everybody has sort of different feelings about it but basically when you steal digital content there's also still digital content remaining so it becomes this tricky issue. For a lot of people it eats into their business model and that's a problem. And a problem I support being concerned about but one of the reasons borrowing becomes complicated is because stealing is easy. So thinking about this and buying things online is also kind of hard. So I have a book and I stole it myself last weekend which you wouldn't think you could do, right? Because it belongs to me. But even though my contract said I would get a copy of the book in every format that was published I did not get a copy of it in for the Kindle because they outsourced that to another company who would not literally give me a copy for free. Oh my God. So I'm telling you if I wanted to steal my own book how easy is that? And you know how easy it is? You type it into Google and you type PDF or Moby or EPUB and you filter through a bunch of links that if I wasn't using a Mac you'd probably put spam and malware on my computer but basically eventually I found a downloadable version. Oh, scripty, that website you were all talking about. And 500 people have already downloaded it. Super. And I'm pretty mellow about the whole thing, right? I don't feel like, oh my God, my children are starving or whatever, my cat is starving. But it is worth understanding that this stuff is kind of simple. Really simple. And I would give you a link to this so that everybody could steal it because I'm an adult lady. I actually told my publisher. They sent a DMCA notice and scripty who actually is trying to do the Google thing. Not just a hotbed of copyright violations and follow the DMCA when we have to but they've taken it down right now, which was interesting. And so it's easier to steal than to borrow which is embarrassing and I wish weren't true and it's not my fault and I know it's not your fault but it is a thing that is worth knowing as true regardless of whose fault it is. I think borrowing digital content is difficult. Borrowing it from my own library is difficult and I don't have any secret superpowers to make borrowing it easier. Like people email it open library a lot and I'm like, look, man, I know that the book is checked out but can't you like sneak me a copy? I've got a paper. I'm like, I literally can't. Like I literally, it does not exist. And then I'm that jerk who says, I'm sorry, the computer won't let you. Because normally I'm like, we'll make the computer give up what it doesn't want to give us but in the case of digital rights management I literally don't know where that e-content is when it's checked out. And I'm about as bright as they get and this kind of stuff. So it's frustrating. But they also know that I would give stuff away when I wasn't allowed to and that's why one of the reasons that's true. So I also tried to borrow my book last weekend because I wanted to borrow. It's available through Overdrive and I have a long-standing personal animosity towards Overdrive that all the people who work there are lovely and the websites they build are unusable. And whatever. I don't know why this is true. But it's true. And so I was just like, I'm going to go borrow my book through Overdrive. That's going to be hilarious. I'll videotape myself trying to do it as I have an aneurysm. But it actually turns out this is the Green Mountain Library Consortium who's our e-content people. But it's not for one really small error e-acts not ready. I don't know what that means but you know what, I can type it into Google and figure out what it means in like two seconds. And it actually went well. The one click stuff Overdrive's got going on. Wow. It really makes a lot of their stuff a lot better. I feel like if I wait another 20 years this stuff is going to die in a minute. But as I said before I'm excited about who's got time. But I did get to check out my book and read it and I spent all weekend trying to hack it so I wouldn't have to return it. Maybe successful. I've now got four copies of it on the shelf so I'm like an idiot. And my other favorite diagram about e-lending is this one which my friend John made. He works down in Jacksonville, Florida and he started out trying to make something helpful for patrons. And by the end of the day he was like I should just kill myself. But it starts up at the top and it basically is like I want to get a book from Overdrive can you read it in a browser? What kind of computer do you have? Do you have wireless? Do you have a Kindle? Did anybody other than Penguin publish it? Do you prefer reading in the Kindle? Who knows? What's a Kindle? Who publishes the book? Do you have the app? Is it easy? And anyway I want to do a dramatic reading of this but next time I'm having a publisher debate and being like do you think this is appropriate? Let's work together because I don't think they like it either. I don't think Overdrive enjoys it. They're nice people and they want to help us lend stuff but they have to completing priorities which is us and the publishers and the publishers have some wobbly ideas about stealing content out of the mouths of faves and we have to find ways to make this more legit which is why every time I've seen this open library and I'm like it's kind of like stealing but the hack with it it's because this alternative is horrible and I feel like it makes me look like a chump and I'm very concerned about my image which is why I became a librarian. So and then stealing is even complicated because it's an illegal gray area it's not particularly effective you know some books you can find but if I want to read some fun book from 1995 like you can steal the Golden Compass maybe I know that but if you wanted to steal a book from 20 years ago that wasn't super popular at the time you actually can't do that it's another thing that like ebook long tail is really good for and you might get crud on your computer because you're going to all these totally sketchy websites which I feel comfortable navigating but I would never tell a patron like no you just go to this website in Russia no it's okay I'll just make sure you don't buy anything no your computer doesn't have a virus I'm pretty sure and it's a terrible situation what we want is to be able to share things with a lower hassle factor and the thing is honestly like we're the people we're the people who should be doing this we understand the systems we speak people's languages on both sides I can talk to publishers and not disrespectfully like okay I totally get where you're coming from but come on let's find a way maybe that's a little disrespectful and we're understanding more and more that we're empowered by the legal environment like how great is that that's so exciting and the cultural shift is really going our way for a change it's funny how having a librarian in the White House didn't actually help that as much as just having a lot of these lawsuits finally percolate up to where they're supposed to be so I was going to give you the link to my book but actually the system works and when we complained to Scribby they took the book down and that's all I personally as an author care about like oh come on quit you know I probably lost four dollars it just doesn't matter to me and maybe that's my privilege talking but still it's four dollars so now the other problem according to the ARL our risk problem insecurity, staff are nervous fair use would help but we don't use it enough and my favorite risk aversion substituted for fair use analysis so this is from the ARL's Code of Best Practices anyone who's really interested in this it's very readable helpful one of the things they use their grant money for is making a great website I mean all these slides are creative comments you can just take them and use them in your own institution and it's real common sense one of the most important points they made was just the existence of a best practices for your type of institution fair use for dancers fair use for marbissets fair use for whatever the existence of a best practices is in and of itself a shield against lawsuits because people assume you're actually trying because it's a good faith effort to show that you're trying to stay on the right side of it as opposed to just I stole it because I wanted it you're like no we have best practices these have been checked out by lawyers and we follow them so you're all going to try and sue us with I don't think it's going to go your way I just would like to save you the time and the heartache of losing your fair use attack on a tiny public library that kind of thing so just having best practices helps keep you safe the other thing that keeps you safe is never doing anything and so that's what we're trying to kind of work on so what we like to call this in the tech world is a wet rare problem is the human non-typey non-bits and bytes part or as we like to say on Metafilter you're trying to apply a technological solution for a social problem or re-sum it up like it sounds like a personal problem when people are like I mean because I don't like whatever reading the word, reading what these people say I don't like it when people want to talk about guns we're like well it's a personal problem go for a walk and that's not always right I think we use tools a lot to help us do the things we want but if the thing has to do with your own sort of personal emotional makeup sometimes you just have to work on that and part of the fair use thing that I'm here to talk about and that I think other people should be talking to other people about is working on risk aversion working on the think of the children things and I think this is hard particularly in places like the Midwest where you know you're going to have a bunch of people who maybe don't agree with some of your more intellectual freedom oriented things I mean it's true in Vermont too but there's just not that many people in Vermont so like the person who's arguing like the kids shouldn't read this is also the one who you help get their truck out of the ditch when they went off the road in the ice and so you can usually hug it out but maybe you can't get it much larger and you don't have to hug it out I really don't alright or the last thing we call this is a PEDCAC problem exists between keyboard and in chair but you can then say it around people and they don't know you're talking about that so like I love this whole story about how the librarian fought with overdrive and oh by the way we own that stuff and overdrive is like we thought no one read the fine thread and hooray hooray hooray because this is really important because if you're having budget problems this is a whole bunch more content you actually have and that's like a really big deal not just a little deal and part of this is just stepping up and being like I know it's unpopular but I think that stuff is ours and there was the argument and then they have a whole bunch of other people that all had this adorable is anybody in this picture in this room? nice work nice work this is how I tell people I'm coming to Kansas they're like oh Kansas how do you you know Midwest fly over I'm like dude are you serious I love it here because they're doing all this stuff this page on Facebook which the state library does is one of the best places to find out what's going on with ebooks and libraries like it's a doofy Facebook page but it's updated and it talks about what's going on and there's not that many states that kind of grok this at a state level so that that can trickle down to the other people and it's really it's like four people in the state library being like this is important so and it's a lot more than my state does which I can speak to you freely because I'm very far away from my state I love Vermont generally but I still think they feel like e-content isn't real content and they're tired of having lunch with me to talk about how so wrapping up winding down a little bit you know we're on this planet where Amazon bought Goodreads that was kind of a bummer Elsevier bought Mendeley you guys sort of on top of that it was really interesting because I don't know if you guys read all the other nerds on the internet but like Dana Boyd did a thing where she stepped down she's a blogger that talks a lot about social issues, digital divide issues she's amazing and she just left Mendeley because she's like I just like nothing personal Mendeley you guys are awesome but like Elsevier are a bunch of monsters to the sharing of public like they're a business they're a very effective business I have a friend who works there we get along but like she's like I can't even be I can't like I have to go do my thing and doing my thing means not being like drinking the Kool-Aid of Elsevier in order to be able to make those trade-offs that you have to up random house, spot penguin exciting I have a friend who works for Penguin she's like every day we just feel like we're going to come in and everybody's going to be fired and it hasn't happened and I think it's probably going to be okay and librarians we just buy an aspirin sounded a little bit more gala than what we actually do which is drink pebbler when your date is not certain when you toss it online and everything seems like it's stuck but high layers but high cell authentication and like I'm as game as the next person but I may not have 20 minutes to dig through digital nonsense in order to be able to get to a thing like I was hoping to use those 20 minutes to read and so there's authentication and un-understandable rights I don't understand a lot of them I err on the side of I'm pretty sure I can use this but one of these days I'm going to wind up in trouble and I'm okay with that but it's easy for me because I work in a teeny public library I would not maybe be doing that and at my teeny public library gets in trouble my town gets in trouble and my town gets in trouble the next time I go off the road into a ditch nobody's taking me out like this is not about going to jail it's about sort of dealing with your community realistically and I can totally see why people are more risk-averse like I totally don't mean to be like so just say ephom and you know whatever but you do have to sort of think about progress within sort of the tolerances of what the law allows and the law now allows more and so having these assertive and you know open library they have lawyers and they're happy to do some of this fight for us which makes me really happy and you can get proxy URLs the point at content that goes from their catalog so that you can single click lend their ebooks but our role to play winds up advocating not just for fair use for patrons obviously but assertive and possibly aggressive sharing of some of the cultural content that we do have I feel like it's risky everybody's going to have to make their decisions in sort of different ways but I think it's also rewarding and you know in the world of tech we call this kind of stuff until it launched Friday Thursday vaporware like everybody talks a good game but what we want is like show me the stuff show me the content show me how easy it is and let me see if my grandma can actually get online and access this content too because that timeline thing that DPLA has which is lovely involves like these micro movements and like I got a shaky hand and I'm in my 40s you know how does the shaky hand brigade use this how does the I don't see it very well brigade use this we're all going to the shaky hand I don't see very well brigade these websites should work for us basically so I like the DPLA as a project I like the people involved with it but I get a little itchy when people call it a library open library I love open library to death but I get a little itchy about it being called the library even though now they have paperwork in the state of California that says they're legally a library whatever that means and I love working there don't get me wrong is it a library? is it the ghost ship of ebooks a library? I don't know these things these damn things everybody knows like the little libraries they're adorable and I love them right? but people email me because they google library and they find my website and they're like care to comment on I'm like it's a bookshelf it's an outdoor bookshelf tell me why it's a library and I'll tell you why you're talking to a librarian I love the project and I don't mean to sound like one of those grouchy internet people it's not a library unless your library's running it and does like you know weeding and content development oh maybe you go take the books out and do a little pocket show in there it's a bookshelf with a roof the big deal is our libraries are not bookshelves with roofs they've got us in them they've got programs in them they've got e-content and all the stuff that walks to everyone which I think has value I'm happy that Burning Man is kind of like this right it's like the community you just bring stuff and give it away gift economy terrific and it's fun it's really fun to go there but gift economy is different from community supported cultural institution economy and so basically just totally wrapping up this picture I feel it's such a crying person but in a world where access to knowledge is more and more defined by not just who has access but how they get access at the end of the day someone has roof like I said before and for us who are inside the bookshelves with roofs and do all the other stuff it's not just so much enough anymore that we know all the passwords as much as that is kind of cool but we actually are the passwords helping people getting from those places to those other places so open them up thank you very much and time for lunch