Confessions of a Mad Librarian

Libraries and Information Commons Workshop

Sunday

Panel 3: Part 1 - Information Commons and Policy

Rick Weingarten -- ALA OITP
We're trying to find language that resonates in a commons debate, not redefine libraries or their roles

Policy from the outside in: commons from outside of the library community
Technological change provides new opportunities and threats: infrastructure, hardware and software
System breaks: major societal changes -- the fights over copyright and privacy are systematic changes because the outcome is so uncertain and unknownable

Illustrative examples with the scholarly communication debate:
From ARL conference on scholarly comm: The whole process of scholarly communication is transforming, no one knows where it's going to come out; the people doing it are making the decisions, but there's no interaction or input from the larger community -- public libraries, press, users ... even the humanities are underrepresented

From a conversation with an Internet2 person: the Commodity Internet is dying -- the research community is buying up backbone/dark fiber for a new cyber infrastructure-- where are the libraries, museums, other institutions?

The library community needs to get its voice into these other debates in order to seriously build a commons

Lee Zia -- NSF
The federal role in commons policy
NSF is concerned about the role of data in the pursuit of scientific education
Lee uses the term "data" to imply broader forms of information beyond just numbers
NSF is a grant-making agency, not a policy-making body and is very laissez-faire towards the investigators once a grant has been awarded; peer review--as a behavioural norm--functions as a type of commons within scientific research communities
NSF is unlikely to preemptively push grantees to enforce non-proprietary distribution systems (open access, commons) as a condition of their awards
The National Science Board is interested in such things as long-lived archives of data/research

Jeremy Frumkin -- University of Oregon
Has done a lot of work in building digital libraries
How can standards influence policy and policy influence standards?
Is Google a commons? Is Napster a commons?
When we develop technology, we don't consider the policy that may come out of it in the short or long-term
Policy can influence technology
Example: Digital rights management
Four years ago, the conversation over rights and management was focused on eBooks
Many standards were proposed and worked on but never approved
The only standard for eBooks that was approved and adopted and implemented was DRM
2 types of standards: de facto standards and official/de jure standards; de facto standards often do get adopted as official standards (ex.: OpenURL, OAIS, MS Word docs, PDFs)
De facto standards tend to be efficient standards, and de facto policy tends to be efficient policy

Tight coupling & loose coupling: tight -- projects or products that are well-integrated but aren't very flexible; loose -- projects or products that work together to a lesser degree but are very flexible

We want tight coupling between commons policy and commons work, and we want to be proactive and drive the commons we want, not be reactive
We will be successful when we can deal with commons in such a simple way that most of the work is invisible to not only the users but the builders of the commons

(Q&A)