In the last 48 hours, through Skype and Twitter, I have been in touch with various colleagues in China. In particular, I have been communicating with the executive director of The Library Project, Tom Stader. The Library Project donates books and libraries to under financed schools and orphanages in Asian countries, focusing on rural China and Vietnam; their most recent efforts have been in Shaanxi Province.

A 10 min podcast interview with Tom can be heard on China Talk Radio. China Daily has a good introductory article.

The Library Project is creating a relief program that will help to rebuild the educational system in Sichuan; Tom is working with the local Chinese authorities to augment aid delivery.

The devastation is horrific; the death toll continues to mount.  The scenes are spirit-crushing.  [GRAPHIC WARNING] Image of dead children being excavated, as the "People's Premier", Wen Jiabao, watches grief-stricken in the earthquake damage zone.  

Beyond the immediate weeks of disaster recovery, there is a need for elementary level books in English and Chinese (emphasis on Pinyin for Grades 1-3).

Tom wrote on his website :

Hundreds of elementary schools have been damaged because of the May 12th earthquake in China. Because of this, temporary schools will be provided by the Chinese government for students to attend. The Library Project will be providing mobile libraries for these remote temporary schools. Books will then be moved to permanent schools once they have been rebuilt or repaired in the region.

He also sent the following note to his Facebook group, Library-Project, and will be updating news there in the next days.

On May 12, 2008 China experienced a 7.9 earthquake in Sichuan Province. Currently, in the aftermath of the earthquake, rescue workers across southwest China struggle to reach the tens of thousands of people who remain buried, as the death toll climbs above 13,000. That toll is likely to rise still higher as workers break through to affected areas, making the earthquake China’s deadliest natural disaster in three decades. Hundreds of thousands are injured or homeless.

The Library Project has created a program, "Project: Earthquake Relief", to help rebuild the educational system that was affected as a result of the earthquake. It is projected that hundreds of elementary schools have been damaged in the Sichuan and Shaanxi Provinces. The Library Project will be providing educational resources for the displaced children attending temporary schools.

The Library Project is currently working with the local governments on how we can provide assistance to the elementary schools that have been affected by the recent earthquake in China. Please check out the link below on our Earthquake Relief program. As more information becomes available, we will be updating this program so that we can help as many children as possible.

GET INVOLVED!

1. Place a donation today. We need your help, every dollar donated purchases one book for an affected elementary school.
2. Spread the word. Email [this link] out to your family and friends.
3. Get your company involved. Tell your HR department about The Library Project.
4. Hold an event. Get family and friends together to raise funds for our Earthquake Relief program.
5. Invite your friends to join The Library Project’s Facebook Group.

Thank you for making a difference in the lives of so many children that have been affected by the recent earthquake. Together we can make a difference.

Kind regards,
Tom Stader
The Library Project Founder

Over the last couple of years, I have argued more or less strenuously for the build of an academic Flickr: a net-based service that would enable faculty and researchers to post and share images with scholarly value, either with the general community, or pursuant to any associated rights, to restricted-use populations.

While not a simple proposition, I believe that an application combining (at least some of) the rich user interaction offered by Flickr with high-value image (and potentially video) content would be seductive to both the academy and the general population. One of my motivators has been, frankly, to remove libraries and other organizational actors from unnecessary mediation. The ability of those most directly engaged with images to push content directly into a distributed system seems to me critical; assuming that a library or academic department would serve as curator or an intermediary aggregator is a surefire kiss of death for rapid adoption and widespread use.

A few days ago, I was having lunch with my friend Raymond Yee. Raymond, who has just written a book on Web 2.0 mashups, has been teaching content and service integration at the UC Berkeley I-School over the past semester. The conversation produced a "duh!" moment for me.

What I realized through the course of my conversation with Raymond was that the most critical aspect of a new Flickr like service is not really an attractive user experience. Certainly, that's essential to help find images and associate data with them; it's also what makes an application desirable enough to initiate use.

However, what will make the application ultimately successful is the availability of open services that permit re-use: mashups that encourage integration with other services and content. It is this feature - the ability to disintermediate the content, at least partially, from the restricting frame of the application - that is the most fundamentally important virtue of Flickr, and should be for any application that is premised on widespread internet adoption and use. Support for re-use enables a plethora of user experiences to be designed and developed. The needs of mobile users are distinct from highly interactive uses in in-world education, and in turn vastly different from many research imperatives.

For an academic Flickr/YouTube-like service to thrive, a well- specified and clean API that permits unimpeded access to the power of the application is the most important architectural design focus. An academic Flickr should support services for authentication, various forms of discovery, content push, content updating, and content acquisition.

Design for use.

With the advent of widely available, powerful network-based search engines, libraries are struggling to keep library services and collections at the forefront of academic research.

In the summer of 2007, the Digital Library Federation (DLF) convened a working group, the ILS Discovery Interface Task Force, to analyze the issues involved in achieving effective interoperation between traditional integrated library systems (ILS's) and internet discovery applications, and to work towards a technical proposal as a solution.

The members of the ILS-DI are:

• John Mark Ockerbloom, Univ. of Penn. (chair)
• Terry Reese, Oregon State Univ.
  
• Patricia Martin, California Digital Library
  
• Emily Lynema, North Carolina State Univ.
  
• Todd Grappone, Univ. of Southern California
• Dave Kennedy, Univ. of Maryland
  
• David Bucknum, Library of Congress
  
• Dianne McCutcheon, National Library of Medicine
  

Previous discussions among DLF members, in concert with a poll conducted in Fall 2007, confirmed that many libraries have acquired or have developed external discovery applications that re-present data from their ILS. These applications vary widely in their functionality, and include complete next-generation catalogs, specialized and multi-collection search services, tagging services, current awareness tools, and social software. Further, libraries are increasingly seeking to assemble flexible assemblages of applications and services that optimize the use of bibliographic data.

Standardized interfaces that work across different ILSs make it easier for libraries to add new applications, both open-source and vendor-supplied, that advance their customers' needs. Libraries seek interfaces that allow ILS data to be aggregated for indexing and search, that allow real-time search and query of ILS data, that support customer information and borrower services, and that allow embedding and interaction between OPACs and search interfaces.

We believe this is a significant and hallmark agreement highlighting the commitment of the library community, both not-for-profit and for-profit, to build a robust, flexible, and fertile marketplace for innovative services.

It is a foundation from which to start constructing a new generation of applications that interoperate both at the level of data, and of the individual. Together, we are moving towards an environment where our knowledge of content is easily shared across access environments, and where our ability as users to control the association of our interests and transactions with others is made fully present and empowered.

Below is a document (aka the "Berkeley Accord") that the ILS Discovery Task Force adopted in concert with the undersigned vendors as a statement in support of achieving functional integration of discovery and data.

ILS Basic Discovery Interfaces: A proposal for the ILS community.


On March 6, representatives of the Digital Library Federation (DLF), academic libraries, and major library application vendors met in Berkeley, California to discuss a draft recommendation from the DLF for standard interfaces for integrating the data and services of the Integrated Library System (ILS) with new applications supporting user discovery. Such standard interfaces will allow libraries to deploy new discovery services to meet ever-growing user expectations in the Web 2.0 era, take full advantage of advanced ILS data management and services, and encourage a strong, innovative community and marketplace in next-generation library management and discovery applications.

At the meeting, participants agreed to support a set of essential functions through open protocols and technologies by deploying specific recommended standards.

These functions are:

1. Harvesting. Functions to harvest data records for library collections, both in full, and incrementally based on recent changes. Harvesting options could include either the core bibliographic records, or those records combined with supplementary information (such as holdings or summary circulation data). Both full and differential harvesting options are expected to be supported through an OAI-PMH interface.

2. Availability. Real-time querying of the availability of a bibliographic (or circulating) item. This functionality will be implemented through a simple REST interface to be specified by the ILS-DI task group.

3. Linking. Linking in a stable manner to any item in an OPAC in a way that allows services to be invoked on it; for example, by a stable link to a page displaying the item's catalog record and providing links for requests for that item. This functionality will be implemented through a URL template defined for the OPAC as specified by the ILS-DI task group.

Next steps:

The DLF ILS-Discovery Interface (ILS-DI) committee will prepare a recommendation with a new interoperability profile, "ILS Basic Discovery Interfaces" or "ILS-BDI", that includes the functions above, along with specifications of the proposed technologies (or "bindings", in the language of the recommendation).

ILS and application developers and vendors will support the ILS-BDI using the recommended bindings in future products.

The DLF will publicize these recommendations, and encourage further enhancements and cooperation between libraries, vendors, and applications developers in building more advanced, interoperable architectures for bibliographic discovery and use.

We are all committed to providing the best library services for research and learning. The agreement we are making now is an important step in advancing these services for the library users of today and tomorrow.

- Digital Library Federation, March 2008

Undersigned by:

1. Talis
2. Ex Libris
3. LibLime
4. BiblioCommons
5. SirsiDynix
6. Polaris Library Systems
7. VTLS
8. California Digital Library
9. OCLC
10. AquaBrowser
    

Abstention:

1. Innovative Interfaces, Inc.

Deindustrialization and Responsibility

Recently, I had the delightful opportunity to talk about digital preservation with Cathy Marshall of Microsoft Research. It was a conversation made odd by the fact that we met in Redmond, although we live and work on opposite sides of the Bay Area. Sometimes it takes an airline.

Cathy has been writing with great insight and poignancy on strategies used for personal archiving, with some early, proffered guidance on the ramifications for service designers and developers.

Her paper, and a separate presentation, made me think for the first time about the dispersal of copies, and the lazy archiving that people assume the open web provides them. It also suggested a philosophical divide between individual and institutional archiving that has ramifications not only for how services are developed, but also the obligations owed to the larger community, extending beyond immediate users.

One of the things not extensively discussed in the library and archival communities, yet which is increasingly implicit in the larger digital environment, is the possibility that even if an original, source object is not re-locatable or re-discoverable -- "Where the hell is that paper on Xanadu?" -- often an acceptable surrogate can be found. Further, it is increasingly likely that there is no real "original", but rather a stream of mildly differing replicas. These are surrogates of type, and form.

On Digital Surrogates of Type and Form.

Surrogates can be of type, or of form. A surrogate of type: imagine that I want a picture of young people with cell phones in Japan. I know that Joi Ito has a terrific picture called "Generation Gap" on Flickr (I use it all the time). If that picture were not available to me, I could find a good-enough surrogate. Similarly, if I wanted a picture of Izumo Shrine in Japan, I could search in a variety of places and find an acceptable image. Perhaps one is more striking than another, or more poignant, but in a universe of a growing numbers of digital objects, it is more likely than ever before that one thing will do about as well as another - and that is a new phenomenon. If not a, then b.

A surrogate of form: a published article is not available, but a preprint is, or another version on the author's web site. They are not identical, but they are close enough. In any given body of work -- increasingly as digital expression grows and penetrates into more of our lives -- a growing chain of similar executions, slow evolutions of thought, develops, overtaking an older style of low-frequency, more punctuated, creative output.

It is possible that the historical sequence of a scholar's production of a single book every five years, is now instead those books, plus blogging, plus presentations at conferences, plus additional editorial work -- all of which is far more inherently discoverable than ever before. (This is true, I suspect, for both humanists and scientists, in varying ways). The existence of a larger body of work permits the use of surrogates of form. The boundary of an individual's or organization's body of work expands as digital artifacts become more prone to a leaving, than to a deletion. If not a-a', then a-b' may be fine.

I suspect further that our self-awareness of this trend actually suggests a positive-feedback loop. Knowing that more of my work is publicly accessible, I am less likely to tend it into a tidy English garden until it is "just so" -- rather I am more susceptible to attempts at seizing the passing fame of iterative publishing, engaging in conversation rather than a more periodic conceptualization of content creation. A river of blogs, papers, presentations. Where does one thought conclude? Where does one begin?

I think these conceptions of surrogates provide perspective on traditional expectations for digital-age preservation. For the society, a successful digital preservation strategy should be about ensuring the availability of a useful set of surrogates.

De-industrializing preservation.

How preservation "happens" is something worth the expenditure of additional, open-minded contemplation. We should consider what we expect from strategies pursuing preservation, and what we expect from those who are providing the valuable content-based services we use on a daily basis. Challenge the gods we have placed in our own temples.

There are many who feel that a high priority for libraries should be placed in preserving or archiving as much material, and distributing the resulting cache in as many locations, as possible. But I wander if that is where our effort should be placed. Certainly some forms of material must be retained by libraries and archives -- unique artifacts, datasets with potentially enduring value, and many other created or sensed things -- but when one considers all the matter that is not being proactively preserved -- how much of it suggests a forced march into preservation archives by libraries who can barely afford their own very modest digital efforts?

Arguably, supporting the most effective broad archive currently available -- the Internet Archive -- and fostering its on-going health and maintenance, should be the primary goal of library-based general internet preservation efforts. Not perfect, but it works, well enough. Special niches deserve more of libraries' focused efforts, but it is beyond their means to distribute copies of Flickr across existing or anticipated archival systems, and the imbalance between data creation and primary storage grows with every passing day.

For the general-purpose (here I partition out significant portions of the academic research and government web), might it not be at least as worthwhile, and likely more sustainable, to simply and explicitly encourage good men and true to do the right thing?

As a society, at a public level, we could mandate that Microsoft/ Yahoo/ Flickr generate, publicize, and support the audit of their own archival systems -- systems that trigger enforced public access under conditions of violation or negligence. We are not forbidden from entertaining the premise that this is partially a corporate responsibility, rather than accepting it as an onus upon academia and the government. It is a payment for the privilege of corporate citizenship, which is itself not a natural right, instead of solely an obligation to be enforced on academic systems that have long since been outpaced in their capacities.

When I studied the de-industrialization of steel in the Northeast and Midwest, it was obvious that whole communities were devastated as a result of the ramifications of corporate departures on social and human services -- disruptions that were never incorporated into their balance sheets. Closing down plants is more attractive when you do not have to pay property taxes, provide unemployment, or pay Police and Fire, or maintain utilities serving abandoned neighborhoods, or support local stores and shops, or provide mental health counseling, or educate the children of your newly unemployed. For corporations, the communities that give their life-blood become mere externalities.

In our digital age, we make a ridiculous assumption that public responsibility cannot be layered onto private entities. But digital images and videos are the assets of the day, as much as the converters, blast furnaces, and rolling mills were of the 1950s and 1960s.

Preservation is not a corporate externality, and forcing preservation to be, by default, the responsibility of the individual or the public sector is an act of profit-maximizing at the expense of the larger society. We should propose legislation that requires openly-accessible content-holding firms of a certain size -- say, with more than half a million registered users -- to demarcate a reserve fund, and designate a suitable non-profit content beneficiary in case of insolvency or the cessation of business. It is not too much for us to ask. To require.

We can hear the stories of Buffalo, Lackawanna, Bethlehem, Youngstown. We can work with higher empathy, and strive for greater action, in our new age of digital steel.

I've been thinking a lot recently about the availability of books in online searchable repositories, and the likely outcomes for publishers, libraries, and the public. Most particularly, I have been considering the impact of a possible settlement between publishers, authors, and Google involving the books that are currently under litigation in the Google Book Search product.

A significant portion of the implicated works are likely to be out-of-print, of uncertain copyright status, and no longer present in any publisher's archive -- available only in the less-visited shelves of the largest research libraries. This substantial category, numbering in the millions of books, incorporates a large number of what are called "orphan works", where the presence of any identifiable copyright owner in the work, or its constituent parts, is not known, and resilient to easy resolution as a result of poorly recorded mergers and acquisitions, lost archival contracts, publisher insolvency, and myriad other reasons. In turn, some of this orphan material is almost certainly public domain; the original copyright never renewed, and long since expired.

What might break the logjam of access to these works, and frustrate the otherwise inevitable near monopoly of access that Google might obtain through a court proposed settlement?  A digitization agreement involving universities and a suitable hosting service that would make this lost material broadly available on reasonable terms, with clear benefits that facilitate research and education, would make a strong counterpoint.

The content could be made available through various monetization arrangements, including subscription based individual access that supported features such as print on demand or digital lending, and licensed access with payment tiers for universities, high school libraries, and similar institutions, which might also be willing to pay a premium for local-hosting options. (If this material was provided through a charitable non-profit organization, hosting fees could be quite low). Alternative arrangements, such as those pursued by the high-energy physics community's SCOAP3 journals project, might also be feasible, depending on the topology of interested parties.

A portion of fees could be escrowed in a common fund for allocation to rights holders should any come forth with the necessary proof of copyright retention. A basic access level to orphans and proven public domain books, sans any advanced features, could be extended to currently registered card holders of public libraries as a free public service (this would have the secondary benefit of driving use of a trusted OpenID through library participation at a community level).

Books that have newly apparent IP holders could be taken down through a simple, authenticated request mechanism, or alternatively retained in the delivery system with a different share of income returned to the identified author and/or corporate parties. The escrow fund would provide a modest, yet reasonable compensation for the works' past use, partially offset by the virtue of the hosting service's implicit discovery fee. Easily accessed lists of available works, e.g., through publication of OpenSearch RSS feeds, would assist possible copyright owners in finding bereft works; transparency would increase trust for all parties.

What might be most challenging would be identifying an appropriate body of content that would be both coherent and compelling; that would include a significant enough number of out-of-print orphans to be useful; and where large libraries might hold sufficient numbers of these books to be able to mobilize for their digitization. Perhaps a subject with an accumulation of desirable material might best meet these parameters: e.g., works of U.S. history, or autobiographies, or American literature. Alternatively, a discipline with a long history, such as anthropology or economics, might embolden a tribe of scholars and interested amateurs to make organization for online access compelling.

Cry out then for participation in such an effort! Nothing prevents us for crafting something that works for many parties, not just one, and yet clearly benefits the richest goals that any public must have for itself -- learning and inquiry into the most fundamental matters of our time, and ourselves.