Aside from transcription, formatting, and adding some links, these notes are presented as I took them - i.e., uncleaned up, sometimes random or unclear, and I've probably gotten a few things wrong or otherwise misrepresented them. My personal comments and observations are in brackets.
It was quite a good conference overall, but I felt some professional frustration in that the presenters with the more traditional library careers tended to be the ones who felt least current and relevant to me, while the non- (and wannabe) librarians seemed to "get it" much more--that fear of technology is so old hat it doesn't need to be restated in detail, that we need to embrace change, stand up for ourselves and our institutions, and get involved in our communities. There were definitely some exceptions, but that was my general impression.
Welcome
Conference materials will appear on these websites:
- http://isp.law.yale.edu
- http://yaleispblog.net
- http://www.flickr.com/photos/37029140@N05/
- hashtag: #lib20
- Videos will be posted after the conference
Since it’s a digital conference, they created a video to open the day in lieu of formal opening remarks:
Panel 1
Josh Greenberg, Director of Digital Strategy and Scholarship, New York Public Library
- How do we digitize librarians and their experiences?
- Example of Jessica Pigza’s craft blog – started virally with no public link, worked with Design Sponge. Craft book exhibit eventually brought 400 ppl to NYPL exhibit, Flickr group created.
- Important themes: IP, changing role of libs, third-party sites
- Red tape involved to get out and do lib work where ppl are
- No lit yet on personal/professional blogging and tweeting and public’s perception of this fuzzy line
John Palfrey, Professor of Law and Vice Dean, Library and Information Resources, Harvard Law School
- 3 criteria of DNs: age, access, skills
- 100% of DNs start with Google then Wikipedia. Some cut and paste; others savvy skeptics.
- News currency: first step grazing; second step going to deeper to blogs; third step smaller group here re-blogs, creates own content
- We need to experiment; pick out what works
- Faculty: some sad about changes; others think we’re not changing fast enough
- Empirical research support
- What materials do we all just provide access to for everyone
- What about unique things?
- Collaborative collecting
- Need to share info about coll. stuff
- Services: moving from cathedral to bazaar model
- Young ppl and fac work in bazaar model – we need to be bazaar guides instead of high priests
Questions
- Q for JP: HLSL in ten years? A: Multi-faceted issue. Unique materials, BD materials, open access, Cohen fellowship – but we can’t do it all
- JG: tension between individual and institutional voices
- Q for JP: hurdles that need to be overcome? A: Local and IP hurdles, fac find OA procedures annoying, implementation is hard, publishing cycle needs to be broken, must be sure about preservation and commitment to archives, collective action opportunity rather than collective action problem. Crucial to push fair use boundaries: use it or lose it. [last sentence echoes in Twitter]
Ann Wolpert, Director of Libraries, MIT
- Books are mature tech; JP’s students aren’t reading books/extended arguments [Twittering law libs don’t think this is a problem]
- MIT fac discussion – committee formed after HU’s OA decision
- Fac view lib as what’s in front of them – each fac sure other disciplines work same way as theirs
- “so sue me” model of using fac’s own work – until they discovered open courseware site was gutted of copyrighted materials.
- Death Star of vendor consolidation [this reference was popular throughout the day]
Charles Cronin, Visiting Fellow, Yale Information Society Project
- An optimist, not a futurist
- Woolf quote about two types of readers
- 40 year crisis in pub libs; popular materials – piano rolls, films
- Problem: ppl not using libs for info [again, some Twittering law libs don’t think this is the problem]
- We need digital Carnegies
More Questions
- JG: paradigm shift needed – model of licensing to higher ed/businesses must be broken
- Questioner notes JP was the only person to mention special collections
- Question for JP: libraries in sky with bazaar at each individual school – how do ABA accreditation stds affect ability to change/re-org? A: JP worried no one will follow us in OA; hubris keeps us from collaborating – we need to stop competing on size of collections and start competing on how well we collaborate [good response to this on Twitter]
Panel 2
Mary Alice Baish, American Association of Law Libraries
- She’s not as cynical as she was a few years ago. Everyone seems to figure out answer to this before she says Obama
- Transparency pledge [do we need one from libraries?]
- Open govt directive: it should be transparent, participatory, collaborative (core principles of democracy [and maybe libraries?])
- Govt responsibility for e-lifecycle mgmt of docs: creation, metadata, version control, official status, citation, authentication, permanent accessibility
- EPA example – digitization without standards = bad
- Change of culture after re-opening of EPA libraries – all about community [this should be underlined three times]
Michael Zimmer, Assistant Professor, School of Information Studies, University of Wisconsin Milwaukee
- Postman on Faustian bargain with technology
- Long tail
- [can libs really see FB data from those who fan their pages as opposed to friend them personally? I think not.]
- Proposes best practices for Library 2.0
- [Faustian bargain with tech can't be as bad as the deal we've got with vendors, can it?]
Ted Striphas, Assistant Professor of Media & Cultural Studies; Director of Film & Media, Indiana University Department of Communication and Culture
- Focus on booklike aspects of Kindle obscure the ways it attempts to go beyond books
- Why is Kindle always marketed displayed with books/paper materials?
- Book recommendation: Gary Hull, Digitize This Book
- Commodification of audience labor - Kindle users are a mass, unsuspecting focus group
Jessamyn West, Community Technologist, Librarian, and Blogger
- Her slides at http://librarian.net/talks/yale2009
- Ppl who need egovt have the least access
- 2.0 can feel like the anti-local
- Michael Pollan variation: “Use the Internet. Not too much. Mostly _____.” What’s the _____? [I propose Twitter in jest; Tom Bruce proposes lolcats; Stephanie Davidson proposes "read information. Not too much. Mostly non-commercial" which I really like.]
- [Everyone laughed at the picture of Jessamyn’s library building, which I thought was no more laughable than Langdell. Small cottage, big stone temple: both very traditional.]
Jonathan Zittrain, Professor of Law, Harvard Law School
- Was at 1999 ARL and OCLC joint meeting in Colorado – sensed fear
- Library definitions, noun - pooling arrangement to deal with scarcity, first sale doctrine, organized piracy
- Notes JP’s use of lib as verb [my notes unclear here]
- Talks abt “consumption of knowledge.” Is knowledge gone when you consume it? What comes out the other end? A: We call that scholarship
- Project Gutenberg – what a crazy idea to just start typing in books
- Mentions .sig of Michael Hart (of PG)
- Boldness of Google Books – why aren’t libraries doing this??
- Perfect is the enemy of the good [this echoes through Twitter] [why does JZ get what many librarians don’t?]
- Makes fun of WAX [Harvard's web archiving system]
Panel 3
Laura Gassaway, Associate Dean for Academic Affairs and Professor of Law, University of North Carolina School of Law
- History of copyright act
Jonathan Band, Technology and Law Consultant
- Proposes Fair Use Legal Defense Fund and notes EFF and other orgs already do some of this work
Denise Troll Covey, Principal Librarian for Special Projects, Carnegie Mellon University Libraries
- Book recommendation: Corynne McSherry, Who Owns Academic Work?
- Libraries should exercise and foster civil disobedience and moral courage
Kenneth Crews, Director of Copyright Advisory Office, Columbia University
- Balance is impossible so throw it out and do good stuff
- Copyright is a social interface – law is abt ppl
- Awkward social relationship with copyright
- Private responses and structural responses
- Creative commons – Google Books
- Remember that Google Books settlement is only about books
- Fragmentation in the future of books, readers, publishers, libraries
- New libraries: [need to get text of this slide in full] Expanding universe of… Supernova… Ecology… Gatekeeper… Appeasers… Apologists…
Panel 4
Jeff Cunard, Partner, Debovoise & Plimpton
- Overview of Google Books settlement
Guy Pessach, Lecturer, Faculty of Law, Hebrew University of Jerusalem
- Digital archives in Europe
Frank Pasquale, Visiting Professor of Law, Yale Law School
- Similarity between private health insurers and Google. Google as middleman
- Mentions Darnton’s On the Media appearance last week discussing “cocaine pricing” of info
- Book recommendation: Jessica Lipman, Digital Copyright
- [try to find his slides – a unique and interesting take, but my brain was full]
Brewster Kahle, Digital librarian and co-founder of the Internet Archive
- Discusses problems in MIT’s making available digital copy of 1964 book Libraries of the Future by J. Licklider – which had been published by MIT.
- Orphaned works
- We’re very close to universal access to knowledge – let’s not stumble now.
- Book recommendation: Terry Fisher, Promises to Keep</li>
- Google gets libraries to work against each other with non-disclosure [sounds like Westlaw]
Concluding remarks
Yale’s Librarians on Parade movie was played
Where are we moving books and libraries to now?






