My local library uses OverDrive, so this evening I went ahead and tried to check out a couple ebooks for my Kindle (well, Kindle app). The steps required were pretty simple: library website to OverDrive catalog to title to checkout page. After I checked it out, I got dropped into Amazon’s website, where I finished by specifying which Kindle app to send the book to.

Of course, Amazon then gave me plenty of opportunity to buy more Kindle books:

One thing that’s not on that page is a link back to the library. It would be nice for the library to be acknowledged, although of course there could be privacy implications if OverDrive is sending Amazon enough information that they could construct such a link.

But suppose I were to purchase one of Amazon’s recommendations. Who benefits? Amazon, obviously. Who else? Is anybody collecting referral fees? And if somebody is collecting referral fees, can the library who paid OverDrive to lend the book that inspired the recommendations in the first place get a piece of the action? What about libraries who have signed themselves up as Amazon affiliates?

There’s a lot to discuss about the announcement, including concerns about patron privacy, Amazon’s DRM policies, and whether and how this will benefit libraries in the long run (in the short run, it at least means that librarians don’t have to answer the question of why they can’t lend books to patrons’ Kindles). But one thing seems pretty clear to me: libraries are about to see their OverDrive hold queues lengthen significantly, which will mean pressure to send more money to OverDrive to meet patron demand. But that doesn’t mean that the libraries can just stop buying physical books, so how is a library to deal with a potentially significant shift in their acquisitions budget?

Bringing this full circle back to the title of this post: can libraries get a piece of the action? Should they?

“It’s just politics.”

This is a common enough phrase, and the usual implication of it is dismissive: if it’s just politics, it’s not about anything really important. It’s grandstanding, it’s just more sound and fury, it’s a sausage factory. At best, it’s the domain of the politicians; let them worry about it. There’s a long post in me about how the attitude behind “it’s just politics” contributes to poor participation in democracy and bad policymaking.

This is not that post.

The inspiration for the post before you was somebody making a comment to more or less that effect the other day in regards to the past and ongoing controversy regarding Koha, its licensing, its trademarks, and its forks. My position on the matter should come as no surprise. If you want Koha, go to http://koha-community.org/. If you’re a librarian using it, please contribute back where you can and participate in the Koha community. If you’re a vendor supporting, implementing, or hacking it, know that it is not just yours, you should give back, obey both the letter and the spirit of the GPL, be a good community member, and don’t worry: you can do all that and still make money! Look Ma! No monopoly!

But dragging myself back on topic, one thing to clear up first: this post is not about the comment that inspired it. I am going after a generality here, not any particular throwaway comment.

What can “it’s just politics” mean when talking about a dispute concerning an open source project and its licensing? Quite a few things:

  1. (Re)opening this can of worms is going to derail any discussion of the software itself for weeks. This can be a very real concern: disputes about the license or the direction of the project can take years to resolve, can become very acrimonious, and frankly can be terribly boring. I, for one, personally don’t find license disputes inherently interesting, and I strongly suspect that most participants in F/OSS projects don’t either. But bitter experience has shown me that sometimes it is necessary to participate anyway and not leave it just to the language lawyers. What can make resolving disputes even more difficult is that email and IRC as communication media have weaknesses that can exacerbate conflict.
  2. Less talk, more code! What doesn’t get done if you’ve just spent an hour fisking the latest volley in the GPL2+ vs. AGPL3 debate? There’s an opportunity cost — that hour wasn’t spent writing some code, or testing, or proofreading the latest documentation edits. That opportunity cost can compound — if you don’t get the kudos for the results of that fisking and miss the warm feeling you get seeing a longstanding bug get closed because of your patch, you may end up disengaging.
  3. Can’t we all get along? It can be very unpleasant being in the middle of an important dispute. While I do think that the Koha community has come out of this stronger than ever, I also mourn the opportunities for human connection and friendships that have been permanently sundered as a result of the conflict.
  4. Newbie here. What is going on?!? It can be very disorienting checking out the mailing list of a F/OSS project you’re considering using only to find that everybody apparently hates each other. It can be even worse if you find yourself making an innocent statement that gets interpreted as firmly putting yourself in one camp or another. Tying this back to the previous point, is the Koha community stronger? Yes. Has it also developed a few shibboleths that cause project regulars to sometimes come down a little too hard on new members of the community? Unfortunately, yes.
  5. From the point of view of an external observer, it’s hard to make sense of what’s going on. It’s all too easy to lose the thread of what’s is being disputed, and the definitive histories of the war tend to come out only after the last bodies have been buried. On the other hand, particularly if you’re an external observer who has some external or self-imposed reason to make judgements about the dispute, do your research: a snap conclusion will almost certainly be the wrong one, or at least lack important nuance.
  6. The noise is getting in the way of figuring out if this software is useful. Fair enough — and if you’re a librarian evaluating ILSs, obviously a key part of your decision should be based on the answer to the following question: will a given ILS solve my problem, either now or in the the realistically foreseeable future. But read on, since that isn’t the only question to be answered.

The outcome of a big dispute in a F/OSS project can be positive, but there’s no question that it can be tremendously messy and painful. But just like in the realm of the elephants, donkeys, and greens, politics informs policy. And policy consequences matter. And there’s no royal road to success:

  • Software doesn’t write itself. People are always involved, and unless you’ve just fired-and-forgotten some code into the wild, any F/OSS project worth thinking about involves more than just one person.
  • The invisible hand is still here. The economics of a F/OSS project may not be based on cash money (though there’s a place for both money and passion), but the fundamental economic problem of resource allocation and human motivation is inescapable.
  • Communities don’t build themselves, and they certainly don’t maintain themselves without effort. In the case of library-related F/OSS projects, there are special considerations: both the library profession and F/OSS hackerdom value sharing. However, there are significant differences in the ways that libraries and hackers tend to communicate and collaborate, and those differences can’t be negotiated without a lot of communication.
  • Regardless of whether you fall more on the “F” side or the “OS” side of the divide in the acronym, F/OSS works for a combination of baldly pragmatic and ethical reasons. But as the very structure of the “F/OSS” acronym implies, there’s are many disagreements and differences of emphasis among F/OSS contributors and users.

What’s missing from these bullet points? The One True Path to Open Source Success. Why is it missing? Because it doesn’t exist: free software has been around long enough that there’s a good body of recommendations on how to do it well, but there’s no consensus.

And if there’s no consensus, then what? It has to be found — or created — or not found, leading to a hopefully amicable parting of the ways. But that can’t happen without discussion, conflict, and resolution. While it certainly isn’t necessary for everybody to participate in every single debate, (constructive!) engagement with the discussion can be a valuable contribution in its own right. If you can help improve how the discussion takes place, even better.

If you or your institution has a stake in the outcome, participating is part of both the duty and promise of F/OSS for libraries: owning our tools, without which our collections will just gather dust.

Put another way, politics, in its broadest and most noble meaning, can’t be avoided, even if engaging means spending some time away from the code. You may as well embrace it.

By the way, I suspect that if you did get manage to get software to write itself, you still couldn’t escape politics. I doubt that an artificial intelligence creative enough to code can be built without incorporating a sufficient degree of complexity that it would be able to avoid all moments of indecision. AI politics may well end up looking rather bizarre to humans, but they’d still be faced with the basic political problem of resolving conflict and allocating resources.

At MPOW I search a lot of library catalogs (and usually I am indeed interested in the searching, not the finding per se). But what do you search for in a “foreign” library catalog?

In the postscript to this post, Jonathan Rochkind reveals that his “brainless test search” is typically “frogs”. Mine is “Amish”, which I picked up from one of my bosses years ago. It’s short, found in the catalogs of most English-language libraries (and in a surprising number of non-English catalogs), and doesn’t return thousands of hits. And apparently, every public library in the U.S. is required by law to hold a copy of Amish society by John Hostetler.

What’s your typical search when you want to test a library catalog?

Liz Rea of the North East Kansas Library System and I have started a new group blog, Library Hackers Unite!. It’s a blog by and for library sysadmins and programmers with a practical bent, and we aim to cover the gamut of library systems hackerdom.

Besides Liz and myself, Joe Atzberger and Ruth Bavousett write there as well. Want to join the crew or do a guest post? Drop Liz or me a line.

Ollie LOLcat
Ollie LOLcat by mlcastle

Yesterday the Open Knowledge Foundation announced their principles of open bibliographic data. Following a definition of “bibliographic data” (though I don’t think that the distinction drawn between “core” and “secondary” data is useful here), the principles are

  1. When publishing bibliographic data make an explicit and robust license statement.
  2. Use a recognized waiver or license that is appropriate for data.
  3. If you want your data to be effectively used and added to by others it should be open as defined by the Open Definition (http://opendefinition.org) — in particular non-commercial and other restrictive clauses should not be used.
  4. Where possible, we recommend explicitly placing bibliographic data in the Public Domain via PDDL or CC0.

I have endorsed the principles and encourage others to do the same.

The principle discouraging data licenses that restrict commercial reuse is an important one. I can see why somebody who is considering releasing a set of bibliographic data into the wild might be tempted to use a license that forbids commercial use. After all, the vast majority of bibliographic records are created or improved by librarians working for non-profit or governmental entities. Although I don’t think anybody ever became rich beyond the dreams of avarice reselling library data, obviously there is some money to be made there, given the existence of commercial and quasi-commercial firms that deal with library metadata. Why should those firms be allowed to make money off the fruits of the labor of countless catalogers without direct financial recompense?

And … I can’t say that I entirely disagree. Libraries spend a lot of money creating metadata in a punishing economy; if some libraries can manage to get some money back to help keep catalogers and metadata specialists employed, so much the better. Until the advent of true artificial intelligence, there will always be an important role for the human creation and maintenance of metadata, though we also need to do a lot better with automating metadata production.

However, bibliographic data is most useful in the aggregate. A single bibliographic record, no matter how well crafted, has very little value. Put enough of them together to describe a library’s collection, and you start to get somewhere: you now have enough to make a catalog. Put a lot of metadata together, and you can do all kinds of interesting things.

It is in the aggregation of metadata where the licensing decisions that libraries make when releasing bibliographic data matter most. The less friction there is to commercial and non-commercial reuse of the data, the more the data will be used and improved.

Consider this: if I, in the course of my duties at a for-profit MPOW, find a file of records that I can do something useful with, I can get started doing that right away if I see a PDDL or CC0 license associated with it. If, instead, I see a no-commercial-use clause, I’ve hit a point of friction. I may choose to track down the contributor and negotiate a separate license, or, more likely, I’ll look for something else to work with. Unless you are the likes of the Library of Congress (i.e., your metadata can’t be ignored), using a non-commercial license when releasing your data simply means that it will be less likely to be used and improved. Worse, if a non-profit decides to aggregate PDDL/CC0 data and commercial-use-restricted data, it is even more difficult for commercial entities to touch the dataset at all — it’s one thing to track down one rights-holder, but dozens?

Metadata is for use. It is also for continual editing and improvement, as metadata is also imperfect and incomplete. A library information ecosystem that promotes easy access to metadata and easy sharing might manage to keep up and stay relevant.

Of course, if numerous commercial entities make use of open bibliographic data but never compensate the libraries who paid to create it in the first place, that would over time become a strong disincentive for libraries to release open data. Therefore, I would like to suggest a fifth point — maybe not so much a principle as a recommendation — to commercial entities who make use of open bibliographic data: consider treating all open data, even data in the public domain, as if there were a mild copyleft license attached to it. In other words: give back. If in the course of providing your service you are not only using open data but improving the records, release your improvements as open bibliographic data. Moreover, invest some time in releasing your improvements in a maximally useful way — putting a file of improved data on your webserver is a good start, but if there are ways to contribute back to shared bibliographic databases or a hypothetical peer-to-peer metadata exchange so that the improvements can be more easily reused, consider doing so.

Yesterday I attended the RDA briefings from test participants session at ALA Midwinter. I only caught the tail end of Beacher Wiggins’ update from the Library Congress, but as I understand it, LC will announce their decision regarding the results of their testing of RDA by Annual, if not sooner. One thing Beacher said struck me: regardless of the decision, we live in a world of mixed data and will have to get used to it. Of course, that’s been the status quo for years, if not decades; RDA is now just the latest player in the metadata standards dance. At least one major academic library test partner has already made its decision about adopting RDA; Christopher Cronin from the University of Chicago, reported that the catalogers there made a unanimous decision to continuing cataloging in RDA after the test is completed.

Besides Christopher, several other test partners relayed their experiences: Penny Baker from the Clark Art Institute Library, Richard Hasenyager from the North East Independent School District, Kathryn La Barre from the UIUC GSLIS program, and Maritta Coppieters from Backstage Library Works. Here’s my idiosyncratic summary of the tester’s experiences:

  • Changing to RDA won’t be the end of the world.
  • Everybody is continuing to work in a MARC framework; the testing group has not been experimenting (or had time to?) with alternative metadata carriers or frameworks beyond some tests of creating Dublin Core records.
  • The testers who work with authority records seem to universally like the new RDA fields.
  • Nobody is mourning the passing of the rule of three.
  • Nobody likes sticking both the publication date and the copyright date in the 260$c.
  • The RDA Toolkit, as a software tool, is still a work in progress. Some like it, some don’t.
  • A clear understanding of FRBR is required for understanding RDA. During the Q&A, there was a discussion in the audience about training current catalogers; the consensus seems to be that it is difficult to teach FRBR to catalogers steeped in the AACR2 language, and much easier to explain FRBR to library school students. Is this a sign of a generational divide?

I was very sorry that none of the public library testing partners gave a briefing. However, I think Richard Hasenyager’s conclusion about when and if the NE ISD will adopt RDA applies to many public libraries: the ISD is willing to adopt RDA, but they can’t do it by themselves; the systems and materials vendors need to have full support for RDA records before it is economical for the school district to proceed. If libraries are to shift from AACR2 to RDA, this must be addressed. There is already a divide between academic and public library catalogers; having academic libraries do original cataloging in RDA while public libraries copy catalog using whatever records they can get (thereby adopting RDA by default without necessarily being fully invested or trained in RDA) would not be an ideal outcome.

There are a lot of programs related to free and open source software at the Annual meeting of the American Library Association this year, but I am particularly looking forward to the LITA preconference on migrating to open source library systems, which I helped organize along with the LITA Open Source Systems Interest Group.  The main speakers are:

  • Terry Reese, Gray Family Chair for Innovative Library Services, Oregon State University, who will be presenting on MarcEdit.
  • David Lindahl, Web Initiatives Manager, University of Rochester, who will be discussing the XC project, evaluating open source with users in mind, migrating and managing metadata, and interoperating the ILS with other open source software.
  • Brenda Chawner, Senior Lecturer, Victoria University of Wellington, who will discuss the Kete community digital archive platform and building communities to contribute to open source software.

I will also be presenting on techniques for loading data into open source ILSs, and I know that a number of people with experience working with and migrating to open source library software will be present to share their expertise.

The preconference will be in the Monroe Room at the Hilton Washington and will run from 9 to 4:30 on Friday, 25 June 2010.  It is a paid preconference of LITA, but I will be blogging it and sharing the thoughts and insights of the speakers and participants with the world.  As far as I know, if you will be attending ALA, it is still possible to register for the preconference.

But wait!  There’s more!  There is another LITA preconference on Friday. related to F/OSS software, the “Open Source CMS Playroom” which will be lead by Karen Coombs from OCLC and Amanda Hollister from LISHost.  For more details, check out the LITA events page.

I found out today that Craig Lowe, the incoming mayor of Gainesville, used to work as a programmer for the Florida Center for Library Automation, so his election is even better news for libraries in Gainesville and Alachua County than I had thought. Craig has been on the library governing board for a while, but it is nice to know that he has direct experience to bear. (Yes, I voted for him.)

On Wednesday, two committees of the Florida state legislature recommended removing funding for the Florida State Aid to Public Libraries program. This is the second time in as many years that this has happened. To compound the problem, the elimination of state aid would also mean that Florida libraries would no longer qualify for some forms of federal aid.

While a handful of library systems in Florida are independent taxing districts and could (painfully) weather this, elimination of state aid would mean that a lot of rural and city libraries would have to close branches, cut hours, and lay off library staff. Many rural libraries are already operating on shoestrings.

Do you live in Florida? Call your state representative and senator today and ask them to vote to continue funding for state aid to Florida libraries. Also, please ask them to stop this proposal from becoming an annual tradition. No brinkmanship with our libraries, please!

Update 2010-04-28: State aid has been restored! [PDF link] Can we not play this game again next year?

I’ll be attending the following programs during ALA Annual this year.

Friday, 27 June

  • 10:30 to 12:00: Old Records, New Records, New Interfaces (ALCTS Catalog Form and Function Interest Group)

Saturday, 28 June

  • 13:30 to 15:30: Metadata Mashup: Creating and Publishing Application Profiles (ALCTS) or There’s No Catalog Like No Catalog (LITA)
  • 16:00 to 18:00: Getting Ready for RDA and FRBR (ALCTS) or Science Fiction and Fantasy: Looking at IT and the Information Rights of the Individual. Hmm, RDA or Cory Doctorow? Decisions, decisions…

Sunday, 29 June

  • 08:00 to 12:00: Creating the Future of the Catalog and Cataloging (ALCTS and LITA). And where did I leave Hermione’s hourglass?
  • 10:30 to 12:30: The Open Library, Promise and Peril (LITA)
  • 13:30 to 15:00: Top Technology Trends (LITA)
  • 15:30 to 17:00: Koha Interest Group Meeting (leaving early)

Monday, 30 June

  • 10:30 to 12:00: Legal Issues in Developing Open Source Systems for Libraries Understanding Free/Open Source Software Licenses, Project Forms, and Project Governance Options
  • 13:30 to 15:30: Open Source Systems Interest Group (LITA)

Other than that, I’ll be variously at the LibLime booth, in meetings, or hacking Koha.