VLA and VSLA pass library confidentiality bill

This is big news. The Vermont Library Association and the Vermont School Library Association have succeeded in passing “An Act Related to the Confidentiality of Library Patron Records” which tightens up some loose areas in Vermont’s current patron confidentiality laws. The governor signed the bill on Tuesday, just in time for the Vermont Library Conference.

You can read more about the process of getting the bill drafted and passed by looking at the Intellectual Freedom section of the Vermont Library Association website. Minor point of pride: I designed the VLA website, enabling just this sort of information sharing and updates and it makes me happy to see it being used to announce such good news.

Librarians notice “abortion” stop word, take action

“The world’s largest database on reproductive health, POPLINE, has been blocking searches using the term “abortion” since late February. The block was removed Friday afternoon…. The search block was discovered by medical librarians doing routine searches.” More on this story from Wired. Johns Hopkins who hosts the database made a strongly worded statement against the blocking of this term.

As near as I can tell, a few things happened in a row. USAID, who funds the database, complained about finding items in the database that did not “fit the criteria” of what the database was created for, items that were apparently pro-abortion in some way. From the Wired article

Sandra Jordan, director of communications in USAID’s office of population and reproductive health, could not identify the documents that prompted her office’s complaint, but said the publications were one-sided in favor of abortion rights. “We are part of the Bush administration, so we have to make sure that all parts of the story are told,” says Jordan. “The administration’s policy is definitely anti-abortion, and the administration does not see abortion as a part of family planning policy.”

The database administrators then dealt with the complaints by making searches for the term “abortion” come up blank, effectively making abortion a stop word in the database. Loriene Roy the president of ALA released a statement supporting Johns Hopkins removing the term from the stop word list.

I find this whole incident exceptionally creepy. While I’m pleased that the outcome was ultimately favorable to open access, the demonstration of the chilling effect of complaints about an information resource and the perhaps well-meaning but utlimately censorious actions of the database administrators is concerning. [thanks sven!]

Reimer Digital Library to be open to public again real soon now

The Reimer Digital Library, an online archive to publicly accessible US Army publications has been password protected since February 6th as a security measure. In response to a Federation of American Scientists FOIA request and a pointed coverage by the Washington Post, the Army wil be restoring access to the library “within two weeks

LoC + Flickr – Commons steps in the right direction

I got into a funny conversation with a friend of mine at the MIT Puzzle hunt this weekend (my team came in third out of 37!) about finding images of things. There’s a lot of data collection in puzzling and a lot of times when you have to do is, say, look at a photo and figure out what it is or where it’s from. This is great of someone recognizes it, not so great if someone doesn’t. Every puzzler has their own personal sites they use for this. I tend to use Google images because it’s fast and I can move through it quickly. Others use Wikipedia. My friend was saying he uses the Commons site. At first I thought he meant the Creative Commons search which I don’t fiund super-useful and told him so. He actually meant the Wikimedia Commons which is a great place to find freely licensed images.

Now Flickr has launched their Commons site which does a few things.

  1. Makes LoC images available for anyone to see
  2. Allows people to tag and interact with these photos
  3. Creates a new way of licensing or explaining their IP idea called “no known copyright protections” which they go on to explain

These beautiful, historic pictures from the Library represent materials for which the Library is not the intellectual property owner. Flickr is working with the Library of Congress to provide an appropriate statement for these materials. It’s called “no known copyright restrictions.”

Hopefully, this pilot can be used as a model that other cultural institutions would pick up, to share and redistribute the myriad collections held by cultural heritage institutions all over the world.

So, they’re taking a risk, they’re sharing their data, they’re presuming good faith, and they’re going to try this out. Close readers may also note the small text on this page “Any Flickr member is able to add tags or comment on these collections. If you’re a dork about it, shame on you. This is for the good of humanity, dude!!” Which, loosely translated means they’re starting out trusting people and trying to maintain a light tone about it.

So, the original photos are still held by the Library of Congress and Flickr has no “ownership” of them as a result of this partnership. They’re available worldwide [well except Dubai and other places that block Flickr entirely] and they’re in a system that allows for user-generated content additions to the content. I’m pleased that the LoC, or someone at the LoC decided to step up and really demonstrate how trust and openness can help further the mission of culutral institutions. Now if I could only get LoC to friend me….