Jumpstarting the Public Sphere: Information Policy Issues for the 21st Century
October 23-24, 2008
Vancouver Public Library, Central Branch
350 Robson St, Vancouver BC
Presented by the British Columbia Library Association’s Information Policy
Committee

(registration and full details: http://www.bcla.bc.ca/jumpstarting)

With debates over information policy issues all over the news, the question of who controls and who has access to information has never been more timely. Many people have heard of things like Bill C-61, TILMA, media concentration, information access, and net neutrality but may be unsure about the implications of these terms and how they relate to information, libraries, and the public sphere.

On the evening of October 23, Michael Geist, Canada Research Chair in Internet and E-commerce Law, will give a keynote address on “Why Copyright? The Fight for Canada’s Digital Future” (synopsis below). His speech will set the tone for Friday morning’s panel discussions in which presenters will give conference attendees the background information they need in order to spend the afternoon discussing issues more deeply and coming up with creative ways of defending the public sphere from privatization and corporate control.

We are fortunate to have Dr. Sam Trosow give the Friday afternoon keynote talk to close off the conference. Dr. Trosow is Associate Professor at the University of Western Ontario jointly appointed to the Faculty of Law and the Faculty of Information and Media Studies (FIMS) and author of Canadian Copyright: A Citizen’s Guide.

Please join librarians and interested community members to discuss these pertinent issues and help come up with ideas for what you can do about them!

Thursday October 23 @ 7 PM, Alice MacKay Room
Keynote address: Michael Geist, Canada Research Chair in Internet and E-commerce Law
“Why Copyright? The Fight for Canada’s Digital Future”

In June 2008, the Canadian government introduced Bill C-61, new copyright legislation that closely followed the U.S. Digital Millennium Copyright Act. The public response to the bill was both immediate and angry - tens of thousands of Canadians wrote to the Minister and their local Members of Parliament, leading to town hall meetings, negative press coverage, and the growing realization that copyright was fast becoming a mainstream political and policy issue. The “Canadian copy-fight”, which includes many new advocacy groups and the Fair Copyright for Canada Facebook group that has over 90,000 members, has attracted considerable attention from the mainstream media, with many wondering how copyright had emerged as a contentious policy issue. This talk will assess both the legislative proposals and the Canadian copyfight experience in an effort to answer the oft-asked question “why copyright?”

Friday October 24 @ 8:30 AM, VPL Lower Level

Friday’s informational speakers will be:

• Ellen Gould, Trade Analyst - speaking about TILMA and trade agreements
• Paul Holden, BC Freedom of Information and Privacy Association (FIPA) - speaking about net neutrality
• David Loukidelis, BC Privacy Commissioner - speaking about access to information
• Leslie Regan Shade, Concordia University - speaking about telecommunications policy
• David Skinner, York University - speaking about media concentration
• Paul Whitney, City Librarian, Vancouver Public Library - speaking about intellectual property

Closing keynote: Samuel Trosow, University of Western Ontario

To register for the full conference, or for more information about speakers and times, please visit http://www.bcla.bc.ca/jumpstarting. Student and low-income conference rates are available.

Michael Geist’s talk is free, but registration is required (http://www.bcla.bc.ca/geist for more information). Attendance at Geist’s talk is included in full-conference registration.

Great big thanks to the British Columbia Library Association, Vancouver Public Library, BC Electronic Library Network, Simon Fraser University, Vancouver Island University, and Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives for their support.

PLEASE NOTE: Media Democracy Day will be taking place at the Vancouver Public Library on Saturday, the 25th of October. There will be workshops about media democracy and the legendary annual Independent Media Fair. For more information about that event, see http://www.mediademocracyday.org. We hope you can attend both the conference and the MDD events!

I’m co-chair of the BC Library Association’s Information Policy Committee. We’ve just set up a blog called — get this — The Information Policy Blog. I’ll be posting information policy-related stuff over there (and possibly cross-posting it here as well); so will several other committee members. Please go take a look!

While I’m on the subject, you should also check out two other blogs: We Read Banned Books, about libraries and intellectual freedom, and Social Justice Librarian, about, well, libraries and social justice (including lots of information policy material). If you’re interested in the kinds of issues I write about here, then both will be well worth your time.

The Code4Lib Journal (C4LJ) will provide a forum to foster community and share information among those interested in the intersection of libraries, technology, and the future.

Submissions are currently being accepted for the first issue of this promising new journal. Please submit articles, abstracts, or proposals for articles to c4lj-articles@googlegroups.com (a private list read only by C4LJ editors) by Friday, August 31, 2007. Publication of the first issue is planned for late December 2007.

(There’s more information at code4lib.org.)

Congratulations to all involved on getting this thing up and running!

Interesting job ad on LISjobs.com:

Job Title: Chief Librarian
Organization: Torres Advanced Enterprise Solutions
Location: Guantanamo Bay, Cuba,
Description: Are you interested in putting your library science education and experience to work in one of today’s most challenging, interesting and rewarding environments? Torres Advanced Enterprise Solutions is recruiting for a Chief Librarian to manage the Detainee Library, under the direction of the Joint Task Force-Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

In managing the Detainee Library, the Chief Librarian is responsible for providing, maintaining and developing library services and operations using reading, recreational games and puzzles, music, or electronic media. The Chief Librarian is responsible for selecting and maintaining a range of reading and recreational materials to reflect the needs of the patrons in terms of languages and appropriate/approved topics.

(Via Ratcatcher.)

How did I miss this one? Roy Tennant has started a site called TechEssence.Info, a source for “simple, easy to understand information about information technology” for library decision-makers. The front page describes the approach like this:

You’re busy. You don’t have time for a lot of jargon, techie posturing, or attitudes. You’ve come to the right place. We don’t put you down, we don’t talk down to you, we just give it to you straight. Come here for accurate, understandable explanations of important information technologies for libraries. Go elsewhere for the hype.

The roster of contributors includes Roy himself, Dorothea Salo, Meredith Farkas, Andrew Pace, Eric Lease Morgan, and others. In addition to a group blog, they’re compiling a series of concise, informative introductions to key technologies from AJAX to OpenURL. The site looks like a frighteningly useful resource for non-techies who need to know about this stuff.

(Via Dan Chudnov.)

From a message posted to the Data Liberation Initiative mailing list:

As of April 24, 2006, all electronic publications available on the Statistics Canada website will become free of charge. … The adoption of the New Publishing Model supports the longstanding principles underlying the Agency’s dissemination program: to make information of broad public interest widely available to the Canadian public but to charge individual clients for special products and services where the benefits do not accrue to the public at large and where additional costs are incurred by the Agency in providing them. … The move to free electronic publications will increase consistency in our priced publication program and improve access to our published information for users, respondents and stakeholders.

This is a significant step towards opening up access to Canadian government information. We’re still stuck with Crown copyright (unlike in the US, where government documents are in the public domain), but it looks like the federal government is starting to move in the right direction.

One of the things that came out of the recent code4lib conference was the idea that there ought to be a code4lib journal, a place where the library world’s developers and programmers (and those of us who are interested in what they do) can share their ideas with one another. There’s already been some good discussion on the code4lib mailing list about what the journal ought to look like. Here’s my attempt to summarize the discussion and outline the direction I see us taking.

First of all, what are we trying to accomplish? The goal is to get the good ideas out there. That means we need to first choose the good ideas, then publish them in a format that lots of people will pay attention to. There is a considerable audience out there for the work that code4lib-type people are doing, but not everyone can keep up with a blog aggregator, a mailing list, an IRC channel, and a conference, and not everyone who should be listening takes all of those media seriously. A journal is a good way of reaching out to that latent audience, because journals still have an inherent aura of legitimacy, and they can bring together all the latest cool ideas in an easy-to-digest package. A journal will help us to disseminate our ideas, educate people about what can be done with IT in libraries, and expand the code4lib community.

The code4lib journal will focus on publishing practical advice: handy scripts, clever hacks, calls for action, and projects that have succeeded or failed. The model here is the lightning talk format that worked so well at the conference; Art Rhyno has suggested some possible topics, and we will not be afraid to publish actual code. Short, practical articles will be complemented by longer, more extensive or higher-level articles, like reports on large research projects or the kind of stuff that Lorcan Dempsey writes. Articles will be solicited by the editors, perhaps on the basis of conference presentations, interesting blog posts, or discussions on code4lib communication channels or elsewhere; unsolicited submissions will also be more than welcome.
The journal will take a hybrid approach, where the formally published articles are complemented by less traditional content — edited IRC logs, podcasts and screen captures, and the various other fantastic, innovative suggestions that have come up during the mailing list discussion. (Again, Art Rhyno has come up with some very interesting “Traditional Publishing Model Departure Points,” as have others; I’ll try to gather these in a separate post.) I’m excited about trying out some of these ideas alongside the traditional approach. But I think we do need that core of formal, regularly published, editorially vetted publication to garner the wider interest and support that we’re looking for.

There will be a regular publication schedule — I’m suggesting once every two months — but articles will be available early if they are finalized before the publication date. The articles won’t be peer reviewed (because peer review takes too long, is of dubious value, and would be difficult to do properly given the smallness of the library technology community); instead, they’ll go through a multi-part editorial process in which the journal’s editors solicit or receive material, do a preliminary review, and post draft versions for review, comment, and discussion by the community at large.

We’ve started to draw up a set of guidelines stating what the journal’s purpose is, what its format will be, and so on. If you have some ideas, please feel free to head on over and add a comment or make some changes. Or, you know, you could volunteer to be an editor or write an article or something. Let me know if you’d like to help out.