A friend of mine is a librarian, specifically a law librarian. She posted a link on Facebook to an article about appreciating librarians. It spawned a pro-librarian rant from me that I thought I would blog about ( and include with maybe an edit or two).
The problem we face is that our knowledge and culture are being digitized, which while it exponentially improves accessibility to that cultural knowledge, also jeopardizes it.
There is the simple physical risk faced by the media on which these artifacts are being stored, those media becoming less and less permanent by the year. While books and canvas were imperfect, being vulnerable to the elements and accidental edits on reproduction (and not so accidental ones), they seem to have lasted decades and centuries. The printing press (theoretically) improved the accuracy of reproduction, and reduced the risk of loss. Works are fixed to digital media by means less permanent than the chemistry of inks and paints. Though factory-pressed optical media are probably the most resilient fixations since stone tablets (the laser etches an aluminum disc which is sealed into polycarbonate), homemade writeable optical media use dyes that, while more resilient than magnetic media, are rarely of a near-permanent grade. Less permanent than dye-based optical media are magnetic media. Though some can hold their polarizations for indefinite amounts of time, they are susceptible to magnetic fields like speakers, x-ray machines, and power transformer blocks. And then we have non-permanent ethereal storage – the emergence of the cloud, or community-based distributed network storage, the integrity of which is only theoretical and based on statistical predictions. In the end, we still need books as a mostly permanent record.
There is a more insidious risk though. Digital media can be manipulated by the technicians who make them usable to the masses. Just as the monks had censorial control before the printing press – a control the Crown tried to regain through early drafts of copyright law in England – the distributors are now claiming a greater right over content than that of the commons, and they gain an ability to exercise that right through technology. Under Canadian copyright law, the works of Dale Carnegie will enter the commons this year, on the 50th anniversary of his death. But in the United States, copyright lasts 70 years after death. In November of this year, in Canada it will be legal to reproduce How to Win Friends and Influence People. If you do so in print, and bring that printed copy to the United States, you won’t be able to copy it or sell it there, but it will still be yours. If, on the other hand, you download it to your favourite e-book reader in Canada, it will not be subject to royalties. If you then drive over the border, the e-book would possibly try to erase the book, lock it down until you return to Canada, or impose a royalty against you. This was made famously possible when the Amazon Kindle erased copies of Orwell’s 1984 because of the differences in international copyright law. So much for international legal competition keeping pressure on reasonable laws. Story here: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/18/technology/companies/18amazon.html
I won’t digress any more. My point is about librarians as gatekeepers, defending the archive of our books and culture from those who would destroy them. Without further ado, my mini-manifesto on the risk of common cultural property becoming the puppet, through digital means, of copyright holders rather than the protectorate of library gatekeepers:
Anyone who doesn’t see libraries and their custodians in whom we put the trust of our literary and fixed-medium knowledge cultural artifacts does not appreciate the freedom we hold dear as Canadians. The deepest source of our freedom is the sanctity of our knowledge and written word, historically preserved without digital alteration or rights management. Whether it’s Google, communism, or the Church in its “only the clergy get to read and write” days, knowledge rights management has been around as long as knowledge has been communicable and societies have had hierarchies. Libraries have been a sanctuary, and librarians their vanguard. Perhaps now more than any time since before Gutenberg, as knowledge becomes digital and thus its reproduction becomes dependent – and controllable – by the technologically inclined (today, the DRM managers; back then, the monks with quills), the preservation of printed, shareable, archivable, never-expiring should be a top priority.
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