The “other documents” along with the syllabus are things like the midterm exam, the course evaluation, and the “final you don’t have to take.” We’d originally planned to have a final exam, but due to the complexity of the printing project and the fact that we really wanted them to focus on refining their virtual exhibition assignments, we chose to forego the exam. But that didn’t mean that I had stopped thinking of things I wanted to ask them.

Most of the questions on the “fake final” are questions that I actually find somewhat intriguing, but that I either left more raw or more jokey than I’d feel comfortable putting on a real exam. But Jessy had a very good question that she and I had talked briefly about during the class, but that never really made it to an open class discussion. Here’s my version of that question, which I think could have been a very good final exam essay question, indeed.

For a college book-collecting contest, a student wanted to submit a collection of electronic books. Would you allow such a submission? In supporting your answer consider some of the following: What are good criteria for judging a collection of tangible, physical books? Is it possible to evaluate a collection of electronic books the same way, or would you propose different criteria? Is it possible or useful to compare collections of paper books and electronic books? How do concepts of “individuality,” “ownership,” and “scarcity” affect your answer? Is book collecting of any kind merely a bourgeois exercise in Pokemon-esque conspicuous consumption, narcissism, elitism, and crypto-fetishism by an anal-retentive phallocracy of bibliobores?

Let’s talk money.

The current inflation rate is 3.87%.

Academic library budgets are flat, or worse.

But at my college library, SAGE is charging us about a 9% increase over what we paid last year. I believe we are locked in to 5% increases for the next two years.

The American Chemical Society is charging a 7.4% increase.

SAGE is a commercial publisher, aiming to maximize its bottom line, though I think it is in danger of killing the golden goose.

The ACS is a nonprofit organization, chartered by Congress. The ACS also accredits college chemistry departments, and one of the conditions of accreditation is subscribing to top chemistry journals, many of which (surprise!) are published by the ACS. So that’s either a conflict of interest or a protection racket, depending on how generous you are feeling. “That’s a nice little chemistry department you have there, library. It’s be a shame if anything were to happen to it.”

SAGE and the ACS both publish high-quality academic journals, some of which are vital to our faculty and students’ work. And it’s true, like so many other libraries, we have accepted these terms, so one could argue that we have only ourselves to blame.

If we have only ourselves to blame, then it stands to reason that only we can fix this.

Like the protestors of Occupy Wall Street, I don’t have clear demands. I don’t have a clear solution. But, like those protestors I can also tell when the many are getting screwed to benefit the few.

#OccupyScholComm

Last week Meredith Farkas wrote The changing professional conversation.

Last Friday, Roy Tennant pointed and nodded at Meredith’s post when he wrote Farkas on the Changing Professional Conversation.

The upshot of all three posts is that the authors feel pulled in many different directions by all the social media sites where they are active. They feel it on the writer’s side, where they feel a lack of control over things they write and then post on sites that they don’t own. And Meredith and Roy also are feeling it on the reader’s side where they find it harder to recall and re-locate the things they saw on Twitter. Or was it Google+. Couldn’t have been Google Wave…

So. I don’t usually like to offer advice here. But I realized that I used to worry about this kind of thing and now I don’t so much. So here’s what I do, or what I would do if I were still more worried about this problem of fragmentation–your mileage may vary.

1. Blog more. If you have something kind of interesting to share, blog it. Don’t just slap it on Twitter and call it good. Let Twitter or Google+ or whatever be your first draft of your cool idea and the blog post be the second draft. If you want to link to someone else’s thing, take two minutes to write up a bit of context and blog it. You know you are just feeding your blog to all those social network sites anyway.

2. Blog less. Each post should be 25-75% shorter than you first thought it should be. I don’t think I have ever wished a post were 250 words longer.

3. Ignore almost everything. FriendFeed is my social network and professional network of choice. I  subscribe to about 20 blogs or other feeds that I’d call “professional.”

And I mostly ignore everything else. I have accounts on Twitter and Facebook and Jobs knows what else (Plurk? Hunch still sends me newsletters. Get a life, Hunch), but only because some people I care about are only active on those sites and it’s nice to check in on them sometimes.

You don’t have to worry about finding again that thing you saw on Google+ if you never go to Google+. Who are the five people in your professional network that really bring the good stuff time and again? Who is reading tons of blogs so you don’t have to? Follow those people, and forget the rest.

4. Keep everything else in one place forever.  Put all your eggs in one basket. My basket used to be del.icio.us. Anything I saw on the web that I thought I might ever want to see again for any reason, I tried to remember to bookmark in del.icio.us. Now I have switched to Evernote, which is more versatile in what kinds of eggs I can throw in the basket, and keeps a copy of the eggs on my computer.

You don’t have to ever look at most of those notes or links ever again. Don’t groom your folksonomy, don’t spend a moment wondering if you should keep a link or cull it. Keep it. Back it up. Space is cheap.

If it’s something that you can’t ignore (see 3, above), own it.

5. Don’t delete your accounts. Just trust me on this one. It’s more trouble than it’s worth. If you can’t stop fussing with it, get a friend to change the password or something.

That’s it. If you liked this post, you’ll like my new social media optimization handbook, Who Leads the Thought Leaders Thoughts, and my book of daily affirmations, The Clothes’ New Emperor.

It’s good to know what students don’t know, and it’s good to remember that students don’t know everything, and that’s a good thing. Students who knew everything would be insufferable. That’s why they are called students and not “Pope” or “Michael Gorman.”

When people seem concerned about how far college students have to go before we can consider them information literate, I’m reminded of something Gerald Graff wrote a few years back. In an introduction to an essay entitled Assessment Changes Everything, Graff – coincidentally a professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago, one of the ERIAL institutions – was writing about serving on admissions committees in the 1990s, and how eager these committees were to get “the best students” for their incoming classes.

The more I thought about the Best-Student Fetish, the more perverse its logic seemed: it is as if the ultimate dream of college admissions is to recruit a student body that is already so well educated that it hardly needs any instruction! Sitting in admissions committee meetings, it was all I could do not to ask, “Hey, why don’t we recruit bad students and see if we can actually teach them something?”

While perhaps we shouldn’t be thrilled that students are naive when it comes to searching, finding, and using information, we shouldn’t be shocked. As Barbara Fister so eloquently puts it, chill. This is why we have jobs as instruction librarians.

I think the whole Control-F thing (or, as I like to think of it, the whole Command-F thing) offers us multiple occasions to chill. We can relax that most people don’t know how to do the find-on-webpage or find-in-document trick; just teach it to the next person you are helping. And even more so, we can relax if we think that the select population who does use Command-F might possibly be “ using it as an intellectually irresponsible crutch.” As Ann M. Blair says in her book Too Much to Know: Managing Scholarly Information Before the Modern Age,

Consultation reading [i.e., skimming and browsing through a large quantity of texts] existed among the learned in earlier centuries, and in an unbroken line of transmission at least as far back as the thirteenth century…. Proficent readers engaged in different kinds of reading depending on the text and their purpose in reading it. This is true today, and was no doubt true in the thirteenth century, though the range of options was not as broad then…; weaker readers, then as now, generally have fewer options about what and how they can read. (59-60)

Of course, I haven’t actually read Blair’s book. I was pretty sure she’d say something like this, so I browsed and skimmed until I found it. If I’d known to look for “consultation reading,” I would have tried searching for it.

I think most people know that feeling of needing to write something, to get it down on paper or encoded in magnetic media; to get it out of one’s head and into the world. Most people stop there, with a diary entry or maybe with a letter to a friend. People who self-publish have that same itch, but after we scratch it, we want to get those scratchings out where other people can feel them. Self-publishing has a bad rap because it is born out of an undeniably egocentric impulse: “I made this, and I feel the need to share it.” Self-publishing has a bad rap because self-publishers are too impatient or too naive or too confident in our wonderfulness to want to submit our work (to be submissive to?) a third-party publisher.

In the 1990s, I was lucky enough to stumble upon the flourishing zine culture. Zines–rhymes with “clean” as in “zine scene,” not with “brine” like “zines of the times”–are little magazines or pamphlets or comics or manifestos or god-knows-whats that are self-published, usually in small runs, usually not designed to make money, often produced on a photocopier. Zines fall in the Crafty Valley between the handmade and the mass-produced. Zines gave then, and give still today, a medium for people who are dissatisfied with the mass media. It’s no wonder that many zines come out of existing subcultures and countercultures such as punks, bicyclists, environmentalists, and other people who find themselves on the margins.

Just as desktop publishing and photocopiers made zines a viable form of self-expression for many thousands of people, the Web and blogs made the Internet the world’s largest self-publishing platform. “Blog” has become such a ubiquitous term that it may have lost some of the stigma of self-publishing that it once had. But I started See Also… partially in response to the ridiculous things that Michael Gorman had said about blogs and “blog people.” If a reactionary jackass like Gorman felt like his hegemony was threatened by bloggers, I wanted in on that action.

Self-publishing is rooted in ego, but its goal is community. For a self-publisher, a million readers isn’t cool. You know what’s cool? A hundred readers. If you can get one hundred people reading your self-published zine, or your self-published blog, or your self-published music, or your stencil art, or your video project, and you can get some significant fraction of those hundred people to respond to you, to send you their pet project, to tell you what you mean to them, or that you are full of shit, or to set something up where you can meet face to face for a meal or a drink or to play music or trade publications, or whatever; if you can do that, that’s cool.

One thing she did was ask us to think about a great teacher we’d had and what qualities made them great. Which reminded me of a post that I have been wanting to write about two teachers I know.

Mrs. Bay was the kindergarten teacher for both of my sons. Every morning she would open her classroom door and greet her students one by one as they entered the class. In those few seconds with each student, she helped those five- and six-year-olds make a transition into starting their school day. She got a quick read of each student, and saw who looked ready to go and who looked sleepy or sick or upset. And it reminded each student that she thought about them and cared about them as individuals, not just as members of the class.

During the school day, Mrs. Bay was completely in charge. She would smile and laugh and joke with the students, but she also treated kindergarten with seriousness and importance, which let her students know that what they were doing was serious and important, too. She kept control of the class not because she had to show her authority, but because keeping the class under control was a way she showed them that she cared about them.

I volunteered in my sons’ classes when they had Mrs. Bay. Usually, I was in the classroom every other Friday. All the other classroom volunteers were moms, so when Mrs. Bay asked the kids to greet me, they often said “good morning Mrs. Lawson!” And every time, Mrs. Bay reminded them with a smile that we don’t call men “Mrs.” And then the kids would giggle and then they’d all say it again: “Good morning, Mr. Lawson!”

My older son, Luke, is nine years old now, and he doesn’t like it if I hug him in public (“DAD!”). But when we saw Mrs. Bay at the Fourth of July neighborhood parade this summer, he had no problem with hugging her.

My sons and I take karate at the YMCA from Sensei Ward. There is a constant coming and going of new students from the class, some as young as Mrs. Bay’s kindergartners, some as old as…me. Most of them are boys from about 10 through high school age. Sensei Ward learns everyone’s name usually by their second class.

We recently missed about three months of karate due to my knee injury. My kids were a bit worried (as was I, honestly) about how much they might have forgotten in their time off. They wondered what sensei might say. I asked them, “have you ever seen sensei angry? Have you ever heard him yell at anyone? Have you ever heard him give someone a hard time for doing something wrong or forgetting something?” They had not. We finally determined that he had spoken sharply to people on occasions when he thought they were doing something that could be dangerous.

Karate is repetitive. There are only about ten basic techniques. But for a beginner, it is difficult to keep all the subtle components of a technique in mind while executing it–how to step, how to stand, where to aim, where the hands go, and so on. There are dozens of ways to mess up any given move. But I don’t think I have ever heard Sensei Ward say “no, that’s wrong” or “no, try it again.” When someone messes up, no matter how spectacularly, he usually says “that’s close!” or “almost!” And then he demonstrates the move again for the student.

And each time sensei does those techniques, he does them as best as he can. Sometimes not at full speed, so we can better see what he’s doing, but always with the correct stance, full extension, proper movement of the off-hand, and so on. It would be easy enough after students have all learned a technique to simply gesture at it as a quick reminder, like a dancer marking her moves, or to just show the part that the student is having trouble with. But he teaches us without saying so that part of karate is doing the same thing repeatedly, each time striving for perfection.

Respect for the individual student. Respect for the learning process. Humility. Patience. These are things I need to find a way to embody in my own teaching, and they are things I can only do through practice and repetition. Fortunately, I’ll have plenty of occasions for practice in just a few weeks.

I’m feeling especially warm toward Bridle today, because his thoughts in his post Open Bookmarks II have led him to a position that sounds a lot like what Iris and I ended up saying in our plan that we drafted in reaction to the HarperCollins backlash.

Here’s the part that particularly resonated with me, though I recommend you read Bridle’s whole post:

Everything you can do with a book you should be able to do with an ebook. And this is where it gets hard. Because, again, try arguing with that sentence: is the future really about taking a step back, gaining some affordances only at the expense of losing others?

There are of course different angles to this. Spotify-type models of buying (or being given) access to libraries for fixed periods, or streaming books, or serialisations or installments: these change the traditional model of book ownership. But there will still be books for sale, and where a reader chooses to buy a book, that book belongs to them. We must not tolerate another 1984, and we must not accept further erosion of the First-sale doctrine. Of course times are changing, but our relationship with books, in whatever form they take, should remain a constant: our books, our reading, our experiences.

At the core of Agrippa is a long poem by science fiction author, William Gibson. The poem appeared only as a computer program on a floppy disk. When run, the program would display the poem scrolling slowly up the screen. The reader had no way to pause, stop, or go back. Once the poem had ended, the computer program would erase the disk, destroying itself.

As with all works of art, the intentions of Gibson and his collaborators are open to interpretation. It seems highly unlikely, though, that they were trying out a new business model for selling electronic books to libraries.

HarperCollins isn’t so avant-garde as Gibson and Agrippa–their e-books will self destruct after 26 checkouts rather than one.

Librarians, particularly librarians at public libraries, are not happy about this. An eBook User’s Bill of Rights has been drafted and widely circulated. There’s talk of boycotts. There’s a hashtag, #hcod for “HarperCollins, OverDrive,” with OverDrive being the ebook distributor for HarperCollins e-books.

A month ago, prompted by an earlier discussion of publisher’s views on digital rights management (DRM) and ebooks, I asked Library Society of the World members to consider a thought experiment:

You are an executive at one of the largest trade publishers in the world, Harper & PenguinMifflin House. The CEO wants a vision of DRM & library circulation of ebooks for 2021 that is both realistic and optimized for the publisher’s interest. Go.

Eventually, I answered my own question. You can read it on FriendFeed, but I wanted to repost it here so I’d have it on my blog (with minor edits). Here’s my hypothetical executive in 2021:

For our average trade publication, we can’t live without DRM, or every reader’s club in the world would buy a maximum of one copy. Forget smash YA hits, since teens are notoriously casual about copyright. We could look to deflect criticism and resentment by outsourcing the implementation and policing to an industry organization as the music labels have done with the RIAA (with much success). I’d rather see us work with retailers and consumers to come up with DRM which is only evident when someone is trying to make an unapproved copy, and which seems fair to the average person. I also think that it wouldn’t kill our company to try other approaches with new authors, niche audiences, and so on.

As for libraries, I think once we get the DRM figured out, the library strategy will fall into place. Right now, I envision smaller libraries paying per-use (i.e., per “checkout”), while larger libraries will want to just have a flat yearly payment for unlimited access. We can calibrate the per-use payment to ensure we meet revenue goals, so that bestsellers might circulate at a discount while other new and specialty books may be at a premium. It will be important that we make our books available on many types of devices to maximize circulations. We will need to work closely with libraries to prevent abuse by their patrons–smaller libraries will be highly motivated to comply to avoid incurring per-use charges from people outside their service areas; larger libraries will have no such disincentive. Perhaps library cards will need to be regulated more closely, like state IDs.

My friend, Marianne, had a different, more hopeful take on the subject which you can read on that FriendFeed thread or on her LiveJournal. I hope that Marianne’s vision is closer to the truth, but I fear that my vision is.

HarperCollins posted an Open Letter to Librarians on their suddenly ironically-titled blog, “Library Love Fest.” OverDrive also responded publicly with A message from OverDrive on HarperCollins’ new eBook licensing terms.

Comments on the OverDrive post often start or end with “thank you.” Comments on the HarperCollins post tend to include words like “absurd,” “destroy,” “greed,” and “unrealistic.”

It’s quite a coup for HarperCollins to seem more absurd to librarians than Overdrive.

I read (or at least skimmed) Nicolas Negroponte’s book Being Digital when it was published in 1995. I remember little of it, but his hard and sharp distinction between atoms and bits is something I still think about often. When you are dealing with atoms, you are dealing with physical items that have mass and volume and need to be shipped and have a cost of manufacture for each item. With bits, you are talking about information which has virtually no mass or volume, and the price of duplication and distribution rounds down to nothing.

Historically, publishers had to balance their interest in atoms and bits, in paper objects and information or expressions of ideas. As Robert Darnton says in his classic essay “What is the History of Books?”, “Little is known about the way books reached bookstores from printing shops. The wagon, the canal barge, the merchant vessel, the post office, and the railroad may have influenced the history of literature more than one would suspect.”

When we start to deal with books primarily as bits, we realize that many of the conventional ideas and expectations for books fall away. We assume that it makes sense to loan someone a book and then have them return it. We assume that if we want many people to be able to read a popular book simultaneously, we need to buy mulitiple copies of that same book. We assume that books last a certain amount of time, given normal use. We assume that we pay for a book once, after which it becomes our property to do with as we please. We assume that there is a period where a book is in print where we can purchase it from the publisher, and then ever after the book is out of print, and available in differint degrees of rarity from used book sellers. We assume that when we no longer need a book we can sell it to someone else. We assume that fairness might mean there is a limit as to how many library books a person may use at once. We assume that purchasing a book for a library makes it available and useful to any literate person who visits the library. We assume that books have a natural and intuitive interface. And so on and so forth.

Every one of those assumptions is based on the premise that a book is an object made of atoms.

ANTAGONISTIC BOOKS: Danger from zach gage on Vimeo.

It’s probably obvious that the physical properties of the book inform what we assume about how they work. Perhaps less obviously, many of those assumptions are based on a history of cultural norms, laws, and unwritten agreements.

Now that it is a fact that books are not necessarily made of atoms, all these assumptions can be re-examined. The cultural norms surrounding books are in play, and authors, publishers, bookstores, librarians, and readers all have an interest in setting those norms in a way that is to their advantage.

When books are bits, the norms and laws are set and enforced by computer code. In yet another book from the 1990s, Lawrence Lessig’s Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace (first edition, 1999; “version 2.0″ was edited with group participation on a wiki and finalized at the end of 2005) made the case that the Internet is not the wild, unregulatable electronic frontier that many idealists believed it was. Instead, it is a world where every step is regulated by computer code. Code can encourage and enable freedom and openness and sharing or it can set checkpoints and barriers at every turn. Regardless, the way things work online is goverened less by physics and almost entirely by computer code.

We can build, or architect, or code cyberspace to protect values that we believe are fundamental. Or we can build, or architect, or code cyberspace to allow those values to disappear. There is no middle ground. There is no choice that does not include some kind of building. Code is never found; it is only ever made, and only ever made by us….[A] a code of cyberspace, defining the freedoms and controls of cyberspace, will be built. About that there can be no debate. But by whom, and with what values? That is the only choice we have left to make. — Lawrence Lessig, Code 2.0, from Code is Law

We assume that the way we find things is the way things have to be. We are not trained to think about all the different ways technology could achieve the same ends through different means. That sort of training is what technologists get. Most of us are not technologists.

But underlying everything in this book is a single normative plea: that all of us must learn at least enough to see that technology is plastic. It can be remade to do things differently. And that if there is a mistake that we who know too little about technology should make, it is the mistake of imagining technology to be too plastic, rather than not plastic enough. We should expect —and demand—that it can be made to reflect any set of values that we think important. The burden should be on the technologists to show us why that demand can’t be met. — Lawrence Lessig, Code 2.0, from Is-ism

I don’t blame HarperCollins for trying this out. They know that some of the norms they have depended on for their business model–the need for libraries to buy many copies of popular books, the fact that books wear out with use–are no longer true with ebooks.

They also know that some of the norms that worked against their business model–primarily the doctrine of first sale and fair use protections–are similarly up for re-negotiation. They are looking for ways to protect sales, explore new payment models, and retain control. That’s what they do. That’s their job.

It doesn’t mean that librarians and readers have to like it, or accept it. I do think it’s time we stopped being surprised by it.

Surely many of the people who work in publishing have values similar to librarians, valuing the propagation of information, the sharing of literature, the place of books in society. But publishing is a business, and most publishers these days are parts of enormous media conglomerates. HarperCollins is part of Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. I think that libraries must respond to particular instances like this on business terms. If the contract isn’t satisfactory, we shouldn’t sign it. And we need to tell the vendor, and our patrons, and fellow librarians why we didn’t sign it and how we are doing our best to balance providing people what they want with creating a responsible, sustainable future for libraries and the people who use them.

Similarly, I admire the impulse behind the eBook User’s Bill of Rights, particularly its opening statement that all ebook users should have “the right to use eBooks under guidelines that favor access over proprietary limitations.”

I’m less sure what it means to say that users should have “the right of the first-sale doctrine extended to digital content, allowing the eBook owner the right to retain, archive, share, and re-sell purchased eBooks.” Since that first sale doctrine seems to depend on the existence of an object made of atoms which can be sold, lent, etc., it can only apply metaphorically to ebooks. What kind of code would create a first sale doctrine for bits? A way to “loan” an ebook so that the instant the patron checks it out, the library’s copy is deleted and not restored until the patron “returns” it? A liberal application of the first sale doctrine would lead to libraries simply posting links to the bits they “own” for public dissemination, a practice which few publishers would be able to stomach.

I think we need to look at what we value in current legal code, such as fair use and the first sale doctrine, and find new ways to lobby for those values to be expressed in code.

As an academic librarian, I have been a little shy about writing about this issue. This particular instance seems to be up to the public libraries to handle, and they seem to be handling it fine without my comment.

Rather than trying to say what public libraries and librarians should do, I’d suggest they look at what has happened with academic librarians and the Big Deal from commercial journal vendors. Once you go down that road of ceding choice and control to the publishers, it is extremely difficult to claw your way back.

Our mission, should we choose to accept it this time, is to advocate for code and norms that enable and encourage access to publications for whomever wants it; preservation of the cultural record; a system that works well for libraries large and small and for all people who can’t afford to buy all the books they might want to read or consult.

I had a conversation today with a professor at my college about how so many of our students seem to come from sheltered backgrounds and are naive or unsophisitcated in ways that surprised us. And yet, one of the most admirable things about many of these same students is that they don’t want to be cozy in this naivete, that they really buy into a liberal arts education, and, on the best days, they are unafraid to expose that ignorance in the service of the greater project of their education.

I had lunch with a mixed group of college employees today–faculty and staff–as part of a series of small focus groups exploring what makes the college a great place to work, and why many people, espcially those who have been at the college for a long time, see that greatness eroding. We spent a lot of time talking about problems in communication and perception across different divisions of the institution; faculty and staff, salaried and hourly staff, top administration and everyone else, and so on. And we talked about the way the different groups heard one another and about power differences, and how to have the courage to speak and the confidence that a disagreement will not escalate into public humiliation or private reprimand. And we talked about how much harder it is to really hate someone else on campus once you take a little time to go talk to them in their office.

And I thought that this college does this kind of egalitarian communication better than anywhere else I have worked, and yet we still don’t do it well enough. If we want to build an institution that runs more on community and less on hierarchy, we will always be needing to do this better.

An internet tsunami has formed in the past few days about a webcomic published almost six months ago. It’s a huge topic, and I don’t want to even try to recap it here. Instead, first know that it involves a comic about videogames that uses over-the-top language about videogame characters being raped by “dickwolves” to try and make a point about the odd in-game morality of MMORPG quests and heroes. Most of the controversy is around how rape survivors reacted to the comic, and how the creators of the comic Penny Arcade and their fans counter-reacted. If that sounds like the kind of thing wich will trigger an overwhelming emotional response for you (and this whole idea of “triggering” is one of the major issues here), you probably shouldn’t follow any of the links below (though I think the rest of my own post will not be upsetting to anyone).

Debacle Timeline has done all the necessary work of documenting how this whole thing snowballed into whatever it is today, with links to a large number of relevant posts.

What’s fascinating to me is that the further you scroll down that page of links–i.e., the further away the posts get in time from the precipitating events–the more subtle and complicated and self-conflicted the writing is. Here are a few small samples of longer, more complex posts:

Being more critical of Penny Arcade and the messages found within, both intentional or otherwise, seems more sensible at this point than an out-and-out boycott of people I once considered to be heroes, but we’ll see. (I Feel Fantastic)

When I read through Courtney’s blog and her posts regarding her feelings revolving around the strip, I thought to myself “Wow, really? Way to hold a grudge.” And I tried to just write her off as a “crazy internet person.” Like I said, I’m a Penny Arcade fan-boy. I was just gonna put on my little blinders and keep on whistling my happy tune.

Then I got into my car and began to drive, typically this is when I enter adult mode and gain the ability to consider both sides of an issue. I think my mind is allowed to do this because it’s as far away from the internet as I can get. As I drove, I kept thinking about the things that Courtney had said and I kept reflecting upon my own views. At the heart of this matter are two ideas: The power we give to words and the responsibility we have when saying them. (Halloween Blues)

Jerry and Mike are two guys who live in Seattle, publish a funny comic, and run a charity for sick children. They aren’t monsters. And I am ashamed of any feminist or ally that calls for harm to them or their families. That is another level of deep-seated sickness that cannot be justified. We can engage with gamers. It’s been done. The Venn Diagram between “feminist” and “gamer” is closing every day. Mistakes are the only way we learn. They can learn. So can we.

All we have to do is listen. (A community post on Feministing)

Ultimately, I find myself struggling to find where I stand in this whole issue. As a long time – often die-hard – fan of the webcomic, instinctually I want to side with Mike and Jerry and while I think Jerry made some good points regarding the role of the creator I cannot approve of the way they have handled this situation as a whole, they have been immature, disrespectful and often disingenuous. Courtney Stanton and others like her have made some very good arguments against Penny Arcade and I’m glad to see that she has not demanded that the strip be taken down – at least not from what I read – because although people got offended and hurt, I believe that comedy is designed to make people laugh at any situation, no matter how horrific. (Eclectic Dynamite)

Doubt, learning, reflection, struggling. It’s difficult to question those we admire. It’s difficult to put ourselves in the shoes of those who infuriate or offend us. And yet, if we decide we really want to talk about these things and make some progress, I’m not sure what choice we have.

As good as that thread was, I was torn between wanting to keep contributing and wanting to slow down and get my thoughts straight first. Sometimes I have a misguided nostalgia for 2006 or so, when all the discussion was on blogs, and we didn’t have Twitter or FriendFeed for the instant discussion. I don’t know that my thoughts below are that well thought-out, but they have the benefit of a few hours more reflection. I don’t know if these thoughts are all that original or if I’m mostly restating what Iris or other people have said, but sometimes saying things yourself is the best way to learn them.

• We are playing different games. I think this is the central point of Iris’s post, and the most important thing to remember when librarians talk about vendors of information products. Most of these vendors are for-profit companies. Profit is what they are for. And while few librarians would say that the profit motive is a bad thing, it seems like we do have a hard time putting ourselves in that mindset. We seem to sometimes expect these companies to care most about sharing information with readers. But widespread sharing is our game. For the vendors, profitability is the game, and sometimes it makes sense to share and sometimes it doesn’t. If you want to understand what a vendor is up to, follow the money.
• We should ask vendors what they are up to more often. Too often, in the LSW room and blog posts, librarians complain about vendors. This is natural, and I don’t want to discourage people from complaining to sympathetic ears when we need to. But I think we need to be more proactive in asking those vendors we do business with to explain themselves. In my experience, they are happy to do so. Iris didn’t wait for a representative of EBSCO to find the LSW thread complaining about the lack of information exchanged between ExLibris and EBSCO, she emailed some questions to a person she’d talked to before at EBSCO. Jenica Rogers blogged some frustration combined with empathy for ProQuest around 1:00 this afternoon, and by 5:00 she’d had a phone conversation with two ProQuest execs. I wonder if sometimes I don’t make those phone calls or emails myself because it would involve acknowledging that these vendors aren’t a bunch of idiots bent on the utter destruction of library budgets, but instead are people trying to compete at their own game which is not our game.
• I’m not sure how to lead on this issue. I am much in the debt of Dorothea “RepoRat” Salo and Mark Kille for engaging me so energetically in that FriendFeed discussion. To sum up where I think I ended up there: I have talked and will continue to talk to faculty at my institution about Open Access. I will publish more and more of my own writing as Creative Commons/OA publications. But I’m not comfortable with pushing for radical change for all until I have a better idea of how that might come about. Even had I the power to filibuster a contract at my library on a general principle of not compounding our engagement with entities which don’t have our best interests at heart, I don’t think I could bring myself to sacrifice the needs of the faculty and students I currently serve for the needs of the profession and scholarship as a whole. I resign myself to the status of a fellow traveler, rather than a radical on the barricades.
• You can borrow ideas but you can’t borrow situations. The more I talk to other librarians and academics, the more I realize how much I have to learn from them, but also, the more I realize how different local situations can be. At my institution, I believe that change can only come with faculty support. Not necessarily every professor–a small group of influential faculty willing to speak up would be plenty. But questions about why the faculty are the key constituency seem nonsensical to me in the context of my institution. They are the key constituency because the College is theirs. The library exists to serve their needs and their students’ needs. This doesn’t mean we have to bow and scrape, and doesn’t mean that we cannot be leaders in our own right. But to make major changes to how the library operates without faculty buy-in would be suicide. At other institutions, that may not be the case. It puts me in the mind of the Billy Bragg song, “North Sea Bubble”:
  

  I went out drinking with Thomas Paine
  He said that all revolutions are not the same
  They are as different as the cultures
  That give them birth
  For no one idea
  Can solve every problem on Earth

  So don’t expect it all to happen
  In some prophesized political fashion
  For people are different
  And so are nations
  You can borrow ideas
  But you can’t borrow situations

I’m not sure if those musings get me anywhere new. But I think to solve problems–hell, to just reasonably discuss problems–we need to see all sides as clearly as we can. I’m glad that Iris is helping us one step further down that road.