Libraries in the age of the internet

David Bollier

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the commons

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a. The commons helps underscore the fact that we the American people collectively own certain public resources, such as the airwaves, the Internet andpublic spaces.

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The Internet

“By identifying these resources as ours, we have greater moral and political leverage to reclaim them and manage them in our own interest.”

b. The framework of the commons lets us see that there is a common thread to many of these debates, namely, the right of the people to control the assets they own. (Like the Environment)

The idea of public libraries, like public education (including public universities like UNI), was a highly contested one throughout the 1800s

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By 1920, the Carnegie estate had donated $50 million to erect 2,500 library buildings, including 1,700 in the U.S.--by far the most sustained and widespread philanthropic enterprise ever devoted to libraries.

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Carnegie libraries in IOWA

c. The commons is not just a reactive critique, but a positive vision.

• Internet Archive

• UIowa digital library

• UNI’s digital collections

• American Memory Project

• Intute

• Internet Archive

• Uiowa digital library

• UNI’s digital collections

• American Memory Project

• Intute– OAI-PMH

(Open Archive Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting)

– The idea of cross searching digital archives through a common search interface

– OAISTER is a really good example of this

• Today there are roughly 9,000 public libraries in the U.S. plus another 8,000 if branch libraries are counted.

• Most are small, many are huge.

• ALL OF THEM ARE GOING DIGITALLIBRARIES ARE NOT JUST A PLACE WHERE

DUSTY BOOKS ARE STORED……!!!!!!

LIKE THIS….

Why do we still need public libraries?

Seattle Public Library

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Salt Lake City

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Copenhagen Public Library

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A Hipper Crowd of Shushers

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Because the commons allows us to seize the high moral ground in fighting market excesses.

Questions to wrack your brain What if Google and its partners don’t want any bad press, and control or limit our access to news and other information?What if Google, MSN and Yahoo make public libraries insignificant? What if all information access, including access to BOOKS, becomes fee-based? Did our forefathers imagine that the threat to information access would be corporate, not governmental?How will the Internet look in 10 years?

Digital Archiving Movement

Open Content Alliance vs

Google Books

Whether they like it or not, librarians and educators are indeed at the center of the fight over the control of information.

--David Bollier, 2002

• A reminder about Books vis a vis democracy

* When China invaded Tibet, the Chinese army burned hundreds of thousands of books from the monasteries.* Cultural Revolution in China (around 1967) saw the wholesale destruction of books containing unacceptable ideas.* Taliban burned over 50,000 books in northern Afghanistan when they came to power.* 1992, Serbian nationalists opened fire on the Bosnian library in Sarajevo and killed firefighters who came to rescue the books

Restricting Access*In the 1940s, around 90% of libraries in the South were closed to blacks