Groover said that since the beginning of Caron’s tenure in 2009, he “wasn’t very interested in working with librarians, archivists or technology specialists, thinking instead that he could just go it alone and figure out this huge modernization push without any sort of grounding in fiscal or professional reality.”

While there’s been a bunch of talk on Twitter about being glad to see the back of the figurehead for gutting LAC and destroying the NADP in the name of mismanaged digitization, it’s also important to realize that for the community of information professionals this doesn’t mean much.

Myron says it better here, but in summary: The shitty policies at LAC are still in place. Their budget has still been slashed. There will be a new head of LAC and it’s important that we make sure that that person is someone who takes the role of a memory institution and its challenges seriously and that requires us to do the work to make our voices heard.

We start achronologically with the BCLA Annual General Meeting on Saturday morning. The IPC had two resolutions on the table: one condemning the muzzling of government employees meant to provide a “[f]ramework for activism to support employees of Library and Archives Canada, employees of other government libraries, and government scientists” and one commending the life and work of Aaron Swartz. Both resolutions passed but there was a significant moment when our chair was asked what exactly the point of the Aaron Swartz resolution was, what would happen because of it? Our chair responded that this was something to do to show people in the future that yes librarians care about this kind of stuff, we don’t just remain silent, and it was also a decent human thing to do.

Didn’t expect to get teary at AGM. Thx @bibliocracy for resolution in memory of Aaron Swartz #bclc2013

— erinzee (@zeeerin) May 11, 2013

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Outside the AGM, IPC partnered up with Steve Anderson from OpenMedia.ca to talk about netroots advocacy and the kinds of things librarians can do to get involved. Steve took us through the activities his organization has been involved in, which involved a healthy amount of meme-ification. Canadians do care about a neutral internet even if they don’t think about it, and Myron pushed the attendees to educate ourselves so we can talk about these issues with our members who would be affected by online spying bills, predatory pricing and undemocratic international agreements (read: everyone). And Barbara Jo May made sure we were optimistic in our abilities to make change in our world.

Participation gap is on the mat with @bibliocracy and @openmedia_ca here #bclc2013. (So glad to have @stranack on the case #nopressure)

— Maryann Kempthorne (@maryakem) May 11, 2013

On Friday night the Hot Topics panel got heated near the end which was probably to be expected with a librarian, an information ethics specialist plus two panel members were current/former board members of Access Copyright. The discussion began with Rowland Lorimer explaining to the audience that “a book is just a license in physical form.” Kevin Williams from Talonbooks talked about the challenges of copyright and digital sales in a changing marketplace and Tara Robertson talked about the ridiculous workflows imposed on her job of making accessible versions of textbooks for Langara’s students. I feel that the panel didn’t quite get into the back and forth the way I’d hoped. I think Micheal Vonn’s views on privacy and whether it is possible to be an ethical stealer of information would have been worthwhile to learn about. It was interesting to see people with a stake in the Access Copyright regime defend their York lawsuit and deny that the supreme court had actually ruled on fair dealing, but that occupied only the very end of the presentation (before Tara suggested continuing the discussion over beer).

Essential we don’t forget this RT @shlew: Risk of this “orgy of the free” is losing a culture that supports professional creators. #bclc2013

— Franklin Sayre (@fsayre) May 11, 2013

Outside of Info Policy specific events, Phil Hall‘s Friday session entitled “Are We Irrelevant Yet?” had a good test for what makes us relevant. Librarianship is about an X and a Y added together. The X is “information transfer/empowering people to use information” or whatever your preferred definition is (mine is “facilitating knowledge creation”) and Y is “anything else.” I appreciated that as a way of deciding what we should be doing in our libraries and in our librarianly lives, really. It gives us a way to say that yes, advocating for laws that help us empower people is part of being a librarian, saying yes LAC employees speaking at conferences and sharing the knowledge of their specific Y contexts is hugely important (and shouldn’t be smothered by terrible codes of conduct). Maybe this is a bit of a stretch, but it was a way for me to look at this information policy stuff we go on about and how to explain its connection to day-to-day work in a library serving the public (which I’m lucky enough to do).

Of course, meeting up with librarian colleagues and talking about the shit (cool, bad or otherwise) going down in the world today was a big part of what these conferences are about. I come out of the conference excited to be doing more work with IPC this year and hope you do too.

For those inclined to give the government the benefit of the doubt, there’s some laudable language in the minutes from the meeting:

And that emphasis be placed on Canadians’ access to historical information and education, by studying the following topics:

• How Hansard can be used as a means of preserving important witness testimony and part of the permanent public record;
• The tools and methods available for Canadians to access and preserve historical content; and
• The tools and methods available to Canadians to increase their knowledge of Canadian history.

This actually sounds great. As an information professional I am all for improving access to information about our history, and I think that archivists and librarians would agree. But the benefits of these words only come about if we’re dealing with a government operating in good faith.

And there’s the rub.

This is a government that has been doing its best to keep information from its citizens (muzzled scientists, dismantling the ELA, and of course our LAC colleagues’ high-risk activities) not improve access. This meeting of the heritage committee was held in camera. Why? Who knows? And the information that it has been promoting is focused on a particular view of Canada’s history in relation to military battles. First Nations history is invisible. Topics like post-war Canada are exceedingly broad, but the Battle of Ortona gets its own shout-out. This is a skewed, essentialist view of history, and it makes the blood in historians I know boil. It’s also worth noting that part of this historical review is focused on getting the CBC and National Film Board to discuss their role in preserving important accounts of history they have in their collections. Combine this with the control the government is taking over Canada’s public broadcaster and one wonders how much cost-cutting will have a role in preserving alternative accounts.

Colin Horgan uses the term “coerced coincidence” in his discussion of this parliamentary review. It’s probably not about the government pushing certain ideas into people’s brains, but about limiting the discussion to things that kind of fit with the CPC’s view of Canadianness. The Ottawa Citizen notes in an editorial:

Another reason to do this review now is that the federal government is in the midst of a cost-cutting exercise that’s affecting many of the institutions responsible for teaching Canadians their history. It’s all well and good to invest in and rebrand the Canadian Museum of History, but it’s perhaps more important to maintain the small museums and built heritage that tend to suffer the most from budget cuts.

Which brings us back, as information professionals to the cuts at Library and Archives Canada (here’s a reminder of what those cuts entail from 2012).

Maybe this review of Canadian history will point out that programs like the National Archives Development Program are important ways to give Canadians access to historical content, and those programs will be reinstated. But actually getting a good result out of this review will be impossible if we don’t engage with it and advocate for those tools and methods that all Canadians can use to deal with their history in all its shapes and forms. They say that is their goal, so we as information professionals should hold them to it.

Access Copyright’s action seems to question rather clear copyright law and jurisprudence, and feels very much like an attempt to intimidate universities into buying their blanket licence.

But why would AC need to be intimidating institutions into using its services? A big answer to that question comes from the Supreme Court’s 2012 decisions supporting Fair Dealing for education. It was these rulings that undermined AC’s business model by supporting a more open approach to copyright in educational matters. In those rulings, as Howard Knopf pointed out at the time:

• Collectives cannot assume that they will be entitled to an additional “layer” of remunerated rights every time there is a new method of delivery. Technological neutrality matters.
• The Court said what it meant and meant what is said in CCH v. LSUC in 2004 and will move forward from there – not be pushed backwards. Users have rights that must be given a “large and liberal interpretation”. Copyright doesn’t exist solely for collectives.
• Educators are in a “symbiotic” relationship with students and the Copyright Act serves the goal of education, which includes access to essential material. “Instruction and research/private study are, in the school context, tautological.”

There’s much more at that link highlighting the kinds of things that in this lawsuit Access Copyright seems to be pretending the court did not say.

Last summer Michael Geist also took a closer look at what those Supreme Court cases meant:

Led by Justice Abella, the court has reaffirmed that fair dealing is a user’s right that must be interpreted in a broad and liberal manner. In fact, the court provides further guidance on interpreting fair dealing with an emphasis on the need for a flexible, technology-neutral approach. In reading the decisions in the Access Copyright and song previews cases, it is hard to imagine a bigger victory for education, Internet users, and innovative companies.

That victory for Fair Dealing and education in general was last year though, and maybe we’ve seen a huge amount of terrible activity at York University since then to justify lawsuits? Nope. As AC’s statement says, its “legal actions signal to institutions that we continue to strongly disagree with their interpretation of the law.” This is not a case of specific infringement, but a policy disagreement that is leading AC to spend the money it makes from its members litigating educational institutions.

The Canadian Association of University Teachers (CAUT) issued a letter to Access Copyright noting that AC’s lawsuit is not in the service of education:

As we have explained, the availability of new contractual models (specifically site licenses directly between content providers and academic institutions), modes of scholarly communication (Open Access publishing), and user rights (the CCH and Alberta decisions and Bill C-11) has had a profound impact on the utility of Access’s services in the post-secondary education sector. It is now clear that Access Copyright’s only plan is to try to hang on to the past. This serves no one well.

And that’s really the problem with this whole thing. Suing people/educational institutions to protect a business model is not a way to help students and scholars. In CARL’s statement Brent Roe said,

[Fair dealing] unlocks knowledge for generations of students, who are the future of innovative research. Education as fair dealing must be protected against predatory lawsuits.

That is a position that we totally support.

The Canadian Association of Professional Academic Librarians has released a short statement, which also linked to the Canadian Association of University Teachers’ analysis of Access Copyright’s bad deal for education.

Also, it’s probably worth noting that BCLA wrote a letter to BC College and University presidents (PDF) in 2012 about Access Copyright, and made a resolution on the matter (PDF) too.

To really get into the meat of this would require someone with more knowledge of the documents than me, but I just want to highlight the language used. As well as saying this is “a last resort” AC’s press release includes the following sentences:

But for those institutions that have walked away from our shared interests of reading, writing and learning, there are ramifications. … On behalf of writers and publishers, as well as those who need the materials they produce, Access Copyright is taking a stand.

Maybe that kind of rhetoric is normal in press releases, but it sounds almost parodic ominous supervillainy to me. Also the funding sources for this lawsuit aren’t lost on information professionals:

I’m pleased that by signing on with AC we’ve helped fund this lawsuit against York and others </sarcasm>

— Ian Gibson (@IanGibson11) April 8, 2013

If you don’t know why a university would not join up with Access Copyright, check out this profile that talks about UBC’s approach (we linked to it a little while ago).

If you want some more detail Michael Geist has been writing about this issue for quite some time, looking at such things as the Supreme Court’s thoughts on how to assess fair dealing in Canada, why the Access Copyright model provides little value, and how the Supreme Court’s decision eviscerated Access Copyright’s business model.

We’ll try to keep you informed as this issue progresses.

One thing I appreciated was how the panelists discussed the fact that there’s an intermediary between the libraries (who have a mission that includes giving access to as wide a population as possible, along with freedom of expression, community development and preservation) and the publishers (who have a mission to get their books as wide an audience as possible while still being able to pay the people who produce the books). Giving control of the actual distribution of ebooks to these corporate intermediaries could be the source of many of the ebook licensing issues.

After listening to that, I read Evgeny Morozov’s article on Tim O’Reilly and his techno-publishing empire, The Meme Hustler. This included some fundamental criticism of our technocratic age and how Silicon Valley ideas have affected the way we think about technology.

Fuzzy, contentious, and complex ideas have been stripped of their subversive connotations and replaced by cleaner, shinier, and emptier alternatives; long-running debates about politics, rights, and freedoms have been recast in the seemingly natural language of economics, innovation, and efficiency.

It’s interesting (to me) how these two pieces played into each other. In the ebook realm libraries have invited in this technological, non-librarian intermediary. These intermediaries don’t have the same goals as information professionals and independent publishers.

An easy example from the podcast comes when they’re talking about wanting friction for borrowing ebooks. The language of “friction” applied to ebooks isn’t something that came from a publisher. It’s such a technocratic word, targeting our culture’s distaste for inefficiency. But why do we see inefficiency as such a terrible thing? Democracy can be a very spiky inefficient thing, especially when we’re trying to be informed citizens.

Anyway, even if you don’t agree with everything said in these two pieces (and maybe even if you think this is a weird juxtaposition in the first place), they’re both/each separately worth a bit of time and thought.

What did those posts say? According to the letter they attacked the character of the publisher. As Gary Price from the Infodocket points out in his article on the subject, it’s actually hard to remove something from the internet, so let’s see those posts again (thanks for the links). From the first of the taken down posts (via the Internet Wayback Machine, which has prompted at least one tweeter to speculate if Archive.org will be the next entity sued by EMP):

[Dr. Richardson, owner of Edwin Mellen Press] mentioned that Askey had written a highly negative blog posting about EMP in 2010 (the posting has been removed from his blog but retrieved by EduHacker and posted here). As I recall, Dr. Richardson characterized the posting as “scurrilous.” I told him I had never met Askey; he had left the U of U before I was hired in 2007. I got the impression that Dr. Richardson believed it was Askey’s fault our library had stopped buying EMP titles, but I explained that I had worked as an academic bookseller and an acquisitions librarian for 20 years and had formed my own opinion of EMP a long time ago, and that it was my own familiarity with EMP that had led us to stop buying the press’ books.

Dr. Richardson then launched into a long defense of the quality and uniqueness of his list. I finally had to cut him off so I could go to a meeting. It was easily the strangest phone conversation I’ve ever had with a publisher.

And from the other post:

It is abundantly clear that the point of ACUP’s open letter was not to confirm or defend EMP’s character as a reputable scholarly publisher; on the contrary, it was to defend Askey’s posting as “the views of an experienced and professional university librarian” and his expressed views as “fair comment,” and to call on EMP to stop persecuting Askey for engaging in legitimate criticism. In other words, having been castigated publicly for behaving in a manner fundamentally antithetical to scholarship and freedom of expression, EMP then deliberately drew the public’s attention to that criticism and attempted to characterize it as “confirmation” of its scholarly status. This is simply bizarre.

Also interesting, apparently whoever’s registered the domain name daleaskey.net uses a mellenpress.com email address. The registrar for daleaskey.com is emp@mellen.demon.co.uk. Daleaskey.org has the most tenuous connection to EMP, only sharing the hosting company with the registrar for daleaskey.net. Admittedly this could all be nothing, and I’m sure a lawyer-friendly organization like EMP wouldn’t create a Fake Dale Askey online presence. But still. It’s kind of bizarre. [UPDATE: @DaveYP has a spreadsheet of EMP's domain holdings if you're interested in digging in further.]

The most interesting and detailed piece I’ve seen this week was by Priya Sarin in a column on Rabble.ca. I’ve reproduced a small chunk, but the whole article is well worth your time:

Section 4.2 refers to the obligation to report “high risk” activities such as a teaching position at the college or university level to the Conflict of Interest Administrator. Further, section 4.4.2 of the Code in relation to the personal, off‑duty conduct of the employee, requires the employee to obtain permission before he or she is able to accept an invitation to teach, speak at a conference, or even to merely attend a conference. These activities have all been classified as “high risk”. In all cases, regardless of whether the personal engagement has anything to do with the activities of LAC or whether the employee is presented in association with LAC, clearance from the employee’s Manager is required. This appears to be an unnecessary intrusion into the personal activities of the employee and an unreasonable limit on freedom of expression.

Can’t you just tell by the section numbers there that it’s not just some person saying “this seems wrong”? It gave me shivers.

Which is not to say that emotional support isn’t welcomed too, especially when it comes as the lead editorial in the Calgary Herald on March 25th:

One would think that librarians and archivists are at grave risk of selling secrets to Canada’s enemies in their spare time, rather than helping to educate their audiences about history.

One of my favourite things about LAC being in the news the past little while has been that teaching and presenting at conferences and sharing information (in non-checking-out-books-to-people ways) as part of librarchivists’ jobs is trying to work its way into the consciousness of people who aren’t infopros themselves (or close friends with one). It’s crappy it has to become visible because it’s under attack, but it’s a hook to hang our discussion of policy on for the future. We have to fight this kind of thing because as Effie Patelos said the other day:

We & the media should be saying “onceyou start picking on librarians, it’s pretty dangerous to society” instead of it being “sad” #saveLAC

— Effie Patelos (@EffiePatelos) March 22, 2013