Friday at Ontario Library Assocation Conference, Feb 4, Toronto Convention Centre:

I had the great good luck of attending four insightful sessions with some top-notch speakers. In fact, I was very impressed overall with the quality of the presentations as well as the quality of the interaction between the speakers and the audience and amongst the delegates. What a dynamic group!

First off, Dr. Ian Kerr’s session Why Librarians Should Care About Digital Rights Management was the call to action to ensure a balance between the rights of the copyright owners and the rights of individuals to access works. “If all knowledge is behind a fence and it’s illegal to jump over the fence, creativity will be stifled.” The use of TPMs (Technological Protection Measures) have built virtual fences around works to the end of promoting authorized use. But TPMs have also resulted in use being controlled and restricted ability to access content — with the outcome being that the control has been much tighter than traditional copyright law allowed. Dr. Kerr maintained that there are three stakeholders in copyright: the creators — who do not benefit from TPMs; the content owners — who would insist that protection facilitates progress; and the public — who may see the demise of the public information commons (ie. public libraries) through this “second enclosure movement” (the first being the privatization of land in the UK). Surely scarcity — which is what copyright actually protects — can be achieved with a balance in packaging somewhere between Fanning’s (Napster) “free beer chug-a-lug” and Valente’s “pricey wine by the sip”. Dr. Kerr concludes by asking: “Are four layers of protection necessary:

1) copyright law;

2) contract law (licences);

3) TPMs;

4) anti-circumvention / anti-device legislation (as is provided in the Digital Millenium Copyright Act).

I found this session to be very interesting and Dr. Kerr very passionately presented the users’ side of the copyright equation. I have to say that, as a licensing management consultant, I’d be fascinated to see a follow up session presenting the copyright owners’ perspective — or a panel of the two!

Walking into the plenary session with Stephen Lewis, I knew I was a little late but still headed up to the front row of a packed auditorium to try to find a seat — but the only seat available in this front row had a briefcase in front of it, so I proceeded into the second row — only to realize when he stood up that this was Stephen Lewis’ briefcase and I had almost taken the seat right beside him! Oh, those missed opportunities in life! But I am very glad that I didn’t miss the opportunity to hear this extraordinary — and extraordinarily humble — statesman speak. We laughed, we cried, we were challenged and we were reminded of what we can do as librarians and as Canadians. “Do librarians have a role? On the African continent in the schools, there is a desperate need for books — librarians could help by organizing the acquisition and shipping of books to needy schools — we can all help by supporting grassroots organizations like CARE and Doctors Without Borders — we could explore the possibility of twinning African schools with schools in Canada.” Finally, “somewhere along the way, international society has lost its moral anchor. As a culturally-alive profession, librarians should get involved.”

I spent lunch roaming the exhibit hall — meeting up with old friends (including old classmates from McGill library school circa 19XX!) as well as seeing some great products and services. After lunch, I attended Implementing Federated Searching: A College’s Perspective put on by Carolyn Lam and Jane Foo of Seneca College. What a massive undertaking — but with such a worthwhile result. The stats aren’t in but it’s clear the outcome will be more users finding more of the right content at the right time in the right place. Lessons learned: “We cannot ask patrons to adopt our terms — we must serve them what they want or they will go elsewhere.” “For Millenials, computers aren’t technology — therefore, they represent a group of users with different expectations than previous generations. We must design services geared to their expectations / abilities.” Federated searching has its limitations — but a successful implementation can be achieved: 1) understand the limitations = expectation management; 2) thoroughly test — Seneca spent 8 months testing; 3) Have staff expertise in metadata and XML — that way, you’re prepared for those upgrades that start to happen almost immediately; 4) involved the reference staff — they need to understand the product and understand WHEN to use it; 5) provide product training to all staff; 6) invest in a development / testing environment — at Seneca, test and production are all on one server which they discovered to be less than ideal = they’re in the process of buying a new server. The Seneca library services, operating within an organization committed to “virtual everything”, will be well-positioned to service their lifelong learners anywhere!

Finally, OLITA’s spotlight speaker was Karen Schneider from the Librarians’ Index to the Internet (LII) who presented Musing on Digital Librarianship and Virtual Libraries. (I must confess I had never heard of LII — and I wasn’t the only one in the audience to Karen’s consternation — but I’ve got it bookmarked now!) Karen offered us a list of the top tech trends — all of which are available via her blog at Free Range Librarian – but shared with us what she’s concluded as the most compelling trend: “information is becoming more of a conversation” based upon the result when she posted the top tech trend question to her blog and got a TONNE of responses with lots of insightful (for lack of a better word) conversation. A few of the key trends Karen focused on: ebooks (are back and better!); folksonomies (we’re being discovered all over again!); pod-casting (broadcasting for iPods!); RSS (if you don’t have it, get it!). She shared lessons from the blogsphere: It’s not a “remote user” as librarians like to say — it’s the librarian who’s remote from the user — not vice versa! And finally, “the first mile is the job of the creators — creators need to get stuff out of their heads and onto paper / whatever format. The last mile is the job of librarians — we need to disseminate / provide access to the creators’ works. And this is a great responsibility.”

Juanita Richardson

Licensing Management Consultant, CEDROM-SNi

juanita.richardson@cedrom-sni.com