Miseducation

There's a fascinating video created by the Southern Poverty Law Center (in January 2017) that focuses on Google but is equally relevant to libraries. It is called The Miseducation of Dylann Roof.

 

 In this video, the speaker shows that by searching on "black on white violence" in Google the top items are all from racist sites. Each of these link only to other racist sites. The speaker claims that Google's algorithms will favor similar sites to ones that a user has visited from a Google search, and that eventually, in this case, the user's online searching will be skewed toward sites that are racist in nature. The claim is that this is what happened to Dylan Roof, the man who killed 9 people at an historic African-American church - he entered a closed information system that consisted only of racist sites. It ends by saying: "It's a fundamental problem that Google must address if it is truly going to be the world's library."

I'm not going to defend or deny the claims of the video, and you should watch it yourself because I'm not giving a full exposition of its premise here (and it is short and very interesting). But I do want to question whether Google is or could be "the world's library", and also whether libraries do a sufficient job of presenting users with a well-round information space.

It's fairly easy to dismiss the first premise - that Google is or should be seen as a library. Google is operating in a significantly different information ecosystem from libraries. While there is some overlap between Google and library collections, primarily because Google now partners with publishers to index some books, there is much that is on the Internet that is not in libraries, and a significant amount that is in libraries but not available online. Libraries pride themselves on providing quality information, but we can't really take the lion's share of the credit for that; the primary gatekeepers are the publishers from whom we purchase the items in our collections. In terms of content, most libraries are pretty staid, collecting only from mainstream publishers.

I decided to test this out and went looking for works promoting Holocaust denial or Creationism in a non-random group of libraries. I was able to find numerous books about deniers and denial, but only research libraries seem to carry the books by the deniers themselves. None of these come from mainstream publishing houses. I note that the subject heading, Holocaust denial literature, is applied to both those items written from the denial point of view, as well as ones analyzing or debating that view.

Creationism gets a bit more visibility; I was able to find some creationist works in public libraries in the Bible Belt. Again, there is a single subject heading, Creationism, that covers both the pro- and the con-. Finding pro- works in WorldCat is a kind of "needle in a haystack" exercise.

Don't dwell too much on my findings - this is purely anecdotal, although a true study would be fascinating. We know that libraries to some extent reflect their local cultures, such as the presence of the Gay and Lesbian Archives at the San Francisco Public Library.  But you often hear that libraries "cover all points of view," which is not really true.

The common statement about libraries is that we gather materials on all sides of an issue. Another statement is that users will discover them because they will reside near each other on the library shelves. Is this true? Is this adequate? Does this guarantee that library users will encounter a full range of thoughts and facts on an issue?

First, just because the library has more than one book on a topic does not guarantee that a user will choose to engage with multiple sources. There are people who seek out everything they can find on a topic, but as we know from the general statistics on reading habits, many people will not read voraciously on a topic. So the fact that the library has multiple items with different points of view doesn't mean that the user reads all of those points of view.

Second, there can be a big difference between what the library holds and what a user finds on the shelf. Many public libraries have a high rate of circulation of a large part of their collection, and some books have such long holds lists that they may not hit the shelf for months or longer. I have no way to predict what a user would find on the shelf in a library that had an equal number of books expounding the science of evolution vs those promoting the biblical concept of creation, but it is frightening to think that what a person learns will be the result of some random library bookshelf.

But the third point is really the key one: libraries do not cover all points of view, if by points of view you include the kind of mis-information that is described in the SPLC video. There are many points of view that are not available from mainstream publishers, and there are many points of view that are not considered appropriate for anything but serious study. A researcher looking into race relations in the United States today would find the sites that attracted Roof to provide important insights, as SPLC did, but you will not find that same information in a "reading" library.

Libraries have an idea of "appropriate" that they share with the publishing community. We are both scientific and moral gatekeepers, whether we want to admit it or not. Google is an algorithm functioning over an uncontrolled and uncontrollable number of conversations. Although Google pretends that its algorithm is neutral, we know that it is not. On Amazon, which does accept self-published and alternative press books, certain content like pornography is consciously kept away from promotions and best seller lists. Google has "tweaked" its algorithms to remove Holocaust denial literature from view in some European countries that forbid the topic. The video essentially says that Google should make wide-ranging cultural, scientific and moral judgments about the content it indexes.

I am of two minds about the idea of letting Google or Amazon be a gatekeeper. On the one hand, immersing a Dylann Roof in an online racist community is a terrible thing, and we see the result (although the cause and effect may be hard to prove as strongly as the video shows). On the other hand, letting Google and Amazon decide what is and what is not appropriate does not sit well at all. As I've said before having gatekeepers whose motivations are trade secrets that cannot be discussed is quite dangerous.

There has been a lot of discussion lately about libraries and their supposed neutrality. I am very glad that we can have that discussion. With all of the current hoopla about fake news, Russian hackers, and the use of social media to target and change opinion, we should embrace the fact of our collection policies, and admit widely that we and others have thought carefully about the content of the library. It won't be the most radical in many cases, but we care about veracity, and that''s something that Google cannot say.

Transparency of judgment

The Guardian, and others, have discovered that when querying Google for "did the Holocaust really happen", the top response is a Holocaust denier site. They mistakenly think that the solution is to lower the ranking of that site.

The real solution, however, is different. It begins with the very concept of the "top site" from searches. What does "top site" really mean? It means something like "the site most often pointed to by other sites that are most often pointed to." It means "popular" -- but by an unexamined measure. Google's algorithm doesn't distinguish fact from fiction, or scientific from nutty, or even academically viable from warm and fuzzy. Fan sites compete with the list of publications of a Nobel prize-winning physicist. Well, except that they probably don't, because it would be odd for the same search terms to pull up both, but nothing in the ranking itself makes that distinction.

The primary problem with Google's result, however, is that it hides the relationships that the algorithm itself uses in the ranking. You get something ranked #1 but you have no idea how Google arrived at that ranking; that's a trade secret. By not giving the user any information on what lies behind the ranking of that specific page you eliminate the user's possibility to make an informed judgment about the source. This informed judgment is not only about the inherent quality of the information in the ranked site, but also about its position in the complex social interactions surrounding knowledge creation itself.

This is true not only for Holocaust denial but every single site on the web. It is also true for every document that is on library shelves or servers. It is not sufficient to look at any cultural artifact as an isolated case, because there are no isolated cases. It is all about context, and the threads of history and thought that surround the thoughts presented in the document.

There is an interesting project of the Wikimedia Foundation called "Wikicite." The goal of that project is to make sure that specific facts culled from Wikipedia into the Wikidata project all have citations that support the facts. If you've done any work on Wikipedia you know that all statements of fact in all articles must come from reliable third-party sources. These citations allow one to discover the background for the information in Wikipedia, and to use that to decide for oneself if the information in the article is reliable, and also to know what points of view are represented. A map of the data that leads to a web site's ranking on Google would serve a similar function.

Another interesting project is CITO, the Citation Typing Ontology. This is aimed at scholarly works, and it is a vocabulary that would allow authors to do more than just cite a work - they could give a more specific meaning to the citation, such as "disputes", "extends", "gives support to". A citation index could then categorize citations so that you could see who are the deniers of the deniers as well as the supporters, rather than just counting citations. This brings us a small step, but a step, closer to a knowledge map.

All judgments of importance or even relative position of information sources must be transparent. Anything else denies the value of careful thinking about our world. Google counts pages and pretends not to be passing judgment on information, but they operate under a false flag of neutrality that protects their bottom line. The rest of us need to do better.

All the (good) books

I have just re-read Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451, and it was better than I had remembered. It holds up very well for a book first published in 1953. I was reading it as an example of book worship, as part of my investigation into examples of an irrational love of books. What became clear, however, is that this book does not describe an indiscriminate love, not at all.

I took note of the authors and the individual books that are actually mentioned in Fahrenheit 451. Here they are (hopefully a complete list):

Authors: Dante, Swift, Marcus Aurelius, Shakespeare, Plato, Milton, Sophocles, Thomas Hardy, Ortega y Gasset, Schweitzer, Einstein, Darwin, Gandhi, Guatama Buddha, Confucius, Thomas Love Peacock, Thomas Jefferson, Lincoln, Tom Paine, Machiavelli, Christ, Bertrand Russell.

Books: Little Black Sambo, Uncle Tom's Cabin, the Bible, Walden

I suspect that by the criteria with which Bradbury chose his authors, he himself, merely an author of popular science fiction, would not have made his own list. Of the books, the first two were used to illustrate books that offended.

"Don't step on the toes of the dog lovers, the cat lovers, doctors, lawyers, merchants, chiefs, Mormons, Baptists, Unitarians, second-generation Chinese, Swedes, Italians, Germans, Texans, Brooklynites, Irishmen, people from Oregon or Mexico."
...
"Colored people don't like Little Black Sambo. Burn it. White people don't feel good about Uncle Tom's Cabin. Burn it. Someone's written a book on tobacco and cancers of the lungs? The cigarette people are weeping? Burn the book. Serenity, Montag."

The other two were examples of books that were being preserved.

Bradbury was a bit of a social curmudgeon, and in terms of books decidedly a traditionalist. He decried the dumbing down of American culture, with digests of books (perhaps prompted by the Reader's Digest brand, which began in 1950), then "digest-digests, digest-digest-digests," then with books being reduced to one or two sentences, and television keeping people occupied but without any perceptible content. (Although he pre-invents a number of recognizable modern technologies, such as earbuds, he fails to anticipate the popular of writers like George R. R. Martin and other writers of brick-sized tomes.)

Fahrenheit 451 is not a worship of books, but of their role in preserving a certain culture. The "book-people" who each had memorized a book or a chapter hoped to see those become the canon once the new "dark ages" had ended. This was not a preservation of all books but of a small selection of books. That is, of course, exactly what happened in the original dark ages, although the potential corpus then was much smaller: only those texts that had been carefully copied and preserved, and in small numbers, were available for distribution once printing technology became available. Those manuscripts were converted to printed texts, and the light came back on in Europe, albeit with some dark corners un-illuminated where texts had been lost.

Another interesting author on the topic of preservation, but less well-known, is Louis-Sébastien Mercier, writing in 1772 in his utopian novel of the future, Memoirs of the Year Two Thousand Five Hundred.*  In his book he visits the King's Library in that year to find that there is only a small cabinet holding the entire book collection. He asks the librarians whether some great fire had destroyed the books, but they answered instead that it was a conscious selection.

"Nothing leads the mind farther astray than bad books; for the first notions being adopted without attention, the second become precipitate conclusion; and men thus go on from prejudice to prejudice, and from error to error. What remained for us to do, but to rebuild the structure of human knowledge?" (v. 2, p. 5)

The selection criteria eliminated commentaries ("works of envy or ignorance") but kept original works of discovery or philosophy. These people also saw a virtue in abridging works to save the time of the reader. Not all works that we would consider "classics" were retained:

"In the second division, appropriated to the Latin authors, I found Virgil, Pliny, and Titus Livy entire; but they had burned Lucretius, except some poetic passages, because his physics they found false, and his morals dangerous." (v. 2, p.9)

In this case, books are selectively burned because they are considered inferior, a waste of the reader's time or tending to lead one in a less than moral direction. Although Mercier doesn't say so, he is implying a problem of information overload.

In Bradbury's book the goal was to empty the minds of the population, make them passive, not thinking. Mercier's world was gathering all of the best of human knowledge, perhaps even re-writing it, as Paul Otlet proposed. (More on him in a moment.) Mercier's year 2500 world eliminated all the works of commentary on other works, treating them like unimportant rantings on today's social networks. Bradbury also did not mention secondary sources; he names no authors of history (although we don't know how he thought of Bertrand Russell, as philosopher or also a historian) or works of literary criticism.

Both Bradbury and Mercier would be considered well-read. But we are all like the blind men and the elephant. We all operate based on the information we have. Bradbury and Mercier each had very different minds because they had been informed by what they had read. For the mind it is "you are what you see and read." Mercier could not have named Thoreau and Bradbury did not mention any French philosophers. Had they each saved a segment of the written output of history their choices would have been very different with little overlap, although they both explicitly retain Shakespeare. Their goals, however, run in parallel, and in both cases the goal is to preserve those works that merit preserving so that they can be read now and in the future.  

In another approach to culling the mass of books and other papers, Kurt Vonnegut, in his absurdist manner, addressed the problem as one of information overload:

"In the year Ten Million, according to Koradubian, there would be a tremendous house-cleaning. All records relating to the period between the death of Christ and the year One Million A.D. would be hauled to dumps and burned. This would be done, said Koradubian, because museums and archives would be crowding the living right off the earth. 

The million-year period to which the burned junk related would be summed up in history books in one sentence, according to Koradubian: Following the death of Jesus Christ, there was a period of readjustment that lasted for approximately one million years." (Sirens of Titan, p. 46)

While one hears often about a passion for books, some disciplines rely on other types of publications, such as journal articles and conference papers. The passion for books rarely includes these except occasionally by mistake, such as the bound journals that were scanned by Google in its wholesale digitization of library shelves, and the aficionados of non-books are generally limited to specific forms, such as comic books. In the late 19th and early 20th century, Belgian Paul Otlet, a fascinating obsessive whose lifetime and interests coincided with that our own homegrown bibliographic obsessive, Melvil Dewey, began work leading to his creation of what was intended to be a universal bibliography that included both books and journal articles, as well as other publications. Otlet's project was aimed at all knowledge, not just that contained in books, and his organization solicited books and journals from European and North American learned societies, especially those operating in scientific areas. As befits a project with the grandiose goal of cataloging all of the world's information, Otlet named it the Mundaneum. Otlet represents another selection criterion, because his Mundaneum appears to have been limited to academic materials and serious works; at the least, there is no mention of fiction or poetry in what I have read on the topic.

Among Otlet's goals was to pull out information buried in books and bring related bits of information together. He called the result of this a Biblion. This Biblion sounds somewhat related to the abridgments and re-gatherings of information that Mercier describes in his book. It also sounds like what motivated the early encyclopedists. To Otlet, the book format was a barrier, since his goal was not the preservation of the volumes themselves, but was to be a centralized knowledge base.

So now we have a range of book preservation goals, from all the books to all the good books, and then to the useful information in books. Within the latter two we see that each selection represents a fairly limited viewpoint that would result in a loss of a large number of the books and other materials that are held in research libraries today. For those of us in libraries and archives, the need is to optimize quality without being arbitrary, and at the same time to serve a broad intellectual and creative base. We won't be as perfect as Otlet or as strict the librarians in the year 2500, but hopefully our preservation practices will be more predictable than the individual choices made by Bradbury's "human books."



* In the original French, the title referred to the year 2440 ("L'An 2440, rêve s'il en fut jamais"). I have no idea why it was rounded up to 2500 in the English translation.

---

Works cited or used

Bradbury, Ray. Fahrenheit 451. New York: Ballantine, 1953

Mercier, Louis-Sébastien. Memoirs of the year two thousand five hundred, London, Printed for G. Robinson, 1772 (HathiTrust copy)

Vonnegut, Kurt. The Sirens of Titan. New York: Dial Press Trade Paperbacks, 2006

 Wright, Alex. Cataloging the World: Paul Otlet and the Birth of the Information Age. New York, NY : Oxford University Press, 2014.

Unequal Access

With the recent indictment of an advocate for open information access who had set up a way to download about 4 million JSTOR articles, presumably with the intent to liberate them from their native closed access, we need to step back and look at how unequal information access is in this world. In major universities in the US, academics and students log on to their computers in their offices or at home and a whole world opens up to them. That's not some kind of accident. The prime goal of university libraries is to make good on "seek and ye shall find." The proof of the success of these libraries is that researchers are oblivious to the complexity of the system that serves them. I would guess that many members of the US university community have no idea how their access to journals is managed and controlled. They don't see the contract negotiations with information providers, the continual development of software that makes single-point searching possible, the multi-faceted delivery systems that blend (or attempt to) digital and paper resources into a single stream. And they don't think about how different it would be if they weren't members of that privileged community.

Contrast that to the access available to a member of the US public who is not part of this academic sector. Like myself. Like the majority of people in this country. There is no access to JSTOR. No openURL server gives me multiple access options. The local public library does have some electronic materials, but these are much less extensive (and less expensive) than the ones in academic libraries. I may have to wait weeks to get a book that isn't in my local library's collection, if I can get it at all. I am often in the embarrassing position of not being able to access articles that I would like to read or quote from, including ones that I myself have authored.

In spite of this, I know that my information access, as a mere member of the US public, is far superior to that found in other countries; countries where serious researchers struggle to participate in research because they do not have the access that many academics here take for granted. Two anecdotes:

-- When I lived in Italy in the 1970's my friends were mainly college students or recent graduates. University education was free, but it was generally accepted that the only way to complete ones final thesis was to be able to afford to go abroad for two or three months. The purpose of this trip was to spend time in a country with a good library system, since libraries in Italy were limited. This was not just for students studying foreign literatures, but even those studying sciences, history, and art. These kids were essentially "library tourists." I don't know if this continues today.

-- During the time I worked at UC I was in a conversation with someone involved in the licensing of databases. For some reason we got talking about enforcement of contractual clauses having to do with excessive downloading and/or piracy. This person told me that all access to one of the UC campuses had been cut off recently for a few days because it was discovered that someone was systematically downloading entire journal runs. When they found the student it turned out that it was a foreign graduate student who would soon be returning home. Knowing that leaving the UC system would mean losing access to the journals he would need to continue his research, he was making himself a copy to take home.

It occurs to me as I write this that the "Digital Public Library of America" could create an information revolution in this country by upgrading the access of the general public to that of an academic or student in a large college or university, without ever digitizing a single page. What makes Stanford "Stanford" or Harvard "Harvard" is not just its famed faculty but the full range of information that is shared by that community. Everything they do, every bit of research, every new idea, is facilitated by the library and its services.

The information access gap between a university researcher and the average person on the street is immense. We have an information elite that, like most elites, considers its position to be earned, just, and reasonable. Few in academia worry that the access they have isn't widely shared. If they did, they would hopefully decide that something should be done.

Obama administration embraces Creative Commons

The copyright notice on the Obama Whitehouse site states:

Pursuant to federal law, government-produced materials appearing on this site are not copyright protected. The United States Government may receive and hold copyrights transferred to it by assignment, bequest, or otherwise.

Except where otherwise noted, third-party content on this site is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License. Visitors to this website agree to grant a non-exclusive, irrevocable, royalty-free license to the rest of the world for their submissions to Whitehouse.gov under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License.

Wow, that feels good!

LC forces take-down of lcsh.info

I am beside myself with fury. I hardly know where to begin. Not long ago, Ed Summers took the LCSH authority file and created an online site with the LC Subject Heading authority file re-formatted as a SKOS vocabulary. For the first time, Web services could link directly to LC subjects as represented in the authority file. And some did.

But the Library of Congress, our Federal, if not National, library, has required Ed to take down the site. A site that contained nothing more than LCSH in a usable form. Data that SHOULD be in the public domain, for anyone to use as they wish. This is an assault against libraries everywhere, an act of censorship.

You can read Ed's statement on lcsh.info.

I would very much like to hear LoC's statement about this. They should not be allowed to control the use of this data, data that belongs to all of us.

Ed couldn't refuse the Library's demand, but anyone who isn't an employee of LoC should have greater freedom. Let's gather around a find a new home for LCSH, one that can't be removed from the public.

Lolita again

LibraryThing also ran into the"Lolita problem." From the blog:

Today I got a form letter from Google, alerting me that Google had detected "adult or mature content" on LibraryThing. They gave one example, the LibraryThing.fr page for the Library of Congress Subject Heading (LCSH) "Erotic stories." No doubt some algorithm caught a few keywords, like "sex" or the common porn-word "Lolita" (it's a book, guys).

Also, I got the first real "spam" on this blog with some energetic "anonymous" poster who kept sending me the message "Lolitas are hot!" I would recommend that he (and I assume it is a he) read "Reading Lolita in Tehran", but I doubt he'd get it.

Millennium and Patron Privacy

Some local users of III's Millennium library system inform me that Millennium now keeps a record of the last user to return a book (or other item), and that record is kept until someone else checks out and returns the same book. The story that I have heard is that libraries wanted to keep the record in case they later discover some problem, such as damage to the item or a missing disk.

My understanding is that in the past the connection between the patron and the book was removed when the patron returned the book. I have seen various privacy policies that touted this as an important protection for patrons.

The librarians I talked to said that Millennium had the option to increase the number of past patrons from one to four, but that there was not a way to prevent this data from being kept.

Can anyone confirm this change to the Millennium software? And if you know of a way to turn off this "feature" could you let me know? It seems that a change of this nature, if it indeed has taken place, is significant and should be widely known.

No Lolita

I don't know how it happened, but Google got set to "use strict filtering" on my computer. I was preparing a new version of my "there's no catalog like no catalog" talk, this time to illustrate the question of open access to library data. So I did my usual search on "lolita":





The word "lolita" has been totally banned by Google under its "strict filtering" option. Curious, I decided to try some other literary works that have stirred controversy. How about "Lady Chatterley's Lover"? Not only did Google do the search, it corrected my spelling:



I was able also to find the works of Henry Miller (whose "tropics" appear higher than the actual earthly ones), and the Marquis de Sade. (Warning: DON'T search on "sadism" and click on Google images if you don't have filtering on. I think I'm going to have weird nightmares for a while. Ick.)

We all know what is going on here, and it's an interesting phenomenon: Lolita is much more than a book, it has become such a part of our culture that it has become a word for a particular forbidden desire. That said, when I did a search on Lolita with filtering turned off I didn't find anything questionable in the first half dozen or so pages of hits (which is all I looked through). Google's ranking seems to favor the book, the movie, and a few businesses with Lolita in their names.

If your library has computers with filters turned on, try the Lolita search and report back to me. Thanks.

Internet Filters and Strange Bedfellows

In the legal battle against the Children's Internet Protection Act (CIPA), the government's position was to mandate filters on library computers as a way to protect children. The ALA and the ACLU argued that such filters were unconstitutional as they blocked speech protected by the first amendment, but also that the filters were ineffective to the purpose intended, letting some "inappropriate" material through. Judith Krug testified, saying: "Even the filtering manufacturers admit it is impossible to block all undesirable material." The government, of course, argued for filters.

Now, the Child Online Protection Act (COPA) from 1998 is going to court. This law requires that Internet sites that carry material that may be harmful to children use some method (such as requiring a credit card number) to prevent children from accessing the material, or face criminal charges if children access their site. In this case, the ACLU is expected to argue that filters are a better way to prevent children from see the offending material (having evolved since CIPA days), and the government will argue that filters are ineffective because a fair amount of pornography slips through them.

*sigh* It's the absurdity of it all that gets to me. That and my paranoid fear that it's all a plot to engage our limited resources while our rights erode on so many fronts.

WiFi and the children

CNET has an article about some concerns arising around ubiquitous WiFi and children's access to the Internet. There's no mention of libraries or what they went through, but it will be interesting to see if cities that are providing open WiFi will face some of the challenges that libraries did. And if not, why not? Isn't ubiquitous, open WiFi Internet access the "worst case scenario" for those who so hotly opposed open Internet access in libraries?

I see that some libraries that offer WiFi are only allowing WiFi access to "older" children. Loudoun County, VA, has a rule: "Patrons age 17 and under must have a parent or guardian sign the necessary forms." Others, like Lansing Public Library, are making their WiFi entirely open: "Our wireless Internet access is open to patrons of all ages; parents or guardians of children under the age of 18 are responsible for supervising and guaranteeing their child's proper and safe use of the Internet." This brings up all kinds of interesting questions in my mind about the differences between accessing the Internet via the library's computer stations and accessing it from your own laptop. Is the obligation to protect children related to who provides the hardware? Are schools providing wireless, and if so are they using filters?