The data is from a much earlier breach. It was previously available through a Telegram service that let you query the data set for a fee; the new change is that the full trove is now much more accessible.

The data includes things like names, birthdays, locations, employers, and phone numbers. On the surface this may seem trivial, but the obvious question one might ask is “if it’s trivial, why were people paying to access it through a bot?” The answer is that information like these makes it easier to send spam or phishing attacks to known numbers, or to conduct identity theft. Most people prefer to keep the same phone number over time – even if they switch service providers – so a number combined with a common name becomes a unique identifier, much like (say) a social security number. And when combined with other sources of information, something like a phone number can be used to defeat two-factor authentication systems that many sites and services are using to protect accounts (for example, the 6-digit code that your bank sends to your phone as part of your login request).

A lot will be said about all this over the next few days, but I have two early observations to make.

Facebook’s formal response is callous and ignorant

As expected, Facebook responded quickly to this news: not with an apology or even an expression of regret, but with a terse message whose subtext is: “this has nothing to do with us”:

This is a monumentally stupid response. It implies that that the impact of a breach is meaningless as long as the source of the breach has been addressed. If a pipe in your house exploded and flooded the place, the Facebook Plumbing Co response would be to walk in, turn off the water main, and then say “it’s fixed” without acknowledging the knee-deep water or the damage it might cause. You might complain, and then they’d say “listen, we stopped the leaking. We can’t control all the crazy things ‘water’ does! Water’s gonna water, amirite?”

In my opinion, we taught Facebook this response: they’ve never been made fully accountable for the damage they cause (genocide, anyone?) so they’ve learned to be blasé about their responsibilities in this area. As an example, if Facebook were found guilty of contravening Canadian privacy legislation by not notifying users of this breach, they would be subject to a fine of up to $100,000CAD — hardly a rebuke for a company whose 2020 revenue is $86 billion (US dollars).

The public response includes some alarming sentiment

There is a flurry of activity on Twitter related to this dataset being made available online: everything from rage to widespread curiosity from individuals about whether or not their own data is in the set (you can currently check this at haveibeenpwned.com by entering your email address, but the site notes that only 2.5 million email addresses are available in the full 533 million account set). Most alarmingly for me, there is a tone of surrendered acceptance: “I share this kind of info with everyone already, so who cares” or “I just assume that hackers know all this already, so this is no big deal.”

My concern here is that the conversation around collection and disclosure of personal data online is still framed in terms of isolated pieces: a phone number, an email address, etc. The larger implications of these kinds of breaches are not easy to grasp and often not considered. It’s not the phone number alone that is problematic: it’s what happens when people combine those elements with other pieces of data to isolate and target individuals. Hackers will do it, for sure, but we would all be naive to think that companies like ClearView AI and Palantir won’t be just as eager to ingest this data and combine it with their already-invasive surveillance and privacy invasion systems, where it can and will be sold to anyone with an interest in targeting people for any purpose.

We are long, long overdue for a very serious conversation about holding companies like Facebook to account for their recklessness.

The post Half a billion users; 106 countries first appeared on Kris Joseph.

It’s a fait accompli because the appeal did not ask for thoughts on the extension itself, but on how to implement it. Thanks to the new Canada-US-Mexico Agreement (CUSMA – the replacement for NAFTA), we’ve been forced to make this change. This move is typical for many legislative changes related to intellectual property: an international treaty, undemocratically negotiated, results in nation-states being forced to implement changes that are not up for public debate (the Trans-Pacific Partnership is another recent example).

Canada’s consultation focused on one central area: what to do with orphaned and out-of-commerce works. An orphaned work is one that still falls under copyright, but whose creator is unknown or cannot be located (meaning that it’s impossible to get permission to use the work). An out-of-commerce work is one whose rights holder is known, but cannot be used effectively because it’s not possible to purchase or license a copy (for example, an out-of-print book or a very old piece of software that is no longer for sale). The paper also discussed other grey areas in the Copyright Act, such as unpublished works.

Like many, I and my colleague Michael McNally have submitted comments for the consultation. Though the ideas will be ignored, we felt it important to highlight the absurdity of extending the copyright term for the benefit of dead people: it’s a move that serves no-one but corporate copyright holders, whose motive is a desire to continue to profit from work they didn’t create (we call this rent seeking).

Our submission — which is admittedly quite sassy — is available online. I’m sharing it for two reasons:

1. There is no guarantee that Innovation, Science, and Economic Development (ISED) Canada will share all submissions publicly, which provides a clever means for them to share “what we wanted to hear” instead of “what we heard”
2. In an act of living the model for which we advocate, we have placed our submission into the public domain with a Creative Commons Zero licence

There are other submissions that are more kind to the process, and I want to point those out:

• Creative Commons issued a statement asking the government to embrace the benefits of the public domain, the intellectual commons, and open licensing
• The Canadian Association of Research Libraries (CARL) and the Canadian Federation of Library Associations (CFLA) submitted a detailed joint document asking for many of the same things we did, using more robust arguments and data

It will most likely be impossible to stop the term extension, thanks to CUSMA. Hopefully, a torrent of submissions that comment on the pointlessness of the extension will remind the government of the importance of this topic for Canadians – see Meera Nair’s commentary and Michael Geist’s commentary for examples. There is still hope that the Copyright Act will be amended in ways that lower the barriers of access to orphaned, out-of-commerce, and unpublished works, but I fear that – like the extension itself – the die has already been cast.

The feature image for this post is by Kyle Glenn on Unsplash

The post Extending Canada’s copyright term: the “consultation” and our submission first appeared on Kris Joseph.

It is true that selecting “very-open” material gives me more flexibility over the open licence I can apply to my own derivative works. It’s also true that relying on “very open” licences makes it easier for other people to reuse and remix my material flexibly. However, adhering to the rule of using only very-open material for OER creation side-steps some questions that, it turns out, aren’t as challenging as I once believed.

When we develop Open Educational Resources (OER), we often think of how David Wiley’s 5 Rs define what makes an OER truly open: retain, reuse, revise, remix, and redistribute. In general, I am not creating an OER if I do not allow other people to remix or revise my material. Therefore it’s generally agreed that materials created under “No Derivatives” (ND) are not OER.

But does that mean I shouldn’t use “ND” material at all? When I am looking for content to include as part of my own materials, evaluating it based on two of the 5 Rs feels clear: I should be able to make and keep copies of the material (retain), and I should be able to share them with others (redistribute). The third R, reuse, also feels straightforward: as long as there’s a Creative Commons licence on material I find, I can always use it (provided I also respect a creator’s wish to limit commercial use).

Things get a little more thorny when we talk about revise and remix, though, since “No Derivatives” feels like it conflicts with those two Rs. After all, when do the changes I make to someone else’s content count as revision, and when do they become a remix? And how does all of this affect the openly-licensed material I choose to work with? Most importantly: since people who license their materials as “No Derivatives” are indicating that they do not want their work adapted, should I just steer clear from including “No Derivatives” materials in my own work? You may be surprised to hear that the answer is a qualified “no.”

Revisions, Adaptations, and Remixes: Oh My!

The key to understanding “No Derivatives” is knowing what counts as an adaptation. In most jurisdictions, copyright law requires some some imagination or creativity in the expression of an idea in order to qualify for copyright protection. If I correct some typos in a Word document, I might consider the newly-saved version of the file a revision since it’s technically different from the previous version. However, since I didn’t actually add any of my own ideas or creativity to the updated document, it’s not an adaptation that might qualify for its own copyright protection. The same logic might apply if, for example, I merely convert an image from a PNG format to a JPG format without altering it. In the example below, I’ve merely made a grammatical correction to an image licensed under CC BY-ND. This does not meet the bar of adding creativity to the original image; as a result, my updated version does not qualify as an adaptation/derivative.

It follows, then, that I am only violating the terms of a No Derivatives licence if the work I’m using is actually adapted in some way.

A remix, by contrast, is created when I combine two or more works in order to create something new. The result may or may not have a resemblance to the original. In the gallery below, I have taken two images from Flickr (both available under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 License) and used them to create an image of a soccer player standing up to a very large duck.

For Creative Commons materials, I can remix works freely as long as my use of the works complies with the terms of the licences on the source materials: for example, they may require attribution (the Attribution or BY element of Creative Commons licences), or they may require me to release my adaption under a compatible license (the Share Alike or SA element).

Figuring out which licences you can mix together can be a challenge, so a chart like the one below can help. Look up the licence of the first work you want to remix on the left hand side, and then read across until you find the licence of the second work. If you see a green check mark, you can mix the two works together. Even in cases where you are combining several works together, the chart can help you identify whether or not you’re going to hit a road block (or maybe a giant duck).

Of course, creating adaptations from licensed works may place some restrictions on how you apply a licence to the resulting work. In the chart below, green boxes represent compatible licences and grey boxes represent non-compatible ones. The yellow boxes represent licenses that are not recommended unless you are careful to note that your material contains adaptations of works that were provided under different terms that may restrict further use.

Using my soccer-player-versus-duck example from above, you can see that my use of two images licensed under CC BY means I can apply several possible licences to my remix: BY, BY-NC, BY-NC-ND, BY-NC-SA, BY-ND or BY-SA.

The examples above show how it is possible to reuse No Derivatives works “as is” (or to make minor, non-creative revisions to them), and how you can remix two or more works to create something new that also respects the terms of the original licences. My Open Educational Resource on how to cope with giant ducks who invade sporting events has a very bright future.

You CAN include “No Derivatives” materials in your own works*

*sometimes

There are still circumstances under which you can include a No Derivatives (ND) work in materials you create. Since ND-licensed materials cannot be adapted, you can include them “as is” in a collection of materials. In the context of Open Educational Resources, here are some examples — this is not an exhaustive list:

• Creating a collection of existing worksheets into a package of exercises for students
• Building a unit plan for a course that contains individual lesson plans, worksheets, or other resources from other people
• Including an existing essay, academic paper, or other written work into a collection of material
• Featuring existing, openly-licensed works in a gallery of images that share a common topic or theme

As long as you respect the terms of the licence (meaning that you provide attribution and respect the creators’ licence terms related to commercial, derivative, and share-alike behaviours), you can use these works. You can apply a Creative Commons licence to your new collection, too, but the licence only applies to your unique contributions — the specific arrangement of works, or any other original material you have added (e.g. an introduction, a set of annotations or comments, etc.) Providing a proper citation for each the works used in your collection is required, and it helps others understand that the works appearing in your collection are created under different terms that must also be respected by future users.

To demonstrate this in action, I have created a gallery of images of ducks in the water. This carefully-curated collection of images is composed entirely of photos licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivatives 2.0.

If I were teaching a biology lesson about duck habitat, for example, I would be free to use these images, un-adapted, as a set of reference images for the class.

To sum up: though restricting yourself to Creative Commons-licensed material with very broad, open licenses gives you much more flexibility in terms of the licence you apply to your adaptations, and provides more possibility for the “revise” and “remix” aspects of David Wiley’s 5Rs, you do not need to duck away from materials released under different licences. You just need to use the charts I’ve shown you in this post to ensure that your use does not violate the terms of the licences other creators have applied.

The material in this blog post is a derivative of content in module 4 of the Creative Commons Certificate Resources, by Creative Commons, which is available under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License. Note that this blog entry collects many materials that have been released under other other licenses, and those have been noted where they appear. Original content in this article by Kris Joseph is available under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0.

The post Collections and Remixes and Reuse: Digging into Open Educational Resources and Creative Commons Licences first appeared on Kris Joseph.

The connection to US law and jurisprudence is inevitable, since many of the events that led to the creation of the Commons were directly connected to the passing of the Copyright Term Extension Act (CTEA, also known as the Sonny Bono act) and the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). Canada has been slow to follow, but the overhaul of the Copyright Act in 2012 brought us anti-circumvention rules (protection digital locks) and the replacement for NAFTA will force us to add 20 years to our copyright terms…. which the US did in 1998. The Creative Commons has exploded independently of these changes, though, and is becoming more and more central to the Open Access and Open Education movements. If creators proactively licence their works and get in the habit of labeling them, they are working proactively to ensure that existing knowledge can be used as a permissive scaffold for new work.

The featured image in this post is by Lysander Yuen on Unsplash

The post Timeline: the Creative Commons first appeared on Kris Joseph.

Our department at the library has had a number of scholars approach us with projects related to making data available in a “digital humanities way.” In response, we always acknowledge the value of open data deposit and public scholarship; however, we often find that researchers are asking about dynamic, interactive ways to turn their work into online exhibits, websites, or interactive applications. As someone with a background in engineering, high tech, and digital humanities, you’d think I’d be excited about these possibilities. And I am. But I’m also very aware that we need to be practical.

The web is littered with projects and tools that have long-since died or gone missing (just browse through the repository of tools at TAPOR to get a sense of the monumental volume of abandoned utilities, software, and sites). Grant money runs out; sustainable funding is difficult to obtain; graduate students with specific technical skills move on to other opportunities… there are so many reasons why this happens.

At the end of the day, though, all the researchers we’ve spoken to have come to us with the same underlying question: we have “living” knowledge to share – how can we do that?

The answer has been surprisingly similar in every case: an online spreadsheet is just fine.

This is not (as you may expect) a diatribe against Google’s data privacy practices, a preference for preservation-ready repositories with scholarly identifiers, a rant about how “open” and “open for use” are not the same thing, or a shakedown of online tools that are popular for research and analysis. It’s a simple acknowledgment that:

• scholars want to share their work, and collaborate with others
• tools like spreadsheets preserve opportunity for those who want to conduct fancy work, since a good old comma-separated values (CSV) file is both human- and machine-readable and can be used in endless ways
• data presented in a tabular format may not be sexy, but it’s recognizable
• often these collections represent work-in-progress for small communities of scholars who are motivated by research questions more than dynamic interactive data visualizations built using bespoke JavaScript libraries

Most importantly, it’s a critical step in meeting a researcher where they are. Yes, I am interested in talking about open access and open licensing and public scholarship and permanent identifiers and scholarly profiles…. but let’s move one step at a time. I’m learning that many, many scholars are willing to go that way but need to work at the pace of their own curiosity, opportunity, and capacity. Until those folks are ready to make big leaps, Google Sheets will provide most of what they need.

In the spirit of putting my money where my mouth is, and because I really need a distraction from my own overreaching projects, I’m going to spend a few future posts working through an example for the pure fun of it. It will involve heated online debates, significant lobbying forces… and lace-front wigs.

The post Sometimes a spreadsheet is enough first appeared on Kris Joseph.

Here is a PDF version of the YUFA letter; the full text can be found below.

The photo at the top of this post is by Evan Mitsui, CBC, and appears as part of CBC’s coverage of the protest.

08 November 2019

102N Steacie Science and Engineering Library
York University, 4700 Keele St.
Toronto ON
M3J 1P3

Sue Graham-Nutter, Chair of the Toronto Public Library Board
Vickery Bowles, City Librarian

c/o City Librarian’s Office
Toronto Reference Library
789 Yonge St.
Toronto ON
M4W 2G8

Cc: His Worship John Tory; Mayor, City of Toronto

To the Toronto Public Library Board and the City Librarian:

You made the wrong decision in allowing the Meghan Murphy room rental. The Community and Event Space Rental policy is reasonable, but your decision about section 4.4 a) in this case was poorly considered and very hurtful. A determination of community harm, including the likelihood of discriminatory or hateful speech, should be made in consultation with the community most affected by that speech. It is shameful that the trans and gender non-conforming community was not engaged as part of the deliberation. 

Upholding the Radical Feminists Unite room booking is a violation of the safe space that marginalized and targeted communities have come to cherish at TPL. Dismissing Murphy’s arguments as not legally-defined hate speech is a callous simplification that ignores the struggles of trans people for dignity, safety and equality. The impact of this abuse is immediately evident. The people protesting at the Palmerston branch weren’t just opposed to the talk inside; they were against the Toronto Public Library. Toronto citizens—readers, writers, library users—were protesting the library! You’d called in the police, and they locked some people inside the building! This is no way to treat any community member, and certainly not how to work with vulnerable communities.

As librarians and archivists at York University we regularly tell our students that TPL is open to them and that they should use it for academic work as well as recreation. We use it ourselves. We’ve always been happy to have such a fine public system beside our own, but we’re no longer comfortable recommending TPL to all of our students. What’s more, your decision has damaging consequences for our profession as a whole. Your free speech absolutism betrays a limited understanding of the very value you seek to protect.

Stand up for trans rights. Librarians have a responsibility to support evidence-based arguments and to oppose those who deny the rights of others. A stance of neutrality should not permit false equivalencies—not all arguments have equal merit—and you should have the critical capacity to see the difference between legitimate debate and outright discrimination. History will not look favourably on this decision. At a time when all libraries struggle to demonstrate relevance and when public libraries have shown great leadership by transforming into innovative accessible hubs for all equity-seeking groups, you have let us down.

Sincerely,

William Denton
for the librarians and archivists of the York University Faculty Association
Associate Librarian, York University
Union steward, York University Faculty Association

Art Redding
Professor, York University
President, York University Faculty Association

The post Open letter from the York University Faculty Association’s Librarians and Archivists to the Toronto Public Library first appeared on Kris Joseph.

In part one I discussed librarianship’s core values as a system (more than intellectual freedom alone) that has always been a little fluid and has often clashed internally.

In this part I will outline a particular shift in values that seems to be taking place in the profession. It is a shift that is complete in one sense, but not universally-recognized in another, and it is a shift that has come to odds with progressive librarianship in this situation.

From Missouri to Utah, with stops in between

Let’s begin with an exploration of recent Library Lore. In 2014, Officer Darren Wilson shot and killed Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. The news that Wilson would not face charges sparked two months of riots in the town. Business were burned. At times, schools were closed. An NPR article described the local library, which stayed open during the crisis, as a “quiet refuge.” In response to the tumult outside, Wilson wrote out a sign and put it on the door: “During difficult times, the library is a quiet oasis where we can catch our breath, learn, and think about what to do next.”

Later, Bonner said “the public doesn’t really understand our mission…we are an institution that supports the community.”

More recently, Emilio Estevez’s film, The Public, presented a fictionalized account of homeless people taking over the main library in Cincinnati during an intense cold snap. The story was loosely based on an essay by former Salt Lake City librarian Chip Ward, who illuminated his library’s function as a homeless shelter during the day due to the lack of other available support for vulnerable people. His essay trains a mirror on a society that aggressively cuts social programs and assistance, leaving the public library as one of the retreats of last resort. Ward is candid about the challenges created by the situation, but he empathizes deeply with the people who need the library’s help:

Imagine the degradation of waiting an hour in the cold rain to get into a soup kitchen for a meal; the hassle of hunting endlessly for an unpoliced spot to sleep; the constant fear of being robbed or attacked by other street people; or the indignity of defecating in a vacant lot. It’s a combination that would probably drive a mentally healthy person to psychosis and substance abuse.

Chip Ward, What They Didn’t Teach Us In Library School

The Salt Lake City library served as a solace from these conditions, and Ward’s essay is dated 2007. The idea of libraries as a welcoming community space for the vulnerable is not new at all.

Both of the previous examples are in the American context, but there are Canadian ones as well: for example, the Edmonton Public Library employs three social workers at its downtown branch who build and sustain relationships with the homeless and other marginalized people who frequent the space. And Winnipeg’s Millenium library (which also employs crisis workers, incidentally) has come under fire for implementing mandatory bag checks and metal detectors at its entrances in February 2019: these checks are barriers to access for vulnerable people who may be fearful of security, or may not enter the building for fear of having critical belongings confiscated.

For at least a decade and a half, libraries have been taking about the concept of the library as a place. I have paywalled articles dating to 2004 and 2006, but here are two recent examples of the ongoing discussion. The early 2000s were the time when libraries began to move books out of their front entrances, creating communal spaces for conversation and programs for everything from childhood literacy and English as a Second Language classes to tax filing support and resume preparation. Of course, none of this happened in a vacuum. Libraries exist within a larger cultural context that (as Chip Ward outlined) does not tend to lavish resources on social programs, and libraries are increasingly relied upon to provide services that are not available elsewhere. And while it is not uncommon to talk about how libraries build community, let’s not pat ourselves on the back too firmly: the focus in this discussion is often a defence of library funding for the sake of economic impact. This Urban Libraries Council article [web archive] gushes about how libraries improve “human, physical and community capacity” in its byline, but the text is all about jobs and prosperity: the main bullet points tout literacy programs, career resources and small business supports.

Regardless of its neoliberal underpinnings, the New Role of libraries as a community space has taken deep root, and you would be hard-pressed to find a public library in North America that does not claim community engagement and support as a core principle. In fact, you could suggest that this “new” value has moved beyond entrenchment to the point of fetish. Due to the paperback release of a Eric Klinenberg’s Palaces for the People (also celebrated in an episode of 99% Invisible), I was forwarded two articles by colleagues in the past week: an article from the National Endowment for the Humanities discusses the library as critical social infrastructure; and a Literary Hub piece wonders why civic leaders fail to fund institutions that selflessly celebrate inclusivity and abolish loneliness. Both of the articles provide examples–some from Klinenberg’s book and some from personal recollections of the authors–that highlight the value of the library as a community space. Librarians are more than happy to blush over them, fawn over them, and share them. They are less happy to deal meaningfully with what happens when a desire to be a “community space” creates conflicts between different members of the community, or between different understandings of what is welcoming. [Though I risk veering off topic here, I do feel the need to nod at Fobazi Ettarh’s Vocational Awe article, which tackles the idea of librarianship as a “sacred calling” head-on. To bring us back into focus, though, you should also see her post about the Toronto Public Library situation]

From community to social justice

As a result of the desire to understand how community needs balance with other values, it was inevitable that the conversation about the appropriate use of library space would eventually run parallel to the conversation about how library spaces should look and feel. After all, when you are talking about making a space that is welcoming to everyone (animating the core values of access and diversity), you need to think about what “welcome” looks like and you need to think very carefully about who is and is not traditionally welcome in public spaces. It was only a matter of time, in other words, before “community building” discourse in librarianship would turn into a discussion of inclusion, safety, and social justice (or, the principle of equity for all).

I’m going to draw quite heavily on a book chapter by Rachel Wexelbaum (2016), because she draws a very clean line from the ideal of libraries as safe spaces for books to libraries as safe spaces for people and communities. Wexelbaum points out that “safe spaces” date back (at least) to the civil rights movement, but specifically notes the creation of LGBTQ safe spaces in beginning in the 1990s (here, she cites Poynter & Tubbs [paywalled article]). More important to our larger discussion of values, though, she emphasizes the role of diversity in librarianship by highlighting the work of Josephine Adams Rathbone. Rathbone proposed a code of ethics for librarians that emphasized friendliness and acceptance of diversity in 1930 (nine years before the American Library Association adopted its first code of ethics).

Wexelbaum is one example; there are many, but I’ll offer another two. In 2012, Sarah Hashemi Scott asserted that library staff and policies should reflect the local community with an emphasis on inclusion, and that we must always consider who “loses” when, for example, we shift to new resource types like eBooks. And less than two weeks ago, Alice G. Smith gave a talk called Social Justice is a Library Issue; Libraries are a Social Justice Issue, which explicitly links issues of equity and social justice to the core value of diversity. Her argument is simple: diversity implies that everyone feels included, and a great way to help people feel included is to provide them with a space where they feel safe. Both Wexelbaum and Smith discuss the queer community, and their use of the library as a safe space, at length. This is the “new” shift in library values that I mentioned in my introduction.

If you take some time to look at Wexelbaum’s work (it’s worth it, I promise) you’ll note that she interprets two of our field’s codes of ethics (ALA and IFLA) to include the provision of safe spaces. You’ll also note that, through examples of censorship in collections, internet access, and ongoing discrimination and harassment in library spaces, she asserts we still have a long way to go. I think Alice Smith feels the same way, but her talk ends with several great suggestions on how the work can and should be done.

All of this discussion suggests a couple of things: first, that the idea of libraries as a safe space (even as an interpretation of “diversity”) is not as widely-held as some would like; and second, that there appears to be active resistance to the idea from people in the profession who operate from previously-established patterns.

The tide has changed

As at least one other person has noted (Sam Popowich’s eloquence makes me swoon), the core values of librarianship seem to be shifting, so I’m not exactly prophetic about this. When I look back at all the examples of the proposed (or enacted) shift that I’ve provided in this post, however, I see a pattern related to the types of leaders that are promoting the change: librarians who are largely female-identified, and largely of colour. It’s hardly a scientific analysis, but it stands in stark contrast to the demographic of the Defenders of Free Speech I highlighted at the top of part one. Like the microcosm of the Meghan Murphy issue, we seem to be in a situation where previous ideas are being vigorously defended because the people who hold them — like Vickery Bowles — feel that their values are under threat.

I do not write this to shame Vickery Bowles or old white guys in general (after all, I am one… or, at least, an old white gay), but to point out that it’s the non-default, non-normative perspective that makes change possible because it calls the default into question. In her talk, Smith suggests that people in positions of power should recognize that position and use it for good; that we must interrogate and reflect on our own implicit biases and reflect on how they inform our decision-making; and that we must understand that our words and deeds can hurt people in ways we take for granted. Excluded and stigmatized people see these things by default; the rest of us need a bit more introspection.

It’s still a mistake

I was asked by someone on Twitter who read part one whether I could consider that intellectual freedom should subordinate all other library values. In theory, I don’t hate the idea. After all: you can’t have diversity without freedom of expression; or access, or democracy. But subordination is not exclusion (setting aside the fact that I still think the Toronto Public Library has abused its own policy), and when I weigh other factors related to this situation (community impact and the sense of the Toronto Public Library as an inclusive and safe space) the net benefit is still negative. There were many other possible solutions to this challenge that the Toronto Public Library ignored for the sake of dogmatic stubbornness, and that’s a real shame.

The context of the Toronto trans, non-conforming, queer and intersectional community is especially notable here. This is the city where a fast food restaurant with a well-known anti-LGBT history opened its first Canadian location 400 metres away from the village where Canada’s largest queer community gathers; the city of a serial killer who targeted gay men of colour while the Toronto Police ignored the community’s insistence that something terrible was happening; the heart of Black Lives Matter’s demand for more inclusivity in queer and BIPOC spaces; the city with a history of tense relationships between the LGBTQ community and police. This community remains marginalized and is under threat. Safe spaces like the Toronto Public Library matter, and the context in this situation matters very deeply. None of this was taken into account when the decision was made to allow Murphy to use Toronto Public Library space.

If this were a discussion of balancing the safety of trans and non-conforming folk with the comfort of people who are being asked to adjust to all-gender facilities and new approaches to how libraries operate, it could be held respectfully. I believe that. But this is not that discussion. When your staff, your community, and people you collaborate with are all telling you that the words and rhetoric Meghan Murphy hides behind to back her position on an issue are hurtful, and that her presence makes them all feel unwelcome, you must listen. They are telling you that they don’t feel safe or included, and the safety and inclusion of our most vulnerable community members must be taken into very serious account. Sadly, the effect of this event and its aftermath has corrupted the safe space that the Toronto Public Library purports to provide, and the effect will reverberate for a long time to come. It’s already being felt: I have a friend who works as a book publicist, and she says that she’s spending her days right now dealing with authors’ requests to pull out of Toronto Public Library events in support of the trans and non-gender-conforming community.

The “old guard” of librarianship now stands firmly-rooted in the door of the public library, presuming to know best while the city in front of them and the building behind them are shifting beneath the doorframe. I sincerely doubt that Vickery Bowles understands the pain and ongoing trauma of intentional misgendering and deadnaming; at least that is the logic I apply when I try to understand the chasm between people who see Murphy’s speech as hateful and those who don’t. People who have viewed Meghan Murphy’s videos and claimed that there is nothing hateful in them are also, I suspect, unfamiliar with the violence that this malicious erasure causes. But here’s the bottom line for me: it is hate speech because it denies the very existence of an entire community. That is not a “discussion” at all.

Twitter removed Meghan Murphy’s account because they qualify intentional misgendering and deadnaming as hateful conduct. Twitter’s policy reflects this because they listened to their community. We should expect no less of our public institutions.

The post The curious case of free-speech-loving librarians who don’t think the Toronto Public Library should provide space for Meghan Murphy: Part Two first appeared on Kris Joseph.

• Three cheers for Vickery Bowles […] who faced a storm but stood for free speech (Globe and Mail, paywalled article)
• Vickery Bowles has my respect for defending free speech and standing up to PC authoritarians (Free Bird Media)
• City librarian Vickery Bowles defends free speech (Toronto Sun)
• The silencing campaign against Meghan Murphy is a disgrace (National Post)
• Toronto Public Library’s stand for free speech (True North)
• Social justice requires intellectual freedom – why the Toronto Public Library should refuse to deplatform Meghan Murphy (The Centre for Free Expression)

I’ll make two observations about these opinion pieces, and then I’ll try to help you understand why many librarians and library workers, including myself, claim to uphold the values of intellectual freedom but still think the Toronto Public Library is making a terrible mistake.

Perhaps you can guess what unites all of the examples above: all of them are cisgendered men, and all of them are white. I assure you I’m not cherry-picking here. Despite numerous searches for other web-based media sources (apart from social media platforms like Twitter, Facebook, and Reddit), I am unable to find many published “pro-censorship” positions, with the exception of CBC’s As It Happens interview and one open letter posted on Medium. The interview stands out most starkly for its reach, of course, but it’s also a catalyst for some of the responses I’ve mentioned.

So, to be clear: the dominant stance on this issue is that free speech must be protected, and the dominant source of that stance is cisgendered and male and white. I’ll get back to why this matters in part two.

There are two perspectives I want to add to this discussion, and I have divided it into two parts. The first perspective, presented in this part, is that intellectual freedom is a critical value for librarians but that it is only one of many values that have always been shifting and (as in this case) conflict with one another. The second part, concurring with and hopefully building on a thorough analysis shared by Sam Popowitch (parts one, two and three), will cover the shift in values that is taking place in the field of librarianship, and will observe that the current “stewards” of our discipline are resisting that shift.

One: Not a value, but a system of values

In brief: this is actually not an issue of free speech (or, in the language of the Charter, “freedom of expression;” or, in broader language common to librarians, an “intellectual freedom”). More clearly, it’s not only a free speech issue. Yes, many of us (myself included) think that Vickery Bowles is misreading her own policy because her interpretation of what is “likely to promote hate” is dubious (for example, Twitter banned Meghan Murphy in November 2018 because her targeted, intentional misgendering and deadnaming of trans women and men is specifically listed as hateful conduct), and that the event should be canceled as a policy violation anyway. I want to put that aside, though, because this view is being be argued coherently by many people — including many women, at least one librarian, and other trans-identifying or otherwise non-conforming people — who spoke at a meeting of the Toronto Public Library board on October 22, 2019.

The broader point I want to make about librarianship’s system of values is that, on the whole, the Toronto Public Library’s decision is ignorant of context, was determined with a process that did not involve the community, and did not take our discipline’s other values and principles into account.

The American Library Association (ALA), through its intellectual freedom committee, has provided a long list of interpretations of the Library Bill of Rights that have all become “policy” for the Association. [For those who are unaware, the American Library Association serves as the body that, among many things, accredits library education programs across North America, and its wide scope of work guides everyone in the profession.] If you look at the list of policies on their interpretations page, you’ll note that they’ve all been added or amended at different times.

I highlight this example because it’s visible, but I also want to point out a heavily-cited book that isn’t available for free and public inspection: Michael Gorman’s Our Enduring Values: Librarianship in the 21st Century (2000). In the first chapter of the book, Gorman reviews four different conceptions of the “philosophy” of librarianship, as conceived by Ranganathan (1938), Jesse Shera (1973), Samuel Rothstein (1967), and Lee Finks (1989). Setting aside the fact that Gorman limited his analysis to four (without going into an extensive list of philosophies Gorman could have explored, where are the perspectives of people like Sanford Berman?), the very premise of Gorman’s book is that we should examination libraries’ history of varying values to look for consistencies. He says as much in the first paragraph of the introduction:

“A recent widely publicized discussion of library education seems to have encountered great difficulty in dealing with divisions between librarians and library educators. Those divisions betray a lack of consensus about common beliefs and values…”

Michael Gorman, Our Enduring Values, page 1

From all of this, we can take the following: the values that underpin our profession, and our interpretations of them, have always been changing in response to broader conditions. It’s interesting that a committee designed to support one value is interpreting policy related to all of the principles in the Library Bill of Rights, because it suggests that one value has supremacy over all others.

Let’s get back to interpretation, though, because historical interpretation of many library values appear backwards when viewed through the lens of the present. For example, while Western libraries have almost always thought of democracy as a core value, they also have a long tradition of believing that democracies only work when they’re full of the right kind of informed citizen. As a result, libraries share a long (and still continuing) tradition of censoring or being forced to censor everything from news on horse races to depictions of sex and violence and (gasp) discussions of communism. But hang on, here: that suggests intellectual freedom has been trumped by a pro-censorship value; one that suggests “librarians know best” about what information people should see, and that our mission affords us the right to curate, editorialize, and creatively-omit content that doesn’t align with the views of dominant culture (or, to be more blunt, the state). Awkward. After all, don’t libraries also value political freedom and general access to information? Absolutely! But time has taught us that libraries—despite arguments you may have heard—are not neutral, unbiased sources of information. Decisions about what to support or not support at the library are made by people who weigh those choices against all the values of the field–whatever those values happen to be at that time–in addition to considerations of impact and consequence. So: intellectual freedom is only one of many values of librarianship, and its interpretation has been fluid based on context. Perhaps more importantly, it is normal and expected for the values of librarians to come into conflict with one another.

Librarians know this… or, they ought to. In fact, the ALA’s policy on meeting rooms specifically says this:

The presence and activities of some groups in public spaces, while constitutionally protected, can cause fear and discomfort in some library users and staff. Libraries should adopt and enforce user behavior policies that protect library users and staff from harassment while maintaining their historic support for the freedom of speech.

Meeting rooms: an interpretation of the Library Bill of Rights, paragraph 1

This is, at least in part, because libraries also value equity, diversity, and inclusion.

It’s worth pointing out, here, that the Toronto Public Library’s Community and Event Space Booking policy, despite outlining “maintaining a welcoming and supportive environment free from discrimination and harassment” in its purpose, does not address the caution outlined by the ALA. Though it provides reasons why the library might deny a request, it does not provide guidance on what to do when, for example, a booking by one group makes another group feel uncomfortable or fearful. The options are “let it happen” or “cancel it,” with no guidance in the policy on contextualizing the event, consulting or engaging with the community, suggesting alternatives, or mitigating risks of harming the welcoming and supportive environment praised in the “Purpose” section. Instead, the policy prioritizes the lens of intellectual freedom—perhaps supplemented by the value of access—when determining how to handle a request for a controversial room rental. This is a policy failure.

It may be obvious by this point that I’m being loose with the terms “value” and “right” in this discussion, because the rights advocated by the ALA are not legal ones. In the context of rights, though, conversations about conflicts are not novel. In The Ethical Presuppositions Behind the Library Bill of Rights (2000; no free version available), the authors note that “few, if any, rights are absolute, unconditional, and universal, and trump everything. Most rights have limits or boundaries, and we need to pay attention to what those are.” (p. 471-72, emphasis mine). There are many examples in the paper where the right to a dissenting opinion conflicts with the preference to avoid censorship or restricting access. In situations where individual rights come into a seemingly-unresolvable conflict, the authors suggest that considering the benefits to society (tipping a hat towards utilitarianism–doing the most good for the most people, which has its own challenges) may work. The act of “considering” is not defined in the paper, but it is fraught: for one thing, who gets to do the considering? In the case of the Toronto Public Library, it’s the city librarian. Apparently librarians still “know best.”

To summarize: the values of librarianship are not sacred, they are not totally exclusive of one another, they are enacted in ways that sometimes appear contradictory, and they have always been variable and subject to interpretation.

Something is missing though. The current list of “core values” of the profession lists things like diversity, but there is nothing that says a library has to be a “safe space,” is there? And if you’re reading between the lines of my argument so far (since I think this event should be canceled, and have also written that I’m setting aside the free-speech-only argument), it seems clear that I am interpreting the values of librarianship to include “safe spaces” among them. It follows, then, that when weighing the intellectual freedom argument against principles of equity, diversity, and inclusion, Vickery Bowles’ refusal to cancel or mitigate the Meghan Murphy event is a violation of safe space principles that harms the community more than it protects intellectual freedom. So let’s examine that argument in part two.

The image at the top of this post is by Tumisu from Pixabay

The post The curious case of free-speech-loving librarians who don’t think the Toronto Public Library should provide space for Meghan Murphy: Part One first appeared on Kris Joseph.

I’m a hypocrite, working in a field that is rife with hypocrisy. To be kind, perhaps it is better to say that practices that should be common in the field of librarianship are not as common as I’d like.

Some examples:

• Librarians advocate for open access publishing, but most library and information science (LIS) journals are not open access.
• Librarians say they advocate for open access, but publish in paywalled journals more often than open access ones (note, ironically, that the article I just linked is located behind a paywall).
• Libraries advocate for universal access to information, but the University of Toronto won’t let me into their stacks without at least a $20 stack access pass, and despite ongoing pressure the Millenium Library in Winnipeg still uses airport-style security at the front door.
• Libraries advocate for personal privacy but typically do not enforce this ethic when dealing with third-party services like Hoopla and OverDrive. At my university there are many librarians who passionately defend Mendeley as a citation manager (due to its admittedly-strong user experience) without acknowledging that the tool is owned by the world’s largest for-profit publisher, that the publisher has been the subject of at least one major data breach this year, and that your use of the “free” software is governed by an overly-invasive privacy policy and questionable data collection practices.
• The American Library Association publishes terrific professional development guides and service handbooks, and NONE of them — not even guides for students of the profession — are available under open content licenses.

Yeah, hypocrisy is everywhere… so perhaps I shouldn’t feel terrible about my own?

Then again, I am now a Digital Scholarship Librarian(TM), advocating for and building Digital Scholarship Supports(TM) for the benefit of Digital Scholars (or, as they are also known, “scholars”… but that’s another post). The definition of digital scholarship is vague but the values that underpin it are not: collaboration, co-creation, transparency, openness, inclusivity, equity, access to information, sustainability, preservation, public scholarship, community engagement, and probably one or two others I’m forgetting at the moment.

Some aspects of “living” the values of digital scholarship are easier: I can openly-license my thesis, or ensure I put Creative Commons licenses on educational materials or presentations I create. Others are more difficult. For example, while I have managed to get open access copies of my publications into free repositories, two of them are ultimately in paywalled journals (because unpublished scholars can’t be picky, and because I couldn’t cover the Article Processing Charge (APC) to make them free.)

When I took this librarian post, I promised I’d advocate for digital scholarship by modeling things that are enabled by digital methods and tools. In terms of my own scholarship, this means many things, including the ones I’ve already mentioned… but for the purposes of today’s Personal Hypocrisy Admission, it’s about making work-in-progress visible to the public and open to participation and feedback from anyone.

In Kathleen Fitzpatrick’s inspirational and aspirational book, Generous Thinking, she not only advocates for a renewed relationship between universities, seekers, scholars, and communities, but she modeled what’s possible in the world of open scholarship by writing the book using an open review process, accepting and celebrating comments and feedback received on drafts as she was composing them. What a gift! Not only does Dr Fitzpatrick benefit from a kind of “ongoing peer review,” but the draft book is still online, comments and all. I can see who commented on material, follow their contributions, read the discussions, and benefit by getting to know the work of other generous thinkers. The result is a strong, deeply-enriched piece of scholarship that lives and breathes in partnership with its own creation process.

Dr. Fitzpatrick is twenty times the scholar I’ll ever be, but I don’t think the bar she sets is too high.

I recently asked my husband if he’d consider sharing his gritty, warts-and-all work-in-progress online for anyone to see. “Uh, no,” he said, and I don’t begrudge him. Despite his reservations (and mine), I set up a PubPub collection last week to store all the work-in-progress on a campus-wide needs assessment project – including a research proposal that’s roughly half-baked in text and probably only 70-percent-baked in my head.

It is Scary. As. Hell. Because I am not used to working this way; because other scholars are far wiser about this kind of work; and because, dammit, it’s not ready. I was recently emboldened by an experience on the ACRL’s Digital Scholarship Section mailing list, where I posted a public set of summary notes of a literature review (which is also informing the research proposal I’m working on). I was nervous about sharing, but the feedback was excellent: one of the researchers I’d read commented with updated material; a scholar at UVIC provided additional resources; and two other librarians suggested papers I hadn’t yet seen.

Bluntly: how was my work hurt by the decision to share? Not at all. In fact, it’s now better. So this is the new norm for me, and I expect that I’ll use this blog from now on to float tidbits of new work. There are a few things in the pipeline, and I’m excited to get feedback on them. If nobody sees the work or comments on it, I’ll be no worse off than when I drafted things alone, sitting in front of my computer.

I don’t think that a commitment to open review is a requirement of contemporary scholarship but I do think it’s an incredible perk, afforded by technology. One area of hypocrisy down, several hundred to go…

Post image is by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay

The post I want to be the right kind of hypocrite first appeared on Kris Joseph.

Your thesis is yours in many ways, but one of the most substantial of these is that you own the copyright. This makes sense; after all, years of work will be buttoned by the release of an artifact (the thesis) that embodies your original thinking in your field. In many other environments—such as under someone else’s employment—your intellectual output may be owned by your employer, but in the academy you generally get to keep the rights to what you create.

The fact that you typically must finish up with a formatted, standardized, archival PDF, monograph-style version of your thesis, regardless of the form your scholarship takes, vexes me for many reasons (what if you want your scholarship to centre on something that isn’t written in a traditional way?), but one of the most significant of these is the deeply-buried and quietly-enforced insistence that you put a copyright notice on your final document—usually right on the front.

The open option

My Master’s degree thesis is in a traditional format, but it focuses heavily on the value of open information. As a result, I decided almost a year ago that I wanted to release my thesis under a Creative Commons licence. You see, as a copyright holder I have the exclusive right to restrict or authorize a wide range of uses of my work. A typical copyright notice reminds people of that fact but doesn’t make it easy for anyone to get permission from me to reuse the work. A Creative Commons licence is a convenient way to say “yes, this work is mine and I have copyright. I want you to know that you are free to share it or adapt it or rework it without asking me first, as long as you give me credit and don’t trade it for lucre.” Regardless of the default/easy path your university wants you to use, we all have these rights as the copyright holders of our theses (with room for caveats in cases where our work is co-authored, integrates other works, has components that are previously published, or contains information that cannot be shared for ethical or cultural reasons).

Paperwork

Passing my thesis defence didn’t get me the degree; as part of other degree requirements, I had to formally “deposit” my thesis with the university. There were forms to fill out and steps to follow, and my excitement at finishing encouraged me to Get It Done so I could Get Outta Here. One form asked me to give the university library and Library and Archives Canada a non-exclusive licence to “archive, preserve, produce, reproduce, publish, communicate, convert into any format, and to make available my Thesis in print or online by telecommunication to the public for educational, research and non-commercial purposes.” Another key component was a “title page template” that included a copyright notice.

Faced with a choice between “Copyright Kris Joseph, 2019” and “This work is licensed under a Creative Commons licence,” I opted for the latter. One statement says “this is mine and you can’t use it;” the other says “this is mine but I want you to use it. Just gimme credit, ok?” The distinction is important, and making it visible on the front of the thesis, so my intentions are clearly visible, is also important.

My logic is as follows:

• I have received scholarship funding from a government source, which means that the public has helped pay for my schooling
• Even if I hadn’t gotten scholarships, I acknowledge that my tuition does not cover the cost of studying at a public institution
• My work has less meaning if nobody sees it, so making it accessible and available to the public makes this more possible
• I want other people to collaborate with me on the ideas on my thesis, or to take them and run with them in (almost) any direction that interests them
• I’m a librarian, dammit, and access to information is an integral component of Librarian Educational Gene Therapy

My agenda is clear: the public helped pay for this thing, so the public should have access. Heck… even if the public didn’t pay a dime, I still think society benefits from the open exchange of ideas. Your thinking may be different and that’s fine—there are lots of good reasons to feel otherwise, including an orientation towards openness that also respects things like indigenous knowledge—but the point I’m trying to make is that you should think through how you want your copyright to be handled and make an assertion, rather than just checking boxes.

Habitual, not mandatory

I have a story I like to tell about habitual behaviour, rooted in the no-longer-Canadian Tim Hortons tradition. The vast majority of people who order coffee there get a “double double” (two cream, two sugar, for the uninitiated) so when I walk in and order a coffee with a single shot of milk it tends to throw people for a loop. Sometimes the staff member will check with me twice: “Milk?” “Yes.” “Just one?” “Yes.” Double-double is the default and it’s built in to the system, so asking for something other than the default throws a switch that interrupts the works. I also remember my days as a Blockbuster employee, when the majority of people would get their movie rentals and snacks in a plastic bag. At the counter I’d ask everyone if they wanted a bag or not, ignore their response, and then put their stuff in a bag. On rare occasions when the customer had said “no thanks,” I’d ignore it out of habit. It was automatic, and when I gave a bag to someone who didn’t want one, awkwardness ensued.

And so it was with my thesis.

Having decided to use an alternative form of copyright, I placed a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial licence on the front page of my thesis. One day after submitting it, it was rejected. “Please remove the logo on the front page,” the feedback said. And “please remove the text that begins ‘This work is licensed…'”

Many people would comply. But I know my rights. I responded, stating that the logo and text are required as part of making the work available under Creative Commons, and that as the rights holder I have the right to decide how my copyright is exercised. I tidied up the title a page a bit (to match an example provided by Creative Commons for offline documents) and submitted it again.

Two days later, I was told that internal consultations had been done, and that a compromise had been proposed. To keep my thesis deposit from being rejected, they suggested I remove the open licence from the front of my thesis, use the “standardized” copyright notice on the title page, and then place my Creative Commons licence inside the thesis, at the end of the frontmatter. On the surface this seems fair, but it isn’t: it suggests that the front of my thesis should say “this is mine and you can’t use it,” but if you keep reading and look carefully, you’ll see that I actually mean “this is mine and I want you to use it and thank God you thought to check the 11th page otherwise how would you know?”

So I replied again and asked to escalate. In my back pocket I knew two things: first, that my work on the Opening Up Copyright project armed me with some knowledge (which you can get, too, gentle reader, because it’s all free) and put me in close contact with staff who know my rights even better than I do; and second, despite the staff’s assertion that the standard title page is mandatory, it isn’t. University policy says that some elements are required on a title page, and that a copyright notice is typically included, but the use of a standard template is not mandatory. In other words: the majority of people may want a double-double, but that doesn’t mean a single shot of milk is illegal; and besides, I know the person who manages the store and they also think milk is a viable option.

The happy ending

I’m pleased to say that this argument was accepted, and that my thesis will be archived with my Creative Commons licence visible on the cover, but I’m concerned. How many of us would defer to a staff member’s inaccurate assertion of what the policy actually says (I had to disagree twice, which is far tricker than just “checking the box”)? How many of us know that the university has a copyright office that can provide guidance on such things?

There are two lessons here. One: you should know that you do not have to drink a double-double if you don’t want one (or: the default copyright notice is not your only option). And two: universities should do a better job of helping grad students understand and exercise the rights their copyright gives them. In light of my logic for using Creative Commons, I think the default should be an open licence instead of a standard, potentially-more-restrictive copyright notice.

Let’s make that change to the default, shall we? Then we can move on to more interesting questions about how a thesis can and should be permitted to take the form of something other than a PDF file with a standardized cover page. I’ll get to that in due time.

The featured image on this post is by Free-Photos from Pixabay

The post Copyleft and Canadian graduate theses: an open letter on openness first appeared on Kris Joseph.