Information Research Weblog

Funny man Michael Moore - not really funny, but hopping mad - is making quite a hit in the UK newspapers for his savagely satirical take on events in the USA. Readers of Stupid White Men may recall that he became a powerful advocate for libraries and librarians when a library attending one of his talks, in New Jersey, I think, started a national campaign to blitz his publisher Harper Collins about their attempted censorship of his book. (And who is behind Harper Collins? Does the name Rupert Murdoch ring a bell? I wonder how much he gave to the Bush campaign?)

I urge everyone who is interested in civil liberties, including intellectual freedom to read Moore - you can start with his Web site, move on to Stupid White Men, if you haven't read it yet, and get the DVD of Bowling for Columbine

Read the report in the Daily Mirror of Moore's Oscar speech, and an extract from his new book, which appears in today's Guardian

I know that many people in the USA are worried by the so-called Patriot Act and the attempts to extend powers under that act. Well, one thing we can be sure about is that unless everyone is prepared to get up and vote the bastards out of office, it won't be long before there are no such thing as civil liberties. If George Orwell was alive today he'd think that 1984 was a little late in arriving but that it had finally made it. And if anyone thinks that it is only US civil liberties that are risk, think again. There are some tough questions for Tony Blair to answer and what he and other politicians don't seem to understand is that the game has changed - it's no longer enough to have a winning smile (even if it is slipping a little lately), people know they've been conned and they are going to want a truth-teller in 10 Downing Street. Exactly who in the present bunch of politicians would qualify for that title is difficult to figure out!

Get on to it, bloggers - post and re-post these links and get people thinking. It could be the revolution of the nerds!

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The top story in the latest issue of The Onion should amuse. The top line: "An Internet worm that disabled networks across the U.S. Monday and Tuesday temporarily thrust the nation into its most severe maelstrom of productivity since 1992."

The economic impact of libraries

If you've ever wondered about the economic impact of libraries in society - and it must be on your minds more or less continually - then wonder no longer. OCLC has produced a nice .pdf file that tells all called Libraries: how they stack up. Among the interesting snippets:

U.S. libraries purchase an estimated $14 billion in goods and services annually—exceeding U.S. spending on videos and athletic footwear, and approaching the level spent by businesses on magazine advertising. U.S. libraries account for nearly half of the $31 billion spent annually by libraries worldwide.

And George Bush, of course, snipped $39,000,000 from the budget for libraries when he slipped into the White House - shows how much influence his wife, the former children's librarian, must have had. Of course, Tony Bliar and the New Thatcherites don't have to do that in the UK - they just crack down on 'waste' in the public services.

Licences for electronic resources

A useful little article on this subject at Free Pint by Paul Pedley of the Economist Intelligence Unit.

The key point, of course, is:

It is important to point out that a licence does not confer ownership rights. It merely specifies the conditions upon which databases and other copyright works can be used and exploited, and by whom. At the end of the subscription period they may well no longer have access to the materials. Indeed, it may even be a requirement of the contract that anything which has been downloaded from the electronic information product is deleted at the end of the contract term.

In other words, "Oh sure, we'll sell you this stuff - but we're going to take it back when George snips another $39 million."

Both of these items courtesy of Charles Bailey's Scholarly Electronic Publishing Weblog

Librarians in court

This from Yahoo News:

In a hotly contested lawsuit before a federal appeals court, two peer-to-peer companies are about to gain a vast army of allies: America's librarians.

The five major US library associations are planning to file a legal brief Friday siding with Streamcast Networks and Grokster in the California suit, brought by the major record labels and Hollywood studios. The development could complicate the Recording Industry Association of America's efforts to portray file-swapping services as rife with spam and illegal pornography.

According to an attorney who has seen the document, the brief argues that Streamcast -distributor of the Morpheus software - and Grokster should not be shut down. It asks the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals to uphold the April decision by a Los Angeles judge that dismissed much of the entertainment industry's suit against the two peer-to-peer companies.

Read more about it

As publisher of a freely available journal, I was interested to find an item on the New Society site about The Public Library of Science's first free offering - PLoS Biology

Of course, it all depends on what you mean by 'free' - the journal is freely available, but asks for $1,500 for each paper published from the author or his/her institution.

Thanks to Sandy Starr of Spiked for this note:

I thought you might be interested in the following new article on spiked:

BLOG-STANDARD POLITICS - by Martyn Perks

Could blogging MPs reinvigorate the electorate?

The cover article in this week's New Statesman (a magazine of the left, for those unfamiliar with it) is by the American thriller writer, Sara Paretsky. It is a something that ought to be read by every librarian, information manager, documentalist, or whatever designation you prefer, since it points to developments in the USA that make Orwell's 1984 look like a bedtime story.

Paretsky states:

"We have today a government that mixes silence with lies. We have a government that has by fiat sealed presidential papers from public view. We have a government that will not reveal the names of the people who created America's energy policy because they claim that naming their advisers will undermine national security. We have a government that is trying to set up a Soviet-style system of citizens spying and reporting on each other. We have a government that recently tapped the home phones and e-mails of UN delegates from Chile, Mexico, Pakistan and Cameroon.

A chill wind is blowing today..."

A chill wind indeed! And the USA is not the only country where elected politicians are subverting the very basis upon which they were elected - leaving aside that President Bush was actually appointed by the Supreme Court. Lies, misrepresentation, news massaging - known collectively as 'spinning' constitute now the principal means whereby governments seek to mislead the electorate. And when anyone speaks out - e.g., as Martina Navratilova did in an interview recently, the media, those sturdy supporters of the freedom of speech, berate her for her 'unpatriotic' statements. Patriotism truly is the last refuge of the scoundrel.

The 'public prints' over the holiday period have brought us accidentally related news - a pity, really, that one or two journalists had not read the words of another before enthusing over the possibility that the value of investment in information technology might now be discovered. Both the Financial Times and the Sunday Telegraph carried news of Bill Gates's investment in the Centre for Information Work Productivity (we can only be glad that the word 'knowledge' was rejected!) at MIT. The aim of the Centre is to discover, through a study of 100 companies, best practice in the application of IT and to measure its impact on the bottom line.

No matter that it has all been done before - members of this list will recall, I'm sure, Strassman, P.A. (1990) The business value of computers, New Canaan, CT: The Information Economics Press - which signally failed to uncover the magic formula. Strassman found that investment in IT failed to deliver increased 'management productivity' until that investment exceeded 50% of total investment in management productivity - if my memory serves me right and his scatter diagram of the relationship of spend to productivity showed no trend line at all, but a fog of points.

The reason, of course, is that investment in IT (including the software that Microsoft is so anxiuous to sell) will have no impact at all unless the information managed by the software and the technology is appropriate, timely, accurate, etc., etc. - and very few companies are interested in spending the amount of money required to get that right.

There's another reason why IT spend may fail to deliver - and that was conveyed in an article in The Observer on the extent to which people are fleeing the city and its stresses for a more relaxed life. It noted:

A recent American study found that even in the boom year of 1993, nearly half of all US employers laid off workers. That pattern has been mirrored on this side of the Atlantic. And if employers are no longer perceived to be loyal to us, even in the good times, why on earth should we be loyal to them?

Good question! I recall a study by Dahl, but can't locate the reference, which showed that the principal driver of improved productivity was staff motivation. Mmmm.

Another information-related topic hit the newsprints - the increasing totalitarian slant of US institutions. Clear Channel is a media giant I'd never even heard of, but one of its Board members is Thomas O. Hicks, who helped Bush to become a millionaire. The report says, "Clear Channel is accused of drumming up support for the war in Iraq, while muzzling those who oppose it. When Natialie Maines, singer of the Texas band The Dixie Chicks, commented that she was ashamed of the president, Clear Channel country radio stations were the first to drop the band from playlists." New York Times writer Paul Krugman is reported as saying: "We should have realised this is a two-way street. If politicians are doing favours for businesses that support them, why shouldn't we expect businesses to reciprocate by doing favours for those politicians?"

Also in The Observer was the keynote address to journalists by Tim Robbins at the National Press Club - read it here. If you weren't worried before, you'll be worried after reading it.

Have a good week!

[I tried mailing this to the log, but for some reason, my messages don't seem to be getting through to Free-Conversant - can't understand why. Perhaps I'll start using one of my other e-mail systems]