Peter Johan Lor

I’ve been reminded that I haven’t yet posted here the sixth instalment of my Library ABC. Every year, around Christmas/New year, I send out a newsletter to friends and colleagues. It has some professional and personal news, and I add to it a page on which I put pictures of three libraries,with brief information or comments about them. The names of the libraries, or the names of the cities in which they are located, start with three consecutive letters of the alphabet. I started at ABC at Christmas 2008, did DEF in the following year, and so forth. You can find more info and the first five instalments here. Last Christmas (2013) I sent out the sixth instalment, covering the letters P, Q and R. I’ve now posted this as well, here.

I recently learned that IFLA’s Professional Committee has approved a proposal from the Section of Library Theory and Research to hold a pre-congress satellite meeting in Cape Town in August 2015.

The theme of the meeting is “Digital preservation as a site of contestation: national heritage, memory, politics and power – beyond technology and management”.  It will address interesting issues of ownership and control of a country’s heritage, memory and traditional/ indigenous knowledge in a digital environment. Related to these are questions about what we mean, for example, by the metaphors of “national memory” and “nation building” in postcolonial situations, and what the roles of libraries and archives can be in such a context.

The Satellite meeting is planned for 12 and 13 August 2015. It will be held in two venues. On the first day we will meet on the campus of the University of the Western Cape (UWC), in the outskirts of Cape Town. This is an appropriate venue as UWC hosts the Mayibuye Archive, which is part of the Robben Island Museum. On the second day we will take the ferry from Cape Town to Robben Island itself, where the rest of the programme will take place, along with a guided tour of the prison compound where liberation struggle leader and South Africa’s first democratically elected president, Nelson Mandela, was incarcerated.

This should be a memorable event, which will be of interest to IFLA members and other interested persons concerned with digital preservation of documentary heritage, including librarians responsible for digitization and digital collections management, archivists, museum curators; also historians and other academics. Members of First Nations communities concerned with the preservation of their traditional/indigenous knowledge and ethical management thereof are also among the potential audience.

Watch out for the Satellite Meeting announcement in the run-up to the 2015 IFLA World Library and Information Congress!

There is never a dull moment at an IFLA Congress. This afternoon in Gothenburg we were addressed by a pirate. The joint session of FAIFE (Free Access to Information and Freedom of Expression) and the Section of Information Technology featured Christian Engström, who represent’s Sweden’s Pirate Party (Piratpartiet) in the European Parliament.

He started by drawing an analogy between Pirate Bay (where people can obtain copyrighted stuff free of charge for their personal enjoyment) with libraries, where people can obtain copyrighted stuff free of charge for their personal enjoyment. (Of course, I have used the word “obtain” to refer to two rather different operations. And Mr Engström eliminated public lending right (PLR) from the discussion. PLR is a mechanism in terms of which authors in some countries receive payments in proportion to the number of times their books are borrowed by library patrons. He does not consider this to constitute compensation of rights holders but rather as a form of cultural policy to encourage Swedish authors. All this, of course, is a bit more complicated than can be put in a few sentences.)

Mr  Engström stressed that the Pirate Party does not want to abolish copyright, but to reform it. Copyright should be confined to business-to-business transactions and not apply to what private citizens do to gain access to information and culture. Here is his party’s reform agenda:

(1)    The moral rights of authors should remain unchanged. (In fact, he claims that netiquette already ensures this, since on the Internet there is peer pressure for people to give credit for materials they borrow from others, by making links to the original sites.)

(2)   All non-commercial use should be free, as it was for all practical purposes, until about twenty years ago.

(3)   The term of copyright should be reduced to five years. (He says no serious investor expects payback on an investment to come seventy-plus years down the line.)

(4)   Rules on derivative works should be relaxed, since all culture builds on previous work. [I like this. Most of Shakespeare’s storylines were lifted from other authors. Under the current copyright regime Shakespeare would be spending too much time in court to write any plays. PJL]

(5)   DRM technology should be banned.

Mr Engström mentioned two reasons for this position:  First, culture is a good thing, and relaxing copyright restrictions will stimulate cultural production. Second, in the digital age copyright can only be enforced by monitoring all private communications on the Internet, which would be an intolerable invasion of privacy.

Points to ponder…

After hearing Henning Mankell’s deservedly well-attended plenary address, I spent most of the rest of today in the joint session of the sections of Management of Library Associations, Library Theory and Research, Management and Marketing, Education and Training, and Statistics and Evaluation, and the SIG for LIS Education in Developing Countries (sessions 87 and 97). This was the first part of a two-year initiative to clarify and give direction to LIS research for national advocacy.  The two keynotes were especially noteworthy. Sue Hutley spoke about a comprehensive national advocacy program in Australia and in doing so gave a thorough, all-round introduction to national advocacy for LIS. See http://www.ifla.org/files/hq/papers/ifla76/87-hutley-en.pdf.

The second keynote, in the afternoon session, was by Sharon Markless and David Streatfield, who spoke about “Impact evaluation, advocacy and ethical research: some issues for national strategy development”, available at http://www.ifla.org/files/hq/papers/ifla76/97-markless-en.pdf.  This was a thoughtful and thought-provoking paper, of interest on the one hand because the authors presented a kind of typology in which national evaluation and advocacy activities were related to the level of library development of various categories of countries — grist to my mill of international and comparative librarianship. On the other hand, they raised a number of ethical issues relating to in-house and outsourced evaluation exercises. Warmly recommended.

A bit late in the day, let me use this opportunity to encourage anyone who is still hesitating about getting up early enough tomorrow, to do so and attend Hans Rosling’s plenary address at 08:30 in Hall B.  Why? Check out http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/hans_rosling_shows_the_best_stats_you_ve_ever_seen.html.

Enjoy!