A Digital Sounding Board: The Internet and Filter Bubbles
Most of us have some sort of daily routine with the Internet. For example, every morning, I get up, take a shower, and then settle down in front of my computer for fifteen to twenty minutes of Internet browsing before I get ready for the day. I check my Facebook, I read the webcomics I follow, I look at my e-mail, I peruse some blogs, and I scan through viral images. Instead of morning coffee, I start my day with a blast of information. But does that blast of information contain a wide range of material from across the Internet or is it made up of content that’s been tailored just for me?
The fact is that the Internet that we see is not pure, unaffected information, but information that has gone through a variety of filters that have been placed in order to ensure that we, as users, will receive the kind of information that we most want to see. These filters involve advertisers, social media companies, search engine developers, and even self-imposed filters that we might not even be conscious of. Together, all of these filters form what author Eli Pariser refers to as “the filter bubble.” In his 2011 TED Talk, Pariser defines the filter bubble as:
Your own personal, unique universe of information that you live in online. And what’s in your filter bubble depends on who you are, and it depends on what you do. But the thing is that you don’t decide what gets in. And more importantly, you don’t actually see what gets edited out. [1. Pariser, E. (Feb. 2011) Eli Praiser: Beware online “filter bubbles”. (Video file). Retrieved from http://www.ted.com/talks/eli_pariser_beware_online_filter_bubbles/]
Sites like Google, Facebook, and even various news sites are in the business of making sure that the content that appears on your screen is the exact content that you want to see. The reason is simple: the more they display content you want, the more time you’re going to spend on their websites, and the more they’re going to profit from the ad revenue that comes from each page you click on. They don’t have an interest in providing you with a diverse array of information, only the information that will make you stay on their site. The result is that many users find limited information, or information that merely supports what they believe/what they want to hear, when they are under the impression that they are receiving unfiltered information. Robert W. McChesney writes that filter bubbles: “keep us in a world that constantly reinforces our known interests and reduces empathy, creativity, and critical thought.”[2. McChesney, R. W. (2013). Digital disconnect: How capitalism is turning the internet against democracy. The New Press: New York.]
Filter bubbles are constructed in a variety of ways, and are designed to keep users reliant on a certain service. Pariser’s initial example is Facebook, where your News Feed is tailored based on the people you interact with on the site. Pariser tells the story of how he started to notice that his friends who posted links to politically conservative information started to vanish off of his News Feed, while the friends who posted links to politically liberal information remained.[3. Pariser, E. (Feb. 2011) Eli Praiser: Beware online “filter bubbles”. (Video file). Retrieved from http://www.ted.com/talks/eli_pariser_beware_online_filter_bubbles/] This is because Facebook employs an algorithm that tracks how often you interact with certain people (clicking links, liking posts, commenting, etc.) and prioritizes your News Feed based on those interactions. For Pariser, who is a self-descried liberal, this meant that his liberal friends stayed on his News Feed because he would more often interact with their posts then he would his with those of his conservative friends. He was exposed less and less to opposing view points, meaning he was offered fewer chances for debate and fewer opportunities to learn something from an unfamiliar source. This does not mean that everything people online say has value, or that all of the conservative information would even be worth Pariser’s time. However, the idea of the Open Internet where all information can be accessed equally is not the Internet we have if sites and advertisers put on our content put more and more filters on our content.
According to Facebook, the News Feed is designed this way because the large numbers of Facebook friends that users have would make the News Feed unwieldily otherwise.[4. Hicks, M. (2010, August 6). Facebook tips: What’s the difference between top news and most recent? (Web log post). Retrieved from https://www.facebook.com/notes/facebook/facebook-tips-whats-the-difference-between-top-news-and-most-recent/414305122130] However, the negative is that users are being exposed to less information that might challenge their way of thinking, and exposed to more information that supports what they already believe. Similar algorithms and personalization techniques are used on Google, and news sites like Huffington Post, Yahoo News, Washington Post, and the New York Times.[5. Pariser, E. (Feb. 2011) Eli Praiser: Beware online “filter bubbles”. (Video file). Retrieved from http://www.ted.com/talks/eli_pariser_beware_online_filter_bubbles/] With all of these filters, how can we consider opposing view points? How can we engage in discussion? How can we learn anything? Pariser argues that because filter algorithms respond to what a user clicks on, that users eventually will only get content that satisfies their immediate wants and whims when online, rather than pushing them to think further. He says:
The best editing gives us a bit of both [thoughtful content and fun content]. It gives us a little bit of Justin Bieber and a little bit of Afghanistan. It gives us some information vegetables; it gives us some information dessert. And the challenge with these kinds of algorithmic filters, these personalized filters, is that, because they’re mainly looking at what you click on first, it can throw off that balance. And instead of a balanced information diet, you can end up surrounded by information junk food.[6. Ibid.]
The problem is, content providers, search engines, and advertisers don’t necessarily see a reason to provide users with the sort of Internet that offers them both ‘vegetables’ and ‘desert’. The system currently in place makes money, and as long as these companies are profiting, they have a limited investment in what content their users are consuming.
The more that individuals are exposed to views and information that validates and enforces their current world view, the harder it becomes to converse with others about those views, especially in a digital format. Filters help convince users that their opinions are more valid than the opinions of others, and people start to create online communities where little debate is welcomed and users mostly share the same opinions. People who don’t share those opinions might be engaged in debate, but a debate that happens face-to-face is a very different kind of debate than the kind that often happens online. So much of Internet debates boil down to people slinging insults, shutting other people down, or overusing the caps lock to make their point. Online discourse is so commonly difficult that if you search “arguing on the internet” you get a slew of images mocking the idea of online debate.[7. Though to be fair, this is possibly affected by Google’s filters on my search.] If online users were exposed to a wider variety of content that challenged their world views, would the nature of online debate change?
The good news is that while content providers and advertisers may not be interested in popping the filter bubble, there are ways that Internet users can lessen the effects that filter bubbles have on their online experience. Pariser’s website, The Filter Bubble, has a list of ten ways to reduce the effect of the filters. These techniques include deleting cookies and browser histories, setting stricter privacy settings, using browsers and sites that allow users to access the internet without providing their IP addresses, and depersonalizing browsers.[8. Pariser, E. (2011) Ten ways to pop your filter bubble. Retrieved from http://www.thefilterbubble.com/10-things-you-can-do] The other helpful thing is to make users aware of the filter bubble. We might be stuck with filters, but if we are aware that they are there and what they are doing to our online experience then we can compensate for those effects and search out information that we might not normally find otherwise. The internet may be a fantastic source of information, but if we do not utilize it properly, what’s the point of having that information source in the first place?
Visiting the Literature and Art of Our Youth
The Eric Carle Museum is the only one of its kind to solely dedicate attention to children’s picture book art. This is a place that praises the illustrator and her work. Located in Amherst Massachusetts, the Carle aims to collect, preserve, present and commemorate picture books for children. Eric and Barbara Carle founded the Museum in November 2002. Eric Carle is a renowned author, artist/illustrator in the world of children’s literature. He is famously known for The Very Hungry Caterpillar, The Grouchy Ladybug, and illustrator of Bill Martin’s Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See? Carle has a distinct and recognizable style; he uses tissue paper collage, which is often combined with acrylic paint, pencil, and crayons. His artistic intention is it to bridge the gap between learning and merriment. He uses his love for nature and vibrant images to capture the reader’s interest and attention. His Museum, commonly known as The Carle, embodies the same intention, to provide a space in which children and adults can enjoy art, literature, and education without the restrictions and ambience of a traditional museum.
I had the opportunity visit the Carle and speak with the Director of Education Courtney Waring, and Museum Educator Emily Prahbaker. Visiting The Carle allowed me to venture away from a library setting, but experience and environment that caters to a young audience. I meet with the two professionals to inquire about their interest in the field, and how they achieved their professional positions.
The Carle is rather small building but voluminous within. The museum contains two galleries, library, café/resting area, gift shop, and theatre. I knew I was in the children orientated environment, when one of the stalls in the rest room had funky shaped toilet set, along with Eric Carle animals formatted into bathroom tiles. My tour was lead by the Director of Education, Courtney Waring. Courtney gave me a tour to the show room that was dedicated to the life and work of Eric Carle. The works shown were Carle’s original works aligned with his revision. Whenever Carle’s books are to be republished he recreate his work to make sure the work is more colorful and vibrant compared the original. In addition, there is also artwork from his early career in illustration and advertisement. In the middle of the showroom was a desk that displayed all of the materials he uses for his illustrations. Courtney mentioned that Carle wanted to display his material to show children that the work he produced could be mimicked by anyone. These materials are accessible to anyone and install the idea that you do not need expensive material to make quality art. After, I saw their current exhibit of the illustrations from Louise Fitzhugh’s Harriet the Spy. The Carle has another gallery but it was under construction to feature the work of Ludwig Bemelman’s Madeline.
Afterwards, I saw the museum’s library. It was small but contained enough content for it’s audience. Its collection was primarily children picture books, with few chapter books on display. Furthermore they dedicated a shelf to Caldecott awarded books. What I thought was interesting and radical about their library was that it was arranged by illustrators last name, and then title of the book. The library the Carle also holds story time, which is often conducted in the galleries. Later, Courtney provided me more insight about the services the Carle offers to their community. I was later provided insight on how Courtney came to the Carle, along with the approaches and methods that are used in the museum to promote literacy and engagement.
The Eric Carle Museum uses several approaches to promote literacy, arts and engagement. The Visual Thinking Stategies, the Whole Book Approach, and inspiration from the Reggio Emilia educational learning project. The Visual Think Strategies is a learner-centered method to examine and find meaning in visual art through a sequence of carefully selected fine art images…Students look carefully, develop opinions, express themselves, consider multiple viewpoints, speculate together, argue, debate, and build on each other’s ideas, and sometimes revise their conclusions[i]. Furthermore, this strategy uses art to help children practice respectful, democratic, collaborative problem solving. The Carle uses VTS open-ended question to engage the children in discussions about the illustrations in a book. However, the Whole Book Approach further emphasizes this dialogue by allowing children to explore all parts of the book, cover to cover, page to page. Lastly, the Carle embodies the ideas of Reggio Emilia educational learning methods. The Reggio believe that children have the right and the ability to express their thinking, theories, ideas, learning and emotions in many ways. Therefore, Reggio educators provide children with a wide range of materials and media, and welcome a diversity of experiences, so that children encounter many avenues for thinking, revising, constructing, negotiating, developing and symbolically expressing their thoughts and feelings[ii]. Emily Prahbakers, who is the Museum Educator, further explained these methods. With her masters from Simmons in Children’s Literature and Library Science, Emily conducts literacy and art programs within the museum and in the community. Emily uses and is a firm believer in encouraging children to have a dialogue about art and literature. Promoting the use of dialogue with children allows for them to make personal and worldly connections with the theme, and message of the book. She believes that a group interaction can empower, and permit children to explore the world around them. This approach leads children to engage in open-thinking. I share the same belief and practice similar methods with the work I do at my library. After witnessing the bizarre feeling of having children stare out of boredom, I have encouraged and ignited dialogue during story time so that they can be an active part of the reading experience.
Speaking to the Director of Education and the Museum Educator allowed me the share interest in children’s literature, plus promoting and advocating for dialogue in literacy for young children. The Carle is a unique facility to praise children picture book illustrations. Museums and libraries have the power to provide alternate educational methods to encourage children to have fun while learning. The service that is available at the Eric Carle Museum is probably the most organic educational interaction a child can experience today.
[i] Eric Carle Museum
[ii] The North American Reggio Emilia Alliance
The Barnard Zine Library Observation
The Zine Collection at Barnard’s Wollman Library can easily be found on the far right wall of the first room on the first floor of Lehman Hall. In fact, it’s the whole wall. In June 2010 there were nearly 1,400 zines in this section, the open stacks, with even more in the archives. The collection now has over 4,000 individual issues of zines, even though many of them are awaiting processing and so are not yet fully represented in the catalog or on the shelves. The collection grows regularly and the librarians who maintain it work hard to keep up.
The administration of the Zine Collection takes place on the second floor of the library, overseen by it’s founder Jenna Freedman with the assistance of Stephanie Neel and several interns. The collection was pitched and accepted in the summer of 2003 by Freedman and was awarded an initial materials budget of only $500. From there it took about a year of planning and work to get the zines onto the shelves.
The collection aims to serve the needs of current readers and scholars and those of future researchers. Zines are primary source documents that tell the story of contemporary life, culture, and politics in a multitude of women’s voices that might otherwise be lost. The zines are written by women (cis- and transgender) with an emphasis on zines by women of color, although they collect zines on feminism and femme identity by people of all genders. The zines are personal and political publications on activism, anarchism, body image, third wave feminism, gender, parenting, queer community, riot grrrl, sexual assault, trans experience, and other topics. The aim is also that readers will enjoy the collection simply for its fun, vibrancy, humanity, and artistic value, which it has in abundance. The variety of titles include Sneer, Shotgun Seamstress Fanzine, Wave: A Feminist Zine, Kerbloom!, Licking Stars Off Ceilings and other colorful names. If you’re unfamiliar with zines, the value and strength of this genre of publication is clear when you see it in person, en masse, at the Wollman Library.
Zines had a large underground popularity in the 1980’s and 1990’s through to today after emerging in the 1970’s, mostly out of the U.S. and the U.K. punk rock scenes. The easy and inexpensive means of reproduction by photocopier enabled people to create small print runs of original material at a low cost, which was then distributed primarily at rock concerts, independent bookstores, comic shops, through the mail and other venues. Some publications were (and still are) sold while others are free for the taking, depending on the particular zine. In high school and undergraduate college–far before I knew about Barnard’s collection–I’d read and contributed to zines and always liked the format. Most were hand-made (or hand-made via computer design) and the culture of independent production, creativity of expression/thought attracted me to the format, as I know it did others. My own personal interests drew me to the original comics and literature, underground music and art/photography aspects of the zine genre, although politics and humor overlapped in one way or another most of the time. These topics are all represented in Barnard’s collection.
The zines that are available circulate in the regular library collection and can be checked out by patrons. It may be notable that magazines–the zine’s big-sister genre in many ways–are not circulated. This may have more to due with library policies than anything else but it stuck out to me because one of the main aims of this archive is to make the material widely available. For example, I’m sure I can find most issues of Rolling Stone without too much difficulty but I’d be hard-pressed to find a copy of The East Village Inky from February 2008 many other places without quite a bit of detective work.
If you’re not simply looking through the stacks and want to find specific zines you can find them in Barnard’s CLIO OPAC, cataloged with the Cutter system. The call numbers start with “ZINES” followed by the Cutter number, which is an alphanumeric scheme ordinarily based on the author or main entry. Since there are twice as many zines in the archives and hundreds more that haven’t been processed yet, if there is something in particular that you’re looking for and can’t find it, you’re encouraged to ask for assistance from the Zine Librarian. The small staff does their best to make issues available as quickly as they can but the growth of the collection slows the process. Since the collection’s inception in 2003, zines have become a part of the library budget and donations occur regularly.
What delighted me about the collection is the passion with which it was created and continues to be overseen by Jenna Freedman. Among her other responsibilities, she spends one day a week devoted to adding materials to the catalog. There are also Twitter and Facebook accounts that are used to promote the collection as well as other online resources that can be found. There is a blog about the collection that gets updated frequently on the Barnard Library website and there is also an active Barnard Zine Club on campus. Freedman often speaks at conferences about the importance of zines and has made it her own priority to “put zines on the map.”
The focus of this zine collection is women’s voices, which is clear from looking through it, but the culture of the collection feels more inclusive than that. It may be my own biased opinion from my own previous experience with zines but I felt welcome and intrigued by the archive. There’s a wide spectrum of opinions and the walls of accessibility can barely be felt.
Protected: Williamsburgh Public Library
Cataloging Plunder: Thoughts on the Digital Text-Sharing Underground
The hacker tenet, “Information wants to be free,” can be read as both a description of the potential of digital information economies and as an extension of library notions of information democracy. As digital relations of production radically destabilize traditional notions of intellectual property, they force information specialists and cultural producers to rethink information access for a new era.
The dominant narrative of the digital era, chronicled by Lawrence Lessig (2004) in his book Free Culture, is that of a dramatic expansion of copyright law to protect the commercial interests of major media corporations. With the passage of the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act in 1998, the copyright term was lengthened to 95 years, preventing a massive number of works from entering the public domain (p. 135). As Lessig laments, the expansion of intellectual property law is pursued in the interests of a meager 2% of works that have any lasting commercial value. The real harm is to the remaining 98% of works that are not famous, not commercially exploited, and no longer available as a result (p. 221). Taken to such an extreme, commercial protection massively inhibits cultural exposure and innovation.
Despite claims of information democracy, we actually witness the “enclosure of the information commons” into a system of monopoly and lease by Silicon Valley conglomerates such as Amazon and Google. Rather than owning physical books, for example, we rent e-books for Kindle and Nook. With e-books, these corporations control devices, software platforms and content in a vertically integrated profit model. In his essay “Interface, Access, Loss” (2013), Sean Dockray points out how e-readers eradicate the “First Sale Doctrine,” which allowed owners of rightfully purchased works to share or re-sell them as they saw fit. He continues:
“The e-reader is an individualizing device. It is the object that establishes trusted access with books stored in the cloud and ensures that each and every person purchases their own rights to read each book. The only sharing that is allowed is sharing the device itself… This is no library — or, it is a library only in the most impoverished sense of the word” (190).
In other words, the e-reader’s interface is not an OPAC coupled with a library card – it is a marketing tool, pure and simple. And as a marketing tool, it privileges access to works deemed commercially profitable for a mass audience.
But in opposition to this expansion of immaterial private property, a digital text-sharing underground has emerged that truly does believe that “information wants to be free.” Collaboratively-maintained “pirate libraries” (my term) such as aaaaaarg, Monoskop, UbuWeb, and Memory of the World offer public access to resources focused on contemporary art, critical theory, media studies and related fields. Though these sites differ somewhat in content, architecture, and ideological bent, all of them flout intellectual copyright law to varying degrees, offering up “pirated” books and media with the aim of advancing information access and creative scholarship.
As acts of civil disobedience, these projects promise both the realization and destruction of the public library. They promote information democracy while calling the professional institution of the Library into question, allowing amateurs to upload, catalog, lend and maintain collections. Because they offer free access to copyrighted media, it is easy to see how intellectual property owners could cast these text-sharing networks as threats to publishers, to artists’ profits, or to “real” libraries. This view of the sites’ threats to book sales, in my opinion, is exaggerated and alarmist. Rather, I propose treating pirate libraries as “digital alternative spaces” that allow for the use (and creative misuse) of art and academic discourses outside of institutional settings. The pirate library actualizes a gift economy where, as Matthew Stadler (2013) writes:
“… Literature is not owned. It is, by definition, a space of mutually negotiated meanings that never closes or concludes, a space that thrives on — indeed requires — open access and sharing,” (175).
While democratic in the sense that they are free and collaboratively maintained, these resources are not necessarily democratic in the populist sense. They attract a modest but engaged audience of critics, artists, designers, activists, and scholars.
UbuWeb, founded in 1996 by conceptual artist/writer Kenneth Goldsmith, is the largest online archive of avant-garde art resources. Its holdings include sound, video and text-based works dating from the historical avant-garde era to today. Though informal, non-commercial and independently run, the site has come to be recognized as an important scholarly resource. UbuWeb focuses on making available out of print, obscure or difficult to access artistic media, stating that uploading such historical artifacts doesn’t detract from the physical value of the work; rather, it enhances it. This sharing of out of print/hard to find materials, common across the pirate libraries, is illegal, yet good for society, as Lessig argues. It increases exposure without harming artists, as the work is otherwise unavailable or under-available (69). UbuWeb intentionally uploads lower-quality video and audio files, emphasizing that researchers should go to the rightful owner for archival-quality copies. Additionally, the site will remove media from its archive upon artist’s request.
Monoskop.org, a like-minded project, describes itself as “a wiki for collaborative studies of art, media and the humanities.” Its significant holdings — about 3,000 full-length texts and many more excerpts, links and citations—include avant-garde and modernist magazines, writings on sound art, scanned illustrations, and media theory texts. As a wiki, any user can edit any article or upload content, and see their changes reflected immediately. Like UbuWeb, the site makes clear that it is offering content under the fair-use doctrine and that this content is for personal and scholarly use, not commercial use.
Aaaaaarg.org, started by Los Angeles based artist Sean Dockray, is probably the largest of these resources, hosting full-text pdfs of over 50,000 books and articles. The library is connected to a an alternative education project called the Public School, which serves as a platform for self-organizing lectures, workshops and projects in cities across the globe. Aaaaaarg’s catalog is viewable by the public, but upload/download privileges are restricted through an invite system, thus circumventing copyright law.
While Dockray has expressed criticism of intellectual property law in some writings and interviews, criticizing this form of property was not Aaaaaarg’s initial intent. He says, “It was simply about… the sharing of knowledge between various individuals and groups that I was in correspondence with at the time but who weren’t necessarily in correspondence with each other.” Though the library is easily searchable, it doesn’t maintain high-quality metadata. Dockray and other organizers intend to preserve a certain subjective and informal quality, focusing more on discussion and collaboration than correct preservation and classification practice.
Memory of the world, a younger “pirate library,” offers a collection of about 5,000 texts, but frames itself through a somewhat utopian philosophy of building a truly universal library. Through democratizing the tools of librarianship – book scanning, classification systems, cataloging, information – it promises a broader, de-institutionalized public library. In Public Library (an essay), Memory of the world’s organizers frame p2p libraries as “fragile knowledge infrastructures built and maintained by brave librarians practicing civil disobedience which the world of researchers in the humanities rely on.” This civil disobedience is a politically motivated refutation of intellectual property law and the orientation of information networks toward venture capital and advertising. While the pirate libraries fulfill this function as a kind of experimental provocation, their content, as stated before, is audience-specific rather than universal.
Between the cracks of the new information capital, the digital text-sharing underground fosters a the coming-into-being of another kind of information society, one in which the historical record is the democratically-shared basis for new forms of knowledge. Furthermore, we should not view alternatives to corporate monopoly as covert and illicit, carried out (metaphorically) under cover of night. Rather, piracy is normal and the public domain it builds is abundant. While these practices will continue just beneath the official surface of the information economy, it is high time for us to demand that our legal structures catch up.
Works Cited:
Dockray, S. (2013). Interface, Access, Loss. In M. Lewandowska & L. Ptak (Eds.), Undoing Property? Berlin: Sternberg.
Fuller, M. (2011, May 4). In the Paradise of Too Many Books: An Interview with Sean Dockray. Retrieved November 20, 2014, from http://www.metamute.org/editorial/articles/paradise-too-many-books-interview-sean-dockray
Lessig, L. (2004). Free culture: How big media uses technology and the law to lock down culture and control creativity. New York: Penguin Press.
Mars, M., Zarroug, M., & Medak, T. (n.d.). Public library (an essay). Retrieved November 20, 2014, from http://www.memoryoftheworld.org/blog/2014/10/27/public-library-an-essay/
Myers, J. (2009, August 26). Four Dialogues 2: On AAAARG. Retrieved November 20, 2014, from http://openspace.sfmoma.org/2009/08/four-dialogues-2-on-aaaarg/
Scanners, collectors and aggregators. On the ‘underground movement’ of (pirated) theory text sharing. (n.d.). Retrieved November 20, 2014, from http://openreflections.wordpress.com/2009/09/20/scanners-collectors-and-aggregators-on-the-‘underground-movement’-of-pirated-theory-text-sharing
Stadler, M. (2013). From Ownership to Belonging. In M. Lewandowska & L. Ptak (Eds.), Undoing Property? Berlin: Sternberg.
Some Related Resources Not Mentioned in this Essay:
Protected: Regulating Google: When the public good outweighs private profit
Meditations on FOIA and Presidential Libraries
After relinquishing his family’s iron grip on the White House, former president George W. Bush has sought to reinvent himself as a Renaissance Man of sorts. He wrote a book about his father, he took up painting, and last April, he unveiled the George W. Bush Library and Museum Center. He “views this as a way for the public to get all the facts so that they can make an educated decision about how they regard him and what he did in office” according to Mark Langdale, who was head of Bush’s private foundation and oversaw construction of the library. He also mentions that Bush himself took on curatorial responsibilities: “He literally looked at every exhibit and said, ‘I want this, I want that.’” [1. Bailey, Holly. “As a new library opens, Bush hopes for a reassessment of his legacy.” Yahoo News, April 25, 2013. Web.]
It seems Bush hopes this library will improve his standing in the public eye, possibly to help his brother’s chances of running for president in 2016. He believes that the library will better contextualize his decision-making by providing the public with important official information. However, during his presidency, Bush’s policies seemed to encourage the opposite, aiming to keep his public in the dark.
This is hardly topical in either the Library Science field or in American politics, but McChesney’s Digital Disconnect and Lessig’s Free Culture reminded me of the heavy ironies that burden the American government’s attitudes towards freedom of information. McChesney dismisses the idea that the web has brought us closer to the democratizing of information since large companies control what we see and how we can use the internet while it becomes a gateway for the government and advertisers to monitor our activity. In particular, he identifies copyright as a significant factor in digital giants “establishing proprietary systems for which they control access and the terms of the relationship” instead of protecting the idea of the internet as an open source of information. [2. McChesney, Robert. Digital Disconnect. New York: The New Press, 2013. EBook.] Lawrence Lessig argues at the beginning of Free Culture that our free culture has been “queered by extremism in the property rights that define it.” [3. Lessig, Lawrence. Free Culture. New York: Penguin Press, 2004.] The internet has long contested ideas of who owns information and who gets to access said information. However, these inquires seem to stop at the federal level. With new bills being pushed to simplify online access to records provided by the Freedom of Information Act, it seems appropriate to examine how official records have been shared in the past.
Under the Presidential Records Act of 1978, presidents and vice-presidents must release their records to the US Government no later than (a very long) twelve years after leaving office. The records are held by the National Archives and available to the public, except under certain exemptions defined by the Freedom of Information Act. Bush twice blocked the scheduled release of 68,000 pages of Reagan documents so that his legal team could review them and judge whether they were fit for public viewing. This resulted in his issuing of Executive Order 13,233, which gave former Presidents, their heirs, and former vice presidents the ability to block their records from going public for an indefinite amount of time. [4. “Archive, Historians Ask Judge to Rethink Dismissal…” The National Security Archive, April 30, 2004. Web.] This seemingly unconstitutional move was not rare. McChesney notes, “In 1995 the government classified 5.6 million documents; in 2011 it cassified 92 million documents…The US Government spends, by conservative estimate, $13 billion annually to make and keep secret government information.” [5. McChesney] Though the Freedom of Information Act exists to keep a well-informed public, the government often exploits its nine exemptions to withhold information. The National Security Archives had to file an action to get the order partially dismissed. The judge ruled that Presidents could not keep information from the public, but did not rule on the role of heirs and vice-presidents. It was only when President Obama took office that the order was fully dismissed. [6. Fuchs, Meredith. “Court Rules Delay in Release of Presidential Papers is Illegal.” The National Security Archive, October 1, 2007. Web.]
Coincidentally, the Bush library was opened to Freedom of Information Act requests starting this past January. Theoretically, this is the heart of the library: open information, free to the public. But, the National Archives FAQ page demonstrates how flimsy this supposed open access is. Documents are considered closed until a requester files a FOIA request for a particular folder and must be reviewed before they can be released. If there is any classified material in the document, it is immediately labeled classified and the request is denied. Declassification reviews can be ordered by the requester, but those can be passed around to as many as 14 government agencies before probably being denied. [7. Adair, Kristin and Nielsen Catherine. Effective FOIA Requesting for Everyone. DC: The National Security Archive, Jan 2009. Web.]
On top of that, there is the bureaucracy that is so fundamental to our federal body. Requests for documents cannot be requested until five years after the president has left office. A president is allowed to restrict public access on specific documents for another twelve years. And even after that, the normal exemptions of the FOIA still apply and requesting information. FOIA requests vary by department and requesters can often get shuttled around from one to another in their search for these supposed public records. Recently there’s been a bipartisan bill the House has been trying to push through to improve FOIA which would include the creation of a single FOIA website that streamlines the request process. It focuses on clarifying FOIA’s fifth exemption, which deals with the withholding of “intra-agency” documents, but is often called the “withhold it because you want to” exemption due to its large scope and vague wording. While documents are considered closed until requested, the FOIA Improvement Act would encourage a “presumption of openness” regarding documents. However, similar bills have been rejected three times already. And even so, many documents would remain out of reach from the public as documents from the Eisenhower Library and before would still be considered classified. And, as Bush’s legal team has already demonstrated, presidents can often find loopholes for holding information and negotiating with judge rulings. [8. Adair and Nielsen]
It seems strange that the man who was so miserly with former presidential documents would want to share his own. But of course it’s not. The old adage that knowledge is power is so much more true when you have state-sanctioned Presidential Library Acts and wealthy donors behind you. Presidential libraries have strayed from attempts to improve transparency between presidencies and citizens. Instead, they have become sites for creating fables. Bush is able to construct his own presidency by building this library and museum. Some even act as shrines to past presidents: Eisenhower, Nixon, Reagan and others have been buried at their libraries. [9. “Frequently Asked Questions about Presidential Libraries and Museums.” National Archives. Web.]
This all seems deliberately removed from the original purpose of libraries, especially when we consider who controls presidential libraries. While the National Archive owns papers and maintains these centers, private money dictates how elaborate these museums can be and what can be featured. [10. National Archives.] For example, the Reagan museum features an exhibit called “Amazing Automobiles: The Ultimate Car Exhibit” and is on view until May 2015. Essentially, the National Archives pays to maintain giant, irreverent billboards for our past presidents, funneling money into upkeep where they should be concerned with the preservation of our presidents’ important historical documents.
Two Columbia Libraries
For my field observation, I went to two of Columbia University’s eighteen libraries, Butler and Lehman. Butler is Columbia’s history and humanities library while Lehman is a digital center for all forms of spatial data.
First I went to Butler, which has six floors and contains about 3 million volumes. It serves mostly the Columbia community but is also open to New York University students and faculty and to select New York Public Library card-holders through a program called Manhattan Research Library Initiative (MaRLI). MaRLI allows any graduate student NYPL card-holder doing in-depth research to apply for a special card that not only allows them to take home books from the NYPL’s research libraries but from Columbia and NYU’s libraries as well. NYPL card-holders can obtain MaRLI status “by demonstrating that they have exhausted the resources available through NYPL for their projects and need sustained access to the resources of the three institutions.” There is also a Metro program that allows New York metropolitan public library card-holders who cannot find a particular book anywhere else to check it out from Columbia. Columbia University has the fourth largest purchasing expenditures 2011-2012 of any research library in the country.
I interviewed the Butler reference librarian and watched him help a patron. I found out that he had his M.L.I.S. from UC Berkeley and that he was able to get a job as a librarian at Butler because he already had a Ph.D. in English. The librarian told me that sometimes Columbia hired librarians who didn’t have M.L.I.S. degrees, which was an unusual practice for libraries.
The patron I observed him helping was a student at the New York Theological Seminary who needed to know for her thesis paper how much money the government spent on prisoners at Riker’s Island. The librarian looked on the website of the Justice Department for statistics but was unsure where to find what the patron was looking for; he then called another Columbia librarian, who referred him to a third Columbia librarian who was a specialist in government statistics. He gave the government statistics librarian the patron’s e-mail so that she could send her the information later as she was unable to see her right away. Over the phone the government statistics librarian said that the relevant information could be found under the New York City Department of Corrections.
Patrons can write to one of Columbia’s subject specialists with questions the reference librarian is unable to answer. The specialist librarian can either answer their question by e-mail or arrange a meeting for an individual consultation, a service open to both graduates and undergraduates. Butler also includes a digital humanities center that helps patrons with scanning and other software issues. At Avery, Columbia’s art library, there is no reference desk, only a circulation desk which will contact the on-duty librarian with a patron’s question.
After speaking with the reference librarian at Butler I went to the Lehman library, which supports spatial data research for all of Columbia. Lehman employs different specialist librarians to find and manipulate data sources. The librarians must know the GIS software applications that work with express spatial data. Among the librarians at Lehman are the data librarian, who helps with statistical combinations, the government information librarian, the journalism librarian, the business data librarian and the social sciences specialist. The model at Lehman is to bring together specialized consultants in a high-quality laboratory environment. The librarian I spoke to has an M.A. in information science from the University of Texas, Austin and another M.A. in geography from Hunter College; he was also pursuing a Ph.D. Most of the consultants at Lehman have M.L.I.S. degrees, but sometimes the library will hire people with different advanced degrees. Job openings at Lehman are very tailored. There is currently an opening for a data services and emerging technologies librarian, the closest thing Lehman has to an entry-level job. The library would consider hiring a recent graduate from an M.A. program, someone with either an M.L.I.S. or a Ph.D. in one of the social sciences. For that particular position the library would prefer someone at the beginning of her career who has worked in a library environment for a couple of years. The position requires someone who will provide broad-based research support and create programming and support for a wide range of tools. She must be familiar with quantitative research tools and have an aptitude for learning and staying current with a very wide range of emerging technologies. The job opening was posted in the spring and still has not been filled because the library is looking for just the right person; the library is going to repost the job.
The biggest users of Lehman are Columbia graduate students, followed by Columbia faculty and undergraduates. The library also works on a limited basis with students from other institutions. Lehman’s primary purpose is to support quantitative social science research and provide methodological designs for this research. The library does a lot of work with Columbia Teachers’ College helping the students there to find information on different school systems, catchment areas and community studies.
Lehman contains resources on real estate and buildings which can be used to research different neighborhoods. One such application is a “heat map,” or crime map, of Upper Manhattan. Another researcher requested business and census data for Canal Street near Chinatown. On a very different note, one patron needed data for an analysis of renewable energy potential in the Central African Republic.
Both the Butler and Lehman resources provide vast resources for researchers lucky enough to have access to them. Lehman in particular works hard to keep up with the latest technologies in order to facilitate high-quality research. As history and humanities are my main academic interests, I would love to one day work at Butler.