John Miedema

John’s Seven Laws of Progressive Library Technology: An Unofficial and Uninvited but Hopefully Not Unwelcome Belated Contribution to Revolting Librarians and the Redux, or an Early Contribution to A Future Volume

There should be a volume of Revolting Librarians issued for each generation of library students. I’m too late for RL or the Redux, and it’s too early for the next, so here’s my unofficial (and uninvited) contribution to past or future volumes.

We don’t hear enough revolutionary lingo these days in the library field. It’s quaint enough to make good poetry. Think of this post as poetry. Still, the basic points are meant to be worthy of reflection.

1. The New Front of Intellectual Freedom is Relevance. While there are still challenged materials, the bigger problem today is finding relevant information amidst the abundance on the web. A problem of plenty seems a good thing, but it is laced with agendas to obscure facts with advertising and misinformation.

2. Information Technology is Part of the Problem. Better search technologies are not enough. Philosophers have a puzzle they call the frame problem, the still unsolved difficulty of programming effective relevance criteria for a dynamic environment. Notice that no one talks about artificial intelligence anymore. In direct proportion to the growth of the web, information seekers need curated information, librarians.

3. Information has an Identity. Would the quality of the web improve if information was linked to an identity? My domain is johnmiedema.ca, my name and geography. It’s something Facebook got right, organizing information around profiles. There is a time for anonymity, but not most of the time. Information is bound to be better when someone has to put their real name on it.

4. Information has a Location. Information seems ethereal, but every byte exists on a physical disk somewhere in the physical plane. Metadata supplies a context on data; context is locality; one cannot escape the local in library. Information has an impact on the planet; think energy use and landfills. We better connect the dots between information and the earth while we can.

5. Information is Ecological. Tweets, emails, blogs, e-books, print, books, stone tablets. All have a role in our information ecology. Status updates lend themselves to tweets, sustained thinking to blog posts or print. Don’t let the library blogosphere wither away into tweets alone.

6. Code is Political. Does it matter if your code counts toys or war machines? It is convenient to talk about “information”; it sounds so neutral. But technology changes the balance of power. In whose hands can it be trusted? Private business? Non-profits? If having an agenda is a dangerous thing, which of us is free from danger? Information is personal is political.

7. Keep it FOSS. Politics has never been as simple as left and right, public vs private sector. Does private interest always poison the well? We can all collaborate more often through free and open source projects (FOSS) that protect the interests of everyone. Be careful. Not everything open source is FOSS. When it’s FOSS, no one has the right to yank the plug, ever.

Doh! I forgot to say “hegemony” somewhere. I’ll never be a revolutionary.

This posts marks a conclusion of sorts. I am interested in both library technology and progressive librarianship. Everyone seems interested in the first topic, but fewer seem interested in the second. Maybe you’ll remember an earlier post, John’s Eight Laws of Library Technology. The current one attempts to tie in progressive librarianship. I had to do some digging to find good titles on progressive librarianship; here’s a good list. I hope I have succeeded in a small way to bring the two together. I’m sure I’ll pick up the theme again another day.

I’m taking a summer break from blogging. I’ve got to finish writing Slow Reading. Talk to you in September.