Paranoia vs the easiness of Piracy

Fun Highlight of today's Blog: currently watching Jurassic Park...win!

Best Quote so far in Lankes class: "Information Organization is the crack cocaine of librarianship" 

Reflections from Tuesday's class: Piracy is bad, but it is very easy. People become pirates because a) it is cool to be a pirate, I mean you get to wear an eye-patch and pillage other sea-faring vessels b) it is easier to download a song from an illegal site than jump through hoops to buy it from iTunes or heaven forbid driving to the store and purchasing a physical copy. Although, you don't actually BUY a song from iTunes...you LICENSE it...if Apple fails there go your songs.

So establish that Piracy is bad check, but it does have some interesting applications. Take e-books, they are digital copies...easily exploited and downloadable. Soon we might not have to pay for e-books because we could just download...illegally. *Insert gasps of shock* How could I imagine doing such a crude and vile thing.....quite easily. I borrow books from the library instead of buying them in the store... the author missed out on a purchase. I buy books from used bookstores...it is rare for me to pay full price for a book. How could pirating a digital e-book be any different? Would the author be losing out on a sale if I would borrow it from the library anyways then months later buy it cheap at a used bookstore? So I could cut out the middle man/men (woman/women?) and just download the book and read it instantly ( or however long it takes to download).

Oooohhhh I just convinced myself to pirate e-books in the future, bad Jessica. Ahem, not that I would do something illegal or something that would threaten the book industry....sheeet! I don't want to book industry to be attacked like the music industry has, so rude! AHHH DILEMMA! Well this will need further soul-probing and cost-benefit analysis.

Anyways, recap: Piracy bad, though it would be cool to say "argh" and be on a boat ( with my flippy floppys),   Piracy will emerge in the e-book market, could I do it without murdering my conscience? This leads me (by no means through normal lateral thinking or writing) to the part of this post about paranoia. I am afraid that with the advent of the digital book that it will become much easier for corporations/governments/crazy parents/what-have-you to censor books and what books people will be allowed to access. It will be easier to monitor what people are buying, because the option of purchasing an e-book in cash is not available (if it ever will). I just keep having flashbacks to George Orwell's 1984 and it is not pretty the height of panic I can attain by worrying about this problem. People can try to placate me as well as they are able, but not being able to access a physical book to purchase/lend/liberate from evil dictator to spread to the masses just does not sit well with me. Or how Amazon took back people's copy of 1984 from their Kindles because they had violated a copyright.What's to stop these companies from going into our e-readers and erasing books from our libraries? It is much harder for someone to break into my house and steal my copy of the Communist Manifesto or my awesome Bible (seriously my Bible is awesome it has footnotes that discuss literary elements in the text and relevant historical information...makes for entertaining reading), or any of my politics and religion filled books (of which there are many because HELLO political science major with a minor of religious studies thrown in to make life interesting).

So, I have a Nook and will continue to read it, but it will not be used for my favorite authors or my serious, question inducing books that I sporadically read. I would not entrust my only source of Harry Potter to be an e-book or the Chronicles of Narnia or Rules for Radicals. Those books will be bought as  physical copies which no one will attempt to take away from me for inappropriate content or political ideologies that are not in line with the current political regime without a severe confrontation. Someday we will regret turning physical books into solely digital copies....geez could I get anymore paranoid and cryptic? Sadly yes..... digital books are not the "Big Bad" as Buffy the Vampire Slayer would say, but I don't think that they are absolutely fantastic,they will lead to piracy in a new industry and easier censorship.

SPAAAACE and community

#1. Listening to Pandora while blogging is highly recommended. There aren't anymore opinions that need to be numbered, I just really wanted to share blogging + Pandora= smiles.

So, Radical Militant Librarians UNITE! We should probably look into  making t-shirts and bookmarks to disseminate amoungst our ranks. Subject headings should be included along with QR formulas so that the world knows what it is in for. This should probably been #2 looking back in the hindsight of the last minute...but it is more amusing for RML Unite! (lookee we already have an abbreviation!) to have its own paragraph.

Serious business now. Last class there was a whole bunch-load and oodles of discussion on the idea of space; having spaces in your library for meetings and activities along with the library becoming that 3rd Place dealing with Ray Oldenburg's (yes sociology comes up in librarianship classes, along with politics  and other such social   fields) theory. First off, I think it is immensely important that libraries have an area/s that are designed for meetings of all types to occur, which means movable furniture!

Yes, you read that right, movable furniture is a must in a meeting type place or a place that fosters collaboration. Giant signs should be place in the room and throughout the library proclaiming that space as a space where you can Feng shui to your hearts content. I mean who wouldn't like having rolling chairs and movable couches? Sure, it might cut into the meetings minutes or such, but it would be a great thrill to set up the room any old way you wanted it. You could even have a dunce corner!  Milne Library at my undergrad school did not foster this idea of movable furniture in a general meeting/collaboration and I think that the library could benefit from having a place in which the students are able to make their own space. Having square tables lined up in straight rows (giving off the message that the tables are in that place for a symmetrical reason and should be moved only at your own risk), generally limiting the table space to about four people, larger groups need not apply. To be fair the library was a popular meeting place...but there was not great joy in the meeting...it was just convenient. I think more people would have been in the library because they really wanted to meet there, not just because it was convenient.

In any library that I hope to work at (if indeed I do work in a library for as we are learning in class, books aka artifacts do not make the librarian) , I would love to see a meeting/collaboration space that has movable furniture and smart boards for the benefit of the group to work with. I also see homemade fresh cookies being available for hard workers with a hot beverage of choice. I would love to make cookies for the hard working collaborators using the free moving furniture workplace, but that might be a little more harder to swing, so I will settle for movable furniture with smart boards for now (at my hypothetical job). However, some day....there will be fresh cookies for my lovely members/patrons/users. Yummmm

Secondly, thirdly?, well whichever, I don't need labels for my paragraphs..or do I? I should start using Subject headings in my blogs....maybe throw in some Dewey or LOC. Anyways, Ray Oldenburg and his 3rd space, which is a place that is not your home and not your work, but somewhere you can meet to talk about home, work, and life. A library is a lovely example of this 3rd space. At the Boston Free Libray, where I used to work and still pretend to whenever I visit (the members are gracious enough to humour me and let me pretend that I still work there, they are so GREAT!), there is always a sense of community hanging in the air. Members and the staff are mostly all on a first name basis and there is always a conversation going on the library that deals with the community; schools, families, town politics, you name it. There are also some really awesome regulars who come in every week the same night and oft times they bring us food and the new juiciest piece of town gossip...errr I mean latest factual news of the community.

I live in a town that does not have a library (don't be horrified, Colden is a ridiculously tiny town with probably more deer than people and there are two libraries less than ten minutes away) and so the 3rd place shows up in the town's bars. I am not saying that everyone is a lush but if you go to the Hotel or up into the hills to Colden Lakes you will hear a lot community discussions going on. Ofttimes politics are the main thrust of the conversation and  a lot of community business probably goes on there, along with the required shop talk and town gossip...uh I mean factual news of the community). So even though my fellow Coldenites and I are not alcoholics, we probably would benefit from a library with an enticing meeting place for people to hang out and discuss things that is not at a bar...though it would be difficult to bring people in because I don't know if libraries can get a beer and liquor license.....

On that note, Libraries = good place to have meetings, collaborations, and catch up on town factual news.