I talked with Alex Stinson (user:Sadads on Wikipedia) today about libraries and archives. The context was that Consumer Reports has a light relationship with Kansas State University because their library system holds some archives relating to the Consumer Movement, including Colston Warne‘s papers. I am not going to give context to our conversation, but I wanted to note some of the things we discussed.
The Digital Public Library of America and Europeana are collaborating to produce a white paper on the rights of the public to access their country’s public library holdings. Alex has been commenting on this paper, and he invited me to do so also in a public draft that he shared. I left some little comments. The issues in this statement are mostly concerned with copyright and access, which are the two big issues to address in the library / archive / museum sector. I do not enter discussions about whether content creators acting alone ought to apply free licenses to their work – that is the usual discussion in Wikipedia and the open access spaces – but when content gets to the library to be cataloged, I do worry about that. I wish for libraries to avoid making wild claims of copyright or ownership over their holdings, such as when they digitize public domain papers, and when they produce metadata to sort their holdings then I wish for metadata to be in the public domain or have CC-licensing so that it can connect with an API and be processed and remixed elsewhere. For example, if someone has cataloged some papers, I wish that an API could connect to their search engine so that people do not need to go to their library website to search their holdings, but instead can search through an international aggregator. Alex and I were talking about this in the context of Consumer Reports sending some of its archival materials to Kansas State, or maybe funding Kansas State to develop some of its consumer archives. This was just talk and I have no idea what is feasible. Alex had worked at this library, and I was asking him about how management thought of open licenses. He showed me their institutional repository for research and I was surprised again as I have been so many times before to see how confused professional understanding is of concepts of free licensing and open access. One problem in their repository was that they committed to open access, but at the same time had a list of things that they forbid including remixing the works, copying them in certain ways, and allowing commercial use. They even mentioned supporting the three Bs (Budapest, Berlin, and Bethesda), which are the three short statements which lay the ground for open access and dictate that these kinds of restrictions are opposed to open access.
We talked about BaGLAMa2, a alpha tool which looks at all of the non-text media files in a Wikimedia category and reports the traffic to the Wikipedia articles which contain them. I have long protested that the Wikimedia Foundation is adverse to talking about the traffic which Wikimedia projects get, except that they like to report the bottom line that Wikimedia projects are very popular. Whenever anyone says “Wikipedia is popular in X field” like for medicine, history, politics, or whatever – the staff there is under a range of pressures to avoid promoting that conversation and to stifle it whenever possible. I talked about this a bit before – it is because WMF staff use outsider branding for Wikipedia, and do not like Wikipedia presented alongside traditional social institutions. Anyway, I like BaGLAMa a lot because it demonstrates that if an institution shares its Creative Commons licensed media in Wikimedia projects, then the public will engage with that media.
We talked about the Wikimedia Library, for which Alex works. I said that someone had contacted me about offering subscriptions to a small journal, and he told me how they are still developing processes for promoting the partners who distribute through their subscription distribution service. There is a lot to praise about the Wikipedia Library and a lot to develop also. As with so many successful Wikimedia projects, I perceive the greatest barrier of success for it to be resistance from the Wikimedia Foundation staff. When a community project like this becomes successful it draws more attention and more problems to staff there. Of course they are paid to encourage Wikimedia community success, but as human individuals, they also wish to avoid having increased work burden and responsibility especially when there is no conceivable way that they can manage it.