This looks like fun. Wiki Loves Monuments, a photo contest organized by Wikipedia, invites people to take, upload, and share photos of monuments located in 17 European countries during the month of September 2011. Europeana has announced that is is a sponsor for one of the 12 prizes for best photo and is offering a special competition and award for a photo of an Art Nouveau monument.

I’m unclear on two points. If I’m not a resident of one of the European countries, does a photo of a monument in one of the countries still qualify? Are libraries monuments? If they’re counting parks and archaeological sites, I’m assuming libraries count.

If some good photos of libraries surface, maybe we can show them during Internet Librarian International! That would be even more fun.

Dahlia Lithwick, the keynote speaker at the 104th annual conference of the American Association of Law Librarians (AALL), explained why the Justices of the Supreme Court are conflicted about free speech issues. It goes back to their confirmation hearings, which tend to be brutal and vicious. This gives them a jaundiced view of both the press and the public. Lithwick, a journalist who covers the Supreme Court, then examined six recent free speech cases.

Her takeaways:
1. The media (and technology) can turn speech into assault. It’s no longer a situation of worrying only about yelling “Fire” in a crowded space, something not considered to be free speech. Today, whispers in one place, amplified by the internet, can have drastic consequences in other places, even if the Supreme Court thinks it’s free speech. One example: A book burning in Florida (the book being the Koran) resulted in deaths of Americans in Pakistan.

2. Technology transforms private speech into public speech. Nothing is off the record anymore. When a Justice gives a speech or shows up at a venue, that event is recorded and becomes public on websites. Some justices haven’t grasped this and don’t appreciate the attention.

3. Assaultive speech is not speech. Here her example is the violent video games, which she thinks should not be considered free speech, particularly because they require interactivity. She also asked us to think about Phelps v Snyder, where pfc Snyder’s father was viciously attacked in an epic ode published on the internet, but that was not considered by the Court. The Court did rule that the Phelps family demonstrating at military funerals was a form of protected speech.

Lithwick made an excellent case for new technologies being way ahead of the law (not that I find that a particularly new phenomenon — it’s been that way for years). She also pointed out that many of the Court’s decisions about protected free speech are not in line with how the general public thinks. She suggested it is not an accident that those most concerned about civility are those who endured the most uncivil confirmation hearings.

Her final point: When it comes to free speech and technology, the Court needs to change. She certainly wowed the AALL crowd, delivering a well-crafted, intelligent, witty, and thought-provoking talk with nary a PowerPoint slide in sight!

I’m intrigued by the recent criminal indictment of Aaron Swartz for allegedly stealing somewhere in the neighborhood of 4.5 million records from JSTOR. This statement from JSTOR explains the facts and is remarkably restrained.

Other commentators have not been so restrained. Kevin Webb, in a Reuters blog post said, “None of us want to break the law. It’s simply that we don’t have a choice.

The mechanisms for sharing academic discourse are broken. They barely even function as systems for connecting interested parties within existing disciplines. Ask just about anyone who spends their time writing or consuming scholarly work and you will hear a litany of complaints about how poorly suited the academic publishing industry is to modern day collaboration.”

Timothy Lee, a Forbes blogger, decried Swartz’s “reckless activism” but seems to applaud the idea of making any information resulting from government-funded free, regardless of how that is accomplished. This is an extreme reading of “open access” and one that even the most fervent OA advocates would not condone stealing entire databases, particularly when it involves breaking and entering.

JSTOR even says in its statement that it willingly provides large data sets to researchers for analysis. Furthermore, why JSTOR? Already, some 14% of its customers don’t pay anything. It’s a non-profit. And it concentrates on scholarly research in the humanities and social sciences. Federal dollars do not flow to these disciplines as they do to the hard sciences.

Demand Progress, the organization founded by Swartz, has a petition you can sign if you support Swartz’s activities.

In the midst of all the heated discussions, two things caught my attention. One, no one really knows what Swartz intended to do with 4.5 million JSTOR documents. Was he going to analyze them as he has done previously with law review articles and Wikipedia? Or did he intend to re-publish them on the web? Many commentators, both in mainstream media and the blogosphere, assume one or the other. The fact is, we don’t know. Would you feel differently if you knew he was attempting a scholarly analysis versus setting free millions of documents? Does it matter to a legal case?

The second thing is rather more mundane and speaks to changes in library research. There has been a cascade of commentary, again both in mainstream media and the blogosphere, that is largely repetitive. Here’s the repeat that bothers me — the assertion that he published his analysis of over 441,000 law review articles in the Stanford Law Review.

Librarians of my acquaintance immediately jumped on LexisNexis (and other legal databases) to find the exact citation. Swartz isn’t there as author. You can find the article once you realize the actual author was Shireen Barday. It was published in v. 61 #3, December 2008 of Stanford Law Review as a Note. There are many “librarianish” ways to get to the actual article. The easy way, which I hope they’re teaching in library schools these days, is to eschew traditional online databases and go direct to Aaron Swartz’s own website, where he happily gives up the exact URL to the article.

Just as the debate about what open access entails, how it should be implemented, and what the role of traditional publishing will be is convoluted and complex, so is the way in which librarians approach research projects.

As a side note, the September/October 2011 issue of ONLINE will run an article about open access and the many different methodologies and techniques of searching the web will be explored at WebSearch University early in October 2011.

I note that AllBusiness has announced a major redesign. It’s all about small business, I gather, with a new tagline of “Your Small Business Advantage.” As a D&B company, AllBusiness has had a relationship with ONLINE, but it getting weird. It does seem to have articles from the magazine but none more recent that May/June 2010. And I seriously love the bizarre indexing AllBusiness has applied to some of the articles. Case in point: Walt Crawford’s column in the September/October 2008 issue. Titled “Twitter Ate My Column,” it’s about the perils of time wasting posed by social media and what to do about it. AllBusiness has decided to index it with “Jews & Judaism” and “Religious Groups”.

Say what, AllBusiness? Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, et al. are not, to the best of my knowledge, religious entities. Nor did Walt even hint that they were. And nothing about Judaism is in there either. Maybe D&B should have hired a taxomist to help with this redesign.

The Special Libraries Association (SLA) is holding its annual conference in Philadelphia. Although the exhibit hall opened only yesterday afternoon, some of the membership came in earlier for board meetings and continuing education sessions.

For SLA staff, the beginning of the conference for most of the attendees feels like mid-conference, since they’ve been here for days assuring that everything is ready to go. And I have to say (so I will say) that they’ve done a terrific job! My registration experience was the quickest, most seamless I’ve ever enjoyed.

The exhibition hall yesterday afternoon was crowded and attendees were, by and large, upbeat. I spent an enlightening hour at the LexisNexis booth (#411) walking through their company dossier product, which will be the topic of my next ONLINE column. I now realize, however, that I need to go back and learn about their newer product offerings. A new (to SLA) exhibitor is Material Connexion (booth #841) which has the most interesting samples of actual advanced materials and a novel definition of library. Ask them about the sample made from shredded counterfeit money.

Swag alert: Cool buttons are at the Leadership Directory booth (#1521). Yesterday I was wearing Library Nerd, may go with Caffeinated Librarian today.

I also had a very interesting meeting with EBSCO, whose representative pointed out to me that the counts between full text journals in the Wilson and EBSCO databases when they merge to form super databases include new journals not currently in either company’s databases and that customers will have a choice as to whether their libraries will subscribe to the super databases or not.

I also spent some time learning about products from Arabia Inform, which I now realize is not in the Info-Expo guide, so I’m not sure of the booth number, but it’s over toward the 200 aisle. Their monitoring of the political and business situation in the Middle East should be of great value to many of the SLA attendees.

I love having Sunday afternoon in the exhibit hall, undisturbed by competing information sessions. Today I’ll be splitting my time between the exhibits and sessions.

My NewsBreak on the acquisition of H.W. Wilson by EBSCO is now live at the InfoToday website.

Some of the press releases about the acquisition described it as a “merger.” It’s not. EBSCO bought Wilson and made it a division of EBSCO Publishing. The Wilson offices in the Bronx and in Dublin (Ireland) will close. The databases will move to EBSCOhost and WilsonWeb will close down.

As someone who started her library career when people actually consulted printed indexes (yes, in book form!) to start their research, I have always been a bit concerned that Wilson seemed perpetually late to the technology party. While I was entranced by Dialog, Orbit, and other early online search services, Wilson kept trying to sell me books. Now, granted, once they did recognize that electronic delivery was going to trump print, they did a bang-up job. Text to speech, for example, is fantastic.

Here’s hoping that EBSCO preserves the best parts of the Wilson technology, indexing, and databases — without onerous price increases that will prevent libraries from enjoying said preservation.

Personally, I’ll miss seeing the Wilson booth at conferences and chatting with Wilson staff.

My new word for the day is “maptivism.” I discovered this in a blog post about digital mapping. OK, I didn’t just “find” it. In the typical social media information seeking mode that predominates these days, I was pointed to it by a Twitter post from Kevin Anderson @kevglobal, who will be a keynote speaker at Internet Librarian International this coming October.

But I digress. Nancy Scola, who wrote the blog post, gives many examples of how maps enhance our understanding of the news and of statistics. A map can make truths visible that aren’t so obvious from the rows and columns of a spreadsheet. The post is replete with map examples, from Japan after the earthquake to US school systems.

It strikes me that the biggest change in map making is interactivity. I used to rely on AAA for road maps. They were large, unwieldy and annoying. Now I use online maps, where I can zoom in and out, get directions and print just the part I need on one sheet of paper. I’m sure I’m not alone. But the ability to create maps, that maptivism thing, adds a new dimension to the work that information professionals do.

In that vein, I’m looking forward to Chris Sherman’s talk at WebSearch University where he’ll talk about maps. I’m wondering if he’ll declare himself a maptivist?

The cover story for the May/June 2011 issue of ONLINE is all about digital transparency and the valuations of social media companies. Authors Enrique Bonson and Francisco Flores wrote the article before LinkedIn’s (LNKD) IPO this week, so had only one public company, XING, to evaluate for a true market valuation. LinkedIn surprised everybody with the heady valuation placed on it by the market. It had a 109% gain in just the first day of trading and is valued, as of this morning, at $10 billion. Bonson and Flores used an article from Reuters dated January 6, 2011 for their $2.2 billion valuation.

That’s a pretty amazing difference, but supports the gist of the article, that digital transparency is hard to ascertain before companies go public. It also makes many people wonder whether the LinkedIn valuation is a sign of a new dot-com bubble.

The opening session of Computers in Libraries yesterday made me very happy that I wasn’t the conference organizer. The keynote speaker, James Crawford, Engineering Director for Google Books, was delayed. Apparently, he’d decided to take a redeye from California, which was to arrive in Dulles less than 3 hours before he was scheduled to speak. And Dulles isn’t all that close to the Washington Hilton. His flight was delayed. The result: He landed at Dulles about the time he was supposed to be addressing some 2,000 people at CIL.

Jane Dysart, CIL conference organizer, swiftly pulled together a panel of ebook and industry experts to fill in. They did this admirably. Kudos to Roy Tennant, Dick Kaser, Stephen Abram, and Marshall Breeding. For a full transcript of their remarks, see Don Hawkins’ report at Information Today’s LibConf blog.

While listening to them, some random thoughts flashed through my mind. The comment about libraries’ digitizing local and personal collections caught my attention and I’m wondering if this presages closer cooperation between public libraries and local museums. This type of intersection could benefit both institutions, particularly in times of limited funding for both.

The changing technological nature of ebooks, particularly the introduction of HTML5, set me wondering if ebook technology will fundamentally change the definition of a book. If you think of a book as a bunch of chapters strung together (I’m thinking non-fiction here, not fiction) that can be read out of sequence, you’ve got a research tool not that much different from a journal with articles strung together. Plus, when you can embed video, audio, images, and possibly more exotic technologies in the future, books become dynamic rather than static.

Today there’s an entire track devoted to ebooks. That’s likely where you’ll find me. I’ll be interested in learning more about the emerging technologies of ebooks.

It’s the week that Computers in Libraries comes to Washington DC — and this time it’s actually in Washington DC rather than Crystal City, which is in Virginia. I know at least one person who’s coming to CIL for the first time in years, since he was boycotting Crystal City.

I’ll be doing some live blogging here, but the main source for blog coverage of the conference will be at ITI’s conference blog site. There will probably be lots of tweeting as well. Follow the hashtag #cil11 (although I notice that #cil2011 is also being used).

Pre-conference workshops are today. If you’re around this evening, don’t miss the Gaming & Gadgets Petting Zoo from 5.30 to 7.30 at the Washington Hilton.