does any­one care if their library records are being tracked? should they?
ALA OIF has received a grant from the Open Soci­ety Institute/Soros Foun­da­tion to explore the issue of pri­vacy in the dig­i­tal age

Pan­elists: Dan Roth (Wired), Cory Doc­torow (CrapHound), and Beth Givens (Pri­vacy Rights Clearinghouse)

Dan Roth
no one ever talks about pri­vacy in his world unless he asks the ques­tions
the only time it has ever come up that he can remem­ber was in 2005 when a com­pany lost 600,000 employ­ees’ info (Time Warner) — hap­pened to his par­ent org
he talked to cor­po­rate com­mu­ni­ca­tions, who hadn’t told any­one; they had lost the info a month before
they said “we’ve only lost tapes 4 times this year“
every­one at work was upset for days
no one ever talked about it again & peo­ple stopped talk­ing about it
and these were jour­nal­ists
how can your reach the pub­lic if jour­nal­ists don’t care?

lit­tle incen­tive for con­sumers to care about pri­vacy — not sure why they should care (except for the peo­ple in this room)
beyond just the ques­tion of will a com­pany get spanked for los­ing infor­ma­tion, will con­sumers use it as a cri­te­rion for which com­pa­nies they will deal with?
some com­pa­nies have said we have bet­ter pri­vacy poli­cies than google — you should trust us
ask.com decided last year that pri­vacy rights would set them apart
– offered askeraser, where users could con­fig­ure what was stored by the com­pany
but this wasn’t mean­ing­ful, and ask is still 4th or 5th in the mar­ket
if you use the google tool­bar, it’s col­lect­ing infor­ma­tion about you — steve ballmer tried to make a big deal about it, but con­sumers didn’t care

cited a sur­vey in which 75% of pri­vacy execs said they don’t share data
how­ever, mar­keters share the info (some even share SSNs), so the CEOs don’t know their com­pa­nies are doing this

the idea of the free econ­omy — free as a busi­ness model
you get some­thing great in return for info about you
they all count on ads being served up to you
thinks there will be an arms race to offer more info about users, which means more col­lect­ing and more shar­ing
this will build up to a point where we’re all com­pletely find­able online
phorm — ad sur­vey com­pany that teams up with ISPs; tracks their users as soon as they log in until they turn off their com­put­ers and serve up ads the whole time
there is no real way to opt out of it
it will be very pop­u­lar and is being tested in the US by Charter

it’s time to decide where we stand on this
if we don’t want to get stuff for free in exchange for data, we need to fig­ure out some way to tell busi­ness that we do care about it and how we want to han­dle it
it all looks hope­less, because it looks like amer­i­cans don’t care
but think about 7 years ago, when only a ded­i­cated group cared about the envi­ron­ment
now more peo­ple care, and the same could hap­pen with pri­vacy
hope­fully we won’t have to wait a decade to find out

Beth Givens
Pri­vacy Rights Clear­ing­house was estab­lished in 1992
two types of pri­vacy — infor­ma­tional pri­vacy and con­sti­tu­tional pri­vacy
they con­cen­trate on the for­mer (ACLU and EFF con­cen­trate on the lat­ter)
lines are blurred in real­ity, but there are too few of us all the way around
pro­vide prac­ti­cal infor­ma­tion about how peo­ple can pro­tect their iden­tity in credit offers, med­ical pri­vacy, gov­ern­ment records, debt col­lec­tion, etc. and from iden­tity theft
librar­i­ans can turn to the PRC for help with ques­tions such as “how do I get rid of all of those credit card offers I get in the mail?”

a few years ago, Sun CEO Scott McNealy said “you have no pri­vacy, get over it already“
he said visa knows what I bought, some­one has my med­ical records, some­one has my den­tal records, etc.
1967 def­i­n­i­tion of pri­vacy — when some­one can decide what infor­ma­tion about them is trans­mit­ted to oth­ers
“infor­ma­tional self-determination“
Canada & EU do a much bet­ter job than US; they have pri­vacy com­mis­sion­ers and we don’t have that (no com­pre­hen­sive data pri­vacy law)
instead, we have the sec­toral approach — a law for this indus­try, another one for that indus­try, etc.
HIPAA isn’t a pri­vacy law, it’s a dis­clo­sure law
it’s a swiss cheese approach and there are lots of holes
Fair Credit Report­ing Act was enacted in 1970 — wouldn’t make it out of con­gress today with the shape con­gress is in these days
gives you a right of access to your credit report
only cred­i­tors, employ­ers, and land­lords can access your credit report — if oth­ers access it, you can sue

Fair Infor­ma­tion Prac­tices — FIPs
when she ana­lyzes an infor­ma­tion bill, she has a men­tal check­list of these things (usage, col­lec­tion, access, etc.) for eval­u­at­ing it
most pri­vacy poli­cies are not really pri­vacy poli­cies at all — they’re dis­clo­sure poli­cies because there’s no omnibus pri­vacy bill on the books
usu­ally in legalese it’s dif­fi­cult to under­stand
throw­ing up your hands and declar­ing you have no pri­vacy is not a valid option
instead, we need to take every oppor­tu­nity to opt out — they have a guide on their web­site
take con­trol of uses of your per­sonal infor­ma­tion
that way, lob­by­ists can’t say to leg­is­la­tors that we don’t need pri­vacy leg­is­la­tion because only a few peo­ple opt out
in fact, let leg­is­la­tors know this is impor­tant to enact

librar­i­ans are the pio­neers — use the PRC resources
we can all do a bet­ter job of mak­ing sure our pri­vacy is more pro­tected, rather than less pro­tected
put books like Cory Doctorow’s Lit­tle Brother — as well as non­fic­tion — promi­nently on your shelves and help guide peo­ple to resources
encour­age users to visit the non­profit advo­cacy group websites

Cory Doc­torow
when we say do we need to care about the pri­vacy of our patrons in light of the fact they’re already giv­ing away their infor­ma­tion on social net­work­ing sites, at least sn users are decid­ing when to give out their per­sonal infor­ma­tion
how can you say info is pri­vate if other peo­ple know it?
well, we have pri­vate but secret acts (going to the bath­room, hav­ing sex) — this is no different

the fur­ther up the lad­der you go and the higher up you are, the more power you have to selec­tively reveal infor­ma­tion
the lower you go, the less power you have to hide your info

is this because of bureau­crats or our tech­nol­ogy?
why do we enter the skin­ner box? go online and give away our infor­ma­tion?
the sys­tem archi­tects cre­ate the sys­tem, but oth­ers cre­ate the norms for us just giv­ing away the info with­out think­ing about it

lon­don is ground zero in the pri­vacy wars
wanted to use rfid passes instead of paper tick­ets — con­vert every­one over
gave dis­counts to new rfid users by tripling the cost of paper tick­ets
same thing with gro­cery loy­alty cards
aimed at peo­ple with the least choice

thinks there are busi­nesses who have manip­u­lated the field
this has raised a gen­er­a­tion where this is now par for the course and this hap­pens all day long, and not just in com­mer­cial set­tings
it’s become the norm because you have to know what you’re doing to turn off the log­ging
rfids are set up so that users have no abil­ity to con­fig­ure, read, or block them
ven­dors say this would raise the cost of rfid, which is true — the same way seat­belts, brakes, etc. raise the cost (a com­pany couldn’t offer a car today with­out those things)
it wouldn’t be a mar­ket cor­rec­tion when that com­pany went out of busi­ness — reg­u­la­tors would take care of it

cre­ates a cli­mate where we have less respect for our own pri­vacy
also where mali­cious peo­ple can read your data and decide what to do with it

libraries are the last bas­tion of DRM — they’re not treated as first-class cit­i­zens
DRM — con­sump­tion of mate­r­ial — a word-by-word capac­ity to track what peo­ple are read­ing
we should be deeply skep­ti­cal of these tech­nolo­gies
libraries have a moral imper­a­tive to block tech­nolo­gies that expose user data (embod­ies a snitch)

an infor­ma­tion econ­omy based on access­ing infor­ma­tion isn’t viable
it’s a busi­ness model that no one wants
no one woke up this morn­ing ask­ing to do less with their music

at the end of the day, this sur­veil­lance under­mines our per­sonal secu­rity and our national secu­rity
sur­veil­lance soci­eties are ones where peo­ple don’t trust each other
they under­mine our secu­rity because it makes our haystacks big­ger with­out mak­ing it eas­ier to find the nee­dles
our infor­ma­tion offi­cials had every­thing they needed to know about 9/11
the mad response since then has been to make the haystacks big­ger
we col­lect the infor­ma­tion to fill the gov­ern­ment data­bases to make it harder for the gov­ern­ment to find the crit­i­cal info
can’t spot the impor­tant stuff in the unim­por­tant stuff we’ve collected

in the remote rail sta­tions, we’ve replaced the guards with cam­eras, which are only foren­sic
when you have that many cam­eras, no one watches them
they don’t pre­vent crimes — they only help you solve them after­wards
cctv is not a means to secur­ing soci­ety
crack addicts who mug and kill you for your cell phone don’t have long-term plans and cctvs don’t help with those scenarios

these sys­tems that we build that pro­vide access to this infor­ma­tion will deter­mine the soci­eties we build in the future
our deci­sions as infor­ma­tion pro­fes­sion­als will deter­mine whether our descen­dents curse us or praise us

Q&A

Q: what is at stake here overall?

Beth: there’s a huge amount at stake. if we don’t some­how suc­ceed in get­ting our mes­sage across about speak­ing out and pro­tect­ing our pri­vacy, we’ll lose it. so much data is gath­ered about us, and pro­files are being built now; the movie “Minor­ity Report” is a great exam­ple of ads being tai­lored to you. wor­ries the most about when all of these cam­eras are out­fit­ted with bio­met­ric read­ers that iden­tify the shape of our face, which hooks into the dri­vers license data­base — this is very pos­si­ble and is high on her list to worry about. wor­ried we’re head­ing in that direc­tion with­out ask­ing the ques­tions and putting up the barriers

Dan: we’ve seen some of this already — what hap­pens when our health records can be read by insur­ers and employ­ers? what hap­pens when you apply for a job and they can read those things? when you can’t get a dri­vers license because of what they know? when you can’t get mar­ried? once all of this info is out there, and if we don’t care, what hap­pens when we develop into a nation of niches? you’re the kind of guy that shops for this one thing? as we move away from mass cul­ture to atom­iza­tion, how does hav­ing this pri­vate infor­ma­tion out there affect us?

Cory: one of the impor­tant things to recognzie about this data acqui­si­tion is that it’s like ura­nium. you can buy it on ama­zon for your sci­ence project, and it’s per­fectly legal. but you can refine it into plu­to­nium and this is a prob­lem. a lit­tle of your pri­vate infor­ma­tion is one thing, but you can quickly amass a lot of pri­vate infor­ma­tion in the pub­lic domain with­out even know­ing it. the inter­net will never unlearn what paris hilton’s gen­i­tals look like. these things never go back in the bot­tle. you will never be able to not look up what CEOs of com­pa­nies were post­ing on usenet in the 90s. as we con­front the poten­tial of our soci­ety in 20 years, all of this info will be like smog and we won’t be able to destroy it

dan: we’re in a golden age right now where most com­pa­nies don’t know what to do with all of this info they have. they just keep col­lect­ing it, but at some point they’ll fig­ure it out. if some­thing is going to hap­pen, it has to hap­pen now

cory: or it’s like the breakup of the soviet union, where you could buy the plu­to­nium eas­ily. cited a sit­u­a­tion where sell­ing blade servers came with the info on it. you’re load­ing the gun and hand­ing it to suc­ces­sors forever

beth: rec­om­mends the “Dig Dirt” report/survey about how employ­ers are using social net­work sites and other infor­ma­tion as a hir­ing tool (more than 50%) and mak­ing value judg­ments about indi­vid­u­als and keep­ing this to them­selves. doesn’t apply to pri­vacy or employ­ment laws. old laws are inad­e­quate for cov­er­ing this kind of thing. let young peo­ple know, even though it might not do any good because they may not listen

Q (Jes­samyn): these data­bases exist — we know that. at what point do we either have to say the horse is out of the barn or that there are assur­ances about things hap­pen­ing? if we’re just wait­ing for the proces­sors to hit the point where they can use the data, do we need a new strat­egy about seri­ous top-down leg­is­la­tion? is there any pur­pose to doing some­thing other than top-level stuff

cory: calls it “turn­ing for­ward the clock,” not “turn­ing back the clock.” we’re going to reg­u­late how this is used and teach peo­ple how to use it. respect­ing the awe­some power of infor­ma­tion and reg­u­lat­ing this activ­ity. could triv­ially build a skin­ner box that rewarded peo­ple for pro­tect­ing their pri­vacy and in fact justin hall is work­ing on this with pmog — the pas­sively mul­ti­player online gam­ing (http://pmog.com/)

dan: look­ing for the trans­parency side. if we care about this as a soci­ety, we have to keep at this and find ways to make it hap­pen. use game the­ory to your advan­tage to encour­age peo­ple to do this. con­sumers don’t have any idea why they should care about this and you have to teach them why they do

beth: very few peo­ple take advan­tage of the oppor­tu­nity to view their credit reports. try to get the right of access into law now, because it doesn’t exist. PRC tried to do this last year but failed in cal­i­for­nia because of the infor­ma­tion and credit indus­tries. couldn’t get past the com­mit­tee hear­ings. have to keep try­ing. count­ing on a “data valdez” doesn’t work because we’ve had one after another (their web­site keeps track of these secu­rity breaches — a run­ning tally). when more peo­ple real­ize that the deci­sion made about them (job, insur­ance, etc.) was caused by per­sonal infor­ma­tion that is out of their con­trol, it will help ener­gize them, but it’s dif­fi­cult. cal­i­for­nia is a trend­set­ter in terms of leg­is­la­tion, but the infor­ma­tion bro­ker indus­try is fight­ing & block­ing this legislation

cory: other tips and tricks that make it eas­ier to game the sys­tem — skipxxip (sp?) gen­er­ates fake logins for reg­is­tra­tion sites. every time he gets a postal solic­i­ta­tion, he writes “deceased” on it and sends it back

Q kate shee­han (blog­ger): about 8–9 years ago, Wired ran an arti­cle about how to be invis­i­ble online. is it even fea­si­ble any­more? is it even a good idea to try to make your­self invis­i­ble or to man­age it? how do you buy a house then?

beth: “how to be invis­i­ble” book. can’t be invis­i­ble because then some­one else has to man­age your mail. that’s why she’s a pub­lic activist. remem­ber the unabomber? he owned the cabin so records showed that and even he couldn’t be invisible

cory: thinks it’s just bad tac­tics; shift over the last few years is that “green can be glo­ri­ous” — doesn’t involve suf­fer­ing or eat­ing food that tastes bad; being green can actu­ally help us per­son­ally — there’s an imag­i­na­tive oppor­tu­nity to come up with cool ways to make pri­vacy luxurious

dan: would like to see a point where you can fig­ure out what is being trapped and what you’re giv­ing away. try to read the pri­vacy poli­cies of a lot of web­sites and they’re incomprehensible

beth: that’s why the right of access would be very valu­able — to see what is held about us

dan: the one story he did about pri­vacy, he talked to HP’s chief pri­vacy offi­cer. she described the amount of work HP does to keep user data pri­vate in the EU, but not in the US because we don’t require it. wasn’t a no-brainer to just do it here since they were already doing it there

cory: defaults mat­ter. if a router came with log­ging off by default (or apache) and you had to explic­itly turn it on, we’d have a very dif­fer­ent world. push leg­is­la­tion and best prac­tices. fire­fox could do more to sur­face what infor­ma­tion about you is being given away. linux could expose info. the open source world in par­tic­u­lar could help with this by set­ting the defaults to off. there’s a really good inflection/leverage point there by just talk­ing to some geeks in the right way

Q: as librar­i­ans, peo­ple come into our insti­tu­tions, how do we con­vince our users that pri­vacy is impor­tant in the age of face­book? what do we do?

cory: friend of his is a hacker who built the “hacker­bot” — a robot sat on the floor on the ground with a router on it and it would sniff the area net­works and grab unen­crypted pass­words. it would roll up to your feet and show you all of the pass­words you just trans­mit­ted; a library that had over the door a printer that showed all of the info you dis­closed would be very pow­er­ful. hav­ing slider bars that show red/green for amount of disclosure

beth: described a game that could be used in libraries. it’s a town square where you’re chal­lenged about pri­vacy data and ques­tions you can answer. can come up with cre­ative ways to edu­cate and inform peo­ple; use the library as a launch­ing pad

cory: in a few years, teach­ers will be able to dat­a­mine info about their stu­dents as a very instruc­tive lesson

dan: require that every­one check out cory’s books

Q kate shee­han: we’re very con­cerned about pri­vacy, so we don’t let users see every­thing they’ve ever checked out. we’re pro­tect­ing their pri­vacy, but they want to access that info. her library has the abil­ity for the user to turn this on so they see it and staff don’t, but most libraries don’t have that. how do we bal­ance this?

cory: demand of ven­dors ways they col­lect infor­ma­tion for only the user to access. maybe the data resides only on their library card and not on your server. stuff can live on the edges — doesn’t have to live in the mid­dle, and it can be encrypted. it’s utterly con­ceiv­able that if there was demand for it, ven­dors would pro­duce the solutions

cory made an explicit state­ment that all of his remarks are in the pub­lic domain!

q: how do we argue for this when pri­vacy pro­tec­tions cost money?

beth: could try scare tac­tics. the more you col­lect, the more the risk it can get breached. larry ponemon (sp?) has cal­cu­lated the cost of data breaches ($100–200 cost per name per data breach). the les­son many of these enti­ties have learned is that if we hadn’t col­lected all of this stuff, we wouldn’t be in trou­ble now. don’t keep data for very long

cory: has a friend who described a con­ver­sa­tion with a self-defense instruc­tor. what do I do if I’m in a dark alley when two guys are fol­low­ing me and I’m alone? answer — don’t go to dark alleys alone

q: as a con­sumer, i was bet­ter able to man­age my pri­vacy before 9/11 and before I bought a house. now my info is every­where. how do I man­age this?

beth: in terms of prop­erty, cre­ate a liv­ing trust and don’t put it in your name — this will pro­tect you from real estate ledgers. start young on this one. this is good in gen­eral — just have a PO box — so that it becomes habit­ual. this is why work­ing with young peo­ple is so important.

q: but tra­di­tional things like bank­ing require a phys­i­cal address and a Social Secu­rity number

cory: need to take con­trol of your tech­nol­ogy; jail­break­ing drm; take con­trol of debate & learn to speak intel­li­gently about this; danah boyd shows a slide on online pre­da­tion and how rare these occur­rences are — know­ing how to speak about the issue is key. third thing is régime change — if you don’t par­tic­i­pate in the elec­toral process, it will par­tic­i­pate in you

q: one of the big wor­ries we’re fac­ing today is that after 9/11, there is increased access by gov­ern­ment to library infor­ma­tion. there is a cer­tain logic to the idea that we’ll be safe if we just give up our pri­vacy. how much safer would we really be if the gov­ern­ment knew every­thing every­one was reading?

dan: thinks peo­ple are start­ing to say that all of data col­lec­tion this hasn’t helped us at all

cory: safety and secu­rity are not pla­tonic uni­ver­sals. you can only be safe by def­i­n­i­tion from some­thing. if you’re going to be made more safe from ter­ror­ists, you have to be less safe from gov­ern­ment. this is at odds with the found­ing prin­ci­ple of this coun­try. if you believe the for­mer, you should go back to the soviet union. say­ing we are tak­ing away your free­dom to keep you safe from ter­ror­ism is a fun­da­men­tally unamer­i­can premise

q: we have this huge cult of celebrity that every­one feeds into where it’s a cool thing to divulge this infor­ma­tion. there has to be a shift for librar­i­ans to edu­cate peo­ple if there’s a drive to not give out that info. would need a celebrity cam­paign to counter the norm

beth: that’s a great idea, espe­cially for the long-term consequences

dan: saw this hap­pen in a story about a secre­tive bil­lion­aire. guy pur­chased a com­pany and never talked to the press. his daugh­ter had a blog­ging site, though, where she talked about her par­ents and the fights they’d get into, what she over­heard them say­ing. it revealed a lot about this guy and it enabled dan to approach him to say here’s what I know about you. that blog *stopped* as soon as the guy found out about it

q: trans­parency has ebbed and flowed across his­tory and we’ll never have absolute pri­vacy. we need to assert pos­i­tive rights for pri­vacy. how do we watch the watch­ers and take care of the pos­i­tive ways?

cory: his daugh­ter is 5-months old, but their first game will prob­a­bly be 10p for every cctv you spot. wants to make a cam­paign of post-it notes with closed eyes on them that peo­ple can put on cctv cam­eras — “don’t watch me”

jes­samyn: demys­ti­fy­ing the media and telling peo­ple that it’s okay to not always believe the news­pa­pers and magazines

q: it would be use­ful for us as a com­mu­nity to look at the suc­cesses of the green rev­o­lu­tion and how it evolved, maybe pig­gy­back on it. is our “incon­ve­nient truth” “infor­ma­tion foot­prints” instead of “car­bon foot­prints?” get our own al gore and make our own movies. let’s build on that

dan: will have a prob­lem con­vinc­ing peo­ple not to opt-in to things they use every­day, though

cory: there’s a third option between refusenik and throw­ing up your hands — take con­trol of your habits; use “google com­man­der” fire­fox exten­sion; in the library, we could redi­rect doubeclick URLs to 0000 so that library users are not tracked

dan: dig­i­tal van­dal­ism would make this info use­less — a friend clicks around aim­lessly to delib­er­ately cre­ate false data

q: how can we work bet­ter with our IT peo­ple? and our ven­dors? what would be per­sua­sive to the geeks who design our systems?

cory: is a for­mer sysad­min and geeks believe really strongly in pri­vacy for them­selves. if you can get those peo­ple to expand the uni­verse of peo­ple whose pri­vacy they want to pro­tect beyond them­selves, they can under­stand it’s part of their mission

q: the EFF has the Tor pro­gram that can be down­loaded for free to anonymize web surf­ing and can be used on library com­put­ers, too, if your IT peo­ple install it

cory: it was orig­i­nally intended for naval communications

http://privacyrevolution.org/

- addi­tional live­blog­ging of this ses­sion at the Loose Can­non Librarian

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I’ve been invited to live­blog and solicit ques­tions for an Annual Con­fer­ence ses­sion about a newish ALA grant project designed to edu­cate the pub­lic about pri­vacy rights. More info will be up soon at their site, Pri­vacy Rev­o­lu­tion, but for now, they have a top-notch panel speak­ing about this sub­ject at Annual (Cory Doc­torow, Dan Roth from Wired, and Beth Givens, the direc­tor of the Pri­vacy Rights Clear­ing­house), and they’re solic­it­ing ques­tions from those who can’t attend the ses­sion. If noth­ing else, there is a sur­vey avail­able on the site that they’re hop­ing you’ll take in order to col­lect data about infor­ma­tion pri­vacy poli­cies and practices.

Jes­samyn West has a longer expla­na­tion on Librarian.net, and I think it’s prob­a­bly eas­ier if every­one just posts their ques­tions there, although I will def­i­nitely ask any rel­e­vant ques­tions posted here, too. If you’ll be at the con­fer­ence, we’ll be in room 201D in the con­ven­tion cen­ter from 1:30–3:30pm on Sun­day, so please join us.

As soon as there is more info about the project avail­able online, I’ll post a note about it here. I’m hop­ing good things will come from this, as I think this coun­try needs to have a seri­ous and frank debate about pri­vacy issues, and I believe libraries are a good forum for this.

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I’ve finally had a moment to col­lect room num­bers, and since I see that some of the gam­ing stuff isn’t listed in the pro­gram guide, here’s a quick run-down.

• Open Gam­ing Night
  Fri­day, June 27, 7:30–10:30pm
  Hilton, Pacific Ball­room C
   
• Games and Gam­ing MIG meet­ing (open to any attendee)
  Sat­ur­day, June 28, 10:00am-noon
  Sher­a­ton Park Hotel in Plaza A/B
   
• DDR at the Well­ness Fair
  Sun­day, June 29, 10:30am-2:30pm
  On the exhibit floor
   
• More gam­ing ses­sions in an eas­ily scan­able for­mat on the Annual wiki
   
• And of course, the Cal­i­for­nia Dream­ing game will be every­where on Sat­ur­day and Sunday!

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Hav­ing explained what the Thinker­ing Spaces project is about and how it works, I want to wrap up some thoughts on it by not­ing next steps. Using the MacArthur grant, the Illi­nois Insti­tute of Tech­nol­ogy Insti­tute of Design folks are going to imple­ment two instal­la­tions in the Chicagoland area so that they can mon­i­tor them closely. While they hope to put one in Chicago itself, they’re also look­ing at putting the other in a nearby sub­urb in order to get usage data from a range of demo­graph­ics. Accord­ing to the grant’s time­line, this will hap­pen around Sep­tem­ber and will last for a few months, as this is phase is a tem­po­rary one. Then project staff will ana­lyze and pub­lish the data in 2009.

We all agreed that there needs to be some starter con­tent for users to play with from day one, and while the intent is to pro­vide an unstruc­tured, infor­mal learn­ing envi­ron­ment, I think there’s also some hope that stu­dents will be able to use it to col­lab­o­rate on school­work, too. So they’ll need to find some con­tent part­ners, espe­cially for the long haul. One of the things I like about this project is that it’s another way for libraries to gen­er­ate and pro­vide access to local con­tent. I’m thrilled that the trial will be in this area since Chicago has such great his­tory. In fact, a meet­ing we had the next day reminded us that 2009 will be the cen­ten­nial cel­e­bra­tion of Daniel Burnham’s plan for Chicago, which is a nat­ural fit from every angle — recre­ational, infor­ma­tional, and edu­ca­tional. In addi­tion, res­i­dents could build resources about the com­mu­nity and attach to books infor­ma­tion that, as TJ noted, can’t be found on the web or on Ama­zon when you look up a title online.

Per­son­ally, I won­der if teach­ing media lit­er­acy has more impact in this type of envi­ron­ment where users are mash­ing up con­tent from dis­parate resources, and I think there are nat­ural tie-ins for teach­ing both kids and adults about pri­vacy, fair use (using Cre­ative Com­mons licenses), and dig­i­tal iden­tity. Unfor­tu­nately, it may be too late in the cycle to plan a con­tent mod­ule around pol­i­tics and the elec­tion, but maybe the users will do that them­selves (espe­cially with a pres­i­den­tial can­di­date from Illi­nois). When there are more of these instal­la­tions in libraries, it’s easy to imag­ine a net­work spring­ing up where librar­i­ans curate con­tent and post it online for other Thinker­ing Spaces projects to down­load and [re-]use. Imag­ine hav­ing some­thing like this in place in New Orleans and sur­round­ing states so that vic­tims of Hur­ri­cane Kat­rina could record their sto­ries and add to the body of knowl­edge that will be pub­lished in print. As the IIT folks said, the book becomes the patron repos­i­tory, and it is no longer a pas­sive object. It’s not just open source space, but open source con­tent, too.

Obvi­ously it will take time to scale this up in terms of num­bers, so IIT is design­ing a plan. I would hope to start region­ally, build­ing statewide in Illi­nois, and then expand­ing across the coun­try. In fact, with the right fund­ing, a part­ner­ship with IFLA would make it pos­si­ble to do this inter­na­tion­ally and tie sis­ter cities together through the instal­la­tions to let users col­lab­o­rate across geog­ra­phy. And maybe ALA’s Pub­lic Pro­grams Office could inte­grate this type of space with its exhibits, and when it trav­els from one site to the next, user-generated con­tent goes with it, avail­able for users at the next site to remix. So many possibilities.

But right now the work is focused on get­ting those first two test instal­la­tions up and run­ning. I’m hop­ing to track this project very closely, visit the libraries where they are imple­mented, and report back peri­od­i­cally. I’m opti­mistic about the poten­tial for inter­ac­tions and part­ner­ships within the com­mu­nity, although I’m wor­ried that the short time­frame can’t pos­si­bly expose all of the pos­si­bil­i­ties. I think just see­ing how users play with con­tent in these new ways will be enough to spark our col­lec­tive imag­i­na­tion (as it did mine) and give us a glimpse of the future.

See also:

• Thinker­ing Spaces in Libraries
• Mash­ing Up Con­tent in the Library (Thinker­ing Spaces II)

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I’ve alluded to the fact that ALA is doing a lot with gam­ing these days, some of which is hap­pen­ing at our Annual Con­fer­ence (which starts June 27), some of which I’ve helped organize.

The biggest one is the — wait for it — “big” game, “Cal­i­for­nia Dream­ing.” I posted about this on the ALA Mar­gin­a­lia blog so you can get the details there, but I’m thrilled to see that more than 100 peo­ple have already signed up. I think this is going to be a lot of fun, and my only regret is that I won’t get to see all of the clues myself and play. Well, actu­ally my biggest regret is that we don’t have enough prizes to award to the extra teams who have joined. I had high hopes that atten­dees would get into the game, but I didn’t real­ize they would do it so enthu­si­as­ti­cally before we even started. You folks rock.

If you’re attend­ing the con­fer­ence, the game is free to play, and you can sign up all the way through Sun­day if you get inspired as you start see­ing clues around the con­ven­tion cen­ter. Watch for other atten­dees with your team’s color on their badges to iden­tify your team­mates to col­lab­o­rate and win. You can pick up your col­ored sticker at the Cal­i­for­nia Myth Author­ity game HQ in the new Games Pavil­ion on the exhibit floor. I’ll be hang­ing out there when­ever I can given my sched­ule, so if noth­ing else, come by and say hi.

Another mile­stone at Annual will be the first meet­ing of the Games and Gam­ing Mem­ber Inter­est Group (MIG) since it was offi­cially approved at the 2008 Mid­win­ter Meet­ing. There were far more than the 100 sig­na­tures required to start the group, and it’s great to see it form so quickly based on mem­ber inter­est. Dr. Scott Nichol­son is the orga­nizer, and he’ll be con­ven­ing the meet­ing at Annual, which will take place at 10:00 a.m.-noon on Sat­ur­day, June 28, at the Sher­a­ton Park Hotel in Plaza A/B. If you’re at all inter­ested in gam­ing, come to the meet­ing to get an update from our expert panel from the Ver­i­zon Foun­da­tion grant, exchange tips and tricks, hear what oth­ers are doing, and learn more about ALA ini­tia­tives in this area. In fact, we also have a big announce­ment to make at the meet­ing, so there’s even some mys­tery to it.

I’ve also helped orga­nize ALA’s first ever open gam­ing night for all atten­dees, which will rock out on Fri­day, June 27, from 7:30–10:30 p.m. Come play Boom Blox, Dance Dance Rev­o­lu­tion, Mario Kart Wii, Rock Band, and Wii Sports, with no pres­sure. We’ll also have boardgames such as Ham­ster Rolle, Inge­nious, TransAmer­ica, Wits & Wagers, and more. The event is spon­sored by The Ver­i­zon Foun­da­tion, so we’ll even have snacks. Friends, fun, and food — you can’t ask for more than that. We even have some prizes from The Car­toon Net­work, Elec­tronic Arts, and Microsoft to give away for the videogame winners.

The other gaming-related activ­ity I’ll be involved in is run­ning a Dance Dance Rev­o­lu­tion setup dur­ing the Well­ness Fair on the exhibit floor on Sun­day, June 29, from 10:30 a.m.-2:30 p.m. I’m get­ting back into DDR at home (which may be a whole other future post) because it’s such great exer­cise, so if you’ve never had a chance to play and you can’t make it to open gam­ing night, you can come by the Fair to try it for yourself.

That’s just the tip of the ice­berg of what’s going on at Annual around gam­ing, and you can get an overview of the rest of the ses­sions on the Gam­ing News blog.

In addi­tion to all of this fun stuff, here are some other places you can catch me to say hi:

• the Vir­tual Com­mu­ni­ties & Libraries Mem­ber Inter­est Group meet­ing on Sat­ur­day, from 4:00–5:30 p.m. at the Ana­heim Mar­riott in the Mar­quis Ball­room NorthEast
• the Empow­er­ment Con­fer­ence on Sun­day, from 8:00–10:00 a.m., speak­ing with Michael Stephens about tech­nol­ogy trends
• the panel on pri­vacy on Sun­day, from 1:30–3:30 p.m., in Room 201D of the Con­ven­tion Cen­ter, which I’ll blog more about later this week (I hope to have Cory Doc­torow sign my Kin­dle at this session)
• the Web Advi­sory Com­mit­tee meet­ing on Mon­day, from 8:30 a.m.-noon, in Room 202B of the Con­ven­tion Center

Those are the high­lights, although I’ll be rac­ing around to other meet­ings and ses­sions, too. I’m look­ing for­ward to another fun-filled, action-packed Annual and hop­ing for a lit­tle down­time here and there to catch up with friends. It’s strange being on the staff side of the con­fer­ence, as I don’t get to hang out as much, but it’s excit­ing being able to help con­nect atten­dees with each other, as well as good con­tent. I hope to see you there.

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Yes­ter­day I gave an overview of the Thinker­ing Spaces project, so today I want to explain a lit­tle more about how we were able to manip­u­late con­tent using the var­i­ous tech­nolo­gies and objects.

RFID is a big com­po­nent of the sys­tem, as it iden­ti­fies con­tent and allows it to travel with an object. To start, the TS folks put a book with an RFID chip on the reader, which trig­gers a process that dis­plays the cover on the screen, along with a key­board for typ­ing text to asso­ciate with the title. In this case, the con­tainer is the book, and the user can draw or type to add con­tent that will travel with it. To illus­trate this, they remove the first book and put a sec­ond one on the reader. A new cover image appears, along with some infor­ma­tion that’s already been added by a pre­vi­ous user. Take that book off and put the first one back on, and the con­tent we added reap­pears. The whole thing is very cool, and I imme­di­ately started think­ing about local his­tory col­lec­tions, school­work, and reader reviews. All of which is the point — your librar­ian mind starts hop­ping with possibilities.

Then they showed us a library card with an RFID chip in it. This one hap­pened to have infor­ma­tion about me stored on it, so putting it on the reader brought up infor­ma­tion about me, which rotated with books I rec­om­mend. Oth­ers in the Thinker­ing Space could see all of this about me, which would be great if I was work­ing with a group I’m men­tor­ing, coör­di­nat­ing, or col­lab­o­rat­ing with. The IIT folks under­stand the pri­vacy issues involved, though, so they’re explor­ing dif­fer­ent ways to han­dle this. Alter­na­tives include using avatars with­out per­son­ally iden­ti­fi­able infor­ma­tion, hav­ing the group build a per­sona to achieve cer­tain skills, and using spe­cial cards for col­lab­o­ra­tive clubs rather than embed­ding the infor­ma­tion in stan­dard library cards (this would pro­vide an opt-in sys­tem). None of this is set in stone, but it demon­strates one way in which library users might share infor­ma­tion about them­selves in the phys­i­cal library.

Next, we began play­ing with the story of The Wiz­ard of Oz by plac­ing a Rubik’s Cube with RFID chips on it on a reader. The starter Oz con­tent is attached to this con­tainer and it can include the text and images from the book itself. Plac­ing a sec­ond, blank, paper “sto­rycube” on the reader brings up a tem­plate where some­one can use a wand to drag and drop images into a tem­plate to tell a story, which can then be saved to another object (in this case, it was a small doll). Putting a sec­ond doll on the reader brought up some­one else’s story. The con­tainer could be any­thing that uses RFID or bar­codes. Turn­ing the cube pro­duces other con­tent, such as weather maps (watch for tor­na­does), and putting a cam­era on the reader brings up pic­tures and images related to the book, all of which can be manip­u­lated on the screen.

TJ then took some pic­tures of the group and other objects in the space, and since his dig­i­tal cam­era had an Eye-Fi card in it, the pic­tures began appear­ing on the screen as well. We could then mash up these pic­tures with text, sounds, and other dig­i­tal con­tent to cre­ate a nar­ra­tive, a pre­sen­ta­tion, a doc­u­ment, or just explore them all together. The space also has a dig­i­tal micro­scope and a web­cam that can project images onto the screen as well.

We also played with a col­lab­o­ra­tive draw­ing table that just does a basic col­or­ing demo right now. How­ever, the idea is that there might be some projects where users can work on their own pieces sep­a­rately to build a larger whole, or they may have to col­lab­o­rate and work together as a team to cre­ate some­thing. Some­times they might have their head down work­ing, but other times they might have their head up, inter­act­ing with the other par­tic­i­pants. Pretty much every­thing in the space is based on col­lab­o­ra­tion, as opposed to sin­gle users.

What I like about these ideas is that they expand on exist­ing con­tent in the library, using the library’s col­lec­tion, and mash­ing it up with users’ ideas to cre­ate some­thing new. It’s Jon Udell’s remixed phys­i­cal library, not just the online one. Or the users cre­ate some­thing new from the begin­ning, based on their inter­ac­tions with our col­lec­tions and ser­vices. The com­mu­nity can con­tribute con­tent and knowl­edge, and the library could archive it.

And it doesn’t have to be just for kids or stu­dents. For seniors who have trou­ble using a mouse and a com­puter, a setup that lets them use a wand (or even bet­ter, their fin­gers) to drag objects might allow them to play with dig­i­tal con­tent (espe­cially local his­tory) in dif­fer­ent ways. Could fam­i­lies cre­ate genealog­i­cal his­to­ries this way and mash them up with com­mu­nity resources? The Shanachies in the Nether­lands intend to build a giant screen in the DOK Library Con­cept Cen­ter where res­i­dents can post their own sto­ries and pic­tures. Imag­ine com­bin­ing that with library cards that let those res­i­dents update their sto­ries and remix them in a Thinker­ing Space.

It will be inter­est­ing to see what hap­pens to things like nar­ra­tive and copy­right in these types of envi­ron­ments. One of the ques­tions now is will libraries be one of them? This project gives me hope that the answer is yes, and hon­estly, what bet­ter insti­tu­tion do we have in which to dis­cuss, explore, and imple­ment the answers?

See also:

• Thinker­ing Spaces in Libraries
• Imple­ment­ing the Pro­to­type (Thinker­ing Spaces III)

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Today I saw one pos­si­ble future for libraries, and it has me pretty excited. I can look back on my pro­fes­sional career and see a pro­gres­sion of advo­cat­ing for shift­ing ser­vices to where our users are, mak­ing our spaces more col­lab­o­ra­tive, and rein­vig­o­rat­ing libraries as the com­mu­nity cen­ter (regard­less of type of library). It’s why I’ve explored tech­nol­ogy, blog­ging, RSS, social net­works, gam­ing, and col­lab­o­ra­tive spaces. Today, many of those pieces came together for me in a pretty amaz­ing pack­age that has the power to reimag­ine the library as third place, cross some dig­i­tal divides, and inte­grate par­tic­i­pa­tory cul­ture into our ser­vice model. Even bet­ter, it involves peo­ple and books, not just technology.

So what did I see today? A project called Thinker­ing Spaces, con­ceived of by some very smart peo­ple at the Illi­nois Insti­tute of Technology’s Insti­tute of Design and funded by the MacArthur Foun­da­tion. After quite a bit of ini­tial vision­ing and research, this group has built a pro­to­type for a rel­a­tively cheap, portable, col­lab­o­ra­tive space that can be put up and taken down in libraries of any size on the fly. It’s built using an out-of-the-catalog Steel­case frame, and uses Johnny Chung Lee’s Nintedo wiimote hacks to cre­ate an inex­pen­sive, drag-and-drop envi­ron­ment. The tech­nol­ogy is as plug and play as it can be to cre­ate an open source, open con­tent space where any future tech­nol­ogy that is built on these stan­dards can be eas­ily integrated.

The point is to bring spaces into libraries that let peo­ple col­lab­o­rate around the con­tent that already exists in in our build­ings, add new con­tent to the mix, mash it all up to cre­ate some­thing new, and share it with the com­mu­nity. Rinse. Repeat. It’s a way to con­nect peo­ple with the phys­i­cal world and help them make sense of it by inter­act­ing with and chang­ing it. It’s another instance where the library adds value to the equa­tion (the same way it does with books and now games), offer­ing an expe­ri­ence you can’t repli­cate at home, borne of the com­mu­nity. TJ, the pro­gram­ming wiz­ard behind the cur­tain, called it a “human inter­face envi­ron­ment,” rather than a “human com­puter inter­ac­tion.” It takes the focus off tech­nol­ogy and puts it back onto the people.

The var­i­ous pieces are designed for dif­fer­ent types of inter­ac­tions, including:

• asynchronous
• synchronous
• sub­scribe to a men­tor (one-to-many)
• col­lab­o­ra­tive storytelling/joint commentary
• cumu­la­tive expe­ri­ence (see what oth­ers have done and build on it or change it)

Because the space is scal­able down to 5’x5’ or expand­able up to 12’x12’, it should fit in most build­ings in some form. Libraries could assem­ble the full ver­sion one day and only cer­tain pieces the next week. It could be used at spe­cific times for cer­tain pro­gram­ming and then bro­ken down and stored until the next ses­sion. It has its own con­tained wire­less net­work, or it could access the library’s wifi. It’s designed to cre­ate a dis­tinct, exploratory envi­ron­ment that doesn’t require any­one to run it.

Out of all of the dis­cus­sions and demon­stra­tions today, TJ summed it up best when he said the project is about ” ‘look at what I did,’ as opposed to ‘look at what I bought.’ ” To pro­vide that type of inter­ac­tion in the safe, non-commercialized third place of the library for the entire com­mu­nity is a pretty excit­ing prospect. No other entity in the com­mu­nity could pro­vide the breadth and depth of this type of expe­ri­ence. The team at IIT — Dale Fahn­strom, Greg Pry­grocki, Heloisa Moura, and TJ McLeish — has cre­ated a work­ing pro­to­type that daz­zles the imag­i­na­tion for the next gen­er­a­tion of library services.

Over the next few days, I’ll write more about the details, the plan, and what I hope is the future of the project, but for now you can see my Flickr set of pic­tures from today’s visit to get an idea of what it looks like and what it can do. Keep­ing in mind that it’s still in the pro­to­type phase, it’s still pretty inspiring.

See also:

• Mash­ing Up Con­tent in the Library (Thinker­ing Spaces II)
• Imple­ment­ing the Pro­to­type (Thinker­ing Spaces III)

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