NEWS FEATURE Trading trust
Are public and academic libraries making trades that will be invisible to the next generation and increasingly difficult to reverse?
DURING a public conversation between Sir Roly Keating, CEO of the British Library and Tony Ageh, former NYPL digital direc- tor, an audience member asked why younger generations were so trusting of big tech.
“Imagine there’s a Consumer Tony and a Citizen Tony,” Tony said. “As I was growing up it was a healthy bal- ance, possibly leaning towards Citizen Tony. But over the years I think Con- sumer Tony has started to take over. He prefers things to be free and is willing to sacrifice an awful lot of Citizen Tony’s rights and it’s become unbalanced.” But he says: “People born into that era probably don’t even know they’ve made that trade… they’ve just come in as consumers and have not realised that somebody, somewhere, has traded in their citizen-ness.” (find the inter- view at
https://libraryon.org/pressplay)
Public libraries
He sees deals being done, even with benign forces, in public libraries as potentially devastating. “I am not a fan of eBooks at all. They are good, they
are very useful but my concern is that the services are not provided by the libraries and therefore the librarians are being edged out.”
He mentioned Overdrive, which he believes has good intentions, saying: “Steve (Potash, founder and CEO) is a very good personal friend of mine, we go out a lot, we talk a lot, and I tell him, ’you know you’ve got to be very careful because the more you try and help, the harder it will be for librarians to replace you at some point’ and I do worry that many of the most important relationships between patrons and librarians are being, dis-intermedia- ted… they are being usurped.” Part of Tony’s work at NYPL was eBooks and the library’s Simply E plat- form, which he says “was trying to pull together all the commercially provided services like Overdrive, Access 360 and almost trying to disintermediate them, create a layer between them and the patrons, so we could put the librarians back in.”
Academic Motivating anyone to pre-empt future
problems in any sector isn’t easy, even where relations between buyers and sell- ers are already negative. For example, encouraging the academic community to be proactive in responding to new and growing privacy concerns was the aim of a recent report by SPARC (The Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition) – (
https://bit.ly/49SqF8Q). This highlighted the potential gap between the privacy libraries promise their users, and the privacy policies of the companies that libraries buy licences from and “the need to be aware of this risk.” SPARC says big publishers are becoming information analytics businesses and that “insti- tutions should actively evaluate and address the potential privacy risks as this transition occurs, rather than after it is complete.”
The report specifically analyses pub- licly available documents and practices of Elsevier’s ScienceDirect, according to SPARC. But Elsevier contests its findings, saying it “includes incorrect and misleading information about our user data and privacy practices” and that Elsevier “does not use surveillance software, sell any personal usage data to any third parties or use vague language in our contracts”.
Whatever the details of the dispute, it shows the importance of presenting potential problems in a way that will motivate institutions to take action.
Individual
But individuals can still make their own decisions about the issues their institutions are struggling with. Tony said he’s had digital jobs since 1995, including bringing the Internet to The Guardian and iPlayer to the BBC. “My job title at the BBC was controller of the Internet,” he said, “so you would have thought I’d be an advocate. And yet I’ve never been on Facebook. Not accidentally. I have never trusted some aspects of the internet.”
12 INFORMATION PROFESSIONAL April-May 2024
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52 |
Page 53 |
Page 54 |
Page 55 |
Page 56
