Group 42-Sells Out! - The Information Archive/Group 42 Sells Out (Group 42) (1996).iso/privacy/rotenber.txt

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8.  PRIVACY AND INTELLECTUAL FREEDOM IN THE DIGITAL LIBRARY
    Friday, March 20, 1992

    Chair:  Marc Rotenberg, Computer Professionals for
                            Social Responsibility

    Panel:  Robert Walton, CLSI, Inc.
            Gordon Conable, Monroe (MI) County Library
                            System
            Jean Armour Polly, Liverpool (NY) Public Library
            Steve Cisler, Apple Computing


ROTENBERG: Oftentimes we speak about privacy and freedom as
if they are two competing goals, but I think the lesson that
we may have to learn from this panel is that, in fact, they
are complementary goals.  During the last several years it
has become clear in the United States Congress and a number
of other places as well that libraries continue to be the
source for some of the best ideas about how to protect
personal privacy in record-keeping systems.  We're going to
be hearing more about that on this panel.

But something else has happened in the last several months
that should be particularly interesting to the people who are
participating in this conference and interested in the
application of the First Amendment and traditional press
freedoms to the computer networks.  In October this past
year, Judge Peter Leisure, who's a federal district court
judge in New York City, issued an opinion in a case called
Compuserve vs. Cobbie.  At issue in that case was a question
of the publication of allegedly defamatory material through
the Compuserve service.  Now the question that Leisure
confronted was whether to analogize the Compuserve service to
a traditional publisher like the New York Times or the
Washington Post, or whether perhaps to adopt a different
model, like a library or a bookstore or a newsstand.  The
conclusion that Leisure reached in trying to find the most
robust framework to promote the free flow of information was
that under the traditional newspaper analysis, Compuserve
might well be held liable for the publication of defamatory
information.  But if instead Compuserve was viewed as a
library, as a bookstore, or as a newsstand, which could not
possibly be responsible for reviewing the contents or the
words of all the publications that they helped to
disseminate, then they would not be held liable.  Leisure
reasoned that therefore this was the better approach to
promote the flow of information in the new emerging
electronic environment.  I think that's a very interesting
insight and may provide some guidance for how we understand
the computers, freedom, and privacy world.

Let me begin now by introducing our first speaker.  He is
Robert Walton, the president of CLSI, the oldest and largest
library automation vendor in the world, with headquarters in
Newtonville, Massachusetts.  Prior to assuming the presidency
of CLSI, he was president of Walton-Bridge Consulting in
Austin, Texas, a leading library automation consulting and
marketplace research firm.  Mr. Walton is well known to the
library community, having over fifteen years experience as an
executive automation consultant faculty member and as a
writer and a librarian.  Bob Walton.


WALTON: Good morning.  Since we are going to try and stay on
time, my ten minutes is ticking on the large $3000 tick-off
clock down in the other end of the hall, so what we'd like
to do is walk you through a series of slides.  I've been
asked to try and represent a point of view, primarily as a
producer of technologies that libraries can assume, and how
this might have an impact on some of the topics that we are
focused on today.  We'll have to dim the lights if we're
going to use the slides.

If you were to go to a typical library school and try and
understand the focus of what librarians are taught to do in
terms of the purpose of their institutions, clearly it's a
very traditional role of recognizing that the library has
been primarily a place.  It's not a service, it's a group of
walls within which books and materials are located.  We're
now in the process as a profession of trying to change the
image of what a library is to less of a place and more of a
service.

INSERT FIG. 8-1 & CAPTION: "Figure 8-1"

Figure 8-1 is an inscription at Enoch Pratt that really is
used and characterizes what most librarians view as their
purpose -- that is, to be a source of wisdom, a source of
information that can allow anyone of any socioeconomic
bracket to have access to the world's information.

INSERT FIG. 8-2 & CAPTION: "Figure 8-2"

In contrast to that would be something I would call the
indictment (Figure 8-2), and that is a statement made by a
faculty member at Emory which basically says that our current
libraries as institutions today are really nothing more than
warehouses -- they are buildings that hold material.  They
remain static, they remain focused on what librarians like to
do -- which is collect things, not distribute things -- and
his indictment would indicate that we have the greatest
amount of opportunity through the use of technology to begin
to see this change.

If we were to look at my colleague vendors, the firms that
supply automated systems to libraries, and how that's going
to make a shift in the tone and the focus of our perspective
as a profession, unfortunately we don't hold much hope that
we are going to see a significant change over the near term,
and it may be the long term before things begin to really
focus in new and sort of broadening directions.  If we were
to look at high, modern, and low as the R&D dollars of
library automation vendors today, most of those dollars are
focused on fulfilling prior commitments which have not been
met (Figure 8-3).  In technology, we call that contract
commitments; if we are normal people, we call it lying before
you have a product.

INSERT FIG. 8-3 & CAPTION: "Figure 8-3"

The second priority is to try and adjust to what can only be
called the promiscuous growth of technology--the ability to
handle the variety of platforms that all types of
institutions, including libraries, are desperate to acquire.
The less expensive and more available they become, the more
we as software providers are desperately scrambling to
support as many of these platforms as possible to remain
viable.  If you look on the low end, where we should be
investing most of our dollars in terms of broadening our
emphasis, it ought to be on delivering full text, moving to
expert systems, working on archival imaging as opposed to
traditional text-oriented databases, and looking at things
that have to do with incorporating statistical and non-
textual data into the function we call a library to begin to
really expand access.

Charles Hildreth, who is one of the early developers of the
online catalog, really summed it up best (Figure 8-4).  He
says that we should be really focusing on trying to develop
an online catalog, which would be an online library, where we
begin to really envision our role as serving people that may
never come into a building.  Perhaps some of these buildings
that we've invested in will simply become mausoleums of the
future and not really be the focus of what we as librarians
do.

INSERT FIG. 8-4 & CAPTION: "Figure 8-4"

A good example of this would have been found in the Wall
Street Journal article that caught my eye.  The front page
article was titled, "Plug in, Sign on, and Read Milton
Electronic Classic.  Project Gutenberg is sending good books
to computers everywhere for free."  Here's an English
professor at a small liberal arts college in Illinois who's
tired of waiting for libraries, so he's bought a bunch of
PCs, hired a bunch of students, and they're keying in full
text of the classic books and distributing them over the
Internet.  His goal is to have as many as 10,000 titles by
the year 2000 --they only have twelve titles completely done
today, and at 25 per year, obviously he's got a little way to
go.  The interesting thing about the article was the
reactions of some of his fellow faculty members at his
university, and I quote one, "Are you a Communist?"
(laughter)

INSERT FIG. 8-5 & CAPTION: "Figure 8-5"

If you look at the predictions of Alan Turing (Figure 8-5),
the problem that we in libraries have, being fairly
conservative as a profession, is that we don't believe many
of the claims of what technology has to offer us as an
institution.  In fact, if we look back on what Alan Turing
said about the things that were going to come when he made
these predictions in 1950, most of the communities said,
"What's wrong with you, Alan? Are you nuts?"  I think we can
very clearly see that those things have really come to
fruition.

The second excuse that librarians use is that the ultimate
drop in cost of these technologies, as publicly-based
institutions, has got to stop.  Well, how cheap can it really
get? Surely we're going to hit a point where we can't
continue to see drops in cost so that the technology can
become more embraceable by the libraries that perhaps are not
the wealthiest in the country.

INSERT FIG. 8-6 & CAPTION: "Figure 8-6"

The reality is that if you really look at the cost of these
technologies, as probably you know as well as I, it's really
in terms of the intellectual effort that goes into the design
of them.  It's not really the cost as focused on raw
materials that go into the devices.  We're reaching a point
now where between 2 to 5% of the cost of most workstations is
actually raw material cost (Figure 8-6), and the rest is
actually the development cost and the amortization of
knowledge.  It's also the marketing -- it pays for the
airline tickets to come speak at ACM.  All of these factors
that are not really material costs are added into the
material, and are included in how you package and sell that
particular technology.

INSERT FIG. 8-7 & CAPTION: "Figure 8-7"

If we were to look, for example, at all of the monographic
publications of 1990 (Figure 8-7), including not only popular
trade material, but also proceedings of conferences, academic
papers, etc., there are approximately 70,000 titles published
in that year.  Using even today's fairly antiquated disk
storage technology, a library could have full-text online
storage of every publication of 1990 for about $250,000.  And
you can see the trend lines that develop.

Certainly if we understand the importance of time as a
resource in itself, and we look at our own careers ten or
fifteen years from now, libraries do have definitely within
their embrace a massive amount of information that they're
going to have to cope with.

This information is going to pose a number of significant
problems for a library.  If we look at the barriers to this
type of a library situation, it's not going to be technology.
Librarians still tend to focus on the technology.  We as
vendors encourage that because it's something we can control.

INSERT FIG. 8-8 & CAPTION: "Figure 8-8"

The real issues for a library are going to be the following
(Figure 8-8): intellectual ownership of the information --
it's not simple, as you probably understand from the focus of
this conference -- the issue of how publishers are going to
benefit from electronic distribution as opposed to paper
distribution, where they have much more control and can
exercise a greater amount of security.  There are a lot of
legal liability issues, and there's certainly institutional
egoism.  As we look at the problems of networking, they're
much less technical than they are a matter of institutional
egos that have to begin to stop talking about "my library"
and start talking about "my consortium."  And then we have
the obvious economic impacts, which are going to be important
for many public libraries as they try and understand the
impact that they're going to have in creating, not a
classless society, but perhaps a more class-oriented society
based upon one's ability to pay.

INSERT FIG. 8-9 & CAPTION: "Figure 8-9"

Even on something as simple as open access to the
information, we haven't accomplished some of the things that
we all hold to be basically fundamental in terms of our
impression of what a library has, and that is free access to
information (Figure 8-9).  As we've seen what Bill Moffett
did at the Huntington, California library with the Dead Sea
Scrolls, and as we look at the way even presidential papers
are restricted in terms of their access and the timeliness of
their release, clearly we have a long way to go, regardless
of the technology, in simply making information available.
Some people think that is a technological barrier and not an
intellectual one.

INSERT FIG. 8-10 & CAPTION: "Figure 8-10"

We also are going to have to understand the issue of
information malpractice (Figure 8-10).  For the first time,
libraries are not going to be passive distributors of
information, they are going to be active authors of
information.  They're not going to author the information
itself, they are going to repackage it, they're going to
develop interfaces, they're going to allow intelligent
systems to guide people to conclusions based upon the way
that they present that information.

Traditionally, malpractice has been something that has not
been a big concern to libraries because they have been
protected by the general theory that as long as you exercise
some skill and are prudent in a use of a particular tool, you
are not personally liable.

INSERT FIG. 8-11 & CAPTION: "Figure 8-11"

However, as we look at the traditional limitations going
away, we begin to see some disturbing trends.  In the last
three years, there have been three cases (Figure 8-11), which
we don't have time to discuss in detail now, which indicate
that there are going to be liabilities for libraries and
private providers of information as they begin not only to
repackage information, but also when the information provided
to them is inaccurate.  They are going to be held
responsible.  Perhaps the most damning of these was the
second one -- the Brocklesby case, where they repackaged FAA
data and put it into graphical form using a CAD/CAM system.
A pilot, enjoying looking at a map, instead of a table of
data, flew his plane into a mountain that wasn't supposed to
be there.  Even though the FAA data was in error, even though
the private library that had packaged this and produced it as
an alternate tool was absent of malice, they were found
guilty and had to pay not only consequential but punitive
damages.

INSERT FIG. 8-12 & CAPTION: "Figure 8-12"

If we look at what's going to change this, the catalyst of
improving technology is going to be important for the
following reasons (Figure 8-12): we're going to see drops in
costs to lead libraries that will exacerbate the issues I
raised before, and we're going to see changes in policy that
will put pressure on libraries to either get in or out of the
information business in a more aggressive way.  I think the
way that we'll reach success on that will be the death or
resignation of some of our key library managers.  (laughter)
Thank you very much. (applause)


ROTENBERG: Thank you.  Our next speaker is Gordon Conable.
Gordon is director of the Monroe County Library System, in
Monroe, Michigan.  He is vice president of the Freedom to
Read Foundation, and the immediate past chair of the American
Library Association's Intellectual Freedom Committee.
Gordon?


CONABLE: Good morning.  There's a tension that librarians
deal with between the free flow of information and respect
for the privacy of individuals.  This conflict arises in much
of what we do -- it is central to the ethical obligations of
librarianship that turns many of us prematurely gray.
Librarians use computers to control the circulation of their
materials by matching records of the items which they hold
with records of the patrons who borrow or use them.  These
computers can provide bibliographic access to information
-- digital storage is an increasingly functional way to store
and retrieve vast quantities of text.  Librarians use
computers to facilitate resource sharing, interlibrary loans,
and document delivery; and libraries, like all other
institutions in the information business, are living
through the transformation of document production,
publication, retention, distribution, and organization from
paper to electronic forms.

The role of libraries as custodians of recorded information
is being transformed.  The role of librarians as organizers,
mediators, and searchers is being transformed.  The role of
librarians as advocates of free expression is being
transformed.  As automation alters the way we carry out our
traditional tasks -- the acquisition, organization,
maintenance, and distribution of information in physical,
primarily paper, formats -- we must ensure that our new
methods still reflect the underlying principles which define
our purpose.

Most current applications of automation in libraries are in
inventory control, access, and circulation.  We call the
first of these bibliographic control, by which we mean the
physical and intellectual description of packages of
information, books, etc., for the purpose of identification
of them and retrieval of them.  The model is still based
around the requirements of organizing and handling physical
objects in print format in a manner which accommodates their
storage and the browsing retrieval of them.  We take books
and we describe what they look like, and then we describe
their intellectual content in a manner that they can be
housed so that topics of the same subject matter are
physically next to each other on shelves.  This is labor
intensive.  Automation has allowed us to save a great deal of
time and increase our productivity because every library in
the world doesn't have to do the description independently
any more.

If we were not storing things in print form, what we would
have to do in terms of the retrieval mechanism and the
classification and description would be very different.  So,
as we migrate into full text storage in electronic format,
the task of organizing libraries becomes very different.

Circulation is transaction control which matches the
inventory of physical objects, books -- units of information
-- with an inventory of users.  It's based on the old model
-- we still want to issue library cards.  But what automation
does is enable us to gather a great deal more information
about the user and the use that they make of library
materials than we ever could under manual systems.  And this
raises serious ethical questions about the privacy of the
individuals and our ability to protect the confidentiality of
use of materials.

Libraries, particularly publicly-funded libraries, are
institutions which derive their function and their
justification from the First Amendment.  The American system
recognizes not only broad rights of free expression, but also
a corollary right to receive information freely without
government interference.  This corollary right has been
recognized in the courts, including the U.S. Supreme Court,
as necessary for free speech to have meaning.  If there is no
right to receive a speaker's ideas, the effect of the speech
is as effectively muzzled as if the speaker were gagged.  For
librarians, the right to receive information without
government interference also means the right to receive it
confidentially.  The privacy of one's thought processes and
of the subject matter that one is thinking about -- the
individual's proprietary right to inquiry, if you will -- is
central to individual intellectual freedom.

There is an increasing array of attempts to attribute
exposure to certain types of expression with a causation of
criminal or antisocial behavior.  This is the Ted Bundy
theory of criminal responsibility: I read Playboy, therefore
I raped and murdered.  This theory is being embodied
in pending federal legislation, in state legislation, in
tort claims, and in creative criminal defense.  Fortunately,
American case law still rejects the notion that "monkey see
monkey do" is an enforceable legal principle or an adequate
criminal defense.  However, there are increasing and
persistent attempts to validate this simplistic explanation
of disturbing, frightening, or threatening behavior.  This
reinforces the notion that the right to privacy of
information use is a necessary protection if free inquiry is
to continue to exist.  For if we judge each other by what we
assume to be the consequences of what we read, we surrender a
crucial element of our freedom.

In an era where information resources are indistinguishable
from economic resources as a basis for power, libraries are
one of the few leveling forces in the society.  This happens
to be consistent with Andrew Carnegie's dream, which
motivated him to give a lot of money to establish public
libraries in this country in the first place.  Carnegie felt
the library was the institution which would enable the common
person to lift himself up by his bootstraps -- the gender is
not a mistake in the case of Andrew Carnegie -- and what he
meant was that the information would allow the individual to
achieve economic accomplishment in the society.  That's why
Carnegie thought it was important that libraries be free,
that there was a public good in making it possible for
anyone, regardless of his or her means, to have access to the
information which would economically empower them, or
politically empower them.  This only works if libraries
continue to be supported as a public good, without fee and
without charge -- tax support of these services, and keeping
of them open for all, without fees.

The change in technology makes this hard to maintain because
the economics of electronic information are different from
the economics of print information, and there's a political
transition that libraries are having some difficulty making.
Two recent court cases reinforce the perception of the
importance of the free public library and the right to access
of information, if freedom is to continue to remain in this
country.  One of those is a case in Morristown, New Jersey in
which the library passed regulations which limited the rights
of an indigent person to access that library.  The case has
had a lot of media attention, but the judge in the case, a
federal court judge, ruled that the right to receive
information in the library was a First Amendment right, and
that government regulations which basically excluded people
for arbitrary, capricious, or economic reasons had imposed
upon their First Amendment right to receive information.  The
case is on appeal, but if the basic principle is upheld, a
large blow will have been struck for the principle that the
government has a function in providing access to information
to all, regardless of means.  And if that is so, the strength
of America's libraries will have been substantially
reinforced.

The other case is not one about which I feel so optimistic,
and that case, I think, was referred to by Robert Peck
yesterday -- Rust vs. Sullivan -- which arose out of abortion
controversy, but basically has established at the Supreme
Court level a legal principle in this country that funding
dictates the content of speech, and that if the federal
government gives you a dime in any way, they can dictate what
you say, and they can muzzle what you say.  This is an
extremely disturbing precedent because it says that the power
of the purse to control speech is now established as the law
of the land, and it is just beginning to be applied in areas
other than abortion.  This is the first major inroad of
federal enforcement of politically-correct speech, and it is
ironic that this court ruling came out in the same week that
President Bush made a speech decrying politically-correct
speech on campuses.

There are other issues that libraries face in relation to
automation and that relate to the privacy of patron use.  One
of those has to do with database licensing, since some
databases are licensed with the expectation that the users of
those databases be limited by some sort of characteristic.
There are business databases which cannot be marketed to
labor organizations.  Libraries which do not screen their
users by these kinds of classifications are faced with a
dilemma if they buy into those kinds of licensing agreements.

Another issue that I want to mention is the question of
archival integrity.  A book is printed, and while books do
not last forever, they have some permanence --  once the
words are printed on the page, they remain that way until
another book is printed.  Electronic information is much more
malleable, creating a problem that librarians are sensitive
to -- that if you can change the text electronically and
rapidly, revisionists have a powerful new tool.  If we are to
have any kind of a permanent record of what we were thinking
at any given time, this is an issue which will have to be
confronted and dealt with.

Librarians have addressed and thought for 100 years about
many of the issues which are being discussed at this
conference.  We have promulgated opinions, policies,
interpretations, and statements on these subjects; we have
been concerned about the protection of the content as much as
we have about the technological delivery of the information.
Many of the people in this room are coming to these subjects
from the point of view of technological delivery of
information.  As you address the implications of the
technology upon the content of the information, which is
after all the most important part of it, come and talk to us.
We know a great deal about it; we've written some things
about it.  This is our intellectual freedom manual -- the
fourth edition will be out in June.  Buy it, you'll find some
things that apply.  Thank you very much.  (applause)


ROTENBERG: Our third speaker is Jean Armour Polly, who is the
assistant director for public services at the Liverpool
Public Library.  She has been a strong advocate for public
technology in libraries, and is a member of five of the
sponsoring organizations of this conference.  She is also a
co-host of the Apple Library Users Group SIG on the WELL.


POLLY: You guys get to guess which five I belong to.  I think
you can probably guess.  I thought that I had fifteen
minutes; I discovered I have ten, so I'm just going to whip
through these overheads, and we're going to talk just a
little bit.  If you see anything that you're real interested
in, give me a call or send me E-mail.

Insert Fig. 8-13 & caption "Figure 8-13"

Everybody always wants to know, well, where in the world is
Liverpool Public Library, and Figure 8-13 shows you.  We're
in the central part of New York state, in NYSERNET country.
Oh, and I'm supposed to say that the ALA -- American Library
Association -- does have an 800 number: 1-800-530-8888.  You
can call us toll-free and get all sorts of cool information
on intellectual freedom and all of our publications.
(audience interruption -- "wrong number") Oh, that's what
they gave me -- what is the number now?  1-800-545-2433.
Thank you --an update, version 2.0.

Insert Fig. 8-14 & caption "Figure 8-14"

Figure 8-14 showsthe top ten factoids of Liverpool Public
Library in the computing era, the last ten years.  We're
celebrating ten years of public computing, we've got a public
lab, we've got seven or eight computers of all varieties and
flavors, Macs, PCs, Apple-IIs, what-not, we've got a lot of
stuff there.  I don't have time to tell you all about it.
Since 1984, we've been circulating software for home use.
We've got about 1500 titles, and, of course, multiple copies
of those titles.  We are in full compliance with the Computer
Software Rental and Loan Act of 1990 -- we don't have time to
talk about it.  We have a staff LAN, we have lots of people
in our computer department.  We're very unusual for a public
library, and we like to think of ourselves as a center of the
public computing universe in libraries in America. (laughter)
Let's see, we do a lot of nontraditional services -- we do
file transfer, we do scanning, and we do serve the patrons.
We get a lot of people who come in and say, "My entire life
is on this disk, and I have no backup."  We help them out.

We run our own Apple Library Apple users group there at the
library, and we have about 150-some members now.  We have
free membership, we have meetings and newsletters and what-
not.  We ran a public electronic bulletin board -- I'm going
to talk about it on the next view-graph.  We had a free
public site to take advantage of the GENIE Desert Storm E-
mail free service that they ran during the Desert Storm
conflict, and I think we were the first public library to
offer that service in a public setting.  Subsequently,
several others picked up on that.  We also ran Operation
Oasis, which was an airlift that the computer department ran.
I don't know why the computer department ran that -- we have
a lot of strange people in our department.  We did three
airlifts with 60,000 pounds of stuff, including 13,000 books
and games, puzzles, you name it, we sent it.  We're a Library
of Congress American Memory beta test site -- I don't have
time to talk about it.  This is a wonderful project and I'll
be happy to send you more stuff on it.  Basically, it's an
interactive video disk out-of-the-archives-and-into-the-
streets type of thing of original materials for people to
use.  We're an Apple Library of Tomorrow test site, and of
course, the number one factoid is that we are the smallest
public library with an Internet host.  Running out of time
here.


Just briefly, we ran the electronic bulletin board.  We were
the first library east of Chicago to run one.  There were
really no BBSs in our area, which is why we decided to fill
the void, plus we thought there should really be a publicly-
run BBS opportunity for people to share information.  In our
area, and I'm sure this is true in your areas too, there are
boards that are run by people that may or may not support the
Constitution.  So we decided, seeing that we've had this 100
years of experience with the Constitution and intellectual
freedom, that it would be a real good idea for the library to
run one.  Well, actually the dates I showed were wrong.  We
ran it for about two and a half or three years before we
finally took it down.  During that time we pretty much
experienced all the intellectual freedom issues known to man,
or to woman, as the case may be.  We let anybody come in and
use the computer, home computer, or any kind of computer
could come in.  We let people use online pseudonyms, but they
had to give us their real names.  We posted our rules and
regs in the welcome message so everybody knew when they came
in the door what the deal was.  We didn't allow any kind of
illegal activities discussed, and there would be no
profanity.  How did we get around that? The particular
software we ran had an obscenity filter in it (laughter),
which meant that we had to have a meeting to figure out all
the obscene words that we knew.  (laughter) Well, it was a
fun meeting, and not something that they taught me in library
school (laughter), but it made for an interesting meeting, as
I said.  We hadn't allowed for people that could swear but
could not spell.  (laughter)  We also didn't realize that you
could be really dirty without ever spelling a word out in its
entirety and our parser was not that sophisticated.

Insert Fig. 8-15 & caption "Figure 8-15"

Figure 8-15 lists some of the stuff we had on the night shift
BBS, and one of things that we did grapple with was religious
fanatics on the board.  Now we ran this, keep in mind this
was mid-80's, a 48K Apple II Plus with three disk drives.
Now I'm not talking 1.2 gigs here -- I'm talking 5-1/4-inch
floppy drives.  Remember those? There was a certain amount of
space that we allotted to message bases, and once that filled
up, it would delete the oldest messages.  Well, in an
evening, if you had a particular ax to grind, you could
pretty much fill up the message base and take up all the
publicly-accessible space.  Well, this wasn't good, and one
of the groups that was doing this was a particular religious
group which shall remain nameless unless you catch me in the
hall later.  (laughter) These folks decided that they would
fill up all the message boards every night with copyrighted
material.  Well, that was our out.  We did not allow
copyrighted material on the board, once we found out it was
copyrighted.  Another thing that happened was people did not
want to read this information, so we gave this particular
group their own message board and people could either go
there and read it or not go there and read it.  We called it
the 200 Club (laughter) because in the Dewey Decimal System,
the 200 range is for religion and philosophy. (laughter)
Well, librarians have a sense of humor, and in Cyberspace we
have to do this too.  Anyway, what pulled the plug on this
finally was that we had a proliferation of boards in our
area, and time and resources.  Of course, libraries never
have enough of either.  But the third thing was what really
pulled the plug -- it was the specter of government
regulation that scared us off.  We didn't want to be a test
site to test a case for the FBI, although now I find out if I
had just encrypted my files, I probably would have been okay.
We didn't want to be a place where pedophiles could solicit
children, so after upholding our public-spirited principles
for so long and so well, we gave up with a whimper.

But we're not gone forever.  Recently, a year ago, our mid-
level regional came to us and courted us, and we got married
to the Internet.  How am I doing on time? Oh, pretty badly.

What did this experience teach me? Well, acquire what people
want, make everything available to everybody, and make it
free to come in the door and look, give everyone library
cards but get some ID first, don't let people appropriate
your materials without your knowing about it, if they screw
up there may be a fine, let them know that, if you break
something tell someone, and don't use library materials in
the bathtub. (laughter)

Okay, what am I doing with my Internet connectivity? Well,
I'm doing a whole bunch of cool stuff-- I'm FTP-ing all over
the place, I'm telnetting into probably your sites, but my
real thing is--I want to get my library clients interested in
what they can do with networking.  I want them especially to
ask for public access to the NREN because if they don't ask
for it, they probably won't get it.  Well, much has been made
of this public on-ramp to this data highway, but we need more
than just the on-ramp.  We need the travel brochures, we need
the rest stops, we need the AAA of networking.  I don't know
who's going to be providing that service.  It may be public
libraries, it may be mid-level regionals, it may be NSF, it
may be a combination of all of those things.

I'm concerned about the GPO Window project -- I think it's
going to be wonderful, it's a one-stop shopping for
government information.  But I'm concerned about it and I
wanted to ask this question yesterday and didn't get a chance
to.  A few years ago, the IRS decided to stop the mass
distribution of its forms, and they decided to dump this on
libraries.  This particular thing has caused libraries many
problems indeed.  We distribute at our library about 70,000
forms every year.  Well, we have to pay somebody to order all
those forms early on, and distribute them; we have to figure
out some way to keep it staffed there and keep the items
stocked that people want.  And it really has created quite a
burden for us.  A few libraries nationally have decided not
to provide this service at all, but that's difficult when the
patrons are banging down the door asking, Well, why don't you
provide this?  They're even asking me in New York, well, why
don't you have state forms for California?  (laughter) I
mean, you wouldn't believe what people want.  Well, I'm
concerned that GPO Windows may just say, well, here's all
this cool electronic information.  Where's my public's on-
ramp to that? Are they going to give me network connectivity?
Are they going to give me equipment? I think they've got to
think about this stuff, too, not just create the information
and then not give me a way to get it.

Okay, really fast, as we know, it's the electronic frontier
and, of course, pioneers often have to deal with harsh
environments.  Well, we've got to humanize that, and I've got
permission here from Mr. Cerf to talk about that all pioneers
have to deal with this harsh environment, but around the
campfire of a glowing off-hook light, we need to see bards
like Vint Cerf delivering his soliloquy "Rosencrantz and
Ethernet": (laughter)

   All the world's a net! And all the data in it merely
     packets
   Come to store and forward in the queues a while
     and then are
   Heard no more.  'Tis a network waiting to be
     switched!

   To switch or not to switch? That is the question.
     Whether
   'Tis wiser in the net to suffer the store and forward
     of
   Stochastic networks or to raise up circuits against a
     sea
   Of packets and, by dedication, serve them.

   To net, to switch.  To switch, perchance to slip!
   Aye, there's the rub.  For in that choice of switch,
   What loops may lurk, when we have shuffled
     through
   This Banyan net? Puzzles the will, initiates
     symposia,
   Stirs endless debate and gives rise to uncontrolled
   Flights of poetry beyond recompense. (applause)

Thank you.

If I could just take one more minute, not only that, but
we've got Emily Post News, foremost authority on proper net
behavior:

  "Dear Ms. Post News: How long should my signature be?"
  "Dear Verbose: Please try to make your signature as long as
  you can-- it's much more important than your article, of
  course, so try to have more lines of signature than text.
  Try to include a large graphic made of ASCII characters
  plus lots of cute slogans and wisdom.  Be sure to include a
  complete map of Usenet which needs .signature to show how
  anyone gets mail to you for any site in the world.  Include
  Internet gateways and how people on your own site can mail
  to you."

Okay, really fast, I just want to make an announcement that
we have indeed humanized the network to the extent that Elvis
has an E-mail account at my house.  (laughter) You can write
to him at LPL.ORG.  Well, I guess I've taken up all my time
here -- I just want to say that we got NREN okay, now we need
money for the K through 12 sites in the public libraries,
which will give the rest of us the access.
Telecommunications helps us overcome what has been called the
tyranny of distance and we do have the global village.  How
are we going to use it?

And this is my last thing, I promise you, Marc.  One
illustration of the power of the net, which I think we all
have to keep in mind, a lot of us last fall got an E-mail
from Dave Hughes, who's not here so I can talk about him.
Dave Hughes sent an E-mail to all of us and said, put down
your cursor, call up Gore's office -- here's the number --and
lobby for K through 12 funding for NREN.  Well, later I asked
Hughes how it went, how many phone calls did you generate? He
said that he read the observation by the Houston reporter at
10:00 PM, he'd posted his reaction by 1:00 AM, and the deluge
hit Gore's office by noon -- 14 hours.  He doesn't have a
count, but judging from the reaction, by 2:00 PM on the
working day, a senior Gore official called him and asked him
to call off the dogs (laughter).  He posted on five systems
-- the WELL, Metanet, Echo, Compuserve, Comprivate --
Rendiscussion on the Internet, and in Roger's Bar on his own
system.  It must have been in the score of calls, I would say
the hundreds of calls, and it was made more significant
because they were from so many different places, so many
different people, not affiliated with each other in any way
other than interest in the issue.  He says it's a
verification of Toffler's reference to "adhocracy" replacing
bureaucracy -- people forming up around a task or issue, then
dissolving again out into Cyberspace, something networks make
possible in spades.  And I think librarians and other
Internauts like those of you in this room, have to become
advocates of advocacy.  On the net you can either be a
signpost, a roadblock, or a line noise, and I would encourage
all of you to get involved by joining a listserv, getting
involved with Compuserve or the WELL or CPSR, and join EFF
and all of those organizations.  Don't just put your notes
away and think that the conference is over, because it's just
beginning.  Thanks.  (applause)


ROTENBERG: That was wonderful, Jean, thank you.  I'm going to
offer a slight correction now, because I've heard the story
of that phone call between Gore's aide and Dave Hughes as
well, and I don't think the word that Gore's aide would use
would be "called" -- I think he would say probably instead,
"begged and pleaded," because it was quite a response.

The next speaker is Steve Cisler, and Steve is the senior
scientist at Apple Computer Library.  He works with the
information retrieval projects at Apple and also the Apple
Library of Tomorrow research grants.  Steve?


CISLER: Thanks very much, Marc.  You may have noticed in the
news last night, or perhaps this morning, that the postal
director of Congress resigned because of inappropriate perks
for Congress.  I have a number of overdue record notices for
Newt Gingrich, for George Bush, and Bob Dole, and James
Billington is going to ... Well, let me stop it right here.
(laughter)  Because of privacy concerns.

Bruce Sterling has written about offshore data havens, and
I'd like you to think of libraries, especially public
libraries, as sort of privacy havens.  I'm going to talk
about an incident that I, as a public library user, would
like to share with you.

In the September 1991 Scientific American issue on networks
and computing, Mark Weiser wrote about ubiquitous computing.
At Olivetti in England, researchers are wearing small devices
that perform some simple tracking and call forwarding
functions that will benefit the researcher as well as that
person's colleagues.  I learned the other day from a member
here that the lunchroom at Olivetti has both a privacy area
and a connected area, where if you are wearing these small
devices you can be traced.  Or, if you want to eat or chat or
read a book in private, you can.  I like to think of the
library as a place where you can connect up to the word of
electronic and print information, but still retain a good
deal of personal privacy and be assured that others won't be
able to find out what you read, viewed, or the questions you
asked the reference librarian, be that a person or a software
surrogate.

Although I don't work in public libraries any more, I still
use them.  There are several county branches and a city
branch within about a fifteen-minute bike ride, and some
member of our family goes to one of these every couple of
days.  At the checkout counter of the Saratoga Library there
is a posted notice reminding people that all library records
are private, and they cited the California civil code number.

My own awareness of privacy issues changed after attending
the CFP-1 conference.  Last spring I had written an article
for the Library and Information Technology Association
covering issues of privacy and reuse of personal data by the
American Library Association and other related issues.  So I
called the county librarian of Santa Clara County, a woman
named Susan Fuller, to see if there was really any story
behind the poster that was so prominent.  What follows is
really a summary of articles in the San Jose Mercury News,
conversations with Fuller and Lani Yoshimura, the branch
librarian in Gilroy, who's also very active in an
intellectual freedom committee in California, as well as a
letter from Gary Strong, the California state librarian.  And
I think it shows the way censorship is tied to privacy issues
in libraries.  It also raises the issues of industry
standards at odds with First Amendment concerns, freedom of
choice, and the role of citizen watchdog groups in how our
public institutions are run.

In September 1990, a magic shop owner by the name of Steve
Dawson, whose establishment was very near the Milpitas Branch
Library, noticed that a kid had a video of "Beverly Hills
Cop."  He was really shocked to find out that the kid had
checked it out at the library nearby.  "Beverly Hills Cop" is
R-rated, but you should keep in mind that the MPAA system of
rating movies is not accepted by the library community.  This
is a motion picture industry standard and it really takes the
decisions of what is appropriate and suitable for a child out
of the hands of parents and puts it in the hands of theater
owners and groups such as Blockbuster or Warehouse.  A lot of
people accept it as law, but it is by no means that.

Now the county library has an open access policy that allows
anybody to get a card and to check out any circulating
materials.  What's more, no parent can request to see the
circulation records of a child, or for that matter, a spouse.
The library's policy is that it's up to the parent, or
parents, to establish values and guide their child, but that
the child has rights to privacy.  Anyway, Dawson, the magic
shop owner, argued against this stand at the Library
Commission meeting later that year -- this is in 1990 -- and
again at the County Board of Supervisors.  The San Jose
Mercury News in an editorial initially backed Dawson's idea
that a parent should okay their kids' use of R-rated films.
Librarians really unanimously opposed this, and the newspaper
used rather different standards for judging books than for
movies.  The newspaper had also been writing in support of 2
Live Crew in Florida at that time, but they'd withheld
support for an issue much closer to home.  Naturally, the
newspaper backed access rights to printed material, but it
kind of weaseled out of the same standards for non-print.
Later, the editorial committee at the newspaper narrowly
changed its view and decided that since kids could see "Fatal
Attraction" or "Robocop" on TV, messing around with the
library system just to keep them from getting at the movies
was not worth it, so they sort of came around to the library
stance.

The County Board of Supervisors had a really large meeting,
and they voted 3-2 not to support Dawson's plan.  Then they
had a unanimous vote to support the library's open access
policy.  The reason for the difference in the vote was that
part of the previous split vote was really due to Dawson's
own board member supporting his constituent's plea.  Now the
county library sends out a notice now to parents of underage
cardholders and reminds them of the open access policy and
what kind of freedom that means for their kids.  The parent
may ask to have the card revoked, but it's only for a 6-month
period, and the child can go back and get a card again
without the parents' permission, so it's really sort of all
or nothing.  So far, though, nobody has elected to have their
child's card revoked.

Dawson was not pleased with this compromise or with the
decision of the board, so he wrote to Governor Wilson, who
turned the letter over to Gary Strong, the California state
librarian, who replied to the owner of the Magic Touch.  In
his reply, he reiterated the library profession's views on
labeling, on restricting access, on providing the widest
range of materials possible, and on the need of parents to
talk with children to impart values, etc.

I was really impressed with the support within our community,
within the library community, and a bit surprised about the
San Jose Mercury News waffling on the issue.  But I was very
proud of my own library's commitment to the privacy of even
young library users.  And what's important is a consistent
system of support from our national organization, our state
library, the county library, and on down to the grassroots
level.  So that's one reason why it's really nice to work
inside the library system.

I now work in a library in the advanced technology group at
Apple, and we work, as Marc said, with information retrieval
projects, with the grant program -- by the way, we support
Project Gutenberg and we're doing a new project with the Dead
Sea Scrolls that will be very exciting -- and we perform
typical corporate library tasks, such as online literature
searching.  We also have a large user group with 17,000
members, and we have a 100-page quarterly magazine.  As you
can imagine, we've had a lot of requests for our list of
subscribers, both from sales and marketing people inside the
company and from third-party vendors outside.  But we
believe, as I learned really at the last conference, that, as
Alan Westin predicted, most databases of personal information
will be consensual.  So ours is right now and we haven't
given it out to anybody except other librarians who wanted to
start a local users group in the area.  So I was a little
annoyed to have my own professional association sell mailing
labels with my name and address to other vendors, even after
I wrote on the application form not to do so.  While I can't
get angry at a data clerk who ignores such a plea, I did
write the director and after many months, I did get a
response.  Then I got even more response when they found out
I was going to be doing a little talk on this.  (laughter)
But really, let me hasten to say that you can opt out, you
don't have to have your information sold to vendors.  I'd
prefer to have an opt-in box, my own Peace Corps volunteer
group in northern California has that.  But, it's a
consideration of revenue flow within a non-profit group.

On the WELL, Kevin Kelly, former editor of the Whole Earth
Review, recently posted a very timely treatise on privacy as
a commodity.  He said, "Information is so valuable that even
its absence is worth something.  We are in the first days of
a great awakening as ordinary citizens realize that ordinary
information about themselves is something one can sell or
save."  And he made these predictions: government will slowly
weasel out of the business of being a guarantor of privacy.
The middle class will have the least privacy, partly because
the rich can afford it, and the poor won't really use the
instruments of credit that deprive many of us of privacy, and
the information commons, that place where information is
pooled to be shared, will become endangered and those that
survive will do so by endogenous self-government, rather than
national policies.  And then finally, he said, "the co-
evolution of privacy and information will take place
according to the rules of the private sector."  Now, I find
his essay provocative, but I still firmly believe that the
library, especially the public library system, will continue
to be an information commons, a protector of privacy and a
counterforce to those practices of direct marketing
professionals who believe they are doing us a favor by narrow
casting electronic text, print material, and in the future
broadband network video and sound messages.  Thank you very
much.  (applause)


ROTENBERG: We have time for questions, if people would like
to go to the mikes -- there are three mikes out.  Rick?


AUDIENCE MEMBER: I'm Rick (name inaudible).  I'm very
sympathetic and supportive of the attempts of the library
community to get themselves involved with NREN.  But one
thing has always puzzled me a bit.  Given the Supreme Court
decision about abortion counseling, given the political
climate and the attacks on the National Endowment for the
Arts and so on, isn't the library community a little
concerned about pushing for federal subsidy of a national
infrastructure?


CONABLE: Well, I mean that question suggests that the battle
is over and that we've lost.  I don't know that that's the
case.  There was small glimmer of hope in the Rust decision
-- the Chief Justice in writing his opinion wrote an
exception for the university, asserting that it was such a
traditional marketplace of ideas that applying the strings
over content restrictions in the university would be
inappropriate.  Now I happen to think that fit the political
agenda of the President, who was bashing politically-correct
speech at the moment, but I would hope that we will be
successful in asserting and establishing that libraries fit
within that loophole as well.  That's really the fight of the
next two or three years of greatest significance in this
area, but I'm not ready to concede it yet and we could use
your help in winning it.


ROTENBERG: Yes, sir?


KIM: My name's Gene Kim, I'm a student at Purdue University.
Yesterday in the FOIA discussions, various library officials,
representatives, expressed their enthusiasm for being the
vehicle of delivery for government documents.  I guess my
question is directed to Jean Armour Polly, where she
expressed some annoyance at being the vehicle for delivery
for IRS forms.  I'm wondering what you see as the library's
role in the future for serving the rest of the public sector
and the rest of us.


POLLY: Well, we need to do it, of course, but how is that
impacting my local taxpayers who are paying the salaries and
what not? That was the whole problem with the IRS stuff, just
that it was such an impact on us just to provide the service
well.  I mean, sure, you can just order a few of the normal
forms, and then they give you whatever the IRS number is,
which is all the reproducible tax forms, but a lot of people
don't want to do that, they want the actual form in hand.
And like I said, I gave out 70,000 forms last year.  I don't
know that that's part of our mission, I guess, but it would
have been nice if the IRS would have given us some money to
do that.  They just take it away and it's left to us to sort
of pick up the pieces.  We're out there in the front lines --
they're down here, insulated, or they're at the end of a dial
tone with a busy signal, and we're out there.  So yes, GPO
Window, I want to have it, I want it yesterday.  I've got a
terminal, I've got connectivity, but I'm the only one --there
are about five public libraries on the Internet.


CISLER: Also, having just connectivity and even a nice
workstation won't be anywhere near enough to handle GPO
Window.  There has to be a vehicle for internal support to
allay the concerns of the librarians.  I visited with some of
the document librarians about a year and a half ago when the
Window proposal first came up, and they were really already
tired by the problems they were facing at that time.  There's
going to have to be a lot more thought than just about the
hardware and the networks, but about internal support for the
plans, especially if the plans are top down.


CONABLE: There is a precedent, however, for fiscal support.
My library happens to be one of six public libraries in the
country which is a depository of all of the publicly-
available data from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, and we
have a nice little contract with the federal government --
they pay us to provide that service.  All we have to do is
get that applied to the GPO Window proposal and to the IRS
forms and the rest of those sorts of things and then we will
be very happy to handle it.  We'll be able to handle it.


WALTON: I'd like to add that I hope libraries won't resist
this trend, actually.  We can talk about funding a particular
project, but what we fail to realize is that libraries have
been the primary distribution point for federal documents for
probably the last 100 years.  There's something called
regional and selective depository collections now in paper
form.  We're spending tens of millions of dollars on just the
paper documents that we're trying to store, and we're
building huge warehouses to hold them until they become more
accessible to electronic means and better access points.
Government documents are not a terribly friendly nurturing
system to use (laughter), and there needs to be an increased
ability to have access to them-- this is now becoming an
issue, because people are beginning to see government
documents as a real opportunity and a resource for them.  The
concern I have is that we are beginning to see only a few
libraries take a very strong leadership position in using
them, and I'll use one as an example.  Gonzaga University,
which is a private Catholic college in Spokane, Washington,
received a $10 million grant from the Department of
Agriculture to provide information of the Department of
Agriculture to the inland Northwest.  So we're not even
talking about library funding agencies of the federal
government contributing to that process -- that was done
because they had a very strong visionary at that particular
institution.  Here we have one of the largest single grants
given to a library that I'm aware of going to a private
Catholic college.


FREEDMAN: I'm Maurice Freedman, and I'm from the Westchester
Library system.  A couple of points, one just in response to
that last comment.  There are depository libraries -- land
grant universities and several major public libraries --whose
job is to make available all government documents.  They get
complete depository status, the documents go to them to make
them available to the public.  The electronic doorway is
going to solve all kinds of problems for those libraries--
storing them, creating access to them, cataloging them.  All
these miserable manual library problems in many respects will
be mitigated or done away with through the electronic window.
Now, the Liverpool Public Library isn't one of those
depository libraries, but the depository libraries, it is
anticipated, will get support and certainly will get free
access to them.  Now the libraries are going to have to do
the staffing and all the rest of it, but the major university
libraries have all kinds of online systems and online
searching capacities already.  I think they'll welcome it.

Okay, the number that Jean Polly gave originally was at my
request, it is 1-800-530-8888 -- we're begging of you, if you
care about the public having a right to know, we're asking
people around the country to call that number and say you
believe in library service, you want library service, and you
want it to be better funded.  That's 800-530-8888, my name is
not Jerry Brown.  (laughter) The 800 number is a number that
was set up for National Library Week and is lasting for the
next two or three weeks, and we're trying to get people to
call.  The president of the Association, who was supposed to
be here and who I replaced on the program yesterday, said
they are getting tons of calls and don't have enough money to
add 800 lines (or however that's handled), because the volume
is so terrific.  Please call and register your support of
libraries.  Your name is being taken, (laughter) and
forwarded to your Congressperson, and being given as your
support, so it's real important that you as a voter do this
in support of libraries.

I'd like a last comment -- forgive me, or indulge me in this
-- in relation to Bob Walton's comment that libraries will be
dead as we know them.  I guess I've been involved with
technology and computers since 1968, but I always get thrown
into a Luddite position.  Let me ask three different people
here for information, and each of them offers to give me the
information in response to my giving them my Internet number.
I don't have an Internet number.  The overwhelming majority
of the people in this country do not have Internet numbers.
It's going to be a while before you find most people in this
country communicating over the Internet or NREN.  Okay? And
the public library also contains this thing called a book.
Technologically, it's idiocy to have people typing full text
in when there's scanners that can do it a lot more accurately
and quickly than someone keying.  But it took about 1500
years to develop really good means of putting information on
a page, and we've had printing since somewhere around the
800's when it was invented in China.  Reading a book, a
printed page and all the rest of that, is far better than the
displays we have now on our screens, and there are certain
kinds of things, like novels, poetry, all the rest of that
ilk, that you're still going to want in hard copy.  And I
don't know that the laser's going to do the job, either.  But
in any case, we're not quite dead yet, and there's a function
even in the electronic world for guidance and help -- people
can't make it through those electronic databases and all the
rest of it without a lot of guidance, and we're there to
offer it.  And those who can't afford to pay, the public
library's making them available at no charge and no fee.

WALTON: Mitch and I have argued about this for years.  I'm
not saying the public library is dead; what I'm saying is if
you want a very good treatise on what I was trying to do,
there's a good summary by a man named Clement Bezold, who
made a presentation at the White House conference.  He's from
DC Institute of Alternative Futures.  He gives three
scenarios for the future of public libraries -- I'm not
talking about the next few years, I'm talking about through
the year 2030 -- and he says that, unfortunately, public
libraries are not getting with it, and they'll be left behind
because of the way the technology is developing and the
ability of people to pay for information.


AUDIENCE MEMBER: The 800 number that Mitch Freedman gave is
the number to call for this current program in support of
libraries.  The other one is simply the 800 number for the
American Library Association.


ROTENBERG: See, this is why Jerry Brown put it on cardboard.
(laughter) So there would be no confusion.  It's also why the
newspapers blacked it out.  Jean?


POLLY: I just wanted to say one thing about GPO Window.  It's
true that we've got these depository libraries, but a few
of them are in large urban public libraries, and the other
ones are in university libraries.  They're really not serving
my patron.  My patron's out in the sticks, really, and I want
to be able to get to GPO Window right from my reference desk,
and I want them to be able to call in right from home, too.
I think the public library better position itself, though,
because otherwise reference service as we know it is going to
be gone.  People are going to be able to get this information
without ever calling me, although I think that you're right,
the public library is probably going to be helping people
find their way through the Internets and providing these tour
guide functions.


ROTENBERG: We have just about twelve minutes left, so I'm
going to ask people if they can ask short questions or brief
statements.


GLENN TENNEY: I will make no statement other than to ask
two quick questions.  We agree that libraries are being bled
to death -- there's a funding question here.  You mentioned
depositories -- right now one depository in California has
online access to the Patent Office.  That does not serve the
needs of any state that large.  You can have one library with
access -- how do we do it? Do we go and get a grant for one
depository which then covers an area that it can't cover?  Or
do we try to say simply that the federal government should
fund all libraries in the entire country and support them?
Period.  A funding question here.  My library's shortening
hours, the library itself is going into the information
broker business seeking out business in the area in which we
live, and selling their services.  Is that the way we're
going to do it? Question on funding.  The second question is
how can we get the libraries -- simple question -- to online
catalog so I can dial in? It's not a funding question,
because I volunteered to my library to do it for them for
free, and they said, Well, we're thinking about it, it will
be a few years yet.  So -- the two questions.  How do we do
that?


CONABLE: Well, the funding is a problem and there isn't an
answer because this country is in the process of trying to
dismantle the public sector.  It's trying to dismantle the
public sector because everybody thinks they're entitled to
buy their way out of the public sector because the public
sector is deteriorating to the level that it's useless to the
people who can afford the alternatives.  The only way you can
afford the alternatives is to buy them privately, and that
means that you don't want to pay taxes to support them for
the public good.  It's a vicious cycle and a very serious
problem.  I think we need to start thinking about the
implications of that because it will eventually come home to
roost.  It is coming home to roost, and I don't have a real
good answer for that one, but we need to start addressing it.
The other answer is that the public libraries have
traditionally and historically been locally supported, and in
fact, most of their money in most of the country comes from
the local level.  The issue here is that there are some
opportunities available to us that the current governing
structure and local tax bases are probably inadequate to
support.  So we have to start looking at what those things
are and if we can build a politically salable rationale for
funding some of these kinds of advancements at either the
state level or the federal level.  The problem with the
higher levels of government is that the further away from the
roots that you get, the more strings there are attached.
Given my pessimistic view of the current administration's
information policy, I don't know how we're going to reconcile
this.  So, I don't have a good answer, but I recognize the
problem.


WALTON: I have a quick answer.  Having worked for fifteen
years with over 300 libraries doing projects before I came to
CLSI, I have never worked with a library that had money.  I
have never been in a library that said they had money.  So if
we're going to abdicate the future because we're waiting for
Santa Claus to come and give us additional funding, we might
as well just forget it.  The way we're going to move ahead is
through entrepreneurship, which has been growing in libraries
-- management entrepreneurship where you get people who are
not held by the traditional bounds of what they've been told
they can't do.  They begin to develop innovative projects,
and from those you begin to build the capability and
recognition by the public that certain things are an
important part of the library.  Wal-Mart wasn't built
overnight.  It took 20 years, and I think that as libraries
and specific institutions have great success with some of the
kinds of things we've heard about in Liverpool, for example,
other libraries will become impressed with this.  They will
begin to investigate it and they'll eventually grow.  But
it's going to take time.


CISLER: I'd like to say to Glenn that I think you could
easily start a very local campaign in the online community to
get people to put pressure on the county or San Mateo City
Library, and I think they would listen to that.  Also, all
their colleagues up and down the San Francisco peninsula are
online so there's sort of a professional impetus to match
their services.

(inaudible comments)

AUDIENCE MEMBER: ...of ... University, one of the more
retrograde universities, at least in terms of the issues
we're discussing.  A couple of quick points or questions.
One is that, despite GPO Windows, we should be aware of what
I think is the most nefarious and slick attempt under the
Paperwork Reduction Act to block access to government
information by defining records, what is in a database, and
whether or not the people will have the right to get at it.
And that the power of that and this unbelievably important
issue has sort of been swept under the rug.  Only the ALA,
very few other agencies other than ALA, have been fighting
this, and it's a lonely battle out there.  It would be nice
if more people, especially in this group, got together on
making database access a key point.  If GPO hides all of this
information, the key information, it doesn't matter what's in
Windows.  The second is I think that we have great
opportunity here.  Discussions earlier, on Wednesday, I guess
it was, were talking about how elitist things like NREN and
Internet are, blocking the people's access, and what I'd like
to ask the panel is to comment on the role of the public
library in providing information to what could be a new class
of information poor in America.  Thank you.


CISLER: Well, there is an interesting example in the city of
Santa Monica.  They put up a system called the Public
Electronic Network through a grant from Hewlett-Packard and
they linked it to their Inlex library automation system so
that people could not only go online to look up information,
but they could also go into public places and use terminals
and interact with the City Council on a variety of issues.
The most famous one is where the homeless community used the
public access terminals to negotiate, I believe, showers and
storage facilities for some of their shopping carts.  These
are people who probably would not have shown up at a City
Council meeting for fear or embarrassment or whatever.
And yet they did use the electronic communications to achieve
something.  And that stands out because it is not done in
many places, but it is an interesting example.


POLLY: We hope to have Internet access in our public lab
sometime this year.  There are pockets of this -- there's the
Cleveland Freenet, for example; there's the whole Freenet
idea.  And there are other pockets besides what Steve
mentioned.


WARWICK: Hi, I'm Shelly Rochelle Warwick of Rutgers, but
I'm also a librarian.  I feel that some of the people on the
panel seem to feel that charging for library services is not
such a bad thing, and I'm very concerned by seeing this.
There is a tremendous differentiation between those that can
afford to pay and the blocking of access, and also even with
the providing of government information through CD-ROM, which
then puts a tremendous financial burden on the libraries,
even though they may have some equipment in place to support
all the various databases.  I'm wondering if the panel would
address whether they think that entrepreneurship, or
basically charging for services, is a positive trend, or
whether it will be a necessary trend in libraries.


CONABLE: I don't think it's either positive or necessary, and
it irritates the hell out of me to hear people say that it
is.  This is a public good -- that is not an obsolete notion.
I mean, the whole point here, if we're going to have
libraries at all, is that we have as a society and a
government a commitment to access to information as the
absolute basic need if we're going to be a self-governing
society.  And even modest fees are actual barriers to access
-- significant and substantial barriers to access.  People
who are making six-figure salaries and who are profiting
through the development and marketing of this technology
don't understand that a 50-cent charge or a dollar charge
will keep tens of thousands of people away from the
information.  Now we cannot continue to do this -- it is not
good social policy.  If we continue to do it, we're going to
have real problems.  We have real problems.  The library is a
very modest public investment in the idea that everyone has a
right to receive the information they need.  Very modest --
it averages about 1% of the total of state and local funding.
That's cheap, folks! What you get for that 1% is worth a
great deal more to the quality of our collective lives than
that 1%.  It is one of the biggest payoffs on any dollar that
we spend for any public service.  You can cut all sorts of
government expenditures.  This is one that we should all be
lobbying to substantially jack up and increase.  If we get
real about it, funding is not going to be such a critical
issue.  And selling our services to the small businessmen on
Main Street will not support these services for everyone
else, and selling these services to the big corporation will
not happen -- they will buy it in a proprietary system in a
way that they want to do it.  Let's get real.  (applause)


CISLER: I would like to say on a very narrow scale within
Apple, our library does not charge back for any services,
which can be fairly unusual in a special library situation.
Nor does our networking center, whereas a lot of other groups
within Apple are pressed to become so-called profit centers.
We feel that, well, we have a little sign up that says, "A
couple of months in the lab will save you two hours in the
library." (laughter) And it's really true -- we have a very
strong following, and there has been no pressure to charge
for DIALOG searches.  Admittedly, we have a much higher
budget and it's a whole different atmosphere, but I just want
to give you the point that the belief system carries forth
from the public libraries to the special libraries as well.


WALTON: I'd like to add a cautionary note.  There is, in
fact, an organization called the Information Industry
Association which lobbies sort of in opposition to ALA for a
lot of the privatization of data.  They're alive and well,
and they're very, very active in setting policy and
priorities.  The other thing we have to understand is that in
this last year, for example, the Ameritech Corporation, which
is one of the regional Bells, purchased NOTIS, a large
academic system based in Chicago.  They're currently looking
into Dynix -- they're not doing this to be altruistic to
libraries.  They are looking toward the future of being able
to distribute for profit data which they believe the
libraries are not supplying to large segments of our
population.  The view I think of many information providers
is they have the long-term view is that there is a self-
fulfilling prophecy in libraries -- that libraries serve a
very important role for a certain segment of a population.
And there are many people in a community, perhaps a majority,
who don't use the library at all.  Part of those will never
use the library, and I think they believe that part of them
don't use it because of a convenience factor, because of
their lifestyles, and because they simply have alternative
sources of information they'd like to see.  I can assure you
they're going to market aggressively to those particular
populations.  If you're concerned that there's going to be
socioeconomic divisions because of this, you're absolutely
right.


ROTENBERG: We're heading toward the end here.  The screen
reminds me a little bit of a video game, particularly Missile
Command, and I can see my cities being destroyed (laughter)
as we get towards zero, so I think we'll take Vint as the
last question.


CERF: Thank you very much.  First I wanted to apologize to
any Shakespeareans in the audience who might have been taken
aback by that little poem. (laughter)  It occurred to me as I
was listening to this very interesting, and in some cases
entertaining, talk that we might find the notion of publisher
changing in a dramatic way.  It's probably come up in the
course of the last few days, and I apologize, I could not be
here earlier.  Maybe everyone will become a publisher. It's
just like what happened in the telephone system -- somebody
predicted in 1935 that the rate of telephone growth and usage
meant that by 1950 or 1955 everyone would have to be a
telephone operator in order for the system to work.  Oddly
enough, that's exactly what happened, but it happened because
we were able to put computers into the system and do the
switching automatically.  So the question I guess I have for
the panel is that if indeed the act of publishing in an
electronic environment is something we are all empowered to
do, how does that change the role of the library? The library
will no longer have to be the archive of everything, but the
place you go to find out where the other stuff is?


CISLER: I think people are either going to ask electronically
or face to face what's the good stuff out there.  Just show
me the good stuff, and I think we'll serve that need long
after there's software agents finely tuned and running on all
nodes.


CONABLE: I trust that our primary role, or one of our primary
roles, will continue to be the defense of everyone's right to
free expression in all of its manifestations.  The right to
access, the right to speak, the right to publish, the right
to find out, the right to know.  That's probably the most
important thing we do, and all of the rest of it is our tools
and our means of doing that.  That doesn't change because the
technology changes.


ROTENBERG: Thank you all.  (applause)