In My Tabs July 22/2012 : LAC-BAC, Wikipedia, and Being The Man

I’ve decided to start listing some of the links I keep open in my tabs over the week. As for the title of the post: that’s an idea I blatantly stole from an old friend, Jhameia Goh.  (Jaymee, hats off to you!)

Library and Archives Canada produces a report on the state of their analogue holdings.  There’s an interesting line in the executive summary, which discusses collections and holdings management: “In short, in managing the on-going usability of its holdings, LAC aims to ensure value for money.” Read on.

–  Metropolis Magazine has an interesting article on how libraries have been envisioned through the ages.  In short: These buildings and the people who work in them adapt, big time.    Let’s keep that up, shall we?  (n.b. I blogged about it here.)

Wikipedia is suffering from a gender bias in its articlesSlate reports on Jimmy Wales‘s talk at Wikimania 2012 (some of my colleagues attended, which makes me almost-awesome) about how the site’s gender gap in its editor and author roles affect not only the interpretation of Wikipedia articles, but whether or not the articles are even remain published.  Note:  This is NOT a new phenonemon.

Wikipedia is also suffering from a dearth of admins. The Atlantic explains that fewer people are volunteering to help maintain the site even though it continues to grow.     (If one of these these bullets about Wikipedia bother you, and especially if two of them bother you, and especially if you’re a women, then you may want to contribute to one of the greatest websites on the free web.)

OCLC’s 2010 Perceptions of Libraries Report.  I’ve been trolling this (and other reports) for an internal report I’m collaborating on regarding online teaching and learning.  I think this is the OCLC report featuring a poll that said that no students started their research with at the Library or at the Library website.

The Open Knowledge Foundation’s Data Journalism Handbook. I have many friends in journalism and PR, and I love that our fields are crossing here (despite the best advice not to).  OKF calls this handbook a “collaborative effort involving dozens of data journalism’s leading advocates.”  With a quotation from Tim Berners-Lee re Data Journalism, so you know it must be good. 🙂

– Following ‘s Sarah Houghton’s recent post on moving into Admin, K.G. Schneider has a great post with hints and tips on what it takes to lead a library organization (or any kind of organization, really).  Are you itching for LIS management one day?  Remember, get out of the library from time to time, save your bullets, and learn what a suit of armour can do for you.

 

Budget cuts to libraries, archives, and information centres jeopardize access to Canadian government information

This has not been a good spring for Canadian librarians and archivists, especially those who work at federal libraries and archives, which are being de-funded and dismantled by federal budget cuts. These information centres sustain government and public research capacity. Their ability to create, preserve, and provide access to public information in our country is at risk.

These cuts, and the centres and programmes in jeopardy, include:

I’m missing some announcements since I was away when so many of these cuts were announced, but this list nonetheless clarifies the seriousness of the situation. In the space of a few weeks, the federal government has severely hampered the nation’s ability to gather, document, use, and disseminate government and cultural information.

You can learn what many of these cuts mean in clear, practical terms by reading this post written by my archivist friend, Creighton Barrett, at Dalhousie University’s Archives and Special Collections.  Creighton explains how these cuts negatively affect the university’s ability to collect and maintain the records used by scholars and citizens in one community alone, and rightly notes that they are a “devastating” blow to information access in Canada. Now, consider how Creighton’s list grows when you add to it the ways in which these same cuts affect the libraries and archives in your own community, and then all other libraries and archives in Canada. And we haven’t even touched what these broader cuts mean for LAC’s programming and resources, StatCan programming, and the research capacity of federal departments and agencies. “Devastating,” may well be an understatement in the long run.

These budget cuts are a knock-out punch to how public information is accessed and used across the country. The cuts not only affect the library community and possibly your civil-service-friend who lives down the road. They will affect the manner in which our society is able to find and use public information.  If public data is no longer collected (see StatCan), preserved (see LAC, NADP, CCA), disseminated and used (see PDS/DSP and cuts at departmental libraries), then does the information even exist in the first place? There will be less government and public information, fewer means to access this information, and fewer opportunities to do so.

Take a moment and recall the freedom you have been afforded to speak freely in this nation.  The utility of that freedom is dependent on your ability to access the information you use to learn, to criticize, to praise, or to condemn.  If knowledge is power, then a public whose national information centres and access points are ill-funded is a weakling. Libraries and archives provide Canadians with direct access to key government information, and for that very reason, they should be funded to the hilt.

This is where I get to my point: We are now facing a situation in Canada where government information has suddenly become far more difficult to collect, to access, and to use. The funding cuts that Canada’s libraries and archives face is an affront to the proper functioning of a contemporary democratic society. These cuts will impede the country’s ability to access public and government information, which will make it difficult for Canadians to criticize government practices, past and present.

I mentioned on Twitter that these cuts show us that the work of librarians and archivists are crucial to the nation’s interest. We are not mere record keepers, and neither do we spend our days merely dusting cobwebs off of old books. We are the people who maintain collections of public information, and we are the people who provide and nurture access to information. Many of us see ourselves as guardians of the public’s right to access information.  If we take on that guardianship, then we must defend and protect these collections and access points. I’m not talking about a Monday-to-Friday, 9-to-5 job. I’m talking about advocacy, which doesn’t have an on/off switch. Either you do it or you don’t.

So, what should you do? Get informed, speak up, and act.  Write letters to the editor. Write to your professional associations and other like-minded organizations; lend them your support, and when needed, tell them to add force to their own statements. Write to your MPs, to other MPs (especially to MPs who sit on government benches), to cabinet members, and to the PMO. When you’re socializing with friends who aren’t librarians and archivists, mention how our work affects their work and their personal lives. Massive cuts to the nation’s libraries and archives do not serve the public good. These cuts may help balance the financial books, but they create an information deficit that inhibits research, stymies dialogue and criticism, and makes government more distant from the people.