Ashcroft Mocks Librarians and Others Who Oppose Parts of Counterterrorism Law (Note: I can't even decide what to bold for emphasis because the whole thing is one giant foot in his mouth that would be funny if it wasn't so terrifying coming from the Attorney General of the United States.)

"Attorney General John Ashcroft today accused the country's biggest library association and other critics of fueling "baseless hysteria" about the government's ability to pry into the public's reading habits.

In an unusually pointed attack as part of his latest speech in defense of the Bush administration's counterterrorism initiatives, Mr. Ashcroft mocked and condemned the American Library Association and other Justice Department critics for believing that the F.B.I. wants to know 'how far you have gotten on the latest Tom Clancy novel.'

The association, which has argued for months that the government's new antiterrorism powers risk encroaching on the privacy of library users, took some satisfaction from the broadside....

Mark Corallo, a spokesman for the department, said the speech was intended not as an attack on librarians, but on groups like the American Civil Liberties Union and politicians who he said had persuaded librarians to mistrust the government.

The American Librarian Association "has been somewhat duped by those who are ideologically opposed to the Patriot Act," Mr. Corallo said.

Mr. Ashcroft's remarks, he said, 'should be seen as a jab at those who would mislead librarians and the general public into believing the absurd, that the F.B.I. is running around monitoring libraries instead of going after terrorists....'

Mr. Ashcroft said critics had tried to persuade the public that the F.B.I. was monitoring libraries to "ask every person exiting the library, `Why were you at the library? What were you reading? Did you see anything suspicious?' "

The Justice Department, Mr. Ashcroft said, 'has no interest in your reading habits. Tracking reading habits would betray our high regard for the First Amendment. And even if someone in government wanted to do so, it would represent an impossible workload and a waste of law enforcement resources'  " [New York Times]

Ashcroft Bars the Doors to Democracy [Editorial]

"But while Ashcroft was telling Boston police how the government was using its powers under the Patriot Act, he didn't mention a January 2003 report from the General Accounting Office that revealed that three-quarters of the 'international terrorism convictions' for 2002 had been wrongly classified as terrorist crimes. They were, instead, routine immigration violations.

Nor did he mention a March 2, 2003, Washington Post report that out of 62 cases of 'international terrorism' that New Jersey prosecutors claimed to have handled, all but two involved Middle Eastern men who were accused of paying other people to take their English exams and who were not linked to terrorism in any way.

He may have repeated the claim, first made in a May 13, 2003, Justice Department report to the House and Senate Judiciary Committee, that FBI agents have contacted only 50 libraries nationwide to obtain records of library patrons, and then mostly in response to requests from librarians who saw something suspicious. But in testimony given to the House Subcommittee on the Constitution on May 20, 2003, then-Assistant Attorney General Viet Dinh stated that 'Most, if not all of these contacts that we have identified were made in the context of a criminal investigation.'

In other words, the number "50" referred to criminal -- not national security -- investigations of libraries." [Boston Globe]

Update: ALA explains exactly why librarians don't take Mr. Ashcroft at his word.

"Librarians are committed to ensuring the highest quality library service and protection of our patrons’ records from random searches, fishing expeditions or other inappropriate invasions of privacy.  This commitment is why we are among the most trusted members of our communities, from Maine to California.  We take great pains to be educated about the federal and state laws that govern our ability to serve our communities – which is why we’re so concerned....

And now Attorney General John Ashcroft says the FBI has no interest in Americans’ reading records.  While this may be true, librarians have a history with law enforcement dating back to the McCarthy era that gives us pause.  For decades, and as late as the 1980s, the FBI’s Library Awareness Program sought information on the reading habits of people from 'hostile foreign countries,' as well as U.S. citizens who held unpopular political views.

We are deeply concerned that the Attorney General should be so openly contemptuous of those who seek to defend our Constitution.  Rather than ask the nations’ librarians and Americans nationwide to 'just trust him,' Ashcroft could allay concerns by releasing aggregate information about the number of libraries visited using the expanded powers created by the USA PATRIOT Act.

Or, better yet, federal elected officials could vote – as several U.S. senators and representatives from across the political spectrum have proposed – to restore the historical protection of library records."

Xeni on NPR's "Day to Day": RIAA Backlash

"On today's edition of the NPR program "Day to Day," I talk with host Alex Chadwick about popular backlash to the RIAA's recent lawsuits against individual filesharers -- and some possible solutions to the digital music dilemma. Link to 'Day to Day' home, archived show will be here after noon Pacific/3PM Eastern." [Boing Boing Blog]

I really wish this had been an MP3 file that had downloaded automatically via my aggregator so that I could transfer it to my Archos and listen to it on the way to work tomorrow. But it wasn't, so instead I used Replay Radio to record it and now I will indeed be listening to it on the way to work tomorrow.  :-)

"A recent study published by OCLC reports the following statistics:

Libraries as logistics experts
U.S. libraries circulate 1,947,600,000 items a year

Public libraries
1,772,000,000 Circulation (lent to patrons)
39,500,000 Interlibrary loan
1,811,500,000 Total (State library data 2001–2002)

Academic libraries
122,000,000 Circulation
14,100,000 Interlibrary loan
136,100,000 Total (ACRL 2001)

Libraries: How they stack up. OCLC Abstracts, 6 (37).

I'll do the math: 53,600,000 ILL items in 2001-2002.
No wonder we thought we were busy, we were!" [ILL News]

Like we said, "best value in town." More stunning facts:

• "U.S. public library cardholders outnumber Amazon customers by almost 5 to 1.... Each day, U.S. libraries circulate nearly 4 times more items than Amazon handles."
   
• "U.S. libraries circulate about the same number of items as FedEx ships per day."
   
• "Five times more people visit U.S. public libraries each year than attend U.S. professional and college football, basketball, baseball and hockey games combined."

Make sure you have copies of this document to hand out to all of your patrons. Put these numbers on your web site. Include them in your newsletter. Autograph a copy and send it to your legislators.

"The American Library Association is accepting donations for its E-Spy program to keep Big Brother out of the library. If you choose to contribute, do as I did and tell them to thank John Ashcroft for inspiring the donation.

From the American Library Association (also available online at http://www.ala.org/espydonation):

'The USA PATRIOT Act expands the federal government’s authority to investigate American citizens. Since the passage of the USA PATRIOT Act, it is possible that library users’ activities may be monitored by the federal government. FBI agents can obtain court orders that allow them to examine user circulation records and Internet use records. Some court orders even allow agents to monitor email and chat room activities without probable cause.

Privacy is essential to the exercise of free speech, free thought, and free association. In a library, the subject of a user’s interests should not be examined or scrutinized by others, especially our government. Provisions of the USA PATRIOT Act seriously undermine our civil rights and liberties guaranteed under the United States Constitution.

ALA is collecting funds to support its educational and legal efforts to counteract the federal government's intrusion upon the rights of library users. Please make a contribution today to support its work on your behalf! It is important that both librarians and library patrons know their rights and know how to protect their civil liberties.

To make a donation to Keep Big Brother Out of Your Library, please mail your check, payable to ALA, to ALA Development Office, 50 E. Huron St., Chicago, IL 60611, and earmark your tax-deductible contribution for “E-SPY.” Or, you can make an online credit card contribution. If you have questions, please contact Lainie Castle in the ALA Development Office (312.280.5050) or email her at lcastle@ala.org.'

To go directly to the online credit card donation page, please visit https://cs.ala.org/onlinegift/ and select 'E-SPY/Keep Big Brother Out of Your Library" from the pulldown menu." [commons-blog]

Senator Brownback Introduces Digital Rights Bill: Electronic Frontier Foundation Supports Measure

"Senator Sam Brownback (R-KS) today introduced the Consumers, Schools, and Libraries Digital Rights Management (DRM) Awareness Act of 2003. The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) supports the bill as an important step toward balancing the rights of the public and the interests of entertainment industries in the age of digital commerce....

The bill includes these provisions:

• Requires conspicuous labeling of CDs, DVDs, and software that limits consumer uses with "digital rights management" (DRM) restrictions
• Imposes strict limits on the Federal Communication Commission's ability to impose federal regulations (i.e., "tech mandates") on digital television innovators
• Preserves the right to donate digital media products to libraries and schools

In addition, the bill helps protect the public's customary and fair use rights with respect to digital media....

EFF will deliver to Congress a petition with over 37,000 signatures, gathered in less than a week, expressing public support for balance in copyright law, and requesting an invitation for EFF to participate in upcoming hearings. Senator Norm Coleman (R-MN) has begun investigations into the RIAA's subpoena tactics through the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations.

EFF is continuing to collect signatures on the petition and will deliver updates to Congress if the RIAA's lawsuit crusade continues." [EFF, via JD's New Media Musings]

Please be sure to voice your support for this bill to your legislators. It's critical.

How did I miss this last month? Awesome! (Emphasis below is mine.)

RDF Site Summary (RSS)

"First came the announcement in July that Elsevier would expose their PRISM metadata in an RSS compliant manner. In doing so, libraries and end users could access tables of contents for Elsevier journals in their favorite tools.

It's evident that other publishers are catching on. Earlier in the week, a primer was released to help publishers gain a better understanding of RSS. And now there's an announcement from NISO about their publication, Metadata Demystified: A Guide for Publishers. Let's hope they start using it in a major way. This publication addresses the ONIX standard, which book publishers are using to translate similar types of information as the PRISM people. LC is using ONIX in conjunction with the 856 MARC field to provide tables of contents for new books.

So, you might be asking again, how can you use this in the real world? Well, imagine being able to display the current issue's TOC next to the PULinks logo in the online catalog, or having the RSS feed the EJournals page automatically without having to maintain a separate database or a kludged catalog record! That's the power of XML -- make the content providers do some of the work for you!" [inSilico]

What's the Best Value in Town? Take a guess.

All libraries should include a page like this on their web sites, although I would advocate adding dollar figures. [Thanks, Will!]

"As promised, more from Edu_RSS. Today we release the Edu_RSS topics page, a set of subject-specific RSS feeds available in multiple output formats (four RSS versions, HTML, Javascript with SOAP and Atom/Echo available shortly). The idea of Edu_RSS topics is that the input from 130 or so RSS feeds is aggregated and organized according to topics. [OLDaily, via James Farmer's Radio Weblog]

This is the kind of service I'd like to see come out of LISNews and LISFeeds.

"On copyright - the Copyright Cops - outlining many of the favorite examples of just how pervasive copyright (and copyright infringement) has become in modern life." [Furdlog]

And make sure you're reading Furdlog daily because Frank is doing a fantastic job covering filesharing and copyright issues.

Unfortunately, posting will continue to be a little light for at least the next week because I have a full plate elsewhere at the moment. Hopefully I can announce a couple of the projects later this week to make up for some of it. In the meantime, I'd appreciate it if you'd consider the following proposal and leave a comment yay or nay.

One of the areas of this site that has been completely neglected is the Honor Roll of Shifted Libraries. I had envisioned it as a quicklist of some interesting examples, a little like Innovative Internet Applications in Libraries, but with a more specific focus on "shifted" technologies. As you can see, though, I haven't really done anything with it, and this becomes painfully obvious to me when I want to reference sites I've highlighted on my blog but have not added to the list (like the Westminster Libraries' Classical.com offering). I'm also beginning to lose track of the libraries circulating Audible titles, and more careful notes would have led to a faster answer about digital files circulating in libraries.

So for myself, I'm thinking of installing some Wiki software in order to track these types of services. If it's just for me, I'll probably just refer to it myself and organize it by service. If you think it could be of use to others, I can make it available to everyone as a link off this site. And I'm pretty sure I can coerce Aaron into helping maintain it....

My thought is to order the lists by service and include annotations and notes about the size of the library and its population. This way, a small library that is thinking about circulating Audible titles can contact a similar size library to get some real-life information about it before heading down that road. The list may not be all that big since Bill Drew is Mr. WiFi hands-down, Bernie Sloan is all over digital reference, Peter Scott started it all with his Blogarama site, and a list of PDA-enhanced library services probably already exists somewhere out there. I'm not looking to reinvent any wheels, so in those cases I'll just point to the sites.

I guess I'd probably start with audio ebooks, online video, services that can be used via cell phones, and the like. Heck, it could just end up being a collection of pointers to other collective sites until new shifted technologies are implemented by libraries, but are these types of links even aggregated somewhere? (If you know of such a beast, please don't hesitate to send me the URL!) Would it help to try and organize something like this, or would it just depress you? TIA.

(If comments aren't working, please drop me a line via email.)