Internet Librarian

How happy was I when the Hollywood writers’ strike ended? Plenty. By the time you read this, we may already be getting new episodes of Ugly Betty and CSI. Thank goodness—Even I was getting tired of reality stuff (though not, I assure you, my beloved Project Runway).

It got so bad last week that my channel-surfing landed on TVW, the C-SPAN for the Evergreen State set, watching the proceedings on the floor of the Washington State House of Representatives—fascinating in a watching-paint-dry sort of way. As it happens, they were considering a bill to require every state university to provide venues for distribution of voter-registration materials, including “an active prompt on its course registration Web site” linking to the state voter-registration site.

That’s a dumb idea for a couple of different reasons: First of all, if college students can’t make their way to voter-registration information, we have bigger things to worry about; and second, what will happen when, someday, there’s no longer a “Web” to have websites on? How many laws and regulations are being written that name this specific technology, and how do they all get fixed when the plug finally gets pulled?

Then in late February, by happy accident, I heard about a California judge who issued an order to disable a site called Wikileaks (wikileaks
.org), which allows whistleblowers and other assorted rabble-rousers to post classified or confidential items to discourage “unethical behavior” by companies and governments. A look at the site reveals some pretty interesting stuff (the Guantanamo Bay operating manual made for compelling reading).

Predictably, the judge’s order, in a case brought by a bank in the Cayman Islands (insert eye roll here), totally missed its mark. Not only did it produce the requisite blowback, making the site far more popular, but it also closed only the most obvious method of access. Yes, wikileaks.org produces a “site not found” message; but any librarian worthy of the name could track down the site within about 15 seconds.

The judge, bless his antediluvian heart, only ordered the registrar to disable the domain name, but the IP address still works, as do a number of offshore mirror sites in exotic places like Belgium and Germany. Hardly worth the trouble.

There’s an “information wants to be free” fable here, but my story is somewhat different. Institutions simply can’t keep abreast of all the new stuff going on in the information world. We’ll find out if and how legislatures and courts will be able to work out the vagaries of internet protocols soon enough.

And us? Can we really expect to keep up with everything that’s new and interesting? Once upon a time, we probably could, but the pace and breadth of innovation and development are now dauntingly swift, and there are good reasons to be judicious (no pun intended) in what we choose to follow since these are not trivial matters and we don’t play fast and loose with the human record in our care. But neither can we afford to let important ideas pass us by.

To explore and embrace what’s going on, we could either be selective, move faster (in all that spare time), or divide and conquer. If we all spent, say, an hour a month trying something new and sharing the results, we’d cover a lot of ground pretty quick, not to mention the benefits we get from just playing around. We may have to run faster and harder to keep up, but the alternative doesn’t bear thinking about.

Of course, the real reason I was happy the strike settled? It meant the Oscars would go on. True devotees know that Margaret Herrick, the academy’s first librarian and later its executive director (and an alumna of the University of Washington’s LIS program), may well have named the Oscar statue . . . but that’s another story.