In the wake of the ongoing controversy over select Young Adult books at the West Bend Community Memorial Library, the Intellectual Freedom Round Table of the Wisconsin Library Association has named Director Michael Tyree and Young Adult Librarian Kristin Pekoll,…
Read More West Bend Public Library Wins Wisconsin ProQuest Intellectual Freedom Award
I shared my thoughts on privacy and the Google Book Settlement at the “Google Books Settlement and the Future of Information Access” conference organized by the UC-Berkeley School of Information. My remarks focused on my desire to trust Google when they say they're "thinking hard" about these issues and promise to "protect readers' privacy rights", while noting their track record is reason enough to cause us some pause, which is why we're pushing so hard as advocates on these vital concerns.
Congratulations to Elizabeth Buchanan and Charles Ess for being awarded an NSF grant to create a much-needed repository and advisory board to address the challenges that emerging Internet and Web 2.0 platforms are placing on research ethics. I'm thrilled to…
The art blog Art Fag City recently published a brilliant and insightful photo essay by Jon Rafman, titled "IMG MGMT: The Nine Eyes of Google Street View". Through text and Street View images, Rafman critically interrogates the gaze of Street View, exposing the ways in which it frames our view of the world, while at the same time constraining it. In the post are some of the more compelling Street View images he has found, along with his closing remarks.
Last year, as part of Milwaukee's 2008 OneWebDay celebration, I posted guidelines to help users adjust their Facebook privacy settings. This has been one of the most visited pages on my blog. Now that we're getting ready for the 2009…
Read More How to Adjust your Facebook Privacy Settings – 2009 Edition
Building on last year's success, I'm pleased to announce Milwaukee's 2009 OneWebDay events: On Monday, September 21 (7:00pm, UWM Union Theater), UW-Milwaukee's Center for Information Policy Research and School of Information Studies is hosting a free screening of the Girl…
[Note: please be sure to read the comments with responses from Google's Alexander Macgillivray] Joris van Hoboken recently brought this section of the Google Book Search Settlement Agreement to my attention: Section 3.7(e) Google’s Exclusion of Books Google may, at…
Read More Will Google Use “Editorial Discretion” to Exclude Books from Book Search?
As the possible approval of the Google Book Search Settlement Agreement looms, various advocacy groups have brought attention to the fact that Google might gain even greater ability to monitor the books you browse, the pages you read, and even the highlights and marginal notes you make on digital copies of books.
New York Law School professor (and fellow Yale ISP alum), James Grimmelmann, has launched The Public Index: A Website to Study and Discuss the Google Book Search Settlement. From his announcement: The Public-Interest Book Search Initiative at New York Law…
Read More The Public Index: A Website to Study and Discuss the Google Book Search Settlement
Amazon has remotely removed copies of George Orwell's 1984 and Animal Farm from user’s Kindles while crediting their accounts, indicating that the books were improperly added to the Kindle store by a company that did not have the rights to them. More than just an eBook reader, the Kindle represents the latest cog in Amazon's large-scale infrastructure of intellectual surveillance.
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