The 6th round of the South Korea / U.S. free trade agreement will be held in Shilla Hotel from Jan 15 to Jan 19 in Korea. In the past, there have been mass protests in Korea against unfair Kor/U.S. FTA and a massive protest is expected during this round as well.
Last year, the U.S. pressured the Korean government to open various korean markets including rice, film, auto, beef etc.
After lifting the ban on beef imports caused by a case of mad cow disease , South Korea has since sent back three shipments of U.S. beef after finding bone fragments in the meat. U.S. officials protested that South Korea employed excessively strict rules to block U.S. imports.

Various Korean activist communities have strongly advocated against the FTA saying that this unilateral method of trade agreement has been detrimental to Korean culture, economy and public health. According to the Seoul Metropolitan Police Agency, 15,000 riot police will be on the street to “protect” the meeting venue.

More articles on Korea FTA issues please check:

• bilaterals.org

• Korean Alliance against the Korean and US. FTA

David Berman, Archives & Museum Informatics, wrote an article in D Lib magazine (Decemeber 2006) recapping Jean-Noël Jeanneney’s Critique on Google. I think all librarians need to read and think about those 5 critiques that Berman addresses.

I was talking with friends over thanksgiving dinner about google (you can tell I can’t stop thinking about google!). We agreed that it is problematic that there is very little public discourse on google despite their increasing expansion into all areas of the cyberworld and it’s infrastructure. We were speculating why there is no public discourse:

1. Ignorance: Maybe people have no idea what are the implications of google’s expansion in our daily life. They don’t perhaps don’t realize that google tracks our search terms, serves advertising based on our email content, etc.
2. Fear: It’s interesting that there are no critical views on google among librarians or higher education. It’s possible that people think that there will be the possibility to work with Google in the future (University of CA and University of VA are two recent sign-ons) and they don’t want to jeapardize by criticizing them. Many academic institutions are already working with them and many others want to join the race.
3. Conflict of interest: A large number of people are already associated with Google in one way or another. So it is difficult if not illegal for those people who know best about google’s inner workings and practices to criticize those practices because of their position.

Whatever the reasons for the lack of public discourse, silence is not the solution. If ignorance is the reason then we have to find the way to educate our public and ourselves. If fear is preventing the public discourse then we need to create a community where we can engage in critical dialog and encourage people to discuss about how the decisions we make now will affect future generations of library users and the world’s citizens. If conflict of interest is the reason then we have to ask ourselves whose interests are being looked after?
I think this is the time and I hope we don’t wait too long.

I thought no one was reading my blog since I haven’t posted anything for a long time. But since I restarted the blog a couple of days I found out that my friend, Jim Jacobs, was picking up my new blog posts via RSS. I guess you never know who will read your blog in cyber world

Speaking about Jim, I had a chance to talk him on the phone today. I always think he is one of the library world’s visionaries but few library administrators recognize his brilliancy since he is way ahead of them (and I’m not trying to butter him up ).

I mentioned to him about my mental struggle with google as a library tool. One thing he pointed out that I think is really important is the concept of transparency. No one knows how google works. There are so many mysterious layers between google search technologies and users.
This is crucial distinction between libraries and Google. When I teach a library class to students I am able to teach how knowledge is organized in the library and how Library of Congress (LC) Subject Headings and LC classification that we use are biased and western culture/dominant ideology-centered — for more, see for example, Sanford Berman’s Prejudices and Antipathies.

With Google, I can’t teach students about the intricacies of how knowledge is organized and why, in google’s search results, certain links are on the top and the others are not. Worse, I don’t even know what is included and what is not included. Google claims that they will organize the world of information, but I am wondering whose world they are talking about.

Organizing knowledge is inherently subjective and its subjectivity has to be revealed in order to challenge the oppression/bias embedded in our culture. One thing that the library community can do while they are dealing with Google is to point out to their user communities about google’s opaqueness in terms of how things are organized and be aware of it’s implications.

Google is getting to be an evil empire (maybe it’s already there) but I don’t know what to think of it. Working in an institution that has a partnership with google is not that easy for someone who thinks google is evil. I am wondering how people who are working in Microsoft deal with their company’s evilness. Worse, as a librarian it is impossible to get away from google. I guess I can promote scroogle and their google scraper search (check out the Firefox scroogle search extension!) but there is no google scholar or google books version of scroogle. As part of my everyday job, I have to struggle with questions like:

• Should Google be branded on our library site or not?

• Should we promote google books and google scholar and if so, then how?

I don’t have any grounded answers for these questions.So what should be done? Can we boycott Google? Should we? Can libraries create their own tools? Unlike other products or companies where a boycott could work (think Walmart or MS software), not using google will not work because they’re so ubiquitous and branching out from search into wifi infrastructure, email, Web apps like Writely etc. Additionally, how many other information products that libraries use are produced by unethical corporations? LexisNexis?
Many librarians are struggling to cope with the feeling that google will take over the library and their jobs. However, I think we have to remember that libraries are different from google despite google’s claim that google and librarians’ missions are similar (I just found out). Many librarians think google is our competitor, but if we compete with google then we will lose. Think about how much money is behind google and how many people work for google.

I think we have to go back to our roots and our fundamental library mission as an educational institution. I will be thinking over the holiday weekend on the issue of google and libraries and hopefully come up with philosophical premises that I can share with our staff and let them know where I stand on this.

Boing Boing: USC’s bizarre, non-legal copyright policy

Turns out our friend Cory Doctorow (see the video) is at USC for the year as a fulbright chair! This story’s truly bizarre and troubling for academic institutions. I thought the academy was supposed to protect scholars, not constrict them out of fear or ignorance?

…It purports to inform students about the contours and boundaries of copyright, but actually presents a collection of scare-tactic half-truths and astonishing statements about the purpose of the university.

In the letter, USC’s officers promise to spend students’ tuition on policing them on behalf of the entertainment industry, but make no comparable promise to protect them from the thousands of automated, baseless accusations generated by the RIAA, MPAA and BSA.

Textcasting has arrived. By Andy Bowers

Slate’s new “textcasting” hack leverages the iTunes podcast distribution infrastructure to
deliver text stories to iPods. How? By embedding the stories in the metadata of silent MP3s.

And you needed another reason to get a new ipod?!

First off, let me apologize for not posting in a LONG time. It’s been hectic on this side of the monitor, and I’ve been blogging more on my other site, Free Government Information. Rest assured that LAZ is not defunct!

And now to the business at hand. Chairman Lamar Smith (TX-21) just introduced the ÒOrphan Works Act of 2006Ó (H.R. 5439), which creates new guidelines for use of copyrighted material when the original owner cannot be located. This is a fairly reasonable approach to orphan works, which have been estimated at upwards of 90% of all works still in copyright. For more see CopyBites and the US Copyright Office’s Report on orphan works.

The End of the Internet?

Jeff Chester, executive director of the Center for Digital Democracy, wrote this article back in February. In fact, we probably blogged about it right here because net neutrality is a HUGE issue for libraries. And if you didn’t get a chance to read the article the first time around, Amy Goodman has a very good interview with Chester on today’s Democracy Now. Give it a listen. It’s incredibly pertinent. (This is part one with part 2 being broadcast tomorrow).

And for those of you in the bay area, be sure to go to the EFF fundraiser next thursday April 20th. There’s to be a panel discussion about pay email and net neutrality between Esther Dyson, editor of Release 1.0, CNET’s quarterly technology-industry newsletter, Danny O’Brien, Activist coordinator for EFF, and Mitch Kapor, President and Chair of the Open Source Applications Foundation. T

The nation’s largest telephone and cable companies are crafting an alarming set of strategies that would transform the free, open and nondiscriminatory Internet of today to a privately run and branded service that would charge a fee for virtually everything we do online.
–Jeff Chester, “The End of the Internet?”

Maine Seeks to Opt Out of GATS Library Agreement

According to a recent post on American Libraries, the state of Maine has petitioned the Bush administration to have the state excluded from the General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS) Library Agreement that is currently being negotiated in Geneva, Switzerland. Maine Governor John Baldacci wrote, ÒLibraries are important sites of free and democratic exchange of information. For this reason few developed countries have committed libraries to the terms of the GATS. By committing libraries to the GATS and not specifically exempting public funding from GATS rules, we compromise the support that taxpayers give to ensure that public libraries continue to serve as valuable democratic spaces. Please carve Maine out of the libraries, archives, museums, and other cultural services sector.Ó

Public Citizen notes that “the U.S. has never specified that public funds for libraries are limited to public institutions only and, ‘since aspects of these services are provided in competition with other service providers,’they may be subject to claims of unfair competition by the commercial sector.” What exactly does that mean? Well, libraries could be sued for offering videotapes and dvds, and even ostensibly for loaning books since all of those services could be viewed as unfair competition.

SPOCK! …. must …. get…utility belt…..SPOCK!!!