dose

The Atwater Library just got some good news: The Department of Canadian Heritage has approved our application for funding for a project called “Digital Media and Website Instruction and Support for Montreal-Area Community Organizations Serving Anglophones.” This is under the Development of Official-Language Communities Program (hence the emphasis on serving Anglophones).

We submitted our application last December, and got confirmation today that we have a good chunk of money “subject to the appropriation of funds by Parliament and to the budget levels of the Program” (??).

I’ve spoken to some dose readers about this project … so get in touch if you are at all interested. There will likely be enough money for one full/part-time position to build the program.

Oops, I should have mentioned this here before. I will be giving a talk on Podcasting at the Atwater Library tonight, Feb 8, at 7pm.

Anyone interested, come along. Free entry. Oh, and the address is:
1200 Atwater Ave.; just south of Ste-Catherine (by the Atwater Metro).

Repost from librivox.org:

Below is a paraphrased sample of an email we occasionally get from librarians and teachers, as well as my response to the email. I have paraphrased the email.

***

To LibriVox,

LibriVox is a great web site. I hope to help my students to use the audiobooks. However I am concerened by the link to Wikipedia you have on your site. We teach our students that Wikipedia is not the best source of information, since anyone can edit it, and we suggest they critically evaluate the site (just as we suggest they evaluate any web site). Wikipedia markets itself as an encyclopedia and many people think it is “tried and true” as a source of information. This is especially a problem in yourger people who have not developed the skills to properly evaluate. I suggest that you should consider taking the link to wikipedia off of your. There are many other sites on the internet maintained by credible sources that could be included instead. Thank you.

XYZ,
Librarian
XYZ Secondary School

Date: Wed, 18 Jan 2006 14:47:46 -0500 (EST)
From: librivox
Subject: Re: Wikipedia link

Hello XYZ,

Thanks for the note, and your feedback much is appreciated. I hope you enjoy the LibriVox audiobooks, and perhaps your school would like to do a recording project for librivox?

re: Wikipedia, I am about to launch into a (long) defence of wikipedia, so be warned! No offense meant. But I would be very happy if you take the time to read my thoughts on wikipedia itself, and its relationship to LibriVox. I would be curious, if you have the time, to hear your response to mine. Again, please don’t be offended, but I am passionate about this issue.

BEGIN DEFENSE OF WIKIPEDIA
I must say that I could not disagree more with your evaluation of wikipedia, and I think you are making a grave error in warning your students away from this wonderful educational resource. Here are some reasons why:

-the wikipedia does not claim to be “tried and true,” in fact just the opposite: it recognizes that it will have errors, and asks that users edit them, whenever they see them. So it is certainly not tried and true, and this is a very important thing to learn about *any* single source of information - especially on the internet. *Nothing* is tried and true, and wikipedia encourages users (student or otherwise) to be careful and critical about the information they find there. It is recognized as an excellent first source, that should be checked. Perhaps that would be a good thing to teach your students: use wikipedia first, check elsewhere, and then make corrections if there are any mistakes in wikipedia!

-the wikipedia is very often the best first source for any topic on the internet. For instance, I wrote much of this article:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feathered_dinosaur

I challenge you to find another source of information on the internet that has as much detailed accurate information on the topic as this article. And I double-tripple challenge you to find another FREE source. It is not my experience that, “There are many other sites on the internet maintained by credible sources that could be included instead.” Which ones? Are they free? If you can find me another resource that has the breadth of detailed information that wikipedia has, for free, I would be very excited indeed! And I wrote large chunks of the article above for precisely this reason: I could not find a single source on the internet that had all the information. It seemed to me that since I had hunted down and found the information from various sources, and since I had used wikipedia previously, that I should give back. It was easy. I just wrote what I had learned, and presto! Now there’s a nice accurate article about feathered dinosaurs, that anyone can read for free, where before there was none. (I note there’s a repeated section in there, which I should edit, unless someone beats me to it).

Note also that lack of of information in a single place is a particular problem for the topics of Authors and Literature, our bread and butter at LibriVox. It is just not true (in my experience) that there is another single source of information on the internet about Authors and Literature with as much accurate information (can you show me one that is free?). And I offer another challenge: can you find a single error in ANY literature articles on wikipedia? If you can I will send you a DVD with all LibriVox books for free … and then I will go correct the error! But I bet you will not find an error.

-wikiepdia also encourages your students to share their knowledge in an open way, to participate in bringing more knowledge to the world. The principle of wikipedia is much like a library, where the idea is that everyone should have access to books. Wikipedians believe that everyone should have free access to knowledge, and they participate in bringing knowledge to the world every time they make an edit, or add a new page. So as a librarian, some of the questions you should ask yourself (among others), are: do you think that knowledge should be free or owned? Should people be encouraged to share knowledge? If you think it should be free, what is the best way to help knowledge be free? What do you think are the effects of discouraging your students from using a source of information, created by volunteers all over the world, who share their time and expertise with the lofty aim of providing a free encyclopedia to the world? If I were one of your students, I would think you were telling me: volunteering to share my knowledge is bad; promoting free access to knowledge is bad; and that I should not contribute to increasing knowledge in the world.

-sometimes articles in wikipedia have incorrect or misleading information - sometimes even hurtful information. This cannot be denied, nor is it denied by anyone. But the amazing thing is how quickly most errors are caught, and edited. The average time between, for instance, “vandalization” (making nonsense, or derogatory edits) and restoration to accuracy is in the SECONDS. Some errors stay longer-usually because no one is reading them. But there is an army of volunteers who care passionately about the objectives of wikipedia — free information for all — and they are incredibly vigilant. Still, they don’t catch everything. But neither does the New York Times.

-errors: Britannica v Wikipedia: although this is, to me, beside the point, an analysis done by Nature magazine found that on scientific topics, Wikipedia has slightly more errors than Britannica, but not significantly more. This despite the wikipedia articles being on average TWICE as long as their Britannica counterparts.

Finally, to wikipedia and LibriVox: wikipedia was one of the prime inspirations for LibriVox. The idea that a group of volunteers could take on a project so useful, so wonderful, so ambitious, and so good for the world - and do it so successfully made me think: maybe people could do the same with audiobooks? Like wikipedia’s editing policy, we accept anyone as a reader, and we make no judgments about the quality of their recordings. And like wikipedia, we say to our listeners: if you do not like how a recording is done, please, make another one, and we will be happy to include it in our catalog.

Finally, and, again, just a silly aside: every time we complete a LibriVox book, we go to wikipedia to add a link to our recording, so that people will know that not only can they go to their library, take out the book for free, but they can also listen for free with LibriVox recordings. We get many hits a day from people who have come from wikipedia. Do you think Britannica, or any other resource would let us link so easily? I bet not.

I hope you did not fall asleep reading that long-winded essay, but I was saddened to get such an email from a Librarian. I have always thought of librarians as defenders of everyone’s right to free information … which is exactly what wikipedia is trying, with all its flaws, to deliver.

In short, we won’t be taking down those link to wikipedia!

Best regards,

Hugh McGuire, Founder
http://LibriVox.org

new design over at librivox. idea: make it easy for new visitors to figure what the hell is going on. i was a bit worried at first; it’s not a design choice that I would choose for my own stuff, but the objective is not to meet my design preferences, but to make it easy for new visitors — not necessarily tech savvy or blog-saturated — to navigate down the 2 streams: listening & volunteering. I think it succeeds. Anyway, check the nice new look:

http://librivox.org

Kristen, lead designed, writes about the speedy collaboration process here.

the idea is for mike; the tone for boris. From dchuds work log:

Library2.0 is not “tags”. It is not “AJAX”. It is not “user participation.” It is not “social”. It is not a “commons”.

It is MOST CERTAINLY not “RSS”.

This is all that it is: *every single thing* we do, every bit of information we publish, every way we publish it, EVERYTHING, is available via a few simple, standard protocols that *anybody* with an animal book and a text editor can make do what THEY want.

That’s it. Now stop boring us, and help build it.

(via jonathan)

For those of you following my little life-overtaking project, LibriVox, here’s a post from the LibriVox blog, along with a link to some cool audio:

I reported earlier on the LibriVox involvement in the launch of the Open Library, and promised an audio clip. So here it is. This is Brewster Kahle, founder of the Internet Archive (where LibriVox hosts audio files), the big force behind the OpenLibrary project. Here he is showing off — to a crowd of 600 silicon valley movers/shakers, + a bunch of librarians and interested public — the beautiful Open Library interface for An International Episode, and then he demonstrates the audio, produced by LibriVox. Have a listen to what happens (sorry about the quality of the recording):

Brewster demo of LibriVox.

You gotta love the “wow” in there!

(see: LibriVox)

Mike was hoping for some blogging while I was in San Fran…unfortunately I was busy doing things that did not include ruining my eyesight and generating carpal tunnel syndrome. I visited my pal John B, saw family in Sacramento, hung out a bit with fling93, and went to Porter Creek Winery, an amazing little vinyard in the so-beautiful Russian River area of California.

But I did go to the launch of the Open Library, an initiative of the Internet Archives and the Open Content Alliance, as a representative of LibriVox. (newly moved to librivox.org, please update your links). I wrote a long review of the event over that LibriVox, but here’s the highlight:

Brewster Kahle, the founder of the Internet Archive, and the driving force behind this project made the case for his exciting challenge: to deliver “universal access to all human knowledge” … to provide an Alexandria for all the people everywhere (as long as they have internet access!). As he went through his speech/presentation, there were a number of periods of clapping, hurrahs etc. But this moment made me a little teary-eyed, I must admit. Brewster was demonstrating, on-screen, the Open Library version of the International Episode … and after flipping through a few pages, he clicked on the “listen” button.

You can’t hear it in the recording I made—which is stuck in my iriver for the moment, I’ll have it available in a couple of days, sorry about that!—but there was an audible gasp in the audience, as in “wow” … and then on came Alex reading for LibriVox… when Brewster pressed stop, the crowd went crazy with applause.

How cool is that?

From the Vancouver Public Library comes an interesting discussion series, Speak Up: Who Owns Knowlegde:

Join us for our Speak Up program to discover and discuss what you think about the ownership of genes, copyright, cost of drugs, selling universities, and the value of open source and open access information technology.

(via LibrarianActivist)

So here’s the skinny on that last post, for those of you wondering what the hell I was on about. I had a conference call today with Brewster Kahle (founder of the internet archive) and some others at archive.org. He’s launching a new project, for which there seems to be no specific info yet available, called the Open Library — sorta like the google project, I guess, but with really specific emphasis on “open.”

Well, he’s invited me to come down to San Fran to participate, highlighting LibriVox. We will do a special LibriVox recording for the flagship Open Library book.

More info to follow!

You know what’s so cool about the internet, blogging, and free libre open source software & culture (FLOSS&C). The democracy of it all…if you write something worthwhile, or do something interesting, or launch a little project that might just catch on, well, nice things can come of it.

Since I’ve been exploring this world of free libre open source software & culture I have been astounded at how easy it is, if you have something to say, to engage in stimulating conversations. Within the space of a week, during the summer, a blogger I comment on & who comments on my blog occasionally, who happens to live in California, was up in Montreal - we met up, and ended up having a stellar dinner party at my house with music and great food. Read a little about that evening here, if you are interested.

Later that week, out of the blue, the brain behind Wirearchy contacted me, said he was in Montreal, had read some stuff on my blog, and did I want to meet for coffee?…sure, I said. Cool world.

And with Jon of Wirearchy I mentioned one of those funny blog-world stories…when I first got into all this crazy stuff, I was reading boris’ webblog, for months. I had commented on his weblog a couple of times, he’d commented on mine. Then he posted pic of himself, and I realized, Ha! I know Boris. We used to stand at the bar at Blizzarts on Thursday nights, side by side, and make small talk while drinking St-Ambroise. For years! …

And, more excitingly, that week, the father/godfather/guru of the free software movement, rms = richard stallman was in town for a conference (which incidently ended with a big verbal battle royal between rms & marcus b of creative commons canada, see my report here, and note — again, the internet is so cool — that marcus actually commented on my review. Ha!). rms is, in my opinion one of the most important political philosophers of our age — at least one of the most important implementers of political philosophy. Well, I had exchanged emails with rms, asking for an interview, which he granted. (The article is still in the works). Point being, I got to go to dinner with rms, which was … educational!

Now, where was I. Ah yes, talking about the inspiring figures on the internet. I would say other than the technical world - beyond my comprehension - of free software development, there are three projects which I think are of huge importance, and have been crawling around in my brain for some while:
-wikipedia - the great open encyclopedia
-project gutenberg, a repository of thousands e-texts of books in the public domain (eg, Joseph Conrad’s Secret Agent)
-and the Internet Archive, a place for public stuff to be kept on the net …

Now archive was founded by Brewster Kahle, and if you want to hear something inspiring, take a listen to this talk he gave, arguing that we have the technology to put all human knowledge on the net, and make it open to everyone. This was one of the most exciting things I have heard in a long time — that not only is there the will and the interest, but also the technology to really do this - to totally open knowledge for anyone with an internet connection to use. (See, also, MIT’s wonderful open courseware project!).

So all this stuff’s been swirling around in the old brain, as mentioned in this post.

Now I’m a writer, so I like books. I like radio too, and if I can listen to good radio, I do. There’s not much good radio in Montreal, so I was pretty happy when I discovered podcasting (duh!), and found not just some good proper amateur podcasts, but also the forward thinking public broadcasters out there who are podcasting stuff like crazy (hey cbc, drop your lockout, and act like a man, and while you’re at it get your head out of your ass about podcasting). ABC and BBC, as well as NPR, are all offering a slate of great content by podcast.

So books, writing, podcasting. I went on a long drive recently, and was looking all over for audiobooks, free to download. Harder to find than you’d imagine. Everyone charges money (even if it’s just a little bit), or so I thought, and then I found this great project: Urban Art Adventures, doing a free podcast of Lady Chatterly’s Lover, a book I’ve never read. Well, Jan from UAA does a spectacular job, very professional, very good rendering, and also very personal, clearly a passionate DYI project of the highest quality. This, I thought, is what the internet is all about. And I sat in my car wondering how long it would be before Jan finished LCL — it takes her 10 hrs! she told me, to produce one chapter! — and when she would start her next book.

My next thought was: why not use all this opensource, volunteer passion, mix in books, podcasts, gutenberg, and the archive, and come up with something that can really contribute to the public domain. And so LibriVox was born (sorry to keep posting about this, but it’s been taking up lots of my energy of late).

Well, now we’ve got 8 books on the go, something like 60+volunteers, and download.it from Italy is starting a parallel project. But the coolest thing of all, and the reason I started this long post is this: Brewster Kahle, from archive.org, and one of the great visionaries of the free internet movement, is pushing an idea of Open Library, and he likes LibriVox… so we hope to participate in an event with them. I’ll be trying to work out details in the next few days.

Cool, eh?