I have come here not to bury Publib, but to praise it.
Ghost of Publib
Last year, OCLC announced that they would graciously host the popular Publib listserve. With 10 thousand + subscribers representing libraries throughout the world, it certainly represented a win/win situation. OCLC – which sells its products to libraries would host and subscribers – who buy products from OCLC could continue to subscribe. OCLC would benefit from the feel-good PR and the ability to data-mine and Publib subscribers could continue to enjoy the communication resource they have contributed to since the early 1990s.
While being hosted by UC Berkeley and Webjunction, Google and Yahoo! and all of the other major search engines readily indexed the discussions by Publib contributors. Even now, a quick engine search of almost any topic regarding public libraries renders a link to a Publib posting from previous years.
But, all of those links are now broken and the provenance of indexing has been destroyed. Although you may still view cached files, the only way to get live files is to go behind the wall set up by OCLC. Access to the root directory is by subscription only, so the search engines would no longer index the content: http://listserv.oclc.org/ So, everyone who searches any topic ever posted on Publib must now go through OCLC and search the files that they exclusively control.
What a great benefit this must represent to corporate interests of OCLC! Thousands and thousands of postings on every topic regarding public libraries, created by uncompensated authors, and they now control all of the content and its indexing for almost no associated cost and can monitor and data-mine all usage by the library community. OCLC established and litigated ownership and control of Dewey Decimal Classification (DDC) in OCLC v The Library Hotel and was recently accused of antitrust by SkyRiver and Innovative Interfaces. Does OCLC now effectively have intellectual property rights to all of the work by Publib contributors?
Hosting a listserv is really not a big deal. It is fairly low level technology and relatively easy to manage. With a bit of server space, Open Source programs such as Mailman can be set up that can manage a huge number of subscribers:
http://wiki.list.org/display/COM/Organizations+that+use+Mailman
Hosting by a non-corporate entity such as a library school or a large library system would have made much more sense. The original iteration with UC Berkeley hosting nested the conversation in a bastion of free speech. Is removing and blocking indexing censorship? Is vetting all new subscribers appropriate? Does the ability to restrict access represent ownership? Does hosting a listserve and controlling access to everything previously written grant intellectual property rights and equate to ownership? Is Publib just another example of intellectual outsourcing?
Time will tell. But, at this time Publib is a ghost of what it once represented.
Please join us on BestofPublib Facebook
The Publib Archives
The Publib archives from the Webjunction listserve are available here: Archives (Wait – they really aren’t anymore).
Archives compiled after Dec. 7, 2011 are available here: Archives
Filed under: Administration, current topics, Ethics, GSLIS, History of Libraries, Intellectual freedom, Library Organization, Library Profession, Open Source, Questions unanswered, Reference, Software, Technical Services, Technology, Web 2.0 / 3.0 | Tagged: censorship, DDC, Google, III, indexing, Innovative Interfaces, listserve, MailMan, OCLC, publib, SkyRiver, WebJunction, WorldCat, Yahoo! | 5 Comments »
Best of Publib - Public Library Discussion and Publib Listserve Analysis 