Table of contents: issue62

Book Review: Delete - The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age

editor — Sat, 30 Jan 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Pete Cliff hopes he'll not forget this marvellous book, even when the author seems to suggest it might be better if he did!

In the past the storage and recall of information (the act of remembering) was limited. If people wanted to keep a record, it had to be written down (at great expense in the days before printing) or they had to rely on (notoriously error-prone) human memory. As time moved on, more and more could be recorded, but recall in the analogue world remained difficult - the raison d'être of information science. However, with the proliferation of digital recording and the advent of cheap and vast storage, the balance has shifted. In a world deluged with data - including our personal collections of digital photos, email inboxes and the like - it has become easier to record everything than attempt any kind of manual pruning - deleting bad photographs, irrelevant emails, etc. At the same time recall methods have advanced, so that I can (should I want) look up an email I sent more than five years ago or see what a colleague blogged last year.

This shift from people forgetting to machines remembering is the central theme of Viktor Mayer-Schönberger's book Delete, published by Princeton University Press. And a fascinating, frightening, well-argued and accessible read it is!

The work opens with the now familiar horror stories of digital remembering - a newly qualified teacher failing to get a job on account of the picture of her on a social networking site, the psychotherapist refused entry to the USA because of a (presumably open access) journal article, published several years before, in which he mentions having taken LSD in the 1960s. Examples of how society is now able to discover (to remember) facts about your life that you have forgotten yourself. This opening chapter neatly sets the scene and highlights just how much Mayer-Schönberger has read around the problem of 'perfect memory'.

In the next two chapters, the reader is taken on a ride through the psychology, sociology and history of forgetting and humankind's battle against it. They culminate in the rise of the technologies that now leave us with a society capable of seemingly perfect memory (though not everything is remembered digitally and we'd do well to remember that!) while individuals are now capable of looking up their past in ways hitherto unimagined. Though the author's arguments are compelling, they are on occasion overstated or based on false premise - is it really all that easy to mine the vast data resources we have at our command yet? However, the book does get the reader thinking and the author himself states that part of his reason for writing it was to stimulate debate.

Chapter IV, Of Power and Time - Consequences of the Demise of Forgetting, is probably my favourite - perhaps because I love a good tale of doom! It examines the consequences of total recall and boils the issue down to two fundamentals. Firstly there is the loss of power, as information about us is duplicated and reused (often out of context) with or without our permission; and secondly the negation of time. Among the issues are two terrifying possibilities: that perfect memory threatens reason, abstract thought and the ability to make decisions in the present, and; that the reasons for retaining data now may seem sensible, but what if (as with the chilling example given) it should fall into the wrong hands in the future?

Having clearly and concisely built a picture of the problem, from the early days of human history to the present, Mayer-Schönberger then turns to some potential solutions. Chapter V outlines six potential responses, drawing on information privacy issues as well as other areas. Curious here is the way he suggests one response would be for information sources (us) to use digital rights management techniques to ensure our data are safe, effectively turning the tables on the music industry or search engines. It is an interesting idea, though one the author later dismisses.

Book Review: Copyright - Interpreting the Law for Libraries, Archives and Information Services

editor — Sat, 30 Jan 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Charles Oppenheim sees much to like in the new edition of this work by a well-known authority but identifies one potentially major drawback.

This is the fifth edition of what is, obviously, a very successful title. The previous edition was published in 2004, and five years is a long time in copyright law and practice, so it was felt no doubt that a new edition was due. However, as I will explain at the end of this review, that decision may have been unsound.

The book follows its normal format of a series of questions regarding UK copyright law and practice, with brief answers. The author is a well-known UK copyright expert and has a gentle, witty writing style, which makes it possible to read the book cover-to-cover if you so wanted. The main chapters, covering the basics of copyright, the major media types, licences, electronic copyright and other matters, is followed by lists of useful addresses and sources of information, and a good index [1].

It is always difficult to achieve the magic combination of accuracy and approachability in legal matters, but Cornish largely manages this. I did identify errors and niggles though. For example, question 2.11 [1] on copyright in facts fails to cross-refer to protection of collections of facts in databases, which is covered elsewhere in the book; the claim in 3.19 and 4.27 that a library, archive or museum when given a bequest of unpublished works can assume that it has also acquired the copyright in such materials unless it is told otherwise is incorrect; in 4.3, the author makes reference to 'trivial works' without explaining what he means by the term; in 4.37 it is claimed that a slide or PowerPoint of a book page made for teaching cannot be made legally, but this is not true, as there could be an argument that the reproduction is for criticism or review, and so is permitted (in any case, the CLA's scanning licence will also often allow this); when discussing the communication to the public right in 4.54, the author fails to note that placing copyright material on an Intranet or as an e-mail attachment is also prohibited; in 6.8, it is claimed that someone who transcribes an interview will own the copyright in the transcription, when in fact the transcriber will jointly own the copyright with the interviewer and interviewee; in 11.64, the author claims it is always an offence to remove or alter rights management information, when in fact it is only an offence when it is done with the intention of enabling or concealing copyright infringement - a very important distinction.

Book Review: My Word! Plagiarism and College Culture

editor — Sat, 30 Jan 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Brian Whalley reviews a look at this problem from an American anthropologist and finds there is more in it than just a consideration of plagiarism.

My Word! is an attention-grabbing title for a book on plagiarism by an academic anthropologist and teacher. Although written entirely from a North American perspective, many bells will ring here for all concerned with teaching and education. Do not, however, expect a set of ideas or rules to prevent (!) or reduce plagiarism.