Slow Reading / John Miedema -- Duluth, Minn.: Litwin Books, 2009

In 1986 Carlo Petrini formed an organization in Rome called "Slow Food" in reaction to the opening of a MacDonald's restaurant. He hoped to promote the pleasures that come from the consumption of fresh, locally grown food, produced from sustainable farming practices. His organization quickly turned into a world-wide movement as there were people everywhere who were fed up with the food-like products being churned out by multinational agribusiness companies and served up as "convenience foods." These foods are lacking in both nutrition and flavor, unless, of course, you include such flavorings as sugar, salt, and oil. The toll these food-like products are taking on our health and well being is incalculable. Obesity, diabetes, heart disease, and other ailments of over consumption plague us as never before.

John Miedema's book Slow Reading transfers the sentiment behind the slow food movement to our reading practices. The parallels are striking. One merely needs to substitute digital technology and the computer industry for agribusiness and one can see that the rush to make money from our consumption of information is doing to our mental lives what junk food is doing to our bodies; and just as the slow food movement seeks to recover the benefits of pre-industrial food production, a potential slow reading movement might recover the benefits of our pre-internet reading habits.

Many of Miedema's observations about reading digital texts versus books are obvious and uncontroversial. Any text that cannot be displayed in a few computer screens is unlikely to be read by anyone. Reading longer texts virtually requires a print copy. Print allows for a degree of concentration and reading comprehension that is nearly unobtainable from electronic texts. This may be due in part to the fact that reading a book involves more of one's body than reading a computer screen. One's hands, arms, and posture are involved in a way that they normally are not when reading a computer screen. Looking directly into the light of a computer screen is far more tiring than reading print on a page.

Then there are the intentional efforts to distract the reader that are built into most Web pages. Advertisement tempt us to abandon our reading and hyperlinks encourage us to follow tangent upon tangent until we lose track of what we originally set out to read. Even electronic texts that take up the full computer screen without hyperlinks are normally embedded in a browser that has scroll bars, "favorites" links, tabs, a clock, date, a search box, and sundry other icons that have nothing to do with the text. All of these distractions are absent from a printed book.

On the other hand, the very disadvantages of a digital text are its advantages. Digital texts are easily searched by computer algorithms and can be connected easily to any number of related texts. They often can be quickly copied and pasted into a new document, enlarged, reduced, tagged, annotated without damage to the original text. The benefits of electronic texts go on and on. Whether the printed text or the electronic text is superior depends on one's needs and intentions, but one important fact stands out: print encourages us to read slowly and carefully, allowing us to find more meaning in the text. That is, we are able to better understand what the author intended by writing the text in the first place. This leads to an important question that Miedema raises about how meaning is related to a text. Do we find meaning or create meaning when reading a text?

Slow Reading offers only sketchy answers to this question, but it does provide an admirable starting point. Finding meaning in a text can be contrasted with creating the meaning of the text, though certainly both are involved in any act of reading. Printed books guide us through the author's train of thought in the order and pace that the author intended. Each paragraph is present in the context of the book as a whole and this context refines and helps to disambiguate the meaning of any individual paragraph. We mostly are finding the meaning in the text. In contrast, an electronic text allow us to create meaning in a way that printed texts do not. This is a function of the ambiguous character of the snippets of electronic texts often displayed without significant context. We are free to draw our own original insight from an author's words, even to reverse the author's meaning completely. We can read the texts in any number of contexts which we create by navigating away from the text to other Web sites that strike us as related to the meaning we are constructing.

These two different reading activities are paradoxically both individual and communitarian. Reading a printed text to understand the author's meaning places the reader in a relatively solitary situation. One is usually reading alone in a room and is directly connected to a single text. At the same time, the print book reader is deeply engaged with a specific contribution by an author who is normally making a contribution to a larger and longer conversation of a community of authors. This links the reader to the larger, longer conversation. Any response the reader might have will be bounded to a great extent by the logic of that conversation. The reader becomes part of the community engaged in the conversation.

In contrast, the reader of an e-text is, of course, more immediately connected to an almost unlimited community of Web authors through sophisticated search tools that browse billions of texts, but the reader of an e-text is not deeply connected to anyone in this community. Search tools encourage the reader pick and choose short passages and construct an entirely new text that is built out of often unrelated or idiosyncratically related texts. The context of what one is reading may be an amalgam of statements in numerous unrelated conversations. The reader is not engaged in discovering the meaning of ideas in a specific on-going conversation within a community. The reader is acting more like a scientific investigator, searching the natural world (or in this case the world of Web texts) for observations that will allow the creation of a novel theory of the reader's own. In an important sense, reading on the Web often involves not engaging with others in a conversation, not listening to the author's full expression of an idea, but listening for what one wants to hear and appropriating the snippet of text for one's own solitary purposes.

Miedema notes numerous advantages that come from "slow," "deep," or "close" reading, including educational and psychological benefits, but Slow Reading is most of all a paean to the pleasures of settling into a comfortable chair and losing oneself in a book. In this age of ubiquitous data smog, that's a very fine thing.

The Googlization of Everything (and Why We Should Worry) / Siva Vaidhyanathan -- Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2011

Siva Vaidhyanathan, professor of media studies and law at the University of Virginia prefaces his book The Googlization of Everything with a quote from Alexis de Tocqueville that perfectly captures his darker attitudes toward Google: "It does not break wills, but it softens them, bends them, and directs them; it rarely forces one to act, but it constantly opposes itself to one's acting; it does not destroy, it prevents things from coming into being; it does not tyrannize, it hinders." Vaidhyanathan is particularly concerned that Google's explosive success is placing too much power over (or perhaps responsibility for) the world's treasure-store of knowledge in the hands of one private company. His concerns are not without merit.

Vaidhyanathan is quick to admit that Google's success is based on the clear benefits that it has given the world. More than any other search engine, Google has "organized and made universally accessible the world's knowledge" and it has done so in a manner that has been comfortable and appealing to most internet users. It has also behaved more or less consistently with its informal motto: "Don't be evil." Having given Google its due, Vaidhyanathan describes practices that Google has adopted that raise important questions.

In general, Google's success depends on the "PageRank system" that they employ in displaying search results. Search results generally appear in descending order based on the number of pages that link to a page that is captured by Google's Web crawlers. This seemingly surrenders any editorial decision-making that Google might otherwise employ in displaying results and makes use of the decisions by a myriad anonymous Web designers to evaluate the merits of Web pages. There are, however, instances in which some filtering is employed by Google, most obviously is Google's willingness to consider blocking a site if they receive complaints about it.

More worrisome consequences of Google's practices stem from their standard practices. While the PageRank system will generally provide an effective quality screen, it also privileges mainstream sites. Popularity among Web designers will lead to a site appearing on Google's first page of results, which in turn will reinforce the popularity of the site. It is not easy for a new or unusual site to break onto the first page of results.

Vaidhyanathan also takes Google to task for their collaboration with the Chinese government in censoring search results. At first Google argued that providing censored information was better for democracy movements than providing no information at all; however, when Google's servers were hacked (presumably by the Chinese government) and information about Chinese dissidents and critics of the government were compromised, Google "pulled out of China." The pull out was less impressive than it appeared, though. Google simply offered its Mandarin-language search service through Hong Kong, and since all traffic between Hong Kong and China is censored by China, China continues to receive Google services, but they are censored by China and not Google directly.

Vaidyanathan also provides an very interesting exploration of the privacy issues that Google's practices raises. Two levels of concern can be identified here: first, Google is amassing a huge amount of information about individual internet users that conceivably could be used against the user. More broadly, though, Google's store of data about users could easily be used by whomever owns the information to understand the demographics of internet users in a manner that could be politically significant. It is already showing itself to be economically significant.

Perhaps Vaidyhanathan's most salient concern is Google's growing dominance in the digitization of our written (and graphic) cultural heritage and here he indicts our research libraries as complicit in a massive, historic act of privatization of a public good. The Google Books project has resulted in the digitization of nearly all of the out of copyright books at Harvard, Stanford, Michigan, Oxford, and the New York Public Library. Disregarding copyright concerns, Google has also digitized massive numbers of "orphan" works, i.e., books that are not out of copyright, but for which the copyright holder is unknown. This turns normal publishing practices on their head: instead of requiring permission before publication, Google sought to publish until permission was denied by individual copyright holders. While it is true that a massive digitizing project of the sort that Google seeks to undertake would be impossible any other way, their actions are a direct challenge to long-settle copyright law. These actions resulted in a now-famous law suit, that has pitted publishers and authors against Google. The parties to the dispute have been trying to come to a legally acceptable out of court settlement, but have thus far been unable to do so.

Vaidhyanathan appears less concerned about the integrity of the traditional copyright regime than he is about what he calls "public failure," or the failure of public institutions to take responsibility of preserving and making freely accessible the world's cultural heritage and this is certainly the most significant concern that Google's activities have raised. While it is true that Google has not prevented others from creating competing digital archives, the head start that they have gained makes competition highly unlikely. This means that the access to the world's cultural heritage is likely to be -- at least for the foreseeable future -- in the hands of a single private company, unless, of course, public institutions take up the challenge of digitizing the resources for which they ostensibly are responsible and this is Vaidhyanathan's call to action. He proposes a "Human Knowledge Project" on the order of the Human Genome project, where governments around the world allocate the resources necessary to create a cultural digital repository that will ensure that our patrimony remains a public good accessible to all.

The Googlization of Everything is not always the most well organized book. Despite improvements from a pre-publication version, the book continues to read too much like a series of related blog postings; however, by the final chapter, the overall concerns do become clear and seem well argued, though one would be hard pressed to point to how and exactly where the argument was made.

Library Ethics / Jean Preer -- Westport, Conn: Libraries Unlimited, 2008

The following review is scheduled to be published in The Library Quarterly, 81(1), 2011.

There are two common approaches to thinking about ethics: descriptive and normative. Descriptive ethics attempts to understand the ethical standards employed by a person, institution, or society. Normative ethics attempts to justify specific ethical standards. Jean Preer’s Library Ethics is mainly descriptive. She writes, “this book will examine how our understanding of library ethics has evolved along with the development of librarianship itself” (p. xiii) and “librarians developed rules in practice that were determined by institutions, customs, and local needs. Indeed, ethics relates to ‘custom,’ the word deriving from ethos, the way things are done” (p. 2.). Often works of descriptive ethics are inherently conservative. They guide us by describing prevailing practices. Preer’s work does a fair job of avoiding this trap by giving fair accounts of countervailing ethical tendencies. In the end, the reader gains a firm understanding of the main ethical challenges facing the profession as well as the evolving answers to those challenges as codified in the American Library Association (ALA) Code of Ethics, the ALA Library Bill of Rights, and other documents. Moreover, the reader is poised to consider these issues more deeply and with fresh eyes.

Early on, Preer addresses the professional aspirations of 19th and early 20th century librarians. A code of ethics is presented as an essential element of any profession. While the aspiration to professional status may seem self-serving, the 1938 ALA Code gave guidance to library workers who sought to understand what the profession expected of them. One year later, the ALA Library Bill of Rights was a promise to patrons, communities, and the world as to what they could expect from the profession.

In tracing the subsequent development of these documents, Preer describes a transformation of ethical imperatives from concrete obligations to broad assertions of professional values. Her history begins with statements by eminent librarians, most importantly Charles Knowles Bolton’s 1909 library code. Bolton prescribed library administrators’ obligations to the library’s board, staff, and patrons. The 1938 ALA Code of Ethics preserved Bolton’s approach with its implicit value of library service; however, according to Preer, the social conditions and the practice of librarianship gradually changed the profession’s ethical foundations. In 1975, the ALA adopted a Statement on Professional Ethics in which specific obligations gave way to an assertion of values; furthermore, the explicit value of access replaced the implicit value of service.

Preer presents the re-conceptualization of library ethics from obligations to values as an advance, but it is hard to see how this is so. To provide concrete help in behaving ethically, a code must not be couched in overly general, ambiguous statements of value, particularly when the code includes multiple conflicting values, e.g., freedom of information and respect for copyright. This is not to say that statements of value are useless, but they must be able to specify obligations that direct our actions. Perhaps a more useful way to think about this history is that the elements of a general formula have been emphasized differently over time. Consider the basic ethical formula: “Librarian A has an obligation to B (a patron, community, or society) to do or not do action X.” Bolton’s code and the 1938 ALA Code more or less explicitly specified the formula’s variables, but by 1975, the object of our obligations (B) had become amorphous and the substance of our obligations (X) had become abstract. Given these changes, we indeed might want to characterize our code as asserting “values.” On the other hand, we simply may have abandoned the difficult work of identifying our obligations in favor of bromides that will pass in the ALA Council.

The more consequential evolution that Preer identifies is our shift from valuing service to valuing access. In the 19th and early 20th century, our ability to provide access was relatively limited. We, therefore, emphasized our role as educators. Preer quotes Alvin Johnson, president of the New School, as observing, “Not buildings nor even book collections, but trained, intelligent, enterprising library service makes a real library” (p. 10); but as the publishing industry expanded, as our collections grew, and as we developed increasingly sophisticated tools for controlling information, our emphasis shifted toward helping each patron access whatever information she or he could identify. The role that information plays in a democratic society ennobled this effort, but when access is the paramount value, the librarian’s primary role is technocratic. We identify the requested item or meme and provide it, increasingly “just in time” rather than “just in case.” We become, essentially, unfiltered search engines.

It is noteworthy that with the expansion of free, full-text internet access to increasing shares of the information universe, access is slipping out of the hands of librarians and into the hands of advertisers, like Google. If our primary value is access, this trend will undermine our reason for being and potentially doom the profession. The following might be as self-serving as developing a “professional” code of ethics, but resurrecting the venerable value of service could give us a more lasting future. At the same time, it will resurrect important ethical problems that faded with the valorization of access.

When service is paramount, other ethical obligations arise. Preer describes an early role of librarians as educators who sought to raise the intellectual and cultural standards of the community. She quotes ALA President Arthur Bostwick’s 1909 presidential address, saying that the books to be collected “must be morally beneficial, contain accurate information or satisfy the esthetic sense in its broadest meaning” (p. 90). Today, most librarians recoil from a role that seems to objectify goodness, truth, and beauty, but this might be only because of our recent, overriding commitment to ostensibly neutral access. Against this, the explosion of readily available information and the commercial provision of this information leaves patrons in need informed advice about which information sources to take seriously and which to ignore. A new day may be dawning for the services of the reader advisor.

Clearly, a move back to valuing service over access would resurface numerous ethical issues. Many of these issues are valuably illuminated by Preer’s fourth and fifth chapters, “Access: What Information” and “Conflicts of Interest: Philosophical.” Her fourth chapter focuses on issues of censorship and obscenity, but it also discusses quality assessment and selection criteria. Separating the wheat from the chaff can be the service that librarians add to ready online access. In her fifth chapter, Preer addresses significant ethical pitfalls on this path. It is difficult to know how we can set aside our “personal” beliefs when selecting items for their goodness, truth, and beauty. Indeed, what counts as a “personal” belief and whether we should set them aside merits examination. Different criteria might be needed for writing general guides versus offering specific advice to individual patrons. In any case, the expertise of the librarian would certainly be at a premium with this restored educational role. We would no longer be technocratic experts in document delivery, but we would become qualified subject specialists whose task would be to provide our patrons with the best of what they want, not merely anything that approximates it. This would require knowing the subject matter, the available resources, and the specific needs of the patron. In school and academic libraries a certain amount of paternalism would be in order just as teachers have an obligation to use their expertise to guide the research of their students. The ethics of librarians would begin to look more like the ethics of teachers.

Preer’s eighth chapter, “Confidentiality,” deserves special attention. Preer notes that confidentiality (or privacy) initially appears in conflict with access, but she does an admirable job of explaining how freedom of expression is predicated on freedom of inquiry which in turn requires a safe environment for inquiry. This can only come about when researchers have reasonable assurances that their research will not be made known against their will. Preer goes on to apply this principle to several circumstances and patron populations. The chapter ends with a succinct discussion of privacy in the era following Sept. 11, 2001 and the advent and implications of the USA PATRIOT Act.

Throughout Library Ethics, Preer traces the ethical attitudes within the library profession and how these attitudes became expressed in codes, statements, and particular policies. It is, as she declares, an examination of library ethics based on practice. Preer largely escapes the conservativism of descriptive ethics through the depth and sensitivity of her treatment of the issues. One might say that Library Ethics begs the normative ethical questions in a good way. The reader is left understanding many of the ethical issues that have challenged librarians as well as understanding how and why ethics codes and statements were promulgated. Equipped with this knowledge, the reader is primed to ask the ultimately more important normative questions.