An Essay of the LISNews Summer Series
Librarians seem to have an aversion to business
as a concept. That is unfortunate. Without business and the taxes
derived thereby, how else would libraries exist? It is not as if
there is a patron these days like Andrew Carnegie endowing library
operations. While dreams may be large, the rocket fuel known as
greenbacks keeps so many ships on the ground away from their
goals.
A situation where this arises is participation in new media
endeavors. The skill sets required for producing in new media are
somewhat foreign to the optimal skill sets needed to catalog stacks
of materials and answers rapid-fire reference questions. Was it any
accident that the producers of the LISNews Netcast Network all
happened to have experience in technical theater as well as
experience in performance? Those are not skills you pick up in
library school and are normally considered within the spectrum of
American higher education as not things to pick up initially at the
graduate level.
There are free tools, where free is considered as in free beer
rather than freedom, that librarians have already used in producing
podcasts. One fairly limited tool that allows call-in roundtables
is TalkShoe. The service's quality has gotten worse over time as
per my own observation during participation in fan discussions
related to Battlestar Galactica. The former program Uncontrolled
Vocabulary provided a roundtable for discussing library science
issues. The present program T is for Training attempts to provide a
similar roundtable focused on training.
A key flaw with TalkShoe is that purportedly uses technology spun
off of the conference loop used by NASA flight controllers who
direct shuttle missions. The problem with that is that it works
great for providing communications and audio that can be recorded
for logging. Such logs were important during situations like the
proceedings of the Columbia Accident Investigation Board where
actions of flight controllers had to be reconstructed. For casual
listening, the audio's quality was slightly abrasive and somewhat
harsh. TalkShoe uses a similar model of recording without the same
required discipline that is exhibited by flight controllers
executing mission orders.
TalkShoe also has limitations on simultaneous live participants.
The upper limits on participation are not too certain but passing
the fifty participant threshold can seriously impair a call's
proceedings. TalkShoe is not a tool used by outfits like CNET or
the TWiT Cottage to record programs with remote guests. The
Skypeasaurus at the TWiT Cottage is a rig built by their studio
manager, Colleen, where six simultaneous Skype feeds are brought in
and can be independently mixed using a local physical audio mixer.
Having a local mixer with a local operator allows far more
fine-tuning of audio quality than the automated system of TalkShoe
can provide.
Now, let us turn to practical suggestions for how librarians can
surmount these problems. For any single library to have the
infrastructure for this in-house would be cost-prohibitive. As the
grow of operations at the TWiT Cottage has shown, programs beyond
those produced by the TWiT Network are making use of the facilities
of the cottage. Having a stable yet reliable hub for bringing in
multiple remote guests is apparently quite valuable for diverse
group like gdgt and the Gilmor Gang. Translating this into the
paradigms of North American librarianship would result in this
being an area of activity undertaken by a consortium or a
vendor.
The initial startup and construction cost for a consortium to being
to provide similar functions to the TWiT Cottage would be immense.
At a minimum, the consortium's base would have to have at least one
T-1 leased line, one ISDN line, one cable broadband connection, one
ADSL connection as a backup, and a single phone line for somebody
to answer. As proven from the growing pains of the TWiT Cottage,
various data connections to the outside world are best split over
separate pipelines so as to ensure acceptable minimum connection
quality. At any fixed location this would also require electrical
wiring upgrades to accommodate the increased load from the
additional air conditioning that would be required to keep the
required hardware operational. A number of computers would have to
be procured so that enough possible connections were available via
Skype or other VoIP system. Systems for editing would be required.
All this would be the case even if no video was involved in
production.
The hardest part to this is the matter of securing the funds so
that an operating base could be equipped. While such an operation
could eventually generate revenue that would allow for
self-sufficiency, that would take considerable time. In the present
harsh economic climate, merely knowing what is needed does not make
it any more likely to become reality. With the tools that are free
as in beer not producing appropriate quality output, alternative
options are few and far between.
###
Stephen Michael Kellat received his Master of Science in Library
Science from Clarion University of Pennsylvania in 2004. He
presently is a librarian in private practice in southern Nevada
after having worked in academic cataloging, private sector retail,
and alpaca husbandry.
This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/ or send a letter to Creative Commons, 171 Second Street, Suite 300, San Francisco, California, 94105, USA.
An Essay of the LISNews Summer Series
One of the issues coming out of ALA Annual 2009
this year is the matter of transparency. Librarians like
technology. Librarians like to use to technology. Price tags are a
little daunting, though, when presented for things that seem to be
so cheap as to be almost free as in beer.
Norman Oder has a report in Library Journal that outlines the
costs of various options in promoting transparency. Oder's
report does not explain too much in depth as to how the particular
figures are derived. The annual cost of posting audio files of
Council proceedings seems to be a bit high on the
processing/posting end unless such has included the eventual costs
of bandwidth in serving up such files. In some respects the cost of
bandwidth in serving up content can be far greater than the cost of
producing it.
Accessibility is also a tremendous concern. Simply put, the process
of securing transcripts is not cheap. The work of a court reporter
is not easy, requires specialized training, and they are quite well
compensated for their troubles. The Council's lawyer also quite
rightly pointed out that having transcripts of Council discussions
could result in lawsuits over remarks by councilors.
Is it really practical to broadcast every waking moment of every
panel, session, and hustings at ALA Annual? Is it really necessary?
With hundreds of panels and multiple situations where you have
concurrent panels, attention is easily divided. A vast army of
observers would be required to have coverage at every single panel.
Having videographers accompany the observers would only increase
the manpower requirements. Post-production would be a situation
more like the investigation by the Columbia Accident Investigation
Board relative to the sheer volume of materials to digest. There is
a reason why tech news outlets like CNET have a couple weeks of
vacation prior to the Consumer Electronics Show as they leave a
skeleton crew behind at the office as their army converges on Las
Vegas. The only known group that would even attempt this with
volunteers is PixelCorps and they have not attempted anything on
this sort of scale.
Is all hope lost on covering ALA? No! The technology does not yet
exist for proper tele-presence structures so that civilians not
attending ALA in person could still be there virtually. The funds
to outfit an army to cover the event, let alone cover the attendant
logistical nightmares, are non-existent. For the cost of hardware
to pull this off, one could presumably fully fund the operation of
a rural library for several years. In this case one must look
outside the walls of librarianship and step away from comfortable
paradigms. Television networks like Universal Sports and ESPN do
show ways this could be better handled.
A paradigm used as of late by Universal Sports is not to provide
full coverage. Logistically they cannot wage the same level of
effort all the time that is required for covering an Olympics. This
is where the matter of editorial judgment comes into play. Only
highlights of events are recorded for air. Not everything is
broadcast in real-time as some events are shown on tape delay. The
FIVB World Cup series for beach volleyball was one example of
select matches being shown on a delay. Coverage of triathalon
competitions, rowing, swimming & diving, and more fall under
similar presentation rubrics.
Television networks already exist that could carry this
programming. One would be ResearchChannel which has coverage
via terrestrial broadcasting, cable television, video on-demand,
webcast, satellite, and more. Northern Arizona University's
UniversityHouse channel, University of Washington Television, and
University of California Television are all also available by way
of satellite within North America. There are somewhat traditional
television-based distribution channels available for pushing
conference coverage outward.
In covering only highlights, much of the nightmare of logistics
goes away. If you have a smaller team picking and choosing among
panels, you can provide a representative sample to viewers at home.
The question of deciding what to cover is a matter of editorial
control that has no simple solutions, though. In an organization
that can seem to outsiders like a confederation of interest groups,
the decision-making authority of what to cover is best held not by
a committee but by a single editorial official. It could take years
for an editorial committee to make a decision in creating a
highlights reel like this while a single individual might take
action more quickly.
For all the costs of bandwidth, streaming, captioning, and more
involved in Internet-based distribution, DVD fulfillment through a
publishing arm like what ALA already has may conservatively allow
for a start to such. With online video downloads already quite
large and quite costly to transfer in some cases, the use of
physical media may allow for easier dissemination. Linux
distributions like Ubuntu and OpenSolaris do this already through
physical media distribution for this who lack the bandwidth to
either download their operating systems or download them in a
timely fashion. This physical alternative to virtual distribution
could become a new stream of revenue for ALA, too. Selling sets of
DVDs of proceedings could potentially take events to members who
could not be there. As Andrew Tannenbaum wrote in Computer
Networks: “Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station
wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway.
All of this discussion may be great but it points out a separate
issue. Is ALA Annual becoming unwieldy in its size and growth?
Could more be accomplished if it was broken down into a set of
separate events spread across the entire year? If that were to
happen, keeping a court reporter in-house would be more cost
effective and would mean an ALA film team could be utilized
perhaps.
The matter now stands at a question point. What is it the
membership wants? What is your ALA?
###
Stephen Michael Kellat received his Master of Science in Library
Science from Clarion University of Pennsylvania in 2004. He
presently is a librarian in private practice in southern Nevada
after having worked in academic cataloging, private sector retail,
and alpaca husbandry.
This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/ or send a letter to Creative Commons, 171 Second Street, Suite 300, San Francisco, California, 94105, USA.