Sunday musing uploaded on Monday

Lessig on Google Print
Lawrence Lessig (author of my favorite book on copyright issues, Free Culture), adds his two cents on Google Print at Wired.

While Google Print will be another challenge in relevance for libraries, Lessig is right when he asks:

Think about Google's core business: It copies whatever content it finds on the Web and puts that content in an index. It doesn't ask the copyright owner first, though it does exclude content if asked. Thus, Google wants to do for books exactly what it has always done for the Web. Why should one be illegal and the other different?

Read Joyce Valenza's interesting comments on Amazon's plan to sell the partial content of books. She rightly bemoans the fact that students don't take advantage of the vetted materials now provided by state databases, especially magazine articles and reference sources available online through subscription services. Ironic that some of the first accessible edited materials on the web, magazine and journal articles, are now among the least accessible since the reader needs a paid subscription to get to them. Where is Google Periodicals?

Getting spoiled
My hotel here has high speed Internet access. You’d think I’d be happy. But no, there is no wireless and I’m chained to the desk by an Ethernet cable and the comfy chair is across the room. Poor me.

Gala Dinner
Speaker at the event was Professor Tommy Koh, Singapore's Ambassador at Large and former Singapore ambassador to the US and UN. Short talk about his fondness for libraries (of course) which was  given before the dinner. I visited with him about the US briefly  and asked if he had ever been to Minnesota. He beamed and said he loved the place , describing it as a place of "cold weather, warm people." (The ability to say something like this instantly  is probably why he is an ambassador.) I added and "it's where all the children are above average." He quickly said, "Oh, I love Garrison Keillor, but people don't get him here." Better go easy on the Minnesota jokes during my talks.

Also visited with Michael Keller, library director from Stanford. He’ll be keynoting on Tuesday on “The Knowledge-Based Web.” Asked him about Google Print and it’s implications for libraries. He hastily pointed out that Stanford is one of the initial libraries involved in the project – at his urging. Glad he did that before I said something really embarrassing.

Gala table talk

• Singapore parents are worried about their children's blogging. 
• Singapore will be ‘piloting” broadband to the cell phone here soon.
• New national library (opened last Saturday) has RFID tags in all its books and has full wireless access.
• One Singapore fellow observed that Singapore is a country of NUTS - the No U-Turn Syndrome and the US is not. When nothing is posted, Singapore drivers will assume U-turns are illegal; US drivers assume they are. He thinks "rule-breakers" not "rule-followers" will be more successful in the global economy. I explained the common US belief that is it no harder to ask forgiveness than permission. Is thoughtful "rule-breaking" a knowledge-worker skill?
  

In many ways this trip has been time travel – into the future.