Andrew Tobias asks if we can finally put the tax argument to bed:

• Is the reason you’re not investing in stocks these days (a) the prospect of having to pay 15% capital gains tax?  Or (b) the fear of further losses?  (Well, or – c – that you don’t have any money?)
• Is the reason you don’t start a new business that (a) if it made you a lot of money you’d have to pay a lot of taxes?  Or that (b) you can’t get anyone to risk the funds you need to finance it?
• Is the reason you don’t hire new workers that (a) you’re paying so much in taxes?  Or that (b) with business down so much, you don’t need them?
• Is the reason you’re not spending money as freely as you used to that (a) your taxes are too high?  Or that (b) you’re afraid of losing your job?  (Well, or – c – that you’ve lost half your net worth and suddenly realize you’d better get serious about saving for a decent retirement?)
• Is the reason you’re unemployed that (a) taxes are too high to make you want a job?  Or that (b) you’ve sent out 400 resumes and called every connection you have, but no one’s hiring.

Quite a while ago now, stepinrazor asked people to do some self-censorhip in a post in the Flickr Ideas forum. FlyButtafly quickly joined the discussion, noting that she’d encountered some material she found offensive in pictures from other Flickr members: “as I’m going through the pictures, one shows up of a protestor holding a sign with a vulgar statement on it.” Though she refused to identify what she saw that was offensive, she did note in a later post that she “would never take my child to a pro-abortion rally.”

Striatic was quick to point out that “it probably wasn’t a pro-abortion rally, it was a likely a pro-choice rally.” Adding:

it’s easy to respect your opinion .. and i’ll try not to mislable your morality .. but even if you think that pro-choice is a corrupt morality {it isn’t beyond debate}, could you please not mis-represent it?

Meanwhile, in a somewhat different thread of the same conversation, GustavoG asked:

But was it offensive? To whom? To what culture? To what subculture within what culture?

Are you aware of the fact that your own icon would be offensive in the Muslim world? Your face can be seen, without any attempt to cover it. Shouldn’t you be forced to label your icon as “may offend”, and therefore be made invisible to the public?

I’ve been trying to synthesize the resulting discussion into a short, meaningful post for over a year now, but what appeared in the Flickr forum was so rich that I’ve now simply decided to quote the best bits of it and let them stand on their own.

FlyButtafly, who had started the thread with a specific question shot back at GustavoG’s expansion of the issue:

your comment about the muslim culture was completely extraneous. It has nothing to do with the issue at hand. We aren’t talking about inane issues that have to do with specific religions, otherwise we could go on to say that you can’t post pictures of pigs because of Jews and muslims and seventh-day adventists, etc., or that we couldn’t show a steak because of hindus. C’mon, let’s please stay on topic.

Quas responded:

I think that was exactly Gustavo’s point, and I think it’s a good one. Obviously Flickr isn’t going to censor pig/steak photos, yet these could be considered offensive to some.

Any photo could be potentially offensive to any viewer [OK, an exaggeration, but bear with me] — it’s just a matter of drawing the line somewhere. And since everyone will draw the line at a slightly different place, it’s going to be very hard (or impossible) to please everyone.

FlyButtafly narrowed the question:

I don’t think anyone disagrees with what is pornographic. Or why don’t we just say “nudity” that way there’s no confusion? Is it offensive to state what is in the picture? And to be able to shield myself from that type of image?

fallsroad re-expanded it:

That statement has been the center of court cases, debates, and regulation since the beginning of the Republic, and will be until long after we are all dust.

Again, FlyButtafly:

It is asking if we could have an explicit “nudity/pornography” and “obscenity/vulgarity” flag. There’s not any ambiguousness about those flags. At least not for the pornography one. Here, if anyone doesn’t understand what that word means: Someone with little or no clothes on.

To which ///Alex leapt:

Someone with little or no clothes on… != Pornography

Is this a pornographic photo?

…And GustavoG added:

you’re asking for the built-in ability to filter the world according to what offends you, and even by one or two of the things that offend you. Let’s assume this is done — and then someone requests another set of flags and buttons and whatnot, this time to filter out some other kind content that you would not find to be objectionable. For example, a steak. (I’m assuming you don’t object to steaks.) What would you say then — “yes, the system should support filtering steaks out”? Or “”o, there is no need for that functionality because I don’t think steaks are objectionable“?

If the steak filter is implemented, next time someone will require yet another filter — e.g. ”I’m offended by improper punctuation, photos with title, comment or notes with improper punctuation should be filtered out“.

Once everybody is happy seeing the three or four remaining non-objectionable photos, how many flags, filters and buttons will be there?

Accusing people of bigotry is easy – one just has to type the words. Please consider what it means, if you think that what offends you should be implemented globally, but what offends others needn’t.

Finally, FlyButtafly:

Maybe I should have stated it this way: In the UNITED STATES OF AMERICA we have certain laws that have been approved by the majority for centuries about what should be allowed in the public square. If this were not true, then we would not have such things as indecency laws, we wouldn’t have a ratings system, and anyone could pretty much get away with anything.

Fallsroad quickly pointed out FlyButtafly’s concerns are matter of great public debate. For my part, I took issue with the suggestion that morality laws of any sort “have been approved by the majority for centuries” in the US.

Censorship became a matter of federal interest in the late 1800s as a result of agitating by Anthony Comstock who burned 15 tons of books in his crusade against perceived obscenity and immorality. Richard Zacks’ An Underground Education reports that Comstock’s furor was a result of his compulsive feelings of desire and self stimulation that accompanied the sight of such materials.

J. Edgar Hoover followed Comstock as America’s top obscenity cop, ordering his agents to deliver confiscated materials directly to his office where it would be placed in a vault accessible only to Hoover and a close friend (also from Zacks). But Hoover and the FBI found themselves on the losing side of a number of First Amendment decisions when the government tried to shut down Reuben Sturman’s publishing enterprise — a story well told in Eric Schlosser’s Reefer Madness.

It’s worth remembering that Last Tango in Paris, with Marlon Brando and Maria Schneider, was rated X when first released in 1973, the same year the popular press coined the term “porno chic” and Deep Throat and Behind the Green Door were playing in mainstream theaters.

The current state of obscenity laws is best credited to (failed banker and convicted felon) Charles Keating, who agitated tirelessly for the government to thoroughly regulate the publishing industry while turning a blind eye toward banking. His 1965 film, Perversion for Profit, attempted to link pornography to Communism and the decline of western civilization. The perils of other people’s moral bankruptcy, it would seem, outweighed the risk of Keating’s own business bankruptcy. Though many argue that it was a moral bankruptcy of a different sort, the latter resulted multiyear depression in large part brought on by the savings and loan scandal and precipitated by Keating’s felonious financial fraud.

The Reagan administration tried to strike out obscenity, but failed to establish the case that the state’s interest (however conflicted) in preventing adults from viewing their own choice of materials was superior to the First Amendment’s constitutional prohibition of state censorship.

In short, we Americans have never been unanimous in our feelings about obscenity. Indeed, the only decision that has withstood the test of time has been the our insistence on free speech.

Anthony Comstock, argument, Charles Keating, civil liberties, community standards, cultural imperialism, first amendment, flickr, free speech, freedom, J. Edgar Hoover, may offend, moral superiority, obscenity, porn, pornography

I prefaced my point about how the standards we choose in libraries isolate us from the larger stream of progress driving development outside libraries with the note that I was sure to get hanged for it.

It’s true.

I commented that there were over 140,00 registered Amazon API developers and 365 public OpenSearch targets (hey look, there’s another one already), but that SRW/SRU would always play to a smaller audience. Basing arguments on the popularity of the subjects is dangerous, especially so within the library community, and touching on such inflammatory arguments during a 20 minute presentation is certain to leave people feisty.

It’s also especially dangerous to use an apparently sacred cow as the object of what I wanted to be a general example. My overall argument was (and remains) that we should look for opportunities to break down the barriers that isolate our work and find means to expand our community. Still, I believe a specific argument about SRW/SRU has merit, and I’m willing to carry the flag on this side.

So let’s start with what I believe we can agree on: SRW/SRU, OpenSearch, and Amazon Web Services all serve substantially similar interests: the ability to issue a query, get a list of results, get a detailed record for each result (not possible with OpenSearch). From here, many people seem to argue that XSLT can be used to mutate the results of one schema to the other, or directly to browser-displayable content with ease. On the face of it, this seems to solve many of the incompatibilities while preserving the unique features of each.

Sadly, those XSLT arguments ignore one problem while creating another.

XSLT (and similar techniques) can change the representation of the data in a record, but they can’t change the type or nature of the data and such techniques certainly can’t address differences in the way applications interact with the API. As an example, consider that an XSLT could likely be written to translate Flickr’s schema for a single image into something that looks like Amazon’s schema for a single title, but no XSLT can make an application that interacts with one API properly interact with the other.

The problem that XSLT solutions ignore is that if all these schemas can be translated between eachother (either cleanly or not), and if catalogers working with one metadata standard must be aware of the limitations of other standards to which their work might get XSLT’d to, then what’s the value of their differences? Why invest the duplicated time and effort in each?

The rest of this argument assumes that XSLT solves neither the needs of the programmer who must still learn to navigate different APIs nor the cataloger who must either use lowest-common-denominator cataloging standards or write metadata that can’t be cleanly translated to other schemas.

With XSLT out of the picture, it becomes clear that SRU/SRW is indeed among the wall of standards that make it impossible for us within the library to share executable code with anybody outside our community. And because of our low numbers and natural variations in chosen environments (preferred language & database among them), we often find it difficult to share executable code among others within our community.

It’s also worth considering the differences in features between SRW/SRU, OpenSearch, and Amazon Web Services: Both OpenSearch and AWS offer ways to include suggested alternate searches within the search response set (OpenSearch does this especially well). Nothing I’ve seen in SRW/SRU does this (please correct me if I’m wrong), yet considering how much interest there is in developing more human search interfaces and those that allow faceted searching, these are clearly essential components of any useful standard.

Further, AWS supports all aspects of the usage of materials, not just the search and retrieval of them. Are AWS’s shopping cart and checkout features not similar to our circ checkout procedures? Could AWS’s list management features not be used to show patrons what they have checked out now or throughout their history (if we or they wanted that), as well as allowing them to maintain the reading wishlists or personal bibliographies?

And AWS’s support for returning related and recommended items for each record, as well as comments and reviews is outside the scope of SRW/SRU, but required for many of the features we want to add to our applications.

The point here is that while there are substantial differences in the details between SRW/SRU and OpenSearch or AWS, it is not easy to conclude that SRW/SRU is substantially better for the applications we seem to most want to build.

And this is when we have to take note of the recent University of California libraries report and the quote that puts us all in our places: “for the past ten years online searching has become simpler and more effective everywhere, except in library catalogs” (and the same could be said of our online databases).

The problem isn’t that we’ve been bad coders, and we certainly haven’t intentionally built systems that were difficult to use. The problem is that our community has been isolated and unable to leverage advances made elsewhere. Again, my argument is that we need to change this, that we need to find more ways to collaborate not only with those within our community, but with those outside our community.

There’s much we might be able to offer coders outside libraries, but the arguments defending SRW/SRU seem to ignore the lessons we might learn from them.

Final example: it’s pretty obvious to all of us now that chat reference should be done using common and freely available IM tools, but that didn’t stop us from investing huge sums of money in building and buying custom, library specific chat reference tools. Where else will history show we’ve made similar mistakes?

a9, amazon api, amazon web services, argument, AWS, cage match, code4lib, code4lib 2006, future libraries, information retrieval, lib20, libraries, library, library 2.0, library standards, opensearch, search, search and retrieval, search retrieval, sru/srw, srw/sru, web services

Regarding nudity in photographs posted to Flickr, dancharvey says:

Honestly, I’m more concerned about all the cats and flowers. Cliche is more damaging than breasts. Your opinion may vary.

nudity, censorship, flickr, photo, photography, top-v, argument, cliche, reason