SICILY, an Italian journalist and author, Luigi Barzini, once said, “is like one of those concave shaving mirrors in which we in the rest of Italy see our image pitilessly enlarged, both faults and virtues.” Of no Sicilian book is this more accurate than Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa's slim epic, “The Leopard”, which was published in November 1958 (translated by Archibald Colquhoun, Harvill £5.99; Pantheon $12).

On the surface a portrait of an aristocratic Sicilian family set against the historical pivot of Garibaldi's unification conquest in 1860, “The Leopard” is also the distillation of an age. Domestic details fill the foreground while great events that mark the passing of feudalism and the advent of the republic take place off-page. Yet Lampedusa's deftness with words is so fine that, although nothing much appears to happen in the book—a move to the country, a dinner, a rabbit shoot, a ball, some conversations—to many readers “The Leopard” is the greatest Italian novel this century, perhaps the greatest ever, and uniquely relevant to modern Italy.

It was, however, loudly denounced when it was published. Looking back, this was to its credit. Critics fell broadly into four categories. Sicilians hated Lampedusa's portrait of the islanders as violent and irrational while stricter Italian Marxists saw his aristocrat heroes as evidence that the novel was right-wing and its author a man with no sense of progress. (That did not stop Luchino Visconti, a Communist supporter, from making “The Leopard” into one of his greatest films.)

Much of the literary Left condemned the novel as worthless because it was neither progressive nor avant-garde. Traditional Catholics interpreted the pessimism of “The Leopard” as a sign of Lampedusa's apostasy and, in particular, Don Fabrizio's crushing attitude towards his prelate, Father Pirrone, as disrespectful. A cardinal of Palermo described “The Leopard” as one of the three factors which contributed to the dishonour of Sicily, the others being the Mafia and Danilo Dolci, a prominent social reformer.

Forty years on, these voices—so loud and so self-satisfied at the time—have gradually died down, while that of “The Leopard” grows more powerful every year. Lampedusa was in effect only a gifted amateur author, but an astonishing range of professional writers, from Italo Calvino to Isabel Allende, owe a debt to the writings of this shy and portly Sicilian prince. In “The House of the Spirits”, just as in “The Leopard”, there is a young couple roaming through a house with many rooms, and a big black dog whose name begins with a ‘B' who bounds in in the first chapter only to end up as a rug some time later.

The Lampedusas, as David Gilmour explains in his biography, “The Last Leopard” (Harvill £8.99; Pantheon; $22), were never great workers. Pale, fat and bad at outdoor games, the author-prince reluctantly enrolled, when he was 21, as a law student with a view to becoming a diplomat. Military service in the first world war interrupted his studies and he never resumed them. Nor did he ever take a real job. Instead he lived quietly with his parents until his marriage at the age of 35, and intermittently thereafter whenever his wife, Italy's first practising psychoanalyst, was travelling. He devoted most of his day to reading and never moved anywhere without a book; volumes of Proust secreted among the courgettes in his shopping bag; a copy of Shakespeare, his widow said, “to console himself when he saw something disagreeable”; and “The Pickwick Papers” by his bed to comfort him during sleepless nights.

Fluent in several languages, Lampedusa nonetheless had a particularly soft spot for English writing. “The Leopard” is saturated with the influence of Keats and Shakespeare. But Lampedusa was equally fond of minor writers, and once calculated it to be a statistical certainty that he was the only Italian familiar with the works of Martin Tupper, a 19th-century novelist and versifier.

In his mid-50s, Lampedusa began to regret that he had read almost everything and he envied younger friends who still had so much left to discover. His wife suggested he give an informal course on English literature to his nephew Gioacchino Lanza, whom the childless Lampedusa and his wife later adopted as their son, and to a friend, Francesco Orlando. The 1,000 pages of notes he wrote on the English greats from Bede to Graham Greene in preparation for the year-long course are the most important source for understanding the literary inspiration of “The Leopard”.

For all these lofty antecedents, two particular events served to free Lampedusa's imagination and allow him to begin writing his masterpiece. The first was the bombing, in April 1943, of Palazzo Lampedusa, the family home in Palermo. The prince was so shocked by the destruction he witnessed that day, that he walked 13 km to the home of a family friend, arriving dusty and unrecognisable and refused to speak for several days. The second was watching his cousin, Lucio Piccolo, being awarded a prize for his collection of poems, “Canti barocchi”, at a literary conference to which the two men had been invited by the future Nobel laureate Eugenio Montale in 1954. Some time later, Lampedusa wrote to a friend in Brazil that if his cousin Lucio could win a prize, “. . . certainly I was no more foolish, I sat down and wrote a novel.”

For nearly two years, Lampedusa would go each day to his favourite café, the Mazzara, and write using a Biro and a cheap notebook. Sensuous recall, for Lampedusa as for Proust, was a route to understanding, not consolation. The more he hunted for a particular word to evoke a smell, a sauce, a whiff of incense, the more sensuously he recalled a vanished past until the novel transformed itself into a Baroque evocation of life and death.

Death is in the first line of the book, of course, and Lampedusa was deeply aware of his own mortality. He died before the book was published. It was his only novel. Childless, impoverished and unrecognised, he wasn't to know it would win the prestigious Strega prize and that 40 years later it would still be in print and selling more than 100,000 copies a year.

Nor would he know quite how prescient he was about Italy. “If we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change”—the most famous line in the book—is as true of modern Italy, and the Mani Pulite investigations into political corruption, as it was nearly a century and a half ago.

It was in the Mafia “maxi-trials” of the late 1980s—with their detailed evidence of crooked deals, sumptuous meals and votes falsely won—that one saw the final efflorescence of one of Lampedusa's best-known characters, Don Calogero Sedara, the despised man-on-the-make and father of the glorious Angelica. “This little head of cunning, ill-cut clothes, money and ignorance,” is how Lampedusa described him, “all munching and grease stains.”

Leonardo Siascia, another Sicilian writer, claimed for many years that he was the first novelist to portray a Mafioso in fiction. He was wrong. Lampedusa's Don Calogero preceded any Sciascia creation by nearly a decade, and still remains one of the truest portrayals of the genre, a “Mafioso avant la lettre,” as Norman Lewis once wrote.

“We were the Leopards and Lions,” Lampedusa's alter ego Don Fabrizio reflects: “those who'll take our place will be little jackals, hyenas.” In his attempt to scale the social and political ladder, Don Calogero seeks to grab church property and the common land using fair means and foul, mostly foul. As a type, he is instantly recognisable. But it took an Australian writer to see the intimate connection between “The Leopard” of 1958 and the maxi-trials that started more than three decades later. Peter Robb attended each day of the hearings in preparation for his “Midnight in Sicily” (Harvill £12; Faber $25.95), one of the finest books on the Italian south. And his analysis is as riveting in its commentary on modern Sicilian life as “The Leopard” was to an earlier generation.

Two spectacular banquets mark Don Calogero's rise; the dinner where he introduces his daughter to the Salina family, and the wedding feast celebrating her marriage to Don Fabrizio's nephew. To close the circle, Mr Robb recalls, it was a grand meal in Palermo that cemented the alliance between the Mafia (represented by an American mob boss, John Gambino), the Italian Christian Democrat prime minister Giulio Andreotti and Michele Sindona, a banker. The venue for the dinner was a restaurant called The Charleston, previously the Caffe Mazzara where Lampedusa wrote “The Leopard.” The secret deal over which the three men shook hands that day coloured Sicily's political landscape for decades to come. Lampedusa once said London would never be forgotten because Dickens had immortalised it; many would say the shy and awkward prince did much the same for Sicily.

During the early 70s, in the wealthy commuter backwater of West Byfleet in Surrey, a small but rather remarkable experiment took place. In the potting shed of a house called Firkins, a teenager named Simon Beer, using bits of radios and pieces of pink and green cardboard, built a series of electrical meters for measuring public opinion. His concept - users of his meters would turn a dial to indicate how happy or unhappy they were with any political proposal - was strange and ambitious enough. And it worked. Yet what was even more jolting was his intended market: not Britain, but Chile.

Unlike West Byfleet, Chile was in revolutionary ferment. In the capital Santiago, the beleaguered but radical marxist government of Salvador Allende, hungry for innovations of all kinds, was employing Simon Beer's father, Stafford, to conduct a much larger technological experiment of which the meters were only a part. This was known as Project Cybersyn, and nothing like it had been tried before, or has been tried since.

Stafford Beer attempted, in his words, to "implant" an electronic "nervous system" in Chilean society. Voters, workplaces and the government were to be linked together by a new, interactive national communications network, which would transform their relationship into something profoundly more equal and responsive than before - a sort of socialist internet, decades ahead of its time.

When the Allende administration was deposed in a military coup, the 30th anniversary of which falls this Thursday, exactly how far Beer and his British and Chilean collaborators had got in constructing their hi-tech utopia was soon forgotten. In the many histories of the endlessly debated, frequently mythologised Allende period, Project Cybersyn hardly gets a footnote. Yet the personalities involved, the amount they achieved, the scheme's optimism and ambition and perhaps, in the end, its impracticality, contain important truths about the most tantalising leftwing government of the late 20th century.

Stafford Beer, who died last year, was a restless and idealistic British adventurer who had long been drawn to Chile. Part scientist, part management guru, part social and political theorist, he had grown rich but increasingly frustrated in Britain during the 50s and 60s. His ideas about the similarities between biological and man-made systems, most famously expressed in his later book, The Brain of the Firm, made him an in-demand consultant with British businesses and politicians. Yet these clients did not adopt the solutions he recommended as often as he would have liked, so Beer began taking more contracts abroad.

In the early 60s, his company did some work for the Chilean railways. Beer did not go there himself, but one of the Chileans involved, an engineering student called Fernando Flores, began reading Beer's books and was captivated by their originality and energy. By the time the Allende government was elected in 1970, a group of Beer disciples had formed in Chile. Flores became a minister in the new administration, with responsibility for nationalising great swathes of industry. As in many areas, the Allende government wanted to do things differently from traditional marxist regimes. "I was very much against the Soviet model of centralisation," says Raul Espejo, one of Flores's senior advisers and another Beer disciple. "My gut feeling was that it was unviable."

But how should the Chilean economy be run instead? By 1971, the initial euphoria of Allende's democratic, non-authoritarian revolution was beginning to fade; Flores and Espejo realised that their ministry had acquired a disorganised empire of mines and factories, some occupied by their employees, others still controlled by their original managers, few of them operating with complete efficiency. In July, they wrote to Beer for help.

They knew that he had leftwing sympathies, but also that he was very busy. "Our expectation was to hire someone from his team," says Espejo. But after getting the letter, Beer quickly grew fascinated by the Chilean situation. He decided to drop his other contracts and fly there. In West Byfleet, the reaction was mixed: "We thought, 'Stafford's going mad again,' " says Simon Beer.

When Stafford arrived in Santiago, the Chileans were more impressed. "He was huge," Espejo remembers, "and extraordinarily exuberant. From every pore of his skin you knew he was thinking big." Beer asked for a daily fee of $500 - less than he usually charged, but an enormous sum for a government being starved of US dollars by its enemies in Washington - and a constant supply of chocolate, wine and cigars.

For the next two years, as subordinates searched for these amid the food shortages, and the local press compared him to Orson Welles and Socrates, Beer worked in Chile in frenetic bursts, returning every few months to England, where a British team was also labouring over Cybersyn. What this collaboration produced was startling: a new communications system reaching the whole spindly length of Chile, from the deserts of the north to the icy grasslands of the south, carrying daily information about the output of individual factories, about the flow of important raw materials, about rates of absenteeism and other economic problems.

Until now, obtaining and processing such valuable information - even in richer, more stable countries - had taken governments at least six months. But Project Cybersyn found ways round the technical obstacles. In a forgotten warehouse, 500 telex machines were discovered which had been bought by the previous Chilean government but left unused because nobody knew what to do with them. These were distributed to factories, and linked to two control rooms in Santiago. There a small staff gathered the economic statistics as they arrived, officially at five o'clock every afternoon, and boiled them down using a single precious computer into a briefing that was dropped off daily at La Moneda, the presidential palace.

Allende himself was enthusiastic about the scheme. Beer explained it to him on scraps of paper. Allende had once been a doctor and, Beer felt, instinctively understood his notions about the biological characteristics of networks and institutions. Just as significantly, the two men shared a belief that Cybersyn was not about the government spying on and controlling people. On the contrary, it was hoped that the system would allow workers to manage, or at least take part in the management of their workplaces, and that the daily exchange of information between the shop floor and Santiago would create trust and genuine cooperation - and the combination of individual freedom and collective achievement that had always been the political holy grail for many leftwing thinkers.

It did not always work out like that. "Some people I've talked to," says Eden Miller, an American who is writing a PhD thesis partly about Cybersyn, "said it was like pulling teeth getting the factories to send these statistics." In the feverish Chile of 1972 and 1973, with its shortages and strikes and jostling government initiatives, there were often other priorities. And often the workers were not willing or able to run their plants: "The people Beer's scientists dealt with," says Miller, "were primarily management."

But there were successes. In many factories, Espejo says, "Workers started to allocate a space on their own shop floor to have the same kind of graphics that we had in Santiago." Factories used their telexes to send requests and complaints back to the government, as well as vice versa. And in October 1972, when Allende faced his biggest crisis so far, Beer's invention became vital.

Across Chile, with secret support from the CIA, conservative small businessmen went on strike. Food and fuel supplies threatened to run out. Then the government realised that Cybersyn offered a way of outflanking the strikers. The telexes could be used to obtain intelligence about where scarcities were worst, and where people were still working who could alleviate them. The control rooms in Santiago were staffed day and night. People slept in them - even government ministers. "The rooms came alive in the most extraordinary way," says Espejo. "We felt that we were in the centre of the universe." The strike failed to bring down Allende.

In some ways, this was the high point for Cybersyn. The following year, like the government in general, it began to encounter insoluble problems. By 1973, the sheer size of the project, involving somewhere between a quarter and half of the entire nationalised economy, meant that Beer's original band of disciples had been diluted by other, less idealistic scientists. There was constant friction between the two groups. Meanwhile, Beer himself started to focus on other schemes: using painters and folk singers to publicise the principles of high-tech socialism; testing his son's electrical public-opinion meters, which never actually saw service; and even organising anchovy-fishing expeditions to earn the government some desperately needed foreign currency.

All the while, the rightwing plotting against Allende grew more blatant and the economy began to suffocate as other countries, encouraged by the Americans, cut off aid and investment. Beer was accused in parts of the international press of creating a Big Brother-style system of administration in South America. "There was plenty of stress in Chile," he wrote afterwards. "I could have pulled out at any time, and often considered doing so."

In June 1973, after being advised to leave Santiago, he rented an anonymous house on the coast from a relative of Espejo. For a few weeks, he wrote and stared at the sea and travelled to government meetings under cover of darkness. On September 10, a room was measured in La Moneda for the installation of an updated Cybersyn control centre, complete with futuristic control panels in the arms of chairs and walls of winking screens. The next day, the palace was bombed by the coup's plotters. Beer was in London, lobbying for the Chilean government, when he left his final meeting before intending to fly back to Santiago and saw a newspaper billboard that read, "Allende assassinated."

The Chilean military found the Cybersyn network intact, and called in Espejo and others to explain it to them. But they found the open, egalitarian aspects of the system unattractive and destroyed it. Espejo fled. Some of his colleagues were not so lucky. Soon after the coup, Beer left West Byfleet, his wife, and most of his possessions to live in a cottage in Wales. "He had survivor guilt, unquestionably," says Simon.

Cybersyn and Stafford's subsequent, more esoteric inventions live on in obscure socialist websites and, more surprisingly, modern business school teachings about the importance of economic information and informal working practices. David Bowie, Brian Eno and Tony Blair's new head of policy, Geoff Mulgan, have all cited Beer as an influence.

But perhaps more importantly, his work in Chile affected those who participated. Espejo has made a good career since as an inter- national management consultant. He has been settled in Britain for decades. He chuckles urbanely at the mention of Pinochet's arrest in London five years ago. Yet when, after a long lunch in a pub near his home in Lincoln, I ask whether Cybersyn changed him, his playful, slightly professorial gaze turns quite serious. "Oh yes," he says. "Completely."

· Andy Beckett's book Pinochet in Piccadilly is published by Faber.

VENICE IN REAL LIFE

Is there a way to save a great city from becoming a theme park?

In 2007, my husband, Andrea Ortona, and I decided it was high time we introduced our children properly to the other, Italian, half of their cultural inheritance. They were already familiar with a holiday Italy—the family gatherings on Easter Sunday in Genova with the grandparents; summer in the hills of Piemonte or Alto Adige; the special trips to special places of interest—but neither they, nor I, for that matter, knew anything about what it means to live in Italy all the time, and Andrea, who had been in England for many years, was decidedly out of practice.
     We went back to Venice. Andrea and I had met there 15 years earlier when he had a violin-making workshop, smelling of linseed oil and wood, on a wide, unshaded fondamenta that got very hot indeed in the summer months and was, appropriately enough, named Fondamenta Rossa. We were returning to the city under radically different circumstances: this time we were setting up life with four children, aged between 6 and 12.

Modern life in an antique environment
Sometimes, living in Italy is like skating on a thin ice of civil life (or civil life as my more northern sensibility might formulate it). There are frequently odd, apparently anachronistic moments when I glimpse, through the surface, the habits and expectations of a third-world economy, a medieval infrastructure. Sometimes it feels as though those are the current reality of the place; at others, they seem like the last lights from a dead star. Nowhere is this paradox more strongly present than in daily life in Venice, since here modern life must unfold, by necessity, in an entirely antique environment.
     On one occasion, soon after our arrival, I went to the music conservatory to deliver a letter for the principal. (A brief digression here, to point out that the system there still requires a supplicant to arrive on foot, with a paper letter in a paper envelope in a fleshly hand.) The Palazzo Pisani is the nearest thing to an Escher drawing I have ever seen in three dimensions: twin, mirroring courtyards, with galleries (some open, some closed) running round at every level. Though stonily monumental, the weeds sprouting from the crumbling masonry give a feeling of gothic decay or of one of Piranesi’s fantastical, menacing architectural drawings.
     I went into the vast, gloomy androne, or ground-floor hall, and turned left into the secretary’s office. Electricity did not yet appear to have been installed in the palazzo; it was a gloomy, monochrome space, with a large desk and a number of chairs lined around the walls. Milling about, apparently with nothing to do, were a number of people, galvanized into excited action as soon as I entered.
     “A letter for the principal. Ah, yes. Who’ll take it?’
     “I will.”
     “No, I will.”
     “Who should we say is calling?”
     For these people—is it too cruel to say flunkies?—taking a letter into the presence of their leader was evidently the high spot of their day. I was reminded, and not for the last time, of being in India, when three separate people might appear to need to clip your ticket at the entrance to a historical site.

Going to extremes
In this land where the prime minister has for years been given licence to rampage more or less unchecked in his devastating petty megalomania, like some 14th-century robber princeling, there is enormous potential for all extremes of behaviour—from the very worst to the very best. This was certainly reflected in my experience of life in Venice.
     During my time in the city, I made the best of friends, the worst of enemies. I encountered an intellectual and social vitality that was both sustaining and exhilarating. I also met a chilling capacity to harm. Fairness is neither consistent nor comprehensive, and bureaucracy, more often than not, is seen as a justification in itself. I have been flagrantly robbed by an arrogant landlord; I have been lied to and publicly abused by a head teacher; I have been criminally neglected by the police. But I have also made lifelong friends, people who welcomed me into their lives with a noisily spontaneous generosity so very different from the cautious warmth of the British. I have sat and eaten wonderful food with lively, imaginative, hospitable individuals.
     In Britain, we spend far too much of our time talking about new kitchens and the school system. We talk a lot about how much everything is worth. In Italy, where I think there is often a deep cynicism about worth, all that’s really left is to enjoy what you can of life—drinking, discussing, laughing, litigating with gusto and gumption. Like all generalizations, these are clumsy tools, but my experience is that they hold a kind of truth.

The universal and the comically particular
My book The Politics of Washing: Real Life in Venice (published on March 29 by Robert Hale) was born days after we arrived in the city. Our fourth-floor flat in a vast, fortresslike and rather gloomy palazzo had a washing line that extended from outside our kitchen window across the courtyard below and was attached to the wall of the building opposite. It worked on a pulley principle, and several times a day I found myself leaning out to peg the family washing along it. That’s when I began thinking about the dynamics of a community that is so very much packed in together, one on top of the other in such a very public way. I wondered what rituals and conventions of space I, a newcomer, was ignorant of, and began wondering how people in this most peculiar of cities lay claim to the space around them.
     From this banal, repeated domestic task and others like it (shopping, the school run, the postal delivery), my book of observations, vignettes and meditations on life in Venice began to take shape. For every story I tell in the book, there are three more standing in the wings. Ordinary life in Venice is a bizarre combination of the universal and the comically particular. One year, for example, just before Christmas, I found myself shopping for books in my local bookshop, knee-high in water. The owner had raised all the stock to the higher shelves and surreal as it was, there was a peculiar kind of peace in browsing in this quiet, watery atmosphere alongside the other quietly reading customers.
     On another occasion, I left a party on the top floor of an ancient palace and was walking down the back stairs when I found, tacked to the wall, a huge family tree. It was written on a piece of parchment straight out of central casting—curling edges, cracked surface, fading ink, the lot. The first name on the tree, nestling in the roots, was dated A.D. 934. That was a seriously long time ago, but what left me astonished was the last added family member. Not only was the name the same as that of the 10th-century founding father; it also belonged to the man whose party I had just left.

A blueprint for the good society
I became increasingly fascinated by this world of enduring, living antiquity. There were times when I felt I was moving among a species previously thought extinct, and this did not apply only to the aristocrats. Venetians of all backgrounds measure their Venetian-ness in terms of how long their families have been in the city. Plenty of apparently DOC Venetians of my acquaintance would never describe themselves as Venetian—or at least they would tell me, almost apologetically, that their grandparents or great-grandparents were from Friuli or Toscana or Liguria.
     I have many anecdotes as well as fond and furious memories of my four years living in Venice, but what matters to me now are not the rich literary pickings (another, more genteel, form of exploitation?), but the city itself. As I wrote my book, I began to wonder if we couldn’t see Venice, not as a clapped-out has-been, but as blueprint for the good society, a future model: a place without cars, a community that circulates through its city on foot, where you can go only as far as you can walk, can buy only as much as you can carry.
     We all know that the stones of Venice are in peril; what is rarely mentioned is the community of people who live there, the rapidly dwindling, passionately tenacious population who know that their city is not only unique because it is so extraordinarily beautiful, so unfeasibly lodged in water, but because it is one of the few places left on earth where a rich cultural heritage, a creative cosmopolitanism, can be lived on a human scale.
     “Venezia è un paese,” its residents say over and over again. “Venice is a village.” My passionate hope is that we can still save this wonderful village, the Venice of Venetians, from the insatiable greed of those who know that the easy money lies in making the city into a theme park. This book is a cri de coeur for a precious and fragile community, as threatened as any Amazonian tribe, by unregulated tourism and individual greed.

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When you live in Venice you have to accept certain things. You don't have a car and you have to carry all your groceries. Then again, even if you've never met someone, you'll know their face and you always say hello. There are no boundaries - it's not like other places where you have a big car and a big wall around your house. Living in Venice is a bit like always being on a stage.

Since I was born and grew up in Venice, I feel very much part of the place. I have seen how the city has changed. I recall there was quite a lot of fog when I took the vaporetto to school. I remember that period as if it were a dream or a fairy tale. Now, when I take my children to school there are lots of people, as if the fog has been substituted with crowds. In my lifetime I have also seen the water level rising. When I was a boy, flooding seemed to be less frequent. Now, more than 30 years on, one street I used to walk along is often under water. People come up with lots of facts and figures, but I hope this helps you to understand what is happening.

I live near Rialto with my wife and children in our family home. The palace was originally built in around 1588 for the Muti family, who were silk merchants from Bergamo. When I was finishing my degree I decided to make our palazzo the subject of my final architecture exam, because I wanted to learn about the history and the evolution of the building. About a month before I was due to hand in my thesis, I discovered that the architect, Antonio da Ponte, had also designed the nearby Rialto bridge. I uncovered this information in a document in the Venetian archives.

The palazzo came into our family when it was bought, in around 1919, by my grandfather Andrea da Mosto. I never knew him because he died before I was born. Coincidentally, he was the director of the state archive and sometimes, in the course of my research, I would come across his writing in pencil along the margins. In a strange way I met him in those documents.

Rialto, which means high ground, was one of the first places to be colonised on the islets of Venice. When they were designing the palazzo, which at seven storeys is unusually tall, they had to build the house like so many others between the street and the canal. Perhaps the most unusual feature is that one of the staircases - a double helix with two staircases that start from different places and spiral around each other. The two never meet, so people can come in and out of the house without ever being seen. I've never seen another like it. I call myself an architect, but the people who built the palazzo, they were architects.

The concept of these merchants' houses in Venice is unique. On the one hand, their owners had to have marvellous spaces to show whatever they were selling, but on the other hand the building also had to function as an office, a factory and a store as well as a residence. In the early to mid-18th century our palazzo was home to the Vezzi family. They had obtained the secret formula for making Meissen porcelain and began producing it in Venice. The palazzo was their headquarters for 10 to 15 years. Venice was the base from which to send your merchandise around the world; Venice was a place of exchange.

My family has been connected to Venice for centuries so it was very interesting researching our history. Although we have never had a doge in the family, several were high-level officers of the republic. One of my most important ancestors was Alvise da Mosto, who started sailing around the Mediterranean when he was only 14 years old. During a voyage in the 1450s, his ship lost direction in a storm and by chance they discovered the Cape Verde Islands.

If you want to find the real Venice, I think the Rialto market is still the place to find it. I'm lucky because it's about five minutes away from where I live. I think it's still somewhere you can see everyday Venetian life, even though the Rialto is close to more touristy parts of the city such as San Marco and Santo Stefano. I also think places such as the Fondamenta Nuove in Cannaregio and beyond San Marco around the Arsenale in Castello are the best places to explore. You will still see tourists there, but you will also see local people going about their daily lives. It's nice to lose yourself. All you have to do is turn down a little street and you can escape the tourists and begin to find little places for yourself and, with it, a sense of the old Venice.

Lots of visitors go to see the famous round staircases of the Scala del Bovolo in San Marco. I love the Madonna dell'Orto, but before you get to the church you also pass a little shop. On the façade there are three stone carvings of three Moors and a camel - all connected to the business of the merchant that lived there. This is one of the things I love about Venice: you find some strange story or someone's name in a book which leads you to discover the human history. Sometimes we stop and just look at the buildings, but if you go beyond that you can really discover something about the people and feel more connected to them.

Being Venetian you need to know how to row. I have a motorboat and a rowing boat so I teach my three children how to navigate in both. We have a little hut on a tiny island in the lagoon, just a room made out of wood. We go there most weekends and spend the night - it's just like

camping. When I was growing up in Venice I missed nature - you don't see many trees and I wish there were more. Taking my children to the island is a way for them to connect with nature, because in the lagoon you are surrounded by it. The island of Sant Erasmo, famous for its artichokes, is just like the country. When we go there, the fishermen teach the children how to catch crabs and it's important they learn things like that.

The Regatta Storica in September is quite interesting. I go to the lagoon and I notice the teams training in all types of weather between Venice and the island of Burano. The gondolino is the most important race, because the boat is so thin and precarious that there has to be a perfect combination of strength and agility. It's a great thing to witness.

Touring the lagoon is a great thing for any visitor to do. Rent a boat and just lose yourself in it - going slowly, of course. There are always lots of tourists on the islands of Burano and Murano, but I would suggest going to the island of Torcello, which has a certain atmosphere. Another place worth visiting is Brenta, one of the rivers that feeds into the lagoon, where all the Venetian patricians built their grand villas. I think going there also helps people to understand the relationship between the lagoon and the land. At one time in the Republic around the 18th century, everything was very expensive and a lot of people from Venice went to live on the mainland where things were cheaper. These days it's the same and people move there because it costs less and the way of life is more "normal".

The local population of Venice has dropped a lot in the past few decades. In the 1950s, there were about 120,000; now there are about 60,000 officially. You also need to add the transient student population and foreigners who have bought property here, but even foreigners who live in Venice are helping. It's very important that people come to live on the island here to halt the loss of workshops, craftsmen and local businesses like bakeries and everyday shops. There need to be more tax breaks for people to restore houses, because it costs three or four times more than it does elsewhere. The state does give some money for restoration, but there is very little support for local productive activities. There are too many glass shops and big shops such as Gucci. We are losing everyday life. If the city is going to die, this is the way it will happen.

I think there could be a new kind of Venetian - people who love the town and who come to live here, but not to profit from it. This could be the future for Venice. People living in Venice give life back to the city, a life that is not just about tourism.

One of the strongest emotions I have is when I take the traghetto, a large gondola ferry, across the Grand Canal - it opens my heart. For the five minutes that it takes to cross the water, I am in the hands of the gondoliers and my thoughts swirl around my head - as I can simply look and admire.

'Francesco's Italy', published by BBC Books is out now, price £25. 'Francesco's Venice' is published in paperback on 8 February, price £16.99

My best bar

Naranzaria (00 39 041 7241035; naranzaria.it), a bar and restaurant in the Rialto market, is owned by a friend of mine. Opening a bar meant he did something for the town and I think that's important. The wine is good and it's also one of the few places that makes sushi with fish fresh from the market. It's Venetian, but also modern.

My top restaurant

Trattoria Antiche Carampane (00 39 041 524 0165; antichecarampane.com) is one of my favourite restaurants in Rialto. Every morning I meet the owners in the market when I am taking my children to school. It serves marvellous fish - they simply pick the best of what's available each day and cook it.

The argument for real books against virtual books is often based on the thingness of the real book — the beauty of the binding, the pleasure of handsome design and typesetting, the sensuality of turning a paper page, the pride of ownership. I sympathize with that, but I’m a reader, not a collector — I love my books (and I have lots of them) for what’s in them. Except for a few dear, battered kid’s books that both my mother and I read as children, the physical individuality of a book is pretty secondary to me.

And so, given this priority of the contents, I’ve defended the e-book and e-reading devices as an extension of, not an attack on, The Book — as augmentation, not loss or destruction.

But this piece is about one way e-books do involve a real limitation, a loss. If this appears somewhat inconsistent, consider: what is life without incompatible realities?

It all began (like many novels) with a letter. I hide from fan email and the social media because email for business and with close friends is all or more than I can handle. Sometimes my PO mail is more than I can handle, too, though I always hope to respond. Anyhow, the letter Orion Elenzil wrote me was handwritten on paper, and it was a very nice letter of appreciation. But there was a PS or afterthought that I was particularly struck with. Orion says it’s OK to quote him:

…About traditional paper books compared to E-books… There’s an aspect to traditional books which is lost in even the best electronic reader, which is Accidental Discovery: i’m reading this or that, and leave it laying about the house, and you visit and see it, or you’re perusing my book-shelves to see what i’m up to, and find something which interests you. I’m a technologist, and i worry that this casual, accidental, and as you mention, social means of discovering by talking about books is threatened by devices which need to be explicitly searched in order to find out what they hold.

I answered him right away (by email — he did say he’s a technologist!) I said:

Your ‘minor point’ about books on paper as opposed to ebooks, the quality of Accidental Discovery, seems to me actually a pretty major issue. What it made me think of first was library card catalogues…. The electronic library catalogue has all kinds of uses and virtues, but (at least as far as I can manage to use it) it absolutely lacks Accidental Discovery. Maybe it has a little Planned Discovery, via subject search, but it just can’t provide what the card catalogue did by way of serendipitous blundering into related or totally unrelated books and authors via the drawer of cards you happened to be looking at.

Then of course the library shelf multiplies Accidental Discovery enormously…. My “research method” was to go to the largest library accessible to me, get into the stack where some books about whatever it was were, and blunder around in those shelves pulling off books until I found the ones I needed. I mean, how much can you know from the title? One book on Ancient Roman Sewers will be useless and the one next to it will be a revelation. But riffling through to establish such judgments seems immensely easier to do with an actual bound book than with the page-by-page limitation of a reading device. (Not sure of that, since I still don’t own one, though I’ve played with them — maybe I just don’t know how to e-riffle.)

To this Orion answered,

I think you’ve hit a nail on the head with the process of browsing the stacks of a library, or of a bookstore. I often head into a bookstore without a specific author or type of book in mind, and just walk around looking at titles and covers, or trying out a couple pages in the middle until something catches my eye. or not.

(Of course, of course! — and this activity, browsing, is so important, and so impossible anywhere but in an actual, physical bookstore — the bookstores we’ve lost, because we’ve let ourselves be lured into the pathless jungles of the Amazone…. )

I hold some hope that this organic and somewhat undirected discovery of books may eventually find an analogue in the digital age. I never would have predicted the amazing ways of sharing online we currently have, so I can’t profess to imagine what the e-reader may become in another ten or twenty years. But I absolutely agree with you that the current modes lack the accidental discovery which artifact books have so wonderfully. Altho I confess I’m also criticizing e-readers without having used them.

(Me too — have played with several kinds of e-reader, but haven’t yet felt a need to own one.

(Orion goes on: )

Another minor aspect I enjoy of traditional books which is currently meaningless with their digital offspring is that each book is its own artifact, complete with a small history and story. Many book-lovers would condemn me, but I’m an inveterate marker-of-pages and notes-in-the-margin maker. And it may be a small hubris, but in books I feel a particular connection with, I generally add my own name beneath the author’s on the title page — not as a mark of ownership, but of history. And now that I say it out loud, I realize that perhaps that agrees with your notion that “Reading is a collaboration”.

In any event, I’m positive that reading will remain healthy, and I’m hopeful that e-reading may discover ways to provide these things we enjoy in traditional reading.

I hadn’t even thought about writing-in-books. It’s a subject naturally loathesome to the librarian. And to the kind of collector who encases an unread book in plastic to preserve its virginity. But Orion is right, it’s important.

Underlining whole passages as I used to do, or even worse covering them with neon hiliter, is a lazy student habit that severely defaces a book. But the pencilled exclamation point or question mark, and the “Bullshit!” or “Wow!” or more subtle or cryptic comments in the margin, are only mildly intrusive, and can be enjoyable, adding a lively sense of connection to an earlier reader. A previous owner’s name on the flyleaf or title page gives this same sense of continuity. An old book bought secondhand may have the names of several people who owned the book, and sometimes dates – 1895, 1922, 1944…. This always touches me. I like to add my name and the year, respectfully, to the list.

My beloved friend Roussel Sargent recently gave me a copy of Ovid’s Metamorphoses printed in 1596 and rebound in vellum in 1604 — a very small, very thick volume, pocket-size, the letterpress still black and clear, imprinted on linen paper that weighs nothing and has worn like iron. For all my lack of the collector’s instinct, I handle that little book with reverence. It is the oldest book I have ever touched, by far. And touch does mean a good deal. So does time.

I know what the contents are, but reading Ovid in this edition would be even slower work for me than reading Latin always is. When I look into it, I’m far more likely to try to puzzle out the writing-in-the-book than the printed text. The margins are full of comments and the close-printed lines are interlineated with translations (mostly into German, or with another Latin word) in various colors of ink, some very faded, and many different handwritings, all tiny and mostly illegible to me. This book has been a scholar’s treasure and perhaps a schoolboy’s torment, it’s been bought and sold and given, lost and found, it’s been jammed into the pockets of greatcoats, thumped about in rucksacks, pored over in student lodgings, it has gathered dust in attics, crossed many waters, and changed hands a hundred times; it contains four hundred years of obscure human histories right along with the two-thousand-year-old words of the poet. Would I prefer it virginal, encased in plastic? Are you crazy?

But the question I can’t answer has to do with content. It’s this: To what extent is the Metamorphoses in e-book form the same book as the one I’ve been describing?

I don’t know.

But thinking about it has made it clearer to me that what there is to a physical book beside its text may be quite important. And it appears that these aspects, these qualities, these intellectual and social accidents, are at present inaccessible to electronic technology: irreproducible.

I hope my generous correspondent Orion is right that we may figure out how to restore human connectivity to the e-book, so that it does not, like so much of what we do on our electronic devices, isolate us more and more deeply, even as we are busier and busier communicating.

— UKL

25 March 2013

Karl Marx: A Nineteenth Century Life by Jonathan Sperber

25 April 2013

Sheila Rowbotham on a crisp portrait of a restless thinker who was neither infallible nor prophetic

I once caused shock and distress when lecturing to a group of trade unionists from South Korea by mentioning that Karl Marx had had an illegitimate son, Freddy Demuth. I tried to reassure them by saying that Demuth became a respectable Labour movement figure who helped to found the Hackney Labour Party, but to no avail. The impact of Marx’s ideas has led the man himself to be presented as either flawless and all-knowing, or deluded and demonic. Jonathan Sperber’s magnificent, scholarly biography cuts through the dichotomies by examining Marx in the context of his times.

The author is able to draw on a wealth of knowledge about 19th-century European, and specifically German, history. He dwells in some detail on Marx’s Jewish family in Trier, explaining the pressure on them to assimilate, as well as the obstacles faced by Marx’s father, Heinrich, a man influenced by Enlightenment thought.

Two lifelong characteristics are apparent early on; young Karl was unable to manage his finances and had difficulty in finishing one piece of work before starting another. His exasperated father wrote to him protesting about his overspending, asking sardonically, “how can a man who every week or two invents new [philosophical] systems, and must tear up the old…descend to petty matters?” Heinrich was even more anxious about his son’s tendency to busy himself “hunting up the shadow of learnedness” rather than focusing on lectures and exams.

By placing Marx firmly in his 19th-century setting, Sperber shows that it was by no means preordained that Marx would become a communist

Sperber shows how Marx’s association with the iconoclastic and irreverent Young Hegelians blighted any hopes of an academic career as the political ethos in Germany became more conservative. He brings out the characters of figures such as Bruno Bauer and Ludwig Feuerbach, whose misfortune it has been to be remembered largely through Marx’s scathing critiques of their ideas. The attack on Max Stirner, who argued that egoism should be the basis of ethics, became particularly obsessive. If Marx had known how Stirner’s ideas would echo in anarchist circles in the late 19th century, influencing Nietzsche, the artistic avant-garde, syndicalists and the extreme right, the fulminations in Marx’s The German Ideology would no doubt have been even more lengthy.

Karl Marx reveals the daunting scope of a man familiar with the Classics, who studied philosophy, history, literature and economics as well as the nascent disciplines of anthropology and sociology that were emerging during his lifetime. Marx’s restless intellect extended to science and bounded off into geology and theories of evolution. What an appalling headache he would have been for the research excellence framework!

Sperber’s knowledge of German history enables him to elaborate well on Marx’s journalism on the Rhineland News and then on the New Rhineland News, revealing how Marx took extensive notes and read far more than was necessary. After the 1848 revolutions, Marx would write for the anti- slavery radicals Horace Greeley and Charles Anderson Dana, on the New-York Tribune and, as capitalism flourished, adopted some contorted Machiavellian arguments. Sperber shows how Marx’s intractable opposition to Russia and his suspicion of the motives of Lord Palmerston led him into an uneasy alliance with the eccentric David Urquhart - an enthusiastic supporter of the Ottoman Empire.

Sperber is most interesting on the sectarian disputes and paranoia pervading the émigré milieu that Marx inhabited in London. Marx’s attacks on his opponents are notoriously abrasive, while his correspondence with Engels is full of acrimonious comments about political associates. Sperber is, however, carefully judicious, explaining how those targeted often responded in kind. Isolation, defeat and powerlessness encouraged suspicion. Marx was no exception; in some cases he was to be proved right about the presence of police agents, although he trusted the Austrian spy, Janos Bangya.

Karl Marx portrays a man who was sharply perceptive while being, in both his life and in his ideas, capable of contradictory blind spots. By placing Marx firmly in his 19th-century setting, Sperber shows that it was by no means preordained that Marx would become a communist. Indeed, the man who wrote the Communist Manifesto and supported the revolutions of 1848 had, only six years earlier, advocated using cannon against insurrection. A fascinating question raised in the biography is one that Marx himself recognised in his own theorising but also relates to the choices he made in his own life. Why do some individuals come to break with their own social and economic interests to support the cause of others? Marx was troubled by the implications of his choices for his beloved wife Jenny and his family, but he persisted through poverty, illness and the tragic, painful deaths of his children.

I smiled at Sperber’s throwaway comment that feminists have not embraced Marx. In fact, Marx has had a profound effect on socialist feminism in Europe, Latin America, Asia, Africa and even North America over the past few decades. We read Marx critically but took much from him. Many of us also placed him in a historical context, finding out how he had influenced women’s movements for emancipation globally, as well as how he failed to assimilate insights existing within the maligned utopian strands of socialism of his own times. Certain people within these movements, including the women who participated in the 1848 revolutions for example, evinced a greater alertness to the material circumstances of domestic labour and to the powerful psychological hold of male-defined dominant ideas and customs.

Sperber gives us a Marx who was neither infallible in his contemporary judgements nor “entirely prophetic” in his forecasts. However, it is not necessary to regard Marx as a source of revelatory doctrine to mine his writing for challenging questions. Indeed, two key tensions in Marx’s political and social thought mentioned in this biography resonate for the contemporary social movements demanding rights, social justice and an alternative economy. One is the dual emphasis on furthering democratic revolution while seeking to secure the power of the working class. The second is Marx’s ambivalence about the ideal future. Was it to be characterised by extensive leisure or by deeply fulfilling work for all?

Sperber rightly dismisses many of Marx’s obsessions. But some of his apparently abstruse preoccupations, such as his loathing for Stirner, can signal continuing dilemmas for radicals who challenge established customs and moral systems.

This biography sees Sperber follow the historical Marx with consummate skill, but he seems perplexed by the impact of Marx. He succeeds well in conveying Marx the mighty and Marx the petty with superb erudition and impressive clarity. He does not, however, communicate the intellectual excitement surrounding a man who has been reinvented by several generations since his death and who will undoubtedly be recreated by future ones. Surely it is possible to recognise great thinkers in their own times as historical figures and consider their ideas in relation to the present. We do this after all with Plato, Aristotle, Machiavelli, Hobbes, Rousseau and Mill. Why not with Marx?

The author

“I was born and grew up in New York City. As an adult, I have lived mostly in the Midwest, so you might say that I am a defrocked New Yorker,” says Jonathan Sperber, professor of modern European history at the University of Missouri.

“I live in Columbia, Missouri, with my wife Nancy Katzman and our two cats. Our son, Adam, is currently an undergraduate at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois (near Chicago), so he is not around at home quite so much any more.

“Columbia is a very pleasant small city, with a low cost of living, easy access to nature and a relatively slow pace of life. Sometimes these positive features can also be a little annoying.

“When I first came to Columbia in 1984, it was very much a college town, but I would say that over the years it has evolved into a small Midwestern city. The university, although of course still very important, no longer has the dominant place it once did. Other forms of employment have gained significance. There is what I call the ‘sickness and death business’ - Columbia has a number of hospitals and a large concentration of medical practices and medical laboratories. Insurance and finance are also important: the city is the corporate headquarters of an important regional insurance company and regional headquarters of a national insurance company. We have even had a little high-tech business - a remote service center of IBM has recently come here.

“Along with the city’s economic evolution has come its cultural evolution: more and better restaurants and retail establishments, an increasingly lively arts scene, including music and cinema, as well as the representational arts, not necessarily tied to the university. If the university does not loom quite so large as it once does, these other branches of enterprise generally involve a well-educated labour force, so Columbians have been persistent supporters of education, and higher education in particular. Unfortunately, that’s not always the case for the state of Missouri in general,” Sperber observes.

Asked about his early years, Sperber recalls, “I was quite the studious child, encouraged in that direction by my parents, who were very much petit bourgeois with educational aspirations. Both attended New York City’s municipal colleges, my father in night school over many years. They both had corresponding jobs: my mother as a schoolteacher, my father as a municipal employee involved in financial auditing.

“As an undergraduate, I attended Cornell University, one of the less prestigious of the Ivy League colleges, which has always been a site of social upward mobility for young people from working-class and lower-middle-class families in the New York City area. In my day such young people were mostly Jewish; today they are mostly Asian. In spite of my undergraduate involvement with both the 1960s counterculture and student radicalism (this was toward the end of the era of the Vietnam War), I did have aspirations toward a university career. At first, it was in mathematics, but I later switched to the study of central European history.”

Sperber carried out postgraduate study at the University of Chicago, where he studied with the “unjustly forgotten” historian Leonard Krieger. Krieger was, he says, “an unusually profound thinker and scholar; his great work, The German Idea of Freedom, remains an intellectual tour de force. As a dissertation adviser, he supported my work and guided it in some very promising directions, although my interests in social history were very far from his.

“Like many historians, I have always had aspirations to write for a broader audience. Previous attempts to write scholarly monographs with a broader appeal - to use the language of the music industry, ‘crossover works’ - have not been too successful. Textbooks do have larger sales, but they are textbooks. So I very much enjoyed the challenges involved in writing a work based on historical scholarship, but in lively prose understandable and enjoyable for the general reader, and brought out by a trade publisher. Although I am not sure if I will write a biography again, my future plans do centre on this sort of historical writing designed for a general, educated readership.”

Of his goals in writing this book, Sperber says, “the point of my biography is to remove Marx from the 20th century/Cold War era binary opposition, in which he was either a keen analyst of capitalism and prophet of human emancipation, or an evil forerunner of totalitarian dictatorship and a deluded enemy of the free market. This latter, hostile attitude is still very widespread in the US. Describing Marx as a 19th-century figure, I think, makes it easier to consider his ideas.

“Most past biographies of Marx have tended either to idealise or to demonise him - the former the attitude of Marxists, the latter of anti-communists. (There are exceptions, such as the long-term standard Marx biography by David McClellan, an excellent work.) I have tried to write a biography that is neither an idealisation nor a demonisation, both often understood in contemporary terms, but a work that puts Marx in his historical context,” he notes.

To his surprise, Sperber recently found himself discussing Karl Marx (and the thinker’s apparently undergraduate-like fondness for procrastination and alcohol) on the popular US TV programme The Daily Show with Jon Stewart.

“I was astonished when I found out that I would appear on The Daily Show. Doing the show was a blast. Jon Stewart is a wonderful performer, who is also very good at guiding a conversation and putting his guests at ease. He has an excellent staff that prepared me very carefully for my appearance. The Daily Show is very popular among US intellectuals and academics; my colleagues, friends and acquaintances (to say nothing of the university administration, and even my students) were very pleased at my appearance.”

Of his non-academic pastimes, Sperber says: “I like to go to the movies and to hear live jazz. For exercise, I run long distances, 15 to 25 miles per week. When I have the time, I like to read works of fiction, both serious literature and genre fiction, especially fantasy and science fiction. I have even taught classes on the works of J.R.R. Tolkien. From Tolkien’s point of view, one could say that I have written a life of Sauron.”

Karen Shook

Karl Marx: A Nineteenth-Century Life

By Jonathan Sperber
W.W. Norton, 512pp, £25.00
ISBN 9780871404671
Published 3 May 2013

Print headline:

Review originally published as: The man behind the Manifesto (25 April 2013)

Reviewer:

Sheila Rowbotham is honorary fellow at the universities of Manchester and Bristol. She is author, most recently, of Edward Carpenter: A Life of Liberty and Love (2008) and Dreamers of a New Day: Women Who Invented the Twentieth Century (2010).

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The Department of Education wasted £350m overseeing a two-year period of massive growth in the numbers of academy schools removed from local authority control, a Parliamentary spending watchdog has reported.

A Public Accounts Committee (PAC) report issued today on managing the expansion of the academies programme finds £8.3bn was spent on academies between April 2010 to March 2012.

As a result of this funding boost the total number of academy schools – which are accountable to Whitehall and beyond local authority control - increased tenfold from 203 in May 2010 to 2,309 by September 2012.

Margaret Hodge said the funding for academies has not been efficient enough.

However, some £1bn of this outlay was an additional cost met by channelling money from other departmental budgets, and some of this came at the expense of funds earmarked for schools facing difficult challenges and circumstances, the MPs said.

Around £350m of the extra £1bn represented unnecessary additional cash that was never recovered from local authorities, the MPs claim.

Chair of the PAC, Margaret Hodge, said: ‘The funding system for academies has not operated effectively alongside the local authority system and has made it hard for the Department to prove that academies are not receiving more money than they should.

‘The Department must publish detailed data showing school-level expenditure, including costs per pupil, so that proper comparisons can be made with the data for maintained schools.’

Urging the department to ‘get a grip’ on value for money, the Committee said the DfE had incurred significant costs from a complex and inefficient system for funding the programme. The Committee said the DfE’s oversight of academies has had to play catch-up with the rapid growth in numbers – with the number of civil servants scrutinising the finances doubling while the numbers of academies had increased tenfold.

Cllr David Simmonds, Chair of the Local Government Association’s children and young people board, said it was 'clearly unacceptable if funds earmarked to help struggling schools improve are diverted because Whitehall got its sums wrong'.

'Having a two-tier system with a separate bureaucracy administering funding for some schools is not efficient and councils have long argued that more money would find its way to the classroom if local councils rather than Whitehall administered the funding for academies, as they already do for other schools, said Cllr Simmonds.

In response a DfE spokesman said: ‘We make no apology for the fact that so many schools have opted to convert, and no apology for spending money on a programme that is proven to drive up standards and make long-term school improvements.

‘The Department for Education has made significant savings in the last two-and-a-half years and has also set aside significant contingencies, which have been set against the growth in academies.’

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Ahh the Labour controlled & chaired PAC (Hodge the Dodge) Now, why will they be moaning? Go Gove, do not be put off by this devilish duo of the left, Labour MP's and Trade Unions

J Smith, Added: Wednesday, 24 April 2013 12:24 AM

Wandsworth Council have already set of an Academy Commission, but it won't have any teeth.

Jane, retired, Added: Tuesday, 23 April 2013 03:38 PM

Tears from the Chancellor (perhaps it was about academy funding) but no tiers from Gove. He will have invent some soon to recreate LEA's to control academies but you can be sure they wont be under democratic control.

Patrick Newman, ex local government, Stevenage, Added: Tuesday, 23 April 2013 02:59 PM

Is it my imagination or have the past few months been dominated by debate about financial incentives to improve performance? Only a moment ago it was all about freedom and autonomy, now it is all money, money, money; performance pay for teachers, salaries for governors and the ever-present yearning from the right for schools to be able to make profits.

In the week Ofsted chief Sir Michael Wilshaw made his comments about paying governors, I had spent 11 hours on governing body business. At one stage in my life, I chaired two governing bodies at the same time. I reckon I'm due quite a lot in back pay.

But would I want it? I am not sure I would. I don't do it for the money, wouldn't welcome the extra layer of paperwork it would inevitably bring and I don't believe there is a crisis in school governance that pay will fix.

About three quarters of schools in England are good or outstanding, which means our little volunteer army is doing a fairly good job for nothing. Failure could be more effectively addressed by compulsory training, better mentoring and weeding out those fair-weather governors who sign up for CV purposes and are rarely seen after the first few meetings.

Teacher pay is obviously different. No one is suggesting professionals should work for nothing, though as schools are increasingly de-regulated this isn't such a far-fetched idea. But headteachers already have discretion about pay, so why fan the flames by linking it overtly to performance?

Before writing this column, I asked people to send me opinion and evidence on performance-related pay (PRP) via Twitter. The responses were swift, numerous and from both sides of the Atlantic. Some people believe instinctively that it is a good idea, many misguidedly believe it is used more commonly in the private sector than is actually the case. But no one was able to provide hard evidence that it works to improve outcomes.

And the same four sources were relayed back repeatedly; research reviews by the Education Endowment Foundation and Pisa, an RSA Animate talk given by American management guru Dan Pink and a paper by Canadian academic Ben Levin, whose track record in raising standards in Ontario means he is always worth listening to.

All made more or less the same points; the evidence is either inconclusive or suggests PRP doesn't work unless salary levels are very low to begin with or the work is purely mechanical. Once higher-level cognitive skills kick in, professionals are motivated by a range of other incentives.

The process of evaluating performance in teaching is riddled with difficulties. Exam results are too crude. Payment by results has led to unethical and fraudulent practices in the US. In a number of cases, teacher bonuses were linked to falsified test scores, which led to prosecutions. Measuring less tangible performance is hard; disaggregating the performance of individuals more difficult still.

But the best response came from an academy head who felt the current version of PRP would be an "unmitigated disaster" in his school as it would lead to wrangling over "who deserved what" when teaching needed to be a team effort: "It attacks the core of what being in a profession is all about. Not all of us are motivated by trying to get as much money as possible, especially if it is at the expense of others. There are already many systems in place for dealing with poor performance (and we use these rigorously at our academy) – I don't think we need any more."

PRP has all the hallmarks of a classic Michael Gove reform: it is not based on evidence, will probably waste time, energy and goodwill when there are other effective ways to manage performance, and is likely to be divisive. Allied to the introduction of unqualified teachers, it is one more step down the road towards Gove's hidden agenda of cutting salaries and softening up the schools market for profit-making providers.

I doubt teacher strikes are the way to see off this plan. The unions would be better off mounting a clear and simple campaign explaining all this to parents, governors and the wider community. It is not all about the money, and we need to say that loud and clear.

This article was written by Fiona Millar.

Is it my imagination or have the past few months been dominated by debate about financial incentives to improve performance? Only a moment ago it was all about freedom and autonomy, now it is all money, money, money; performance pay for teachers, salaries for governors and the ever-present yearning from the right for schools to be able to make profits.

In the week Ofsted chief Sir Michael Wilshaw made his comments about paying governors, I had spent 11 hours on governing body business. At one stage in my life, I chaired two governing bodies at the same time. I reckon I'm due quite a lot in back pay.

But would I want it? I am not sure I would. I don't do it for the money, wouldn't welcome the extra layer of paperwork it would inevitably bring and I don't believe there is a crisis in school governance that pay will fix.

About three quarters of schools in England are good or outstanding, which means our little volunteer army is doing a fairly good job for nothing. Failure could be more effectively addressed by compulsory training, better mentoring and weeding out those fair-weather governors who sign up for CV purposes and are rarely seen after the first few meetings.

Teacher pay is obviously different. No one is suggesting professionals should work for nothing, though as schools are increasingly de-regulated this isn't such a far-fetched idea. But headteachers already have discretion about pay, so why fan the flames by linking it overtly to performance?

Before writing this column, I asked people to send me opinion and evidence on performance-related pay (PRP) via Twitter. The responses were swift, numerous and from both sides of the Atlantic. Some people believe instinctively that it is a good idea, many misguidedly believe it is used more commonly in the private sector than is actually the case. But no one was able to provide hard evidence that it works to improve outcomes.

And the same four sources were relayed back repeatedly; research reviews by the Education Endowment Foundation and Pisa, an RSA Animate talk given by American management guru Dan Pink and a paper by Canadian academic Ben Levin, whose track record in raising standards in Ontario means he is always worth listening to.

All made more or less the same points; the evidence is either inconclusive or suggests PRP doesn't work unless salary levels are very low to begin with or the work is purely mechanical. Once higher-level cognitive skills kick in, professionals are motivated by a range of other incentives.

The process of evaluating performance in teaching is riddled with difficulties. Exam results are too crude. Payment by results has led to unethical and fraudulent practices in the US. In a number of cases, teacher bonuses were linked to falsified test scores, which led to prosecutions. Measuring less tangible performance is hard; disaggregating the performance of individuals more difficult still.

But the best response came from an academy head who felt the current version of PRP would be an "unmitigated disaster" in his school as it would lead to wrangling over "who deserved what" when teaching needed to be a team effort: "It attacks the core of what being in a profession is all about. Not all of us are motivated by trying to get as much money as possible, especially if it is at the expense of others. There are already many systems in place for dealing with poor performance (and we use these rigorously at our academy) – I don't think we need any more."

PRP has all the hallmarks of a classic Michael Gove reform: it is not based on evidence, will probably waste time, energy and goodwill when there are other effective ways to manage performance, and is likely to be divisive. Allied to the introduction of unqualified teachers, it is one more step down the road towards Gove's hidden agenda of cutting salaries and softening up the schools market for profit-making providers.

I doubt teacher strikes are the way to see off this plan. The unions would be better off mounting a clear and simple campaign explaining all this to parents, governors and the wider community. It is not all about the money, and we need to say that loud and clear.

Expansion causing 'chaos' across the world

12 April 2013 | By David Matthews

Philip Altbach says global expansion may entrench the dominance of Western university systems

The world’s university system is in “chaos” because of the globalisation and enormous expansion of higher education, a leading scholar has argued.

Philip Altbach, director of the Center for International Higher Education at Boston College, warned that there was “a lot to worry about” in the global sector and that the downsides of these two trends were being ignored.

“Global mobility of students and faculty is higher then at least since the period of the medieval European universities,” he told a symposium in his honour held at the institution on 5 April.

But this movement had created a brain drain from the “peripheries” of higher education to the “centres” – North America, Europe and parts of the English-speaking world such as Australia – he said.

“The developing and emerging economies are subsidising the rich countries by educating many through the bachelor’s degree and then losing them,” Professor Altbach argued.

The internet had made the world “smaller” but had not diminished the dominance of the West’s established university systems, he added.

Massive open online courses (Moocs), themselves controlled by the world’s elite universities, were “somewhat overhyped” and could take longer than expected to find their place in the global academic system, he said.

Turning to the rise of English as the “Latin of the 21st century”, Professor Altbach said it allowed global communication for those who know it but “seriously disenfranchises” those who do not.

The language’s hegemony forced academics in Asia to work in a second language and to “conform to the academic norms and methodologies” of journals that were controlled by editors in the anglophone world, Professor Altbach said.

All in all, the rise of English and the internet could entrench the power of the “centres” of higher education, he concluded. The idea that the world was entering a century of Asian academic dominance was “exaggerating quite a bit”, he continued.

Professor Altbach also highlighted the dangers of the global explosion in student numbers, saying that “massification” had led to an “overall decline in quality” because people with a broader mix of abilities now had access to university.

It was difficult to maintain quality standards in rapidly growing university systems, he said.

Governments lacked the money to support this expansion, which was one of the reasons why tuition fees have risen and why the idea of higher education as a public good has been “greatly weakened”, he argued.

Professor Altbach acknowledged that there were many benefits to globalisation and massification, but he was “convinced that too many in the higher education community do not recognise the deep problems that we face in the current era”.

Among the other speakers to offer their thoughts on the future of higher education was Patti McGill Peterson, the presidential adviser for global initiatives at the American Council on Education.

She asked if the rise of Moocs could entrench a division between “elite” education at “traditional” universities and “mass” education online, thereby creating “even deeper divisions between class, race and the ability to pay”.

david.matthews@tsleducation.com

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Clinton: Moocs may be key to a more efficient US system

11 April 2013 | By Chris Parr

Former president says online courses could drive down costs

Source: Jaguar PS / Shutterstock.com

The way higher education is delivered in the US needs to undergo a “dramatic change”, which could be driven by the accreditation of massive open online courses, according to the nation’s former president Bill Clinton.

At public colleges and universities, the cost of tuition has been rising above the rate of inflation for more than a decade, and although the federal government has increased its funding for students in a bid to reduce levels of student debt, this has been negated by a drop in average family incomes.

“A lot of people will have student debt that goes beyond the federal student loan programme. I think the only sustainable answer is to find a less expensive delivery system,” Mr Clinton told Times Higher Education.

“You’re going to see a dramatic change because we simply can’t continue to have the cost of university education go up at twice the rate of inflation every decade when wages are flat and aid programmes are not keeping up.”

Pointing out that student debt in the US had risen by 58 per cent in the past seven years, Mr Clinton said that the “next big step” in driving down tuition costs could be “figuring out some way of validating the merits of these online courses”.

“A lot of universities are now participating in online courses, in Moocs…the whole delivery system is in the process of changing, and there has to be some way of saying which online courses give you what you need to know to be certified,” he said.

“[Reducing college costs] has become more urgent because so many public schools have lost a lot of their public aid because of the budget problems in various states.”

Mr Clinton was speaking to journalists ahead of the Clinton Global Initiative University event, which took place at Washington University in St Louis last weekend.

His comments come as a row builds in California, sparked by a Democratic state legislator’s proposal to allow Mooc providers and for-profit colleges to fill gaps in public provision.

Meanwhile, Moocs have been criticised by speakers at a special symposium held in honour of Philip Altbach, director of the Center for International Higher Education at Boston College.

In his address to the event, held at the institution on 5 April, Professor Altbach said Moocs were “somewhat overhyped” and might take longer than expected to find their place in the global academic system.

He made the point as part of a wider critique of globalisation in higher education, which he said had created “chaos” because of a brain drain of talent from the developing world to developed English-speaking countries.

Professor Altbach also said that governments did not have the money to support the huge expansion in student numbers, which was one of the reasons why tuition fees had increased and why the idea of higher education as a public good had been “greatly weakened”.

chris.parr@tsleducation.com

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It’s possible to add self-driving features to future cars for, oh, $150. Seriously. Scientists at Oxford University in England have built a self-driving car around a front-mounted laser scanner. When it sees a roadway it’s capable of navigating, it alerts the driver, who can press a button to give control to the car. Compared to go-anywhere Google self-driving cars, the self-driving car from Oxford dons the role only after comparing the current road to a precise, on-board 3D map of roads it knows about. No GPS is involved. A team at Oxford added self-driving capabilities to a Nissan Leaf.

The all-electric Leaf uses a front-mounted laser scanner, no GPS. In comparison, Google self-driving cars employ a roof-mounted, 360-degree scanner and GPS to verify location. So far, the Leaf has been tested on roads around Oxford at speeds up 40 mph and can stop for pedestrians. According to The Guardian newspaper, “Rather than using the GPS navigation system, which can be unreliable in cities where ‘urban canyons’ caused by buildings block signals, and only accurate to a few metres, the British-developed system uses 3D laser scanning allied to computer storage to build up a map of its surroundings — which is accurate to a few centimetres.” The self-driving system kicks in when it recognizes where the car is, by comparing its surroundings with stored, on-board 3D maps.

The project is led by professor Paul Newman, head of Oxford’s Mobile

Robotics Research Group in the Department of Engineering Science. One of the group’s interests is making vehicles and robots get around when GPS can’t help. “At present many autonomous robots rely on pre-produced maps or GPS to find their way around,” Newman’s bio notes, “but GPS isn’t available indoors, near tall buildings, under foliage, underwater, underground, or on other planets such as Mars — all places we might want a robot to operate.”  The research group’s chief achievement seems to be the creation of the FABMAP algorithm, which uses a combination of machine learning and probabilistic inference to compare the current view of a scene with every scene stored in memory.

According to Newman, installing the hardware and software on the Nissan Leaf costs about £5,000 (USD $7,620) on top of the cost of the car, which is dirt cheap for a self-driving research vehicle. He envisions self-driving cars being viable in 15 years and the cost could be as little as £100 ($152). As cars change from mechanical controls to drive-by-wire (steering, brakes, throttle), existing car designs would be cheaper to adapt.

A colleague, Martin Spring of Lancaster University, told The Guardian that self-driving cars could change transportation in a big way: The car could be a room on wheels where occupants do what they want while under way; no need for a designated driver. Headlamps wouldn’t be necessary, perhaps not even streetlights. (Unless you wanted to give jaywalkers a fighting chance.)

The Google Lite of self-drivers

The Oxford concept, then, takes a more cost-conscious route to self-driving. It wouldn’t work all the time, but it could work for the bulk of long drives, especially limited-access highways. At the same time, the scanner and 3D maps go far beyond what are likely to be the first so-called self-driving cars that would stitch together existing technologies: adaptive cruise control, lane keep assist, and blind spot detection. That would be enough to self-drive on limited access roads but it would still need a hands-on driver to take back the wheel if a deer or pedestrian darted onto the highway, or if a box fell off a truck. And it’s a reminder that we have to work out liability issues.

Now read: Google: Self-driving cars in 3-5 years. Feds: Not so fast.

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Sitting U.S. President Ford was visiting San Francisco in 1975 when a woman attempted to shoot him. A former marine named Oliver Sipple grabbed the gun, preventing the assassination attempt. When the press began contacting him, he asked that his sexuality not be discussed. While Sipple was very active in the gay men’s scene in the Castro, he was not out to family or work. But Harvey Milk, a famous gay rights activist, chose to out him so the public could see that gay men could be heroes, too.

The cost to Sipple was devastating. The White House distanced itself from him, his family rejected him, and he sunk into a dark depression. He gained massive amounts of weight, began drinking profusely, and died at the ripe young age of 47. Many around Sipple reported that he regretted his act of heroism and the attention resulting from it. But for Harvey Milk, the potential social good from using Sipple’s story far outweighed what he perceived as the costs of outing him.

This is a hard moral conundrum, in part because Sipple was clearly a “good” guy who had done a good deed. But what if he wasn’t? What are the moral and ethical costs of outing people and focusing unwanted attention on them?

Two weeks ago, Gawker journalist Adrian Chen decided to unmask the infamous Reddit troll “Violentacrez” as Michael Brutsch. When Chen contacted him, Brutsch did not attempt to deny the things he had done. He simply begged Chen not to publish his name, citing the costs that publicity would have on his disabled wife. Chen chose to publish the piece – including Brutsch’s pleas and promises to do anything that Chen asked in return for not ruining his life. As expected, Brutsch lost his job and the health insurance that paid for his wife’s care; Chen reported this outcome three days later. Many celebrated this public shaming, ecstatic to see a notorious troll grovel.

Although none of his actions appeared to be illegal, it’s hard to call Brutsch a “good” guy. He had created settings where people could share deeply disturbing content. He enticed people to reveal their ugliest sides. In many ways, Brutsch was a classic troll, abusing technology and manipulating the boundaries of free speech to provoke systematic prejudices and harassment for his own entertainment. He got joy from making others miserable.

Unmasking as a Way to Regulate Social Norms

There are many different reasons to unmask people, out them, or make them much more visible than they previously were. Sometimes, the goal is to celebrate someone’s goodness. At other times, people are made visible to use them as an example … or to set an example. People are outed to reveal hypocrisy and their practices are made visible to shame them.

In identifying Butsch and shining a spotlight on his insidious practices, Chen’s article condemns Butsch’s choice of using the mask of pseudonymity to hide behind actions that have societal consequences. Public shaming is one way in which social norms are regulated. Another is censorship, as evidenced by the Reddit community’s response to Gawker.

What happens when, as a result of social media, vigilantism takes on a new form?

Yet, how do we as a society weigh the moral costs of shining a spotlight on someone, however “bad” their actions are? What happens when, as a result of social media, vigilantism takes on a new form? How do we guarantee justice and punishment that fits the crime when we can use visibility as a tool for massive public shaming? Is it always a good idea to regulate what different arbiters consider bad behavior through increasing someone’s notoriety – or censoring their links?

As the Gawker/Reddit story was unfolding, another seemingly disconnected case was playing out. In a town outside of Vancouver, a young woman named Amanda Todd committed suicide a few weeks after posting a harrowing YouTube video describing an anonymous stalker she felt ruined her life. The amorphous hacktivist collective known as “Anonymous” decided to make a spectacle of the situation by publishing personally identifiable information on – “doxxing” – Todd’s stalker. They identified a 32-year-old man, enabling outraged people to harass him. Yet it appears they got the wrong person. Earlier this week, Canadian police reported that Todd’s stalker was someone else: reportedly a 19-year-old.

Needless to say, this shift in information doesn’t relieve the original target of the public shame he felt from Anonymous’ pointed finger. It doesn’t wipe his digital record clean. He has to deal with being outed – in this case, wrongly – going forward.

The ‘Koan’: Technology as Tool and Technology as Weapon

By enabling the rapid flow of information, technology offers us a unique tool to publicly out people or collectively tar and feather them. Well-meaning people may hope to spread their messages far and wide using Twitter or Facebook, but the fast-spreading messages tend to be sexual, horrific, or humiliating.

Gossip is social currency. And in a networked world, trafficking in gossip is far easier than ever before.

The same tactic that trolls use to target people is the same tactic that people use to out trolls.

When someone’s been wronged – or the opportunity arises to use someone to make a statement – it is relatively easy to leverage social media to incite the hive mind to draw attention to an individual. The same tactic that trolls use to target people is the same tactic that people use to out trolls.

More often than not, those who use these tools do so when they feel they’re on the right side of justice. They’re either shining a spotlight to make a point or to shame someone into what they perceive to be socially acceptable behavior. But each act of outing has consequences for the people being outed, even if we do not like them or what they’ve done.

This raises serious moral and ethical concerns: In a networked society, who among us gets to decide where the moral boundaries lie? This isn’t an easy question and it’s at the root of how we, as a society, conceptualize justice.

Governance and the construction of a society is not a fact of life; it’s a public project that we must continuously make and remake. Networked technologies are going to increasingly put pressure on our regulatory structures as conflicting social values crash into one another. In order to benefit from innovation, we must also suffer the destabilizing aspects of new technology.

Yet … that destabilization and suffering allow us, as a society, to interrogate our collective commitments. The hard moral conundrums are just beginning.

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For some time now I have been interested in the question to what extent 'we' should allow, or tolerate anonymity on the internet. When is it a protection and when is it an abuse? It reminds me of the some of the debates that took place around the introduction of the secret ballot; no one now would argue against the secret ballot, but at the time many objected to the idea that a voter need not take any public responsibility for how they voted. John Stuart Mill, for one, objected to the secret ballot.

10/12/2012 10:53 AM

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It's Stunning! Why Has Cape Wind Been Delayed for 11 Years?

SustainableBusiness.com News

Even we were fooled!

All these 11 years, we thought Cape Wind - the first offshore wind farm in the US - was being held back by concerned citizens that didn't want the wind farm to despoil their views or ruin the ecology off the coast of Cape Cod in Massachusetts. 

After all, the group that was behind the lawsuits and relentless pressure has such a nice conservationist sounding name - Alliance to Protect Nantucket Sound.

It turns out there's just one man behind that organization - Bill Koch, one of the Koch Brothers!!

"This is a battle where powerful, entrenched dirty energy interests have pitted themselves against emerging clean energy. It is a fight for the people of Massachusetts to have the green energy jobs they want and the home-grown energy they need, when they need it," says John Kassel, president of the  Conservation Law Foundation, which just launched the website, Cape Wind Now, to expose Koch.  

In our recent article about research that shows Offshore Wind Turbines Could Power Entire East Coast,  we said, "the sole offshore wind project approved by the federal government thus far - Cape Wind - continues to meet with opposition from local residents concerned about the impact on views and property values." Yes, we were fooled. The last thing the Koch Bros want is for that much renewable energy, which could make a dent in their fossil fuel profits.

The Cape Wind Now website features detailed accounts of the Alliance's relentless efforts to block Cape Wind, including its most recent scheme of quietly funding the Town of Barnstable's anti-Cape Wind litigation, says Karen Wood of the Conservation Law Foundation in Cape Cod Today.

"The Alliance pumped $355,000 into a special gift account established by the Town Council for the sole purpose of funding its Cape Wind litigation," she says, "with the funds to be 'managed and expended according to the wishes and instructions of the donor.'"

Despite having lost nearly every lawsuit, appeal and administrative challenge - even prompting a congressional inquiry into the Federal Aviation Administration's fourth straight determination that Cape Wind does not pose a threat to air traffic safety - its efforts continue to delay Cape Wind from being built.

Organizations that support Cape Wind include the nation's biggest environmental groups:  Greenpeace, Sierra Club, National Wildlife Federation, Natural Resources Defense Council, Oceana, the Conservation Law Foundation, the Audubon Society, Toxics Action Center, Environmental League of Massachusetts, as well as labor and public health groups.

The $1 billion, 468 megawatt project would be built 4.7 miles off the coast of Massachusetts in Nantucket Bay. It would supply 75% of the electricity for Cape Cod and the Islands of Martha's Vineyard and Nantucket - more than 200,000 homes.

Here's some more illuminating information from ClimateProgress.

by Michael Conathan

It's not even halfway through October, but Bill Koch has already put on his Halloween costume. This year, the black sheep of the billionaire band of brothers has decided to "trick or treat" as an environmentalist.

Yesterday, the Alliance to Protect Nantucket Sound - a group established by Koch and his cronies to wage war on Cape Wind, the first offshore wind farm proposed in U.S. waters - dredged up an old lawsuit against the project. The frivolous nature of this latest tilt at the project's offshore windmills is enough to make even Don Quixote blush.

This time, the plaintiffs allege the turbines would violate the Endangered Species Act, creating unacceptable risks to protected birds, sea turtles, and the north Atlantic right whale. What they fail to acknowledge is that any potential negative effects from the wind farm's construction have already been looked at over and over again during the project's 11 year trek through the regulatory process. The Environmental Impact Statement finalized by the Department of the Interior in 2009 carefully considered endangered species and determined that Cape Wind would not pose any population risks.

Perhaps most galling was the Alliance calling out the Sierra Club in its press release as an organization that has "sounded the alarm" about Cape Wind. The Sierra Club is, in fact, a vocal supporter of the project. In August, the Club released a report, "Clean Energy Under Siege," detailing the carefully executed campaign launched by Koch and other oil and gas industry leaders against Cape Wind and the rest of the clean energy economy. The Sierra Club has also joined the Conservation Law Foundation in launching Cape Wind Now, an initiative with the goal of combatting the endless stall tactics from Koch and the Alliance.

Koch's environmentalist costume comes with a lofty price tag. As a co-director of the Alliance, he has been one of its biggest donors since its inception in 2003. According to the Sierra Club's report:

• as of 2006, he had contributed more than $1.5 million to the cause. If those contributions have held steady over the years, that would mean he's approaching $5 million of personal money spent opposing the project.
  
• in 2009, his company Oxbow Energy, paid virtually the entire salary of the Alliance's President, approximately $150,000.
  
• Oxbow also spent more than $600,000 to lobby the FAA against approving Cape Wind.

Why? In addition to protecting his investment in dirty energy, Koch also owns a massive, oceanfront mansion in a country club community on Cape Cod with ample views of the area of the Sound where the project will be constructed, Koch has openly opposed the project even though from his mansion, the turbines would appear as tiny twigs on the horizon.

And then there's also that other matter of preventing a commercially-proven, immediately available renewable source of energy from gaining a foothold in a region desperate for additional power capacity and establishing itself as a legitimate alternative to the Koch brothers' precious oil, gas, and coal.

Just remember, Massachusetts, when the Alliance to Protect Nantucket Sound comes ringing your doorbell all dressed up as an environmental group, you better take a peek behind the mask. Otherwise, the trick will be on you.

++++

Michael Conathan is the Director of Ocean Policy at the Center for American Progress. This article first appeared on their Climate Progress website.

Check out Cape Wind Now:

Website: www.capewindnow.org/

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Reader Comments (3)

Author: Not Koch Date Posted: 10/12/12 08:51 PM	There are A LOT of us that care about the sanctity of Nantucket Sound. We would support Wind anywhere else. It just doesn't belong here. There are MANY of us who don't support this project -- but it's easier to dismiss if you paint it as one man's whim.
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Author: The Rest of Us Date Posted: 10/13/12 03:49 PM

I am sure there are other people on Nantucket Island, home of the ultra exclusive, who joined Koch's organization, or have been persuaded by its false agenda. "Not Koch" says they are for wind anywhere other than off the "Sanctity of Nantucket Sound." Not in our priviledged back yard. To which I say, how vile. How many pristine environments have the Koch's and others destroyed -- and continue to destroy - in the process of accumulating their incredible wealth? Koch's are heavily invested in tar sand extraction. You have seen pictures of the devastation in Alberta, Canada? Mountain top coal removal? Poisin rivers from toxic chemical dumps from their paper plants? Deforestation. Yet these beautiful windmills, nothiing more than a distant blip on the horizon from shore, nothing different than a very distant ship or sailboat on the water...is just unexceptable -- because they own it all, and won't have it in their back yard. The jobs for Massachuetts, the enormous boon to citizens for fuel-free, clean energy for millions of people again blocked by a handful of selfish wealth with money interests in fossil fuels.

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Author: ackboy Date Posted: 10/13/12 03:58 PM

I have no love for Bill Koch, but in this instance, I'm on his side. Nantucket Sound is the wrong place for this project. There's no guarantee that the power generated would stay in this area. The power would be sold to whomever would pay the highest price. This article is correct that one of the biggest right wing nut jobs is spending a ton of money to quash it, but there are a lot of people living on the Cape and Islands who are in agreement with him. I'm a liberal who doesn't want to see the Sound despoiled with windmills. If you'd like to say this is a NIMBY post, you're correct. There's nothing wrong with not wanting to see a beautiful, unspoiled place looking like some areas where there are oil rigs erected.

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Finsbury Park residents will soon benefit from better education services and community facilities, as the redevelopment of Crouch Hill Park reaches its final stages.

Islington Council has invested £16.5million to regenerate and transform the formerly neglected and little used metropolitan open land at Crouch Hill Park in the north of the borough.

Once the redevelopment is complete, local residents will have beautiful parkland and education services on their doorstep.

•The Cape Youth Project will reopen in November, offering after-school and weekend play facilities, adventure play and a wide range of activities for children and young people.

•Ashmount Primary School - currently based in an outdated building in Archway - is being relocated to the Crouch Hill site.  The new state of the art building will open its doors to pupils after the Christmas holidays, and will be the first carbon neutral school in the country. 

•Better community facilities, including a completely re-landscaped park and a new multi-use games area are opening to the public in December 2012.  Improved lighting and entrances mean the park will be safer and more accessible, while a new ramp and pathways will provide wheelchair access.

•A new building for Bowlers Nursery at Crouch Hill was the first of the developments to be completed in August, offering day-care and education for the under-fives.

Leader of Islington Council, Cllr Catherine West, visited the Crouch Hill site last week.  She said:

"We're on the side of our residents and this development will transform the area for the local community.  My memories of the Crouch Hill site are of a neglected park area that most local residents didn't want to use, as it was blighted by graffiti and fly-tipping.  Young people at the Cape were also using a building that was in desperate need of updating. 

"Though there are still a few months to go before the development is complete, it's clear how impressive the final transformation will be - from the new first class buildings for Ashmount Primary School, The Cape and Bowlers Nursery, to the re-landscaped park and community facilities."

In 2011 the plans for the new Ashmount School were awarded a BREEAM Outstanding rating (BREEAM is an environmental assessment method and rating system for buildings) in recognition of its sustainable design, the low impact materials being used on site and its sophisticated energy systems.  The new Crouch Hill Park Energy Centre will provide zero carbon energy to nearby affordable housing Coleman Mansions as well as the school, nursery and youth centre.

Crouch Hill Park is a nature reserve, home to birds, invertebrates and bats, including some species that are locally uncommon or declining. In order to protect these and encourage more species to populate the area, the new Ashmount School design includes a brown roof, climbing plants on walls, an area of planted grassland and wildflowers and more woodland.

Willmott Dixon was contracted by Islington Council to carry out the redevelopment of Crouch Hill Park in 2010.  Chris Tredget, managing director at Willmott Dixon in North London, said:

"We are immensely proud of our work with Islington Council to show how it's possible for new schools to have minimal impact on the environment. Thanks to the leadership and strategic thinking shown by Islington, together with the knowledge and learning we've gained from Crouch Hill Community Park, it will be possible to replicate this and deliver zero carbon schools across the UK to the benefit of pupils, staff and local communities."

Really interesting looking group...

[T]he difference between creative and less creative individuals comes into play mostly when there is ambiguity in the situation at hand and, with it, more room for justification… Put simply, the link between creativity and dishonesty seems related to the ability to tell ourselves stories about how we are doing the right thing, even when we are not. The more creative we are, the more we are able to come up with good stories that help us justify our selfish interests.

via brainpickings.org

This explains a whole lot.

The government has hit back against comments from former BT CTO Peter Cochrane that it is ‘visionless' in its attempt to implement broadband across the UK, by insisting that it has a clear plan.

Meanwhile, BT has slammed Cochrane over his demand for fibre-to-the-home (FTTH) broadband, arguing that there is not enough demand for the service.

Further reading

• Former BT CTO slams UK's 'visionless' broadband plans

• House of Lords select committee slams UK broadband rollout

• Ambition deficit threatens UK broadband goals

• Report: Superfast broadband to make UK economy £20bn in 15 years

Last week, in an interview with Computing, Cochrane labelled minister for culture Ed Vaizey's comments that 2Mbit/s broadband would be sufficient for UK citizens as "dumb" and suggested that Vaizey did not understand the need of fast broadband.

In response, a Department of Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) spokesman explained that broadband was "essential" to achieving the government's top priority of sustainable and balanced economic growth

"Our target is for 90 per cent of homes and businesses in each local authority area to have access to superfast broadband by 2015. For the remaining homes and businesses located in areas that are either remote or geographically challenging we have set a target of access to at least 2Mbit/s – ensuring that virtually every premise in the UK will have a broadband connection," he told Computing.

Cochrane had encouraged the government to "sit down and put together a business plan for the nation", arguing that otherwise decisions would make no sense and "waste vast amounts of money". He also said that BT had no reason to invest in the network, suggesting that it should be the government forking out for FTTH broadband capability.

"The government is providing £530m to make this happen. This investment is unlocking considerably more from local authorities and the private sector," responded the DCMS spokesman.

"The suggestion is that the government lacks vision and doesn't understand the necessity of broadband and this is hampering the UK economy – [our] response makes clear that this is not the case," he added.

Last week, Cochrane also laughed off suggestions that there was no need for FTTH.

"There is a lot of misinformation – I've heard people ask why the UK needs FTTH, as although it provides 100Mbit/s to the home it ‘only' gives 10Mbit/s upload, but this is a stupid statement," he said.

In response, BT insisted that the speeds it looks to deploy will be fast enough for customers and emphasised that there was not yet a big enough demand for FTTH.

"We strongly disagree with the claim that broadband speeds won't be fast enough; speeds of up to 80Mbit/s will be widely available," a BT spokesperson told Computing.

"While FTTH on demand will be on hand for anyone who needs even faster speeds, there are currently no consumer services that require hundreds of Mbit/s and no evidence of widespread demand for FTTH, so our approach makes sense. The network is future proof without the need for [an additional] £30bn to be spent," he added.

Through an almost astrological coincidence of timing, the European Central Bank, the Bank of England and the U.S. Federal Reserve Board all held their policy meetings this week immediately after Wednesday’s publication of the weakest manufacturing numbers for Europe and America since the summer of 2009. With the euro-zone and Britain clearly back in deep recession and the U.S. apparently on the brink, the central bankers all decided to do nothing, at least for the moment. They all restated their unbreakable resolution to do “whatever it takes” – to prevent a breakup of the euro, in the case of the ECB, or, for the Fed and the BoE, to achieve the more limited goal of economic recovery. But what exactly is there left for the central bankers to do?

They have essentially two options. They could do even more of what the Fed and the BoE have been doing since late 2008 – creating new money and spending it on government bonds, in the policy known as “Quantitative Easing.” Or they could admit the policies of the past three years were not working, at least not well enough. And try something different.

There is, admittedly, a third option – to do nothing, on the grounds that public bodies should stop interfering with the private economy and instead leave financial markets to restore economic prosperity and full employment of their own accord. This third idea is based on the economic theory that if governments and central bankers leave well enough alone, “efficient” and “rational” financial markets will keep a capitalist economy growing and automatically return it to a prosperous equilibrium after occasional hiccups. This theory, though still taught in graduate schools and embedded in economic models, is implausible, to put it mildly, especially after the experience of the past decade. In any case, experience shows that the option of government doing nothing in deep economic slumps simply doesn’t exist in modern democracies.

Returning, therefore, to the two realistic alternatives, central bankers and financiers are overwhelmingly in favor of the first: keep trying the policy that has failed.

While QE might still help in the euro zone, since the ECB is the only entity that can guarantee that Italy, Spain and France will not go into a Greek-style default, the U.S. and British situations are very different. The U.S. and British governments control their own currencies and therefore face no risk of default. What, then, would be the benefit of more QE in the U.S. or Britain?

So far $2 trillion has been created by the Fed and £375 billion by the Bank of England, but where has all this new money gone? It has certainly not appeared in my wallet or bank account – nor has it fattened yours,  unless you happen to be a bond trader or banker. The fact is that all the new money has been spent on buying bonds. QE has thus inflated bond prices and boosted bank profits, but achieved little else.

The one economic benefit of QE has been to help governments finance the huge deficits caused by recession without having to raise taxes, slash public spending or face Greek-style bankruptcy. In this sense, QE has certainly prevented the U.S. and Britain from suffering worse outcomes, but it has failed to stimulate employment or economic growth. This is exactly what Japan has experienced for 20 years – and as in Japan, additional rounds of QE now will merely act as an anesthetic, perpetuating stagnation but discouraging more effective stimulus measures.

One such radical measure is too controversial for any policymaker to mention publicly, although some have discussed it in private: Instead of giving newly created money to bond traders, central banks could distribute it directly to the public. Technically such cash handouts could be described as tax rebates or citizens’ dividends, and they would contribute to government deficits in national accounting. But these accounting deficits would not increase national debt burdens, since they would be financed by issuing new money, at zero cost to government or to future generations, instead of selling interest-bearing government bonds.

Giving away free money may sound too good to be true or wildly irresponsible, but it is exactly what the Fed and the BoE have been doing for bond traders and bankers since 2009. Directing QE to the general public would not only be much fairer but also more effective.

Suppose the new money created since 2009, instead of propping up bond prices, had simply been added to the bank accounts of all U.S. and British households. In the U.S., $2 trillion of QE could have financed a cash windfall of $6,500 for every man, woman and child, or $26,000 for a family of four. Britain’s QE of £375 billion is worth £6,000 per head or £24,000 per family. Even if only half the new money created were distributed in this way, these sums would be easily large enough to transform economic conditions, whether the people receiving these windfalls decided to spend them on extra consumption or save them and reduce debts.

Distributing money to the general public was the one response to intractable recessions and liquidity traps that united Milton Friedman and John Maynard Keynes. Their main difference was that Friedman proposed dropping dollar bills out of helicopters, while Keynes suggested burying pound notes in chests that unemployed workers could dig up. Unfortunately modern economics, based as it is on simplistic and misleading assumptions about self-stabilizing markets, has forgotten the insights of these great students of deep economic slumps. In today’s world of electronic money, we would not even need Friedman’s helicopters or Keynes’s ditchdiggers. Just a few lines of computer code – plus some imagination and courage from our central banks.

Editor’s note: This piece was updated August 2 to reflect new developments.

PHOTO: Doug O’Neill, trainer of Kentucky Derby winner I’ll Have Another, displays his winnings after cashing a 200-to-1 future bet on the horse at the Primm Valley Casino in Primm, Nevada, June 25, 2012.  REUTERS/Las Vegas Sun/Steve Marcus

Indeed. Why not?

Next Thursday, a giant metaphor will be launched in London. The prime minister of Qatar will fly over especially; his supporting act will be Prince Andrew. Foreign dignitaries will be treated to a lavish dinner; lowly residents of the capital can gawk at a free laser show that threatens to out-do George Lucas.

This is how developers plan to "inaugurate" the Shard, the 72-storey skyscraper that already stalks Londoners everywhere they go. It glowers over your conversations in Peckham; it skulks in your eyeline as you amble along Hampstead Heath. Get up close to Europe's tallest tower, and its 1,017 feet (getting on for twice the height of the Gherkin) render everything around it toylike, laughable.

The money men behind the Shard would like the rest of us to treat it merely as a building. Ideally, you'd marvel at its jutting architecture (the work of Renzo Piano, don't you know); failing that, they'd take you castigating its arrogant flashiness.

But before falling for the predictable Shard-en freude, we should think again. Because what is approaching completion over on London's South Bank is almost the perfect metaphor for how the capital is being transformed – for the worse. The skyscraper both encapsulates and extends the ways in which London is becoming more unequal and dangerously dependent on hot money.

Consider again the story of the Shard. This is a high-rise that has been imposed on London Bridge despite protests from residents, conservation groups and a warning from Unesco that it may compromise the world-heritage status of the nearby Tower of London. What's more, its owners and occupiers will have very little to do with the area, which for all its centrality is also home to some of the worst deprivation and unemployment in the entire city. The building is 95% owned by the government of Qatar and its developer, Irvine Sellar, talks of it as a "virtual town", comprising a five-star hotel and Michelin-starred restaurants.

It will also have 10 flats that are on sale for between £30m to £50m, and from where on a clear day it will be easier to gaze out on to the North Sea, 44 miles away, than at the beetle-sized locals 65 floors down below. "We won't really market these apartments," the PR man cheerily told me. "At this level of the market, there are probably only 25 to 50 possible buyers in the world. The agents will simply phone them up."

So one of London's most identifiable buildings will have almost nothing to do with the city itself. Even the office space rented out at the bottom is intended for hedge funds and financiers wanting more elbow room than they can afford in the City or Mayfair. The only working-class Londoners will presumably bus in at night from the outskirts to clean the bins. Otherwise, to all intents and purposes, this will be the Tower of the 1%.

Perhaps the most remarkable thing about the Shard is that it simply exemplifies a number of trends. First, it merely confirms how far the core of London is becoming, in industrial terms, a one-horse town. Finance, which began in the Square Mile, has now spread to Docklands to the east, to Mayfair in the west and now to the South Bank.

Second, it proves that buildings are no longer merely premises owned by businesses, but are now chips for investment. What's more those chips are increasingly owned by people who barely ever set foot in the country. A study from Cambridge University last year, Who Owns the City?, found that 52% of the City's offices are now in the hands of foreign investors – up from just 8% in 1980. What's more, foreigners are piling into London property at an ever-increasing rate, as they look for relatively safe havens from the global financial turmoil. And yet, as the Cambridge team point out, the giddy combination of overseas cash and heavy borrowing leaves London in a very precarious position. Another credit crunch, or a meltdown elsewhere in the world, would now almost certainly have big knock-on effects in the capital.

The same story applies to London's housing market, too. Earlier this year, the upmarket estate agent's Savills noted that Britons now made just over one in every three property purchases in the posh parts of central London. "The more central the market and the more expensive the property, the more likely it is to be purchased by an overseas buyer or foreign national," their report noted.

London has historically always been the point at which foreign money enters Britain, and disperses in search of a place to invest. But, as Louis Moreno of University College London points out, what's happened over the past 15 years is that an unprecedented amount of foreign money has come into London – and lodged there, in its property. The cash hasn't gone into productive enterprises that will benefit or employ ordinary Londoners. It has sat in plush new flats or office blocks. And now it's setting up its biggest home yet, on the South Bank.

So, the Shard: it's expensive. It's off-limits. It's largely owned by people who don't live here. And it is the perfect metaphor for what our capital is becoming.

The bits that stand out for me are that in 1980 8 per cent of City offices were foreign owned, now it is 52 per cent and that for property purchases in central London Britons make up just over one in three of the purchasers. Of course this last set of stats explains why the London property market is diverging so far from the rest of the country with central London diverging from the rest of London.

by Steve Coffman

Vice President, Library Support Services, LSSI — Library Systems and Services 

The past 30 years of library history is littered with projects and plans and sometimes just dreams of ways the library might play a more pivotal role in the digital revolution that continues to transform the information landscape around us. Some of those projects never really got off the ground.

Web Directories

Remember those heady early days when we thought we were going to catalog the web? OCLC even set up a whole project for this task back around the turn of the century (sounds like a long time ago, doesn’t it?). It was called CORC, or Collaborative Online Resource Catalog. Librarians around the world were supposed to select and catalog “good, librarian-certified” web resources. There was even talk of assigning Dewey numbers to websites — an idea which I’m sure would have brought tears to the eyes of many, especially our patrons. Today, the only evidence you can find of CORC is a few sentences in a list of abandoned research projects on the OCLC website and some links to PowerPoints and articles saluting it — most now more than 10 years old.

Of course, OCLC was not the only outfit to try it. Almost every library felt the responsibility to stuff its website with long and often elaborately annotated lists of web resources for just about everything. And there were lots of collaborative projects to develop “librarian-built” directories of web resources. The Librarians Index to the internet is a good example from the public library side, and the Infomine project at the University of California–Riverside is an example of many from the academic side. Many of these projects were grant-funded and died off when the money ran out. Some still linger — used mostly by librarians, as they have always been — as the rest of the world rushes right by our (sometimes) carefully tended websites and directories on the way to Google, Bing, and other search engines.

Library 2.0

Jumping ahead a few years, we have Library 2.0. Some may feel that it is too early to write this off … even if we could all agree upon what it is supposed to be. Basically, Library 2.0 was intended to allow library users to interact with librarians and each other online using a variety of new social tools developed for the web. It was meant to include patron-contributed reviews and rankings, tagging, blogs, Twitter posts, Facebook sites, and so on. Even a cursory look at some of the more highly regarded Library 2.0-styled websites suggests that this idea may not be going very well. It seems that any conversations we may be having are largely with ourselves, while our patrons are busy contributing reviews and doing all sorts of other cool, interactive things on Amazon, Goodreads, LibraryThing, and the hundreds of other places people get together online to compare notes on books.

Take Daniel Okrent’s Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition as an example. The book came out in 2009 to all sorts of critical acclaim, spent months on the nonfiction best-seller lists, and became one of the primary sources for the Ken Burns documentary on Prohibition for PBS. So, there has been plenty of time and occasion for people to talk about the book. And that’s just what people have been doing on sites such as Goodreads (280 user reviews and 684 ratings for the book when I last checked), LibraryThing (381 members had cataloged it, 18 contributed reviews, and the title had been mentioned in 21 “conversations” on the site), Amazon (112 customer reviews), and B&N (82). So the title generated a lot of discussion and activity at places people go to talk about books. Sadly, that does not seem to include libraries. King County, Library Journal’s “Library of the Year,” which serves a population of 5 million, had only one patron-contributed review. Cleveland Public, which serves a population of 2 million, also had only a single patron review of the title.

Why? I think the reason Web 2.0 technologies have not taken off on library sites is not because people don’t love us — they do, they tell us so all the time. It’s because libraries are preeminently local institutions and our websites attract a limited number of people primarily from the local community. Since only a very tiny percentage of the people that visit any site will end up contributing to it, we lack the critical mass of users needed to create and sustain robust online interaction and communication. While in contrast, sites such as Goodreads, Amazon, and others draw from the entire country and sometimes even the world. So while Library 2.0 made good conference fodder for a while, the realization is, it has failed to reach its goals.

Virtual Reference

Some concepts that have gotten librarians all excited have clearly not interested the patrons we hoped to serve. The classic example here is virtual reference. Back in 1999, Ann Lipow wrote a piece for Library Journal called “In Your Face Reference,” in which she claimed that in order for library reference services to remain relevant to the modern user, we needed to take advantage of the new chat and interactive web technologies to join our users online, where we could be “in their face” 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. We should stand by to help patrons search a database, find a book or article, or answer just about any question they had before they could click the Google button. That article — and several hundred others that came out about the same time — set off a veritable feeding frenzy among librarians. I ought to know: I was selling virtual reference technology at the time. We were helping libraries set up new virtual reference services on almost a weekly basis, and our training backlog stretched out for months, the demand was so great. OCLC and the Library of Congress had a big project called QuestionPoint to enlist libraries around the world to offer 24/7 service. It carried its own knowlegebase where librarians would catalog all of the questions they answered to help automate answering the huge volume of questions expected. A variety of other commercial firms jumped into the fray once they caught the smell of cash from the state libraries and other grant-making agencies — as well as libraries themselves — doling out money to help set up these services.

All of this was accompanied, of course, by a deluge of conference sessions, papers, and articles on every conceivable minutia of virtual reference. In fact, for a few years, the field got so popular, it even had its own conference, David Lankes’ Virtual Reference Desk conference.

The problem is, when we gleefully flung open the doors of our brand new and pretty costly virtual reference services, we found we’d thrown a party but nobody came. Now, let me be careful here. Some of these services still remain and, I’m sure, still serve some people … just as our regular reference desks still serve some people. But the numbers served are nothing like what Lipow and the rest of us thought we would get when we moved our library reference services online. The virtual services did nothing to reverse the precipitous decline of usage for library desk reference services that began with the advent of the search engines and continues unabated to this very day. Nor were the paltry stream of patrons that visited our services enough to justify their continued funding. Most libraries closed them down or merged them with other services once the initial grant money ran out.

Today, although virtual reference is still around — now supplemented by “text” and SMS — it is a mere shadow of its former self. Most of the commercial vendors closed up shop. The QuestionPoint [www.questionpoint.org] 24/7 service stays in the business, probably because it does not have quite the same profit requirement as the commercial services. The Virtual Reference Conference is gone and, while you can still find a few programs on virtual reference at regular library conferences, today it’s far more likely to be a “talk table” than a room jampacked with hundreds of avid librarians, the way it was back in the old days.

We shouldn’t feel too bad, though; hundreds of other commercial question-answering services have also closed up and blown away, including some, such as Google Answers, funded by companies with very deep pockets. In fact, the only services that seemed to have succeeded in this area — albeit in a pretty modest fashion — are those such as Yahoo! Answers and a few others that allow you to ask questions of anybody on the internet, regardless of their expertise or qualifications. All of which goes to show that there seems to be little perceived room or need for librarians on the web to handle the brief, routine, factual questions that had been the stock in trade of our reference services.

Intermediated Searching

Then there are those tasks we did well for a while until new and better technologies came along and superseded us. Anybody remember database searching? Well, for those of you who might be a bit too young, there was a time, not so very long ago, when you pretty much needed a librarian if you wanted to do any kind of an online search. Back in the days before the internet, “going online” meant dialing up any of the several dozen commercial database suppliers with names such as Dialog, SDC-Orbit, BRS, and the like. In order to get information out of these systems, you had to know a little something about Boolean logic and have training and experience in using the various arcane search “languages” that differed from vendor to vendor. You had to know what you were doing — no end users need apply — because mistakes were horribly costly. Type the wrong command and you could rack up hundreds of dollars in unexpected charges. Only trained intermediary searchers, namely librarians, could do a good job, one worth the expense. So for a few years, there we librarians were sitting in the catbird seat. We had the databases, we knew how to search them, and we could do it economically — and people flocked to take advantage of our services. Well, maybe it was a small flock, but an elite one.

But all that changed with the development of the web. Online information that had once been tied up in expensive databases was now available on the web — much of it for free. And you didn’t have to ask — or wait — for a librarian to get it for you.

Libraries have continued to make many of the original proprietary databases available through our websites, but patrons now search them on their own. And if the usage statistics in public libraries are any indication, many of the general interest databases that libraries have worked so hard to promote appear not to interest the public anyway, especially in comparison with all the free information readily locatable through Google and other sources.

Of course, you may point out that people still need research assistance for those situations when Google isn’t enough or when the information can’t be found online at all. This is the “we may not need libraries, but we’ll always need librarians” argument. But there’s nothing that says librarians will be called upon to do the research. After all, research skills have been part and parcel of many professions from the beginning: Lawyers, journalists, historians, doctors, scientists, writers — you name it —have done research too. What made librarians uniquely qualified for reference service is that, at one time, we were the only ones with ready access to large collections of information in one place — whether that information was in books or databases — and we were trained and skilled at finding it. But that uniqueness is no longer ours or anyone’s. The aggregation of information on the web far exceeds that of any library reference collection — print or electronic.

Now that searching is as easy as typing words in a box, knowledge of the subject area is far more important than an understanding of Boolean logic or arcane command languages. Future researchers are much more likely to come directly from the ranks of the professions they serve than from library science programs.

You could also still make the case that libraries provide patrons with affordable access to online information by negotiating deals with database vendors and then providing access for free. But evidence suggests that libraries are no longer the bargain they once were. First, many of the databases libraries used to pay for, including Medline, ERIC, the U.S. Patent and Trademark databases, and many newspaper and periodical full-text archives, are now available free online for anybody to search. Many of the databases that do charge now offer relatively inexpensive individual subscriptions for those who need to search them regularly, and many sell reasonably priced reports and daily “passes” or time-limited access for those who need the databases only occasionally.

Though some vendors who provide “institutional” subscriptions to libraries for a premium price do offer the libraries more data or more functionality, others hobble their library services with restrictions on use — such as limiting access only to library computers. Vendors live in fear of cannibalizing a revenue-generating market. Even if libraries can save their patrons a little money, library databases are no longer the bargain they once were and often come at quite a cost to both the patron and the library.

It was a great ride while it lasted, but the library as a research center — staffed by highly skilled librarians who alone could unlock its secrets — has come and gone. And although some of us still stand on the sidelines proclaiming that people really ” need us to find good information on the net, our plummeting reference statistics show that our patrons are paying us little heed. They are far too busy using the new and better technology.

Public Access Computing

This same process may be at work undermining another core library service — public access computing. When the internet was first made available to the general public back in the late 1990s, it was a pretty expensive proposition. You needed to have a computer and a modem (sold separately back in those days), both of which were quite pricey. Then you needed to subscribe to an ISP, which would set you back another $250–$300 per year, plus the price of the phone line. So few people could afford the internet. That gap got named the “digital divide” and public libraries set about trying to bridge it — with a lot of help from the Gates Foundation.

Statistics show libraries have done a pretty good job providing public access computing. Today, nearly 100% of all public libraries offer public internet access. The number of public access PCs has gone from almost nothing in the early 1990s to nearly 100,000 in 2000, and by 2009 — the latest IMLS data available — that number had more than doubled to 232,505. So, during the past 20 years, public internet access has grown into a mainstay of public library service. That growth has not come without problems — most notably the issues of pornography and filtering. Still, the evidence indicates that public internet access is a valuable service and that the public has flocked to take advantage of it. A 2010 study by the Gates Foundation showed that more than 77 million people — or nearly a third of the entire U.S. population — were using libraries to access the internet and doing it for all manner of reasons — keeping up with friends via social sites or email, doing homework, filling out job applications, researching employers, and all those other activities we engage in on the internet. Many of these people would not have been able to engage in those activities without the public internet PCs at their local public library.

However, a growing body of evidence suggests that — despite our impressive accomplishments — the days of the public internet access PCs in libraries may be numbered. A combination of new technologies and easier, cheaper access to the web has begun to eliminate our importance as an internet access enabler, the same as similar changes have eliminated our role in providing online searching. According to the Pew Survey on Internet & American Life, in June 1995 — about the time libraries were beginning to buy their first public access PCs — only a little more than 10% of the American public had access to the internet — meaning almost 90% were without access. Today those percentages have almost — not quite — reversed. Pew reports that as of April 2011, more than 78% of the U.S. population now has access to the internet — not quite as many as have access to a telephone (94%) or a television (99%), but definitely headed in that direction. And it may not really have all that far to go, because Pew reports that nearly half of the 20% of the population that is not using the internet reports that they don’t believe it is “relevant to their life.”

Of course, not all internet access is created equal — and at this point, only 66% of the U.S. population has broadband internet access at home, meaning that 22% of them still endure dial-up — a very good reason to head down to the library and take advantage of the (usually) faster connection. But that divide — or what’s left of it — is also closing, aided by bundled phone, cable, and internet packages offered by all major phone and cable companies.

Last but not least, you have the rapid adoption of the new smartphone technology that connects an ever-growing number of people to the web through their cellphones, regardless of where they happen to be and at any time of the day or night. Fully 91% of the entire U.S. population currently owns a cellphone, and that number includes every man, woman, and child, not to mention all races and income levels. Of these, Nielsen reports that about 40% had switched to a smartphone with web access as of summer 2011, and, with an adoption rate of 1.5–2% per month, smartphones would reach 50% of market by the end of 2011. At this rate, it won’t be very long before a significant majority of the U.S. population is running around with web access in their pockets or purses or snapped on their belts.

This is quite a different picture from when libraries first got into the internet access business 15 years ago. In fact, in a world where internet access is almost ubiquitous, it is hard to see the library’s role. Of course, there will continue to be a small percentage of the population so destitute that it cannot afford a smartphone or home connection — just as there are very small percentages that cannot afford phones or televisions. And since it’s still hard to fill out an application or print something on a smartphone, people will still need access to a full keyboard or a printer occasionally. But that sort of use won’t suffice to justify those big banks of public access terminals currently crowding our libraries. During the next several years, I bet we will see a significant decline in the demand for internet access in libraries.

In fact, public library statistics have already begun to show the first signs of that decline. Despite all the talk about large numbers of job seekers and others crowding around public library PCs as a result of the current recession, the statistics indicate otherwise. IMLS statistics for 2008 and 2009 show that, although there were large increases in the number of public access PCs available in libraries in both those years, per-capita usage of PCs actually declined from 1.22 in 2007 to 1.21 in 2008 — the first year of the recession. Although it was back up to 1.23 in 2009, overall internet usage for the years 2007–2009 was stagnant, even while there was strong growth in other areas, including visits (5.7%), circulation (5.2%), and program attendance (22.4%). More recent figures from California continue to show that even though California libraries increased the number of public computers available by 5.94% from 2008/2009 to 2009/2010, the total number of computer users dropped 0.3% during the same period. While not a large drop, it’s hardly what you would expect given both the substantial increase in the number of computers available and the dismal state of the California economy. That, coupled with the increasingly empty computer stations at some of our more affluent libraries, is enough to suggest people are finding new and more convenient ways to get on the internet and that our longtime role in bridging the digital divide may be coming to an end.

Ebooks

Lastly, let’s turn our attention to ebooks — our most recent electronic fascination and something many of the self-styled library digiterati are already hailing as a sort of “Great White Hope” that will restore our relevance in a digital world. Certainly there can be no doubt that ebooks have caught on with the general public. Amazon and Barnes & Noble have both reported more ebooks are being sold than paper books. The growth in the ebook market has been so strong, it’s led some publishing pundits such as Mike Shatzkin to predict that an 80% ebook world for straight narrative text is coming in 2 to 5 years (Shatzkin, Mike. “Is an 80% Ebook World for Straight Text Really in Sight?” The Idea Logical Company blog, posted Oct. 21, 2011 [www.idealog.com/blog]). Whether you agree with those sorts of wild predictions or not, there is a general consensus in the publishing industry that the ebook era has definitely arrived and has already begun changing the way books are produced, sold, and read in some pretty fundamental ways.

Ebooks have also been generating similar levels of excitement among the library community. There are now dozens of programs on them at every conference, all jammed with hundreds of eager librarians — just as in the heyday of virtual reference — only more so. Library Journal has put on several “eBook summits’” with breathy titles such as “eBooks — The New Normal” and “eBooks — The Digital Shift.” In fact, School Library Journal now has a regular section called The Digital Shift, whose logo shows a book disintegrating into a bunch of pixels. The professional literature has swelled with articles on the subject and the blogs are buzzing with posts.

All this interest is attracting the usual complement of vendors hoping to take advantage of the excitement. OverDrive was the first major player in the public library market and, as of this writing, claims to serve about 15,000 libraries worldwide. But it has quickly attracted competition from major companies such as 3M, ProQuest, Baker & Taylor, Ingram, and others. Although IMLS and state library statistical reports are not yet counting ebook usage separately, some of the libraries that offer ebooks have reported large increases in circulation. For example, Seattle Public Library claims its ebook circulation jumped by 92% in 2010; New York Public says it in-creased 81% in 2011; and the Kansas State Library reported a tenfold increase in ebook circulation between 2006 and 2010, leading to a 700% increase in its OverDrive bill. To be sure, we are talking early days here, and it’s not that hard to achieve large percentage increases when you’re dealing with small numbers — after all going from 10 to 100 is a tenfold increase. Still, there is definitely a palpable excitement about the potential of ebooks — leading many among us to envision a bright future where millions of patrons will come flocking to library websites to download the latest copies of best-sellers, romances, mysteries, and other popular titles — just as they now use our print collections. However, evidence suggests that libraries will have some serious issues with ebooks. It’s highly unlikely that your local public library will be transformed into a sort of free Netflix for digital books anytime soon. Certainly, not if publishers and online bookstores have anything to say about it — and they will.

Publishers don’t really seem to want libraries involved in the ebook market. As of this writing, four of the six major U.S. publishers — Simon & Schuster, MacMillan, Hachette, and Penguin — will not sell frontlist ebooks to libraries, period. Two of them — Simon & Schuster and MacMillan — won’t provide libraries with any ebooks at all; HarperCollins limits libraries to 26 ebook circulations — and then the library is required to buy a new copy. Add to that strict geographic restrictions on which library patrons may access library ebooks, complex digital rights management schemes making it difficult for library users to download books, and the fact that libraries are commonly forced to purchase ebooks at full retail price or more. It is becoming pretty obvious that library ebook lending is not something publishers want to encourage. And it’s not just libraries. Both publishers and authors have come down hard on Amazon’s new Library Lending Program that allows Amazon Prime members to borrow one ebook per month from a list of about 75,000 titles. None of the Big Six would allow their titles to be included in the program, and a number of other publishers and authors whose titles were included in the Amazon program without their permission are threatening legal action.

Publishers and authors are not taking this hard line stance because they don’t like libraries or because they just want to be mean and nasty. They have a very real concern that giving away free copies of ebooks could cannibalize potential sales of those same titles, and that too much free material in the marketplace devalues the prices they can charge for their books. Frankly, publishers and authors have every reason to be concerned. They need look no farther than the implosion of the music industry for what can happen when too much content becomes available for free — except in that case, it was pirates providing the content, not libraries; still, the overall effect was the same.

For an example a little closer to home, look at what’s happened to the home DVD market — in which sales have declined 43% since peaking in 2006 — a decline the studios blame largely on the rise of “Netflix, Red Box and video on demand rental services” (The New York Times, “A Bid to Get Film Lovers Not to Rent,” Nov. 12, 2011). Libraries — where DVDs often account for 40% or more of the total circulation — are not specifically fingered in this article, but if low-cost rental services can wreak such havoc in the DVD market, just imagine what free can do.

Libraries haven’t taken all of this lying down. Libraries have countered publisher claims that they damage the marketplace by pointing out that libraries help create customers by introducing our patrons to an author’s work for free, and then, once they get hooked, they go on to purchase additional titles. Library Journal even came out with a survey showing that ebook borrowers “are also active book buyers who make many of their purchasing decisions based on the authors or books they first discover in the library. In fact, over 50 percent of all library users go on to purchase books by an author they were introduced to in the library.” There is no doubt that giving away content for free is an important driver of ebook sales. A Book Industry Study Group (BISG) report from April 2011 indicates that “receiving a free/promotional sample chapter” was the leading reason people cited for purchasing an ebook. More than 30% of the respondents stated that they had purchased a book on this basis, while 25% said they bought an ebook after receiving a free or promotional ebook by the same author. Free ebooks are a major component of the digital marketplace; in November 2010, the BISG reports that 48% of all ebooks downloaded were free; by January 2011, that number had grown to 51%. This data would seem to vindicate the contention of librarians that giving away material for free helps drive sales.

And indeed it does. There’s only one little problem. The free content BISG was referring to wasn’t coming from libraries. The free introductory chapters were coming from the publishers and retailers themselves or, in some cases, directly from the authors. Amazon alone offers 1.2 million titles for free; Barnes & Noble claims to have more than a million free titles. Both of them are dwarfed by the millions of free titles Google is bringing online from its library scanning program. So while free is good, and free certainly helps drive ebook sales, libraries are no longer the only game in town when it comes to giving away books.

The e-retailers are offering far larger collections of free material than are found in all but our very largest libraries — and you never have to bring them back. When it comes to giving away promotional chapters or ebooks for free, that is something publishers can now do for themselves and with much greater precision and control over their offerings than libraries could ever supply. For example, publishers could regulate exactly the amount and type of content to give away and to whom to generate the maximum number of sales. While we librarians like to argue that we are “partners” with publishers in turning people onto books and authors, the facts suggest that we are really a pretty blunt instrument when it comes to driving book sales, and that publishers and authors now have much better options when they want to give away stuff for free.

The fact that librarians need to worry about what publishers think at all points out another serious problem with ebooks in libraries — libraries don’t own them. With print books, libraries have always operated under the “first sale doctrine” — a section of the Copyright Act that specifies that when a library (or anybody else, for that matter) buys a copy of a book, it is ours to do with as we see fit. We can lend it to whomever we want, as many times as we want, and when we decide we are through with it, we can dispose of it in any way we want, including selling it, giving it away to the local Friends group, or throwing it in the dumpster. There’s nothing any publisher or vendor can do about it, unless we violate some provision of the Copyright Act.

Not so for ebooks. As of now, anyway, the first sale doctrine does not apply to digital content. So, libraries don’t really purchase ebooks: Libraries license them from publishers or vendors such as Amazon and OverDrive. And it is the terms of those licenses — not the copyright law, or anything else — that determine exactly what libraries can and cannot do with ebooks. Licenses can and do specify to whom the title can be lent. For OverDrive customers, that means only registered patrons who live within the library’s geographic service area. Licenses can also specify how many times an item can be lent — and for HarperCollins customers, as we now know, that limit is 26. Licenses specify the vendor used to download ebooks and the e-readers on which they can be read — as we learned when Penguin recently yanked all of its “Get for a Kindle” links from its content on OverDrive. (The link was later restored for some titles.)

And licenses can specify exactly what happens to ebooks libraries spent good money on when deciding to switch vendors or stop ebook service altogether — as the Kansas State Library discovered when it tried to move its content from OverDrive to 3M. OverDrive had inadvertently used the word “purchase” in its contract with Kansas State, so it agreed to allow the Kansas State Library to transfer its books to 3M on a one-time basis. However, the state librarian was forced to get separate approval for each title from the 193 publishers involved. As of this writing, she had only managed to get approval to move half of her ebook titles and 40% of her downloadable audio books. The remaining titles that Kansas State thought it had bought and paid for will just disappear when the OverDrive contract runs out at the end of this year. OverDrive has since re-written all of its contracts to indicate that all its content is licensed — not purchased — and that the library only has access to it as long as it subscribes to the OverDrive platform.

Should a library want to move to another provider or discontinue its ebook subscription, all of the books it has bought — er, “licensed” — simply vanish into thin air. Not exactly an attractive business model for libraries. But as long as the first-sale doctrine does not apply to digital works, it is all there is. And if we want to give our patrons access to ebooks, we are forced to negotiate the terms and conditions with the publishers and ebook vendors who supply them — many of whom have little incentive to accommodate us. Even in the event libraries can negotiate deals with the publishing industry that would allow us to play a significant role in the ebook market, there remain some very real questions about what that role might be.

Traditionally, libraries have provided value for readers in two important ways. Libraries collected books in a wide variety of subject areas and held on to them long after they’ve gone out of print. As a result, even the most modest libraries generally have bigger and better collection of print books than you can find in most bookstores and, through the wonders of interlibrary loan, we could even offer access to millions of titles available in other libraries around the world. So if you were a reader looking for books outside the limited selection of current titles at your local bookstore, your best bet — until now — has been to head to the library.

Secondly, and just as importantly, libraries reduced the cost of reading and information by purchasing copies of books and sharing them among many readers. We can’t really say libraries are free — we all pay for them in our taxes and/or tuition fees. But they certainly are cheap. The average per-capita cost of public libraries in 2009 was $39.01, significantly less than the purchase price of two trade hardcovers. So, if you are any kind of a reader — and you don’t mind bringing the books back after a few weeks —the library has always been a really great bargain. Plus, if you borrowed your books instead of buying them, you didn’t have to worry about the titles you’d finished piling up in big dusty stacks around the house or finding more room on your bookshelves — you just returned them to the library when done with them and brought home another crop.

But ebooks seriously undermine the value of libraries in each of these functions. First, there’s the nonownership problem which only lets libraries provide patrons access to some portion of the vendor’s collection as long as annual license and maintenance fees continue to be paid. If a library should falter in paying, its whole ebook “collection” simply vanishes — as if it had never existed. More importantly, no matter how many titles a library offers access to, libraries will never be the “big kahuna” of the ebook world, as had been the case for print. That role has been supplanted by Google, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Apple, and others which now offer access to millions of titles from their sites — all of which can be accessed at the touch of a button. In fact, with more than 15 million titles scanned, Google Books already outranks most of the world’s print collections. And, if it can accomplish its avowed goal of scanning all of the estimated 129,864,880 print books that now exist on Earth, it will truly make it Earth’s Largest Library by a very wide margin. Not only that, you’ll be able to search through the full text of all 130 million titles to find what you want, and, when you do, no filling out ILL forms or waiting around weeks to get it. Just push the button and it will appear on your device immediately. Except for building a handy e-reading device and associated apps, Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and the others lag far behind Google, but each provides far and away more ebook titles than are available on any library website. And since ebooks need never go out of print, nor are there any significant carrying costs for electronic inventory, we can only expect these “retail” collections to continue to grow in the future.

So patrons will no longer need to turn to libraries to find titles that are a little more esoteric or were published long ago. If they want ebooks, Google and the principal retailers can already offer access to a much richer selection of titles, and much more easily and conveniently than libraries have ever been able to offer in print. Of course, there are some legal difficulties — ahem — but most of these companies can afford to litigate, if not to legislate.

And, there’s more. A large percentage of the ebooks available from Google and other retailers are available for free — just like the library — but better because you don’t have to go down and pick them up and you never have to bring them back. Google is offering about 3 million free books in the public domain as of this writing, and that number would likely increase substantially if and when the litigation is resolved. Both Amazon and Barnes & Noble claim to offer more than 1 million free titles each, more than either of them offers for sale, and far more free titles than you’d find in the average library collection. A real treasure-trove — as long as you don’t mind if the books weren’t written very recently. Moreover, many of the million or so titles the retailers do offer for sale are priced substantially below the cost of their print versions. As of this writing, the ebook editions of the majority of the current best-sellers on Amazon were priced 20–25% below Amazon’s already steeply discounted price for the print editions, which equates to a discount of more than 50% off the publishers suggested retail prices for print. And that’s just for the best-sellers, the highest priced and most popular titles. Ebook versions of midlist and backlist titles are generally much less expensive, often no more than a few dollars. In fact, a recent study by the Book Industry Study Group found that of the 950,000 titles Amazon offered for the Kindle, 800,000 of them were available for $9.99 or less. The overall average price for a trade ebook was $7.72 in 2010 — down from $8.09 in 2009 (Global Ebook Market 2011 [www.publishersweekly.com/binary-data/ARTICLE_ATTACHMENT/file/000/000/522-1.pdf]).

I’d like to point out that $7.72 is less than the price of a six-pack of decent beer or a couple of lattes at Starbucks. When prices drop to this level, one begins to wonder just how much we really need libraries to subsidize prices and make reading even cheaper. I strongly suspect that if books were as broadly and cheaply available back in the late 1800s and early 1900s as ebooks are now, the public library movement would have had a very difficult time getting off the ground. Andrew Carnegie might have found a better way to spend his money.

However, statistics still show that ebooks that do make it into libraries seem to circulate pretty heavily, indicating that we are still providing a service our patrons value, even with these low price points and the millions of books available for nothing. Nonetheless, I think it becomes difficult to justify spending public tax monies to further reduce the cost of a service that is already cheap and broadly available. We may be reaching that point.

Finally, if there is still room for a lending model at an average retail price of $7.72, are publicly funded libraries the best organizations to provide it? Clearly, libraries are no longer the only game in town when it comes to providing library services. Amazon, Google, and Barnes & Noble already give away way more free ebooks than there are in most library print collections. If it really can be proved that lending books does increase sales, as the ALA and starry-eyed library ebook advocates like to claim, then major suppliers such as Amazon, B&N, Google, and others may make more attractive “lending partners” in the future for publishers and authors than libraries. After all, since these suppliers have the biggest collections, and that’s where most of us go to buy our ebooks now, it would only make sense that we’d want to go to the same place to borrow them.

The ebook retailers already have sales contracts with all the major publishers and could build lending agreements into them, assuming the retailers can convince the publishers to go along. Both retailers and publishers are focused on increasing revenues and profits, which gives them a common ground to work out lending agreements that will serve their interests. As we know, Amazon already jumped into this arena when it opened its Lending Library program in November 2011. Amazon is already offering more than 75,000 titles under the program — far more than most any library — and you can borrow one title a month for free, without the holds, “expiring titles,” and geographic restrictions that plague library ebook lending. Of course, when I say “free,” I mean no charge beyond the annual $79 Amazon prime subscription.

At the moment, many publishers and the Author’s Guild are not happy about the program, but if these groups and Amazon can get their differences worked out, it could turn Amazon into a pretty formidable competitor in the library “market” — especially when you add in a million-plus titles you can download for free at any time. If Amazon makes a success of this lending effort, its competitors and others will jump in as well (perhaps a Netflix for books). Given the pressure on library financial resources and a limited negotiating leverage, public library ebook lending is unlikely to fare very well by comparison.

In short, despite a current fascination with them, the long-term prospects for ebooks in libraries don’t look good. The publishers and most authors really don’t want to see libraries in the market and their terms and conditions are becoming increasingly restrictive. The lack of a first sale doctrine and the burden of licensing terms libraries are forced to accept undercut their ability to use the resources being paid for as publishers and vendors dictate everything, from whom libraries may lend to, how many times items can be circulated, to what titles may be licensed. And for this, libraries may have to pay nearly twice as much as what would normally be paid for a print version of the same item. This is hardly an attractive bargain for anyone except the vendors and publishers, assuming they will still sell to libraries. Meanwhile, Google Books, Amazon, and the other major retailers have undercut the library’s traditional roles by assembling vast collections of ebooks both in and out of print and in every subject area, so that people who once went to libraries now turn first to Google, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Apple when they need an ebook.

The fact is that well over half the ebooks currently available can be read at no cost whatsoever and most of the rest are available at prices so low as to unlikely challenge any but the most destitute among us. And this raises some very real questions about the continued value of the “free” lending library in the age of the ebook.

The Electric Library

What would it look like — a library that existed only on the internet without any kind of physical presence at all? How might it work? Or is “might” the right word? Maybe we should be asking what will work and how soon. A library that exists entirely on the web, without shelves or printed books to put on them, or comfortable chairs, or story time rooms, or even rows of public access PCs, or a building to put all of it into. This library would have no physical presence whatsoever. It would come to life at the flick of switch, provide its services to us wherever we happened to be, and vanish just as quickly when we no longer needed it.

To get an idea of what this virtual library might look like, and the kinds of services it might provide, we’ve looked back over the past 50 years (yes, it really has been that long) — at all of the roles libraries have played, or tried to play, or dreamed of playing in the digital transformation of our society’s infotainment infrastructure. We’ve looked at our early aspirations to catalog the web and what became of them. We’ve documented our largely ineffectual experiments with Library 2.0 and virtual reference. And we’ve seen what happened to once-successful database research services and examined the evidence suggesting that even our heavily used public access computer programs may suffer a similar fate. Finally, we’ve looked at the many issues with ebooks and why they are likely to prevent libraries from ever playing a major role in that market.

In each case, we have seen that some entity has come along — or is coming along — that can do a better job than libraries can in providing library services online. It has become abundantly clear that it really is not necessary for us to imagine what an electric library would look like at all — because it has already been built. It’s here right now, and millions of people are using it every day. The only problem is, libraries and librarians have little or nothing to do with it.

Books are provided by Amazon, Google, Barnes & Noble, and Apple — all of whom boast much larger collections than can be found in almost any library, and many of which you can have for free just as if you borrowed them from our libraries, except you don’t need to worry about bringing them back. Those books that do cost are generally available at affordable prices that are unlikely to set back the typical reader more than the cost of a six-pack — and I note that we haven’t yet seen the need to develop public institutions to make that available for free. Cataloging is provided by Google, Amazon, and the other information providers, with little or no regard for the MARC record, AACR2, RDA, the Library of Congress or the Dewey classification systems, and other arcana which have governed the practice of library bibliographic control for years. In fact, most people seem to prefer the richly detailed catalog entries of the online commercial databases to the skeletal data found in the typical library catalog. And that reference to most people even includes many librarians. Our readers advisory services have been taken over by the likes of Goodreads, LibraryThing, Amazon, and dozens of similar “communities” that let readers share their books and their likes and dislikes with their friends online — all for free.

Library reference collections and reference services have also migrated online. Today, when you have a question, you don’t ask a librarian, you type a few words into the Google search box and get back thousands of results, all within a few nanoseconds. Most people find the information they get back good enough to answer most of their questions. In cases where it is not sufficient, they can always consult an expert. But today, that expert is more likely to be a doctor, lawyer, contractor, journalist, tax accountant, psychiatrist, or somebody else with special subject knowledge rather than a librarian. Finally, most of us are already accessing this vast electronic library via our personal computers, e-readers, tablets, and smartphones. For those few who can’t afford it, there is still the library public access PC, but its days are clearly numbered. As internet access becomes more ubiquitous, people will no more think of coming to the library to log on to the web than they would come to the library to make a phone call or watch television.

So where does all of this leave the real libraries — with real buildings, real collections of paper books, real librarians and staff, and the millions of real people who use them? It is we, the librarians, who came up with the whole idea of equitable access to information, who knew it was important to preserve the written record, to find ways of identifying it and making it accessible. It is we who invented reference services and story times and became the “go to” people when patrons needed accurate information or a recommendation for a good book.

Well, although our aspirations at times have clearly exceeded our abilities, we have played a very important role in the digital revolution that has transformed the information and publishing industry during the past several decades. Our database search services introduced thousands upon thousands of patrons to the wonders of online searching. Collectively, we’ve taught millions of people about the internet, what they could do with it, and what to watch out for. And our public computers have allowed millions of people to access the web who otherwise would never have been able to afford it. And, of course, Google Books would be nothing like itself, if not for the libraries that preserved and cataloged the millions of paper books Google is now busy scanning.

These are all major accomplishments, and we librarians have every right to be proud of them. But the world is moving on. Each of the services we’ve provided in the digital arena has been — or is being — superseded by new and better technologies or by other organizations better suited to deliver services electronically. And when Google has finished its scanning project, it will have no more use for us or our collections either.

So after more than 50 years in the digital market, libraries have come right back to where they started. Our dream of an electronic library has been built, but others own and manage it. We are left with the tangible property we began with, our physical books, the thousands of buildings that house them, and the millions of people still coming through our doors to use them. In reality, those are not inconsiderable assets — especially in a world where it may become increasingly uneconomical to have physical bookstores or places where people can get together to listen to stories or discuss books and ideas. Figuring out how to exploit those assets in this new environment will not be easy. Perhaps we should turn our attention away from the electric library that others have built and focus on the real books and buildings that made us what we were to begin with. Perhaps that will continue to define us into the future.

Or perhaps not. Perhaps we have new roles to play in the digital world or old roles to play but in a new way. Let’s think about that. For my thoughts, keep reading Searcher magazine. I’ll be back.

The views expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect the opinion of LSSI .

This is a really interesting article. I hope to comment properly on it later.

While perhaps a little sentimental in an American way, still a most interesting post.

David Barry (copied from thehairpin.com )

Her fingers were always too shaky to type. Even a decade ago, when she was fresher, healthier, bouncier than she is now, she couldn’t do it. But she so wanted to. One day she came home and told me that her friend Bobbi had WebTV, that petrified totem to dialup, and that she wanted to email her. We walked over to the computer.

Her fingers jangled above the keyboard. “Hhhhii Boobbbii,,,” the email started. She got frustrated and walked away. Over the next 10 or so years, she never quite returned.

***

She’s 84, my grandmother, and as Dutch as a former American can be. Born in Holland, hidden in Holland, repatriated to Holland, she comes to visit about two times a year now. But otherwise she lives there, where she once saw a Nazi playing with her toys in her backyard. Where she was shuttled from hideout to hideout as a kid. Where her family went missing and all but her sister never came back.

But, as is always the case, now is not then. Now she lives in an Amsterdam apartment complex designated and subsidized for the elderly. It’s the kind of socialized benefit that makes too much sense to be offered in America. She moved to it when she was 77, spooked by a dysfunctional American healthcare system and nostalgic for her small remaining family overseas. Her children are here, her grandkids are here, and the country she once called home is here, but her 89-year-old sister is there. And so she is there.

***

This Thanksgiving, she was here. She flew to Maryland and then to Florida, where all of her kids and grandkids paid a visit, if not tribute. In the house it was loud with the sound of crosstalk, the kind of ambient chatter that shows like Parenthood try hard to manufacture. She didn’t follow it all; her ears have never been the same after the war — or perhaps, given how long it’s been, it’s more accurate to say her ears have always been the same since the war. “I don’t understand you!” she said every now and then, a resigned smile on her face. But it wasn’t the volume — we all long ago learned to talk to her with a raised voice — it was the speed. The conversation was moving too fast to track. Age had finally eclipsed her hearing aid.

Her grandkids — even the 14-year-old, especially the 14-year-old — all had smartphones. We lurked with them in corners, half-present, half-removed, half-aware of how rude it probably was. She watched us with a kind of charmed love, the glance that comes from some evolutionary reservoir, the one that only grandparents can go skinny-dipping in. Her eyes shook a little bit and her mouth rediscovered the wrinkles that framed it long ago.

“Who are you talking to?” she asked in her clipped, guttural accent. No matter what the answer was, it wasn’t her.

***

She helped raised me, this woman. She lived with us in Connecticut, in the cul-de-sac where she parked her white 1994 Honda Civic, in the house where we tried to send that email. She picked us up from school, she drove us to practice, she made sure there was an after-school snack every day. “You’re a growing boy,” she’d urge without any irony. (Jewish grandmothers aren’t Jewish grandmothers unless they don’t realize they’re being Jewish grandmothers.)

She had her own life, too, of course. There was Bobbi, and Shirley, and whoever else ambled in to a restaurant for tea in the middle of the day. She was a woman about town, visiting the knitting shop, the Trellis Diner, the synagogue. So she was active — not a skydiving granny or anything, but still active. She was a woman who every now and then wanted to live outside of herself.

But she never did that living online. She was surrounded by technology in our house — she’d watch me play video games for hours — but she never partook herself. She looked over our shoulders as we used a laptop, she used our cellphones without actually dialing the number herself, and she pronounced Internet with hard t's as though it were something as foreign as her accent. It was a world that she only glimpsed through a telescope, curious to look but never expecting to get there herself.

***

On the day most of her family left, she picked up an iPad. “Do you think I’d like this?” she asked. And I said yes, yes she might.

She held it above her lap. It quivered in her knotty, wrinkled hands. Is there anything more alien to a young person than an old person’s hand? Its veins and joints are all visible. Its thin skin droops, scuffed by burns, pets, diapers, steering wheels, doorknobs, and whatever else has brushed by in 80-plus years. Its muscles have withered, wizened down to their most essential bits. Bracelets — the same bracelets that have been on since as far back as you can remember, and even further — sag off its thin wrist. It’s still a hand, but it’s also clearly something else. An artifact, maybe.

She used those hands to put the iPad down on her knees and used one of those craggy fingers — nails impeccably painted orangeish-red — to make the thing work. She ran it along the bottom of the screen and began anew.

***

She is always cold now, my grandmother. She says it cuts through to her bones. She was sick over Thanksgiving, and was too nervous about “catching a cold on top of a cold” to leave the house. Did she want to take a walk to the beach? Too windy. Was the air conditioning too high? Of course. Did she want to step out on the porch with me? She did, for a minute, and that was enough. (And after I come back in, make sure the door is locked, okay?)

Manufactured hysteria over death panels and the like means that this country talks a lot about how strange it is for kids to start taking care of their parents when they get old enough. How the cared-for must now become the caretakers. But watching a grandparent grow old — rather, grow older — is a little different. My grandmother never tossed a Frisbee with me, never advised me about my first girlfriend, never went out to a bar with me after I turned 21. (Though there was that one episode with the Brandy Alexanders at Cousin Scott’s wedding. “Uch! I never!” she now denies.) None of that was part of our relationship before, so none of that could be mourned for now. Our dynamic — being content in each other’s company — wasn’t changing, so it wasn’t in danger of being lost.

But she was losing her own. This grandmother who was afraid of what might happen if she tried something new, this was a different grandmother than I grew up with. I think I’ve spent more hours with her than with anyone else in my life, and this is not the memory of her that I tote around with me.

So it’s not that she’s getting old — to me, she was always old. It’s that her scope of possibility isn’t as large as it once was. Her aperture has narrowed.

***

Her fingers were not too shaky to type on the iPad. Without the spring-loaded keys of a regular keyboard she could press down fully on the iPad’s glass screen until she was ready for the next letter. Within minutes she wanted one of her own. And so we got her one of her own.

“It’s beautiful” she said when she opened it. Moments later, she was texting, her first ever. “Chad hi thanks for helping me please write every thing down for me.” A day later, after I showed her FaceTime, downloaded apps (Epicurious, the Weather Channel, Solitaire, WordSearch, and Talking Tom the Cat — the woman cannot get enough of Talking Tom the Cat), and tried, for the fourth time, to explain the difference between email and text messages, she begged again for me to give her a manual to take back to Holland. “You have to write down what I do with the camera that we see each other.”

The fear of forgetting how to use this new thing was overwhelming. It had taken a decade to get there, but now that she had this technology, she never wanted to lose it. After she made her first videochat call, she closed her eyes and brought her hands to her face. She was overwhelmed with what was finally within reach. “Already I don’t know how to live without it,” she said on her third day with it. I started to look into those Korean Internet rehab centers you always hear about.

She started taking the iPad to bed with her to play Solitaire. It was the same bed she had spent the week in and out of; nursing that cold so another one couldn’t metastasize on top of it. But now the context was different. Now the cold was being crowded out by something new: the glow of a screen.

***

Eventually she thought to finish what she had started. She asked if she could email Bobbi. Somehow she still remembered the email address. Now she finally had the means.

But then when she sat down with the iPad to do it, she hesitated. “I don’t know what to write right now,” she said. And so instead we lingered on the couch for a little while longer. Grandmother and grandson, together with our technology.

Chadwick Matlin is a senior editor at Reuters. He calls his grandmother Nana.

This is an article added to my blog by the "share on posterous" feature.

I comment on it below.

"People of a certain age often enjoy recalling for younger folk the size of the early mobile phones that were lugged around in the mid-1980s, whilst marvelling at the latest smartphones. These brick-sized devices could not even send text (SMS) messages (the first of which was sent in 1992); they were good for voice only. But, what would it have taken almost three decades ago to have had all the capabilities of a 2011 smartphone based on the available technology of the day?
 
This was one of the subjects covered in a recent New Scientist article titled “They said it couldn't be done: 7 impossible inventions”. To quote the article:
 
“The components for the iPhone à la 1985 we've listed so far would fill a large wheelbarrow. But we have left out something important.
 
“The processor at the heart of the iPhone 4 can perform up to a billion operations per second (the new iPhone 4S is even zippier). You might have matched that in the mid-80s if you had bought the Cray X-MP, then the world's most powerful supercomputer. But the Cray would have filled an office cubicle and also required an industrial-strength refrigerator to remove the waste heat. So cancel the wheelbarrow. To haul the 1985 iPhone around, we're going to need a truck.”
 
Interesting stuff, which underlines why the consumerisation of IT has become such a big issue. When I left the academic world for the commercial one in 1986, for the first time in my life, on my desk at work, I had dedicated access to a computer (albeit a text-only dumb terminal) which was linked to a network providing me with any information my employer had stored that it felt would be useful to do my job. I also now had a telephone with its own number; my friends and family could now contact me when I was at work (before that hand-written letters had been the main method).
 
The new entrant to the workplace now has all this and much, much more in their pocket. This is the issue driving IT consumerisation. Employers can no longer impress new recruits with technology and connectivity, they are more likely to disappoint. Competitive employers today are those that allow their employees to use the advanced technology they have become used to at home in the workplace.
 
Consumerisation does of course throw up many challenges, not least how data security, contracts and billing are handled. These issues were discussed in a recent free Quocirca report “Carrying the can” sponsored by ttMobiles and the subject of a recent conference organised by the Wireless Improvement Group (WIG). Quocirca’s presentation given at the conference can be downloaded here.

Bob Tarzey, Analyst and Director, Quocirca"

At that time, I was working on a project concerned with using computer conferencing to support distance teaching of Organisational Psychology. We used desktop computers which ran emulation software that turned them into dumb terminals - our favourite hardware/software combination was an Atari ST running Uniterm. We had stradcom pocket modems running at 2,400 baud across telephone lines to the Birkbeck College VAX computer, on which the conferencing software was run - we started with CAUCUS, then moved on to CoSy.There was no Internet, although it turned out that Peter Kirstein just up the road at UCL was working on that.. Down the road the University of London's Computer Centre was so proud of its Cray X-MP one of only two in the country they said (tho' no doubt GCHQ had at least one other). They used to invite people around to show it off. And now I see teenagers in the street carrying around the same computing power as that!