librarypunk - 158 - Flickr Commons feat. Jessamyn West

Episode Date: February 18, 2026

It’s a fun one! We’re talking with Jessamyn about the public domain, new and old technology, blogging at the DNC, and lots of inside baseball. Media mentioned https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jessamyn_West_(librarian) https://www.librarian.net/stax/5566/the-mining-of-the-public-domain/ https://jessamyn.com/tweets/  https://tararobertson.ca/2016/oob/  Request to Verify Eligibility for Free Ebooks for the Print Disabled https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLScSBbT17HSQywTm-fQawOK7G4dN-QPbDWNstdfvysoKTXCjKA/viewform  Veii’s music: https://veii.bandcamp.com/ Who Owns this Sentence?: A History of Copyrights and Wrongs https://fit.princeton.edu/publications/who-owns-sentence-history-copyrights-and-wrongs  Free Whistles https://linktr.ee/3Dwhistles My Justice of the Peace tumblr https://vermontjp.tumblr.com/ Logan Airport chapel https://discovermass.com/church/our-lady-of-the-airways-east-boston-ma/ Soul of a New Machine https://www.tracykidder.com/the-soul-of-a-new-machine.html Matteo Lane https://matteolanecomedy.com/ My DNC blog https://www.librarian.net/dnc/ Librarian at Burning Man https://www.jessamyn.com/journal/02/burnlib.html Flickr Commons Explorer https://commons.flickr.org/Without a Net, Librarians Bridging the Digital Divide https://www.librarian.net/digitaldivide/ Marrakesh Treaty https://www.wipo.int/en/web/treaties/ip/marrakesh/index Flickypedia https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Flickypedia That's My Grandma Flickr Gallery https://flickr.com/photos/flickrfoundation/galleries/72157722979767596/ Murkutu https://mukurtu.org/ Barnard Zine Library https://zines.barnard.edu/ Cleaning out mom's house https://www.flickr.com/photos/iamthebestartist/albums/72157719713137030 Transcript: https://pastecode.io/s/684xqjj9  Join the Discord: https://discord.gg/qWPTurTnkT

Is my soundboard working? Yep. I hate you. Look at all of you people with your professional microphones. I've just got my... Do I sound okay? I sound okay to me. Yeah, you sound fine.

We've been, is this our five year this month? Five years last week. I only upgraded like last year. Yeah, same. Like bought my own. Yeah. Now you're like, I'm a real podcaster. Yeah, Justin's had his setup for a couple of years now.

Yeah, I like having the, I like, the main reason I bought it, because I like having this arm. It's nice. We all have the same one. Yeah. We all have like a used, exact same used Blue Yeti with an arm. Oh, you're new? Yeah. Mine was so old, the micro USB was like broken. And so I had to buy a different micro USB cable.

I do have a professional headset, but it like plugs into a thing that. that then turns into USBA and I don't even have USBA anymore. So at least my laptop has a headphone jack. I was surprised I could find a six foot micro USB. When I had to replace this one like when I bought it like three years ago. I have one of those in my basement. Yeah. Yeah.

The older you get, the more you hoard old cables. I've just got a bag of cables just in case. I don't know half of them or four. I think I've thrown some of the things away. but I'm like, but they're, the way things are going, I need to hoard my cables. Whole set of like two of those like white plastic drawers in one of my rooms. And when I was working IT where I actually had to go out two branches to fix things, I had a tool bag full of random ass cables in my trunk and tools at all points in time

because you never know when you're going to suddenly need a VGA, what is it, VGA to display port or whatever, yeah. You never know. You never do know when you need those. Like, I had two graphic card inputs and, like, I had one of the weird graphic cards that had one VGA and one DVI. And to have a two monitor set up, I had to have one going VGA and one going DBI.

And I go to the library. I just have this, which is full of like dongles and widgets and whatever. Because, you know, do people have an Android phone? Do they have an iPhone? Do they have an old iPhone? Do they have an antique iPhone? etc. And if you have the thing, maybe they can talk to somebody, do a thing, whatever. If you don't have a thing, they come back to the library next week. Yeah. Someone had a post that was like,

this is really annoying for all the 3D printer boyfriends. The ice whistles have really validated their purchase decisions. Imagine if society depended on all of their hoarded cables. how validated they feel. I may have 94 of those whistles in my home, but yes. Yeah, I mean, I'm torn between do I invest in the 3D printer or do I invest in the DIY chemistry set for making medication? You know, it's like which one is the $500. Oh, God, I think you got to go chemistry, right?

I think the chemistry one is really, you know, you can do so many more fun things with it. Yeah. I started recording. And everybody has a 3D printer. Sorry. That's true. Everyone doesn't do the printer. But, yeah.

You can always go use someone else's 3D printer. Yes. Like at your local library. Unless you're in Vermont, I'm trying to think where the closest 3D printer to me is. I'm not actually sure. I know the closest library with the 3D printer is over an hour away. Yeah. Is it in Burlington or is it like in New Hampshire or Massachusetts?

It's like on the way to Burlington, I think. Okay. Although actually New Hampshire, we don't diplomatically recognize New Hampshire. So I don't know. There are our socialist brethren to the north. I lived in New Hampshire for like four years before I moved to Boston. I was like, oh, God. Now, do you live in Boston, Boston or like suburbs?

I live in Boston. Only asking because my partner lives in Arlington. So, yeah. Yeah. Which Arlington? You're Arlington. We have an Arlington too. And then there's other Arlington's.

But yes, Arlington in the Massachusetts. Yeah, I'm in Florida. There's not a Florida Arlington yet. You don't have an Arlington? Now I got a check of Washington has an Arlington. You haven't lived until you've had an Arlington. Okay. Yeah, this is good.

We'll keep shooting the shit. It's fine. So what we do is... That's how this podcast is. You said ADD and I was like, say no more, I get it. Can I swear on this podcast? Oh, yeah. Justin had to put an explicit label on the podcast

because of how often I say faggot. Yeah, I have toned it down a little bit Just because I'm like, oh crap, they like assign us in grad school sometimes now. Maybe I should stop. But you know what? I don't think so. They're adults. It's fun.

They're real life. Yeah. You're going to hear worse at the library kids. Mm-hmm. Because Jay works there. Because I work. That's right. I believe my representative just called the,

whole Epstein crowd, like a bunch of sick fox, like in public media yesterday. Good. I know, right? Good. Okay. Let's get the introduction out of the way. Let's go. I'm Justin.

I'm an academic library. My pronouns are he and they. Hi, I'm Sadie. I work IT at a public library and my pronouns are Zayette. I'm Jay. I am a cataloging librarian. My pronouns are he, him. And we have a guest, which would like to introduce yourself.

Hey, my name is Jessamine. I am a technologist and public librarian in central Vermont, and my pronouns are she here. Welcome. That gets quieter every time I use it. Whatever, it gets louder in post. It'll be fine. Welcome. I was explaining the...

It's also an honor to have you here, by the way. Hey. Yeah. When Justin was like, we're going to have Jessamine Weston, I was like, how did it take us this long to get like the one person who's famous for being the library? I mean, I follow you guys on Blue Sky, I think, and I think it was that. I don't even remember. Yeah. It's strange.

I usually try and wait for like an opening. Like I see someone talking about something and then I go, oh, they're talking about that. Then I can get them to do an episode. So that's probably the reason is like, you know, what has Jessamine want to talk about? I don't really know. So I always wait for an opening. But yeah, anyone is welcome to email us at any time. If you have an idea for an episode, we get more than enough, you know, AI emails of

someone like, hello, I represent so-and-so who is writing a book about three children who are trapped in downtown Vermont. I don't know, like the big city, Connecticut. And they would love to talk to you. And it's always clearly like someone who's written it with the AI. And it's always clearly someone who has been conned by this person. So like an author has paid this person to get them on podcasts. Yeah. And the person has farmed that out to AI. And I kind of want to always email the author and being like, you know you've been had, right? Like, I hope you can reverse the charges on this person because they're just sending me AI slop.

Great. They're doing no work. Yeah. It's like the people who pay for ghost writers, which is like a legitimate, like, type of writing. You can do, but then the ghost writers are just then using AI for like a tweet instead of actually using a skill. It's like, you could just pay, you could just take out that middleman. Right.

Or, you know, shocking. Use an, yeah, use an AI to send an email yourself. so plugged into AI. Yeah. If you're going to go that route, just do it. That's always the value proposition that I find confusing is like, you should learn to do AI because people are going to rely on you to use AI. I'm like, can't they just ask the AI to do it?

Well, you know, prompt engineer, I'm told, is very sophisticated work. See, we don't have AI in Vermont to the as near as I can tell. So, like, I don't know. Hasn't got there yet. Our socialist brethren to the north. My partner's in Massachusetts. He uses it at work. sometimes a little bit. Like he's a, you know, a program administrator at a academic place. And so

he uses it and he'll just talk to me on the phone like, oh, I made AI do this. And I'm like, I don't, I need it to chair this meeting. And we can't do that. You know, I just for, I, in pre-roll, I just got out of like a two and a half hour like civics meeting that I had to chair. And that's the kind of non-reproducible. You still need human bodies to like listen to somebody and be like, sorry my toilet was running. I don't want to pay $1,000 because I didn't know my toilet was running. And you can just be there and be like, I don't think you should have to. And AI would always charge you $1,000 for your leaky toilet because it's max a rising value for the shareholder, right?

Mm-hmm. AI is the leaky toilet. Right? Right? Yes, exactly. It's never for like the boring repetitive stuff that would make sense. It's always for like the part that's like actually fulfilling or intellectually stimulating to do as a human. That's always a part that it's trying to take away. It's not the like, oh, I don't want to generate the millionth, like, table of contents for this cataloging record. What if it could do that for me? Whereas, like, the OCLC thing is like, it's doing subject headings. It's doing call numbers. That's all it's doing. And I'm like, but that's the fun part. Like, right, aboutness is actually complicated. That's what the intellectual labor is. Like, what the...

I like using my brain. I like using my brain. Can it shovel my driveway? No, it fucking can't. We got like five inches of snow too, which is also made my day a little hectic. Did you guys? We got a little sleet overnight. I think we got like a quarter of an inch. Not real sleep. We did get the snowmageddon a couple weekends ago. Yes, big fun.

Yeah. Yeah, I got trapped in Boston. I was there for the weekend. And then they're like, by the way, your flight's probably going to get canceled. And it was like doing that like two or three days in advance. It's like, rebook now, rebook now. I'm like, eh, nah. I'll deal with it.

Yeah, and so I was there, I was supposed to fly back like that. Three extra days. And I was there to like Wednesday. Oh my God. But you didn't like get to Logan to have them tell you like you don't, you're not going. You just got to like stay there and check your phone and be like, oh. Yeah. No, no.

If I get to Logan, it's usually like for no reason my flight's not leaving. And then I'm there. Yeah. For like five hours or something. Yeah, for extra five hours. But I think Logan has the chapel that you can hang out in and charge you to vice and nobody's ever in there. I didn't know that.

Maybe. I don't. I think they do. They may not anymore. If I were Logan, I wouldn't have a chapel anymore. But like, eh, you know, Boston. Yeah, it was fine. In Vermont, it's a meditation room.

Yeah. Of course it is. Vermont, it's exactly like you think. Of fucking course it is. It's a big interfaith chapel. It's fine. It's fine. The airport.

It's fine. The airport is a big. interfaith chapel. Sorry. I made a leap there that didn't make any sense. No, that's fine. Year five, Sadie's Rifts. I mean, because whenever I'm at the airport, I am actually contemplating mortality more than I usually do just sitting around in my house, right? That's true. You ask the big questions. Like, why am I here in this airport? Yes. Where do I charge my phone? Yeah. Why is a TSA guy think that the TSA works the same?

every airport when I know because there is another TSA at the other airport and I can tell you, brother, I know it doesn't work this way at other airports. And they always insist that it does work the same way. It's like, you know that there's another airport at the other end of this plane, right? Taking off your belt is a universal, Justin. Yeah. They do like the bin, like back and forth, you know, shuffle like here's a bin? No, no bin for you. No bin this time. Only been. Nope, you 17 bins. Nope. You 17 bins. Yeah. Who knows? No bin, 17 bins. they'll make up their meals. Logan has the airport jungle juice, though,

where they've got that thing where it's like dump all your liquids in here and then refill it and it's just like a bin that you dump all your water or whatever else. Wait, what? Yeah, it's like airport jungle juice. I've never seen it in real life. I've only seen photos. I keep looking for the Logan Airport Jungle Juice.

For the airport jungle juice. They should put a little sticking at the bottom of it. Right. Yeah. Even if it doesn't work. It would just be funny. Yeah. Right.

They should put my favorite at the bottom, the link to something completely, actual drinkable alcohol, just so you could like prank. They used to do that at the Museum of Science and Industry in Tampa. It would be like, here's what your water will look like without environmental rules. And then it had a water fountain underneath that you could drink from. And the thing was, it was the nastiest water fountain I've ever drank out of. So I might have actually been hooked up to it. But it was just like, you know, like plastic bottles and dirt in this big clear thing.

And it was like, why don't you take a drink, kids, children? And then it was like a randage. Water Pountain. And then it turned out the water's bad and you're like, this message so mixed. Yeah. I should go and swab it and see if there's like heavy metals in it or something. With your home medical kit as we were discussing. This is why this is what you need.

I need to buy so many weird things. True joy in life. Same. Same. Evergreen. Yes. I was looking into, because I was talking, I spent a lot of my free time on Discord talking to transsexual.

and also on a podcast doing that as well. As one does. Yeah. And so we got talking about home chemistry as one does. And I was like, where does synthetic testosterone come from? We started looking it up. It turns out it all comes from soy. So I was thinking, tell the gym bros that all the steroids they're taking

is actually soy steroids and they'll stop doing it and they'll be healthier people. It's like, dude, your gains are coming from like soy and, beats, you know. And they're just like, well, hell no, then. Fuck it. I mean, they don't eat soy. They're like, they're like, it makes you. Demosculating.

Because it's got phytoestrogens, which is. Well, because I was going to say, I thought there was like an estrogen soy connection. Yes. Yeah, but it doesn't affect human beings at all. It's just for plants. Yeah. It's shaped similarly. Yeah.

Yeah. It's just about like structure, but it doesn't actually have the same effects on humans. Yeah. It's just structurally. estrogen. Like you call the schymical estrogen, but it's... What actually has estrogenizing effects is getting too much testosterone, because then your body turns it into estrogen. Yeah. Like all you... Yeah, all you people out there who were like, oh, my two levels are low, or if you are a trans man, and you're like, oh, my tea levels are low,

there's a reason why you get your blood tested while you're on tea, and it's to see not just if your tea levels are too low, but if they are too high, because then if it's too high, it turns back into estrogen. Yeah. wrote it. Anyway. I did not know that. I'm learning so much. Yeah. Body is a miracle. Can't tongue pop with my tongue pierced.

I was talking to, again, another one of these discords. We were talking about your background, Jessamine. And I was like, you probably have one of the most extensive Wikipedia entries of many of our guests. And I was saying it. And then one of the people I was talking to was like, is she single and is she Polly? No and no. Like I'm barely monogamous. I am barely even in this relationship. Like me and my partner, like both live in separate states and we don't even, I mean, it's, it's ace adjacent monogamous, basically. No. I, I, I, I, my life is complicated. Well, I had to ask for her. No, I appreciate it. And, you know, very, very flattering. We can also cut that out if you want us to. Oh, I don't care. I'm like, Justin, what the fuck are you doing? Justman seems cool.

I like to think I am cool. Yeah, she'll tell me if I'm being a jerk. Yeah, I'll just be like, hey, man, not cool. I refuse to answer that. I don't even care. I mean, this is why I like podcasting, right? Because people talk about whatever, and it's kind of locked up in an audio file and perfect. And it's already on Wikipedia.

Like, I was telling somebody about this earlier today because it's like, not only am I on Wikipedia, but like relatives of mine are on Wikipedia. So, like, I have like a family set of links on Wikipedia and we were talking about anti-Semitism, as one does on social media. And somebody was talking about like, oh, why are these people always like calling out all these individual people is Jewish? And I'm like, Wikipedia does this all the time. Like, if somebody is Jewish and they have a Wikipedia page, their Wikipedia page will mention their Judaism. Like, just for no reason, just because, I don't know, back end creeps. I honestly don't know why this is true.

but my uncle has a Wikipedia page because he's like an actor and kind of people have heard of him. And that's how I found out that my grandparents were like a mixed Sephardic Ashkenazi couple because Wikipedia is like really into that level

of like weird genetic nerdicism in a way that's like a little cool but also deeply creepy. Yeah. Yeah. I know there's a joke in the, there's like a joke about the early like the early life section but I forget what people

call it. No, so it's, you look at someone's Wikipedia page and if they've got like a personal life section that usually means they're gay. Is that what you mean? Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. But there's a separate joke about that for Jewish people and it's like, if there's an early life section, that's the part that tells you if they're Jewish or not. That means they're Jewish, yes, was raised in a blah bitty blah family. I don't even know if mine says it actually. I'll be honest, I don't read it that often. I just like have a buddy where if something's wrong, I'll be like, can you fix this? I'm not allowed to edit this. I'm like, yeah, great.

We're cool. I'm like, great. It says your, it says your father was in a, it's a key figure in a book by Tracy Kidder. Yeah, yeah, that's true. My dad was a technology guy and worked on a computer project in the 80s that happened to be covered by Tracy Kidder as his first like kind of big novel that any, or not novel, nonfiction book about this computer project in the 80s that no one like,

it's back before everybody did computers, right? And the book won a Pulitzer. And my dad was like, the central guy, but he was also like a nerdy computer guy. And so he was briefly famous in the 80s, very exciting for 12-year-old me, and then kind of became unfamous, sort of, except or he was known for that one thing. And the book portrays him kind of correctly as like kind of a taskmaster son of a bitch. You know, like, I loved the man. But like, he was a very, it's all about him being like, get the computer built. Like, you can't even imagine it nowadays because it just, there aren't projects on that, like, tiny scale. There's not like 10 dudes, actually. It was all dudes building the mainframe, you know, and one lady was Betty. And I know her because, like, you know

who the one person is who's different. But yeah. And so my father kind of like continued to work in technology for the rest of his life at the same company. But, his fame was in the 80s. And I can't even imagine what that's like. I worry about that for myself. Like, what if I was only famous last century? And then I just hang out in Vermont and do this. Actually, that's not so bad.

Yeah. I mean, yeah, it's, you worry, there's like a double-edged sword of being like too popular. Like, it does a lot of weird things to, I think. People, people who thrive off of like posting and things like that. it's always like you're rolling the dice. That's something a friend of mine says. You're rolling the dice with that every time where you're like, do I want to maintain this? Roll the dice.

I'm like, is this going to negatively impact my mental health for the next five years or something? Right, right. Especially if you're talking about anything real, right? Like, it's pretty easy to be like, oh, you know, funny joke about Vermont or, oh, interesting thing about the Olympics or even Black History Month. Like, it's fine. But then if you start talking about like, you know, Becca Bates. my representative who called the Epsine peddos a bunch of sick fox. Like, you start talking about that and

suddenly you're involved in a conversation with a bunch of, let's be honest, mostly dudes who just want to have a sea-lining conversation with you about something you didn't even ask them about, kind of. It's kind of, I mean, I don't know, in terms of social media, it was interesting listening to you talk about Discord because, like, I just don't use Discord almost at all. But like, I'm aware it's a very real thing for a lot of people, but I'm like a Massadon dork. And then like blue sky, I feel is like where those communities can come together in a place where some people are without being like the Nazi world of Twitter or I don't know. If you're on Twitter, I'm sorry. I just, or substack. I don't even know. It's fascinating to me. Like there's more choices, which is cool,

but also they all say something about you, which can be weird. Yeah, the Discord, we, we avoided it for a while. I didn't really want to do one. And then I lost contact with so many library people when they all jump ship on Twitter. And I was like, oh, I didn't have another way to, I didn't have a backup way of contacting these people. So I, like, kind of the Discord is just mostly like, we can regroup here because it's not like the open social media where everyone is, every rando is yelling at you. Right. And there's all this discussion of like, oh, should we leave Discord because it's going to do

the face thing if you want to be in an adult restricted thing, which ours isn't adult restricted. So it's not going to ask, scan your face. but it's like don't say anything you wouldn't say in public but we're just here as a rallying point. We have to say once in a while when something funny in the news happens and say don't look to the Discord subpoenaed because I know this is very funny but you're not allowed to joke on it because they are reading things that you type in here. Even though we all support what happened. We all think it was very funny. Yes.

And he had it coming. He could mean so many people. It has meant honestly. It's been a few years. It's been many people who had it coming. I'm just going to start singing from Chicago. Well, and there's so many people who moved off of Twitter and then like changed their avatar and I'm probably still friends with them on different social media and I have no idea it's the same person. I at least always kind of look like me and I've got like one name and there's only, I have no imagination.

So I'm just me everywhere. Like if I'm lucky enough to be me everywhere, Instagram, I have a different. handle, but I still have like my same picture of face and I'm like, it's me. Yeah, there are definitely, I was like, oh, you're that same guy or lady or other person or oh my gosh, sorry. We've been talking for six months and I didn't know I knew you. Whoops. That just happened to me, like today, like a friend of mine was like, oh, I have a friend who's going to go into an MLS program. Let me, let me connect you with them. And then they jump in and I see their name and I go, I know this name. And I go in a blue sky and I'm like, Hey, we're already, we're already been talking on Blue Sky.

Yeah, no, I knew the name immediately. I was like, oh. I was like, I know the name. I don't know. I thought you already were a librarian. I mean, if you're following me on Blue Sky, I kind of assumed it's like an 80% chance you're already librarian anyways.

It's like, you know. Well, that's what I always tell people about Blue Sky. It's like the librarian radio. You know, you can just kind of tune in. What are the different librarian people talking about? And then like, tune back out again. I try not to talk about anything related to libraries on Blue Sky. Really?

Not on like purpose, but I just, I don't know. One, I try not to post that much on it. I'm trying not to like be on social media too much. I do tend to scroll Instagram too much, but it's usually just like pasta videos. And like, recently today, a bunch of Liza Minnelli videos was not complaining. You just kept sending me Liza Minnelli stuff all that. Because she was on the Muppet show. I thought you would like that.

So wait, who's that guy? Mario, what is his name? There's like a very gay stand-up comedian who also does cooking. Mateo Lane. Oh, I love him. I love him. So good. He's so good.

Wait, is he the same stand-of-com comedian? The whole thing about like Call of Duty, like, being in the closet and looking at the wallpaper and being like, oh, we could live here. And then immediately getting killed. Holy. It sounds like it could be. He's definitely a gamer. It sounds like it could be him. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah, he's hilarious. I love him. We're not even going to talk about library shit this episode. We're just hanging out. We talked about library stuff on Blue Sky already. We've already talked about Wikipedia. This is a podcast. And Blue Sky sucks. There's all a bunch of people who don't have a sense of humor. It is pretty bad. Wait, which one? Blue Sky. No one has a sense. No one knows that a joke is.

Or they don't appreciate them. They know it's a joke. They just don't like that it's a joke. Yeah, it's also true. We all met on library Tumblr back when that was still a thing. And like, you know, we would have big, big, like, tumblerian things. And now it's kind of like, people are still hanging out and doing stuff. And it's fun to go on there. I try to remember to go, like, check it because it's completely different from the other stuff that I see. Of course.

Because it's, you know, I followed a bunch of people who were now the opposite gender of whatever they were. And, like, everyone just swapped. It's fine. Change places. And, you know, gender balance is the same. It's just all different people. Yeah. It's honestly kind of, yeah, kind of weird how that worked out.

I find it so strange if people are like, you know, I don't know, I don't know a trans person. I'm like, I only know them. Like, I keep finding them. I live in a town of like 4,000 people and I know a lot of trans people in my town. Like, yeah, you're not looking if you don't know any. Yeah. Or people don't feel safer around you. And so they walk the other way when they see you coming, right?

could also be every cis male friend I have made in the past 10 years has turned out to either be neither cis nor male nor either has turned into a beautiful lady yeah

which is just peak good for them yeah sometimes I worry about making friends now because I'm like oh no I'm going to have to tell you something

I don't know if you know my track record but every friend I have made is yeah That's how it works. So people should read your Wikipedia page because you were like one of the first bloggers. That is true in the last century. Yeah, one of the first bloggers to officially be awarded press credentials at the Democratic National Convention in 2004.

Yes, I got to meet Vermin Supreme. I got to meet President Obama. I got to meet Howard Dean. I got to, I was so weird and dumb. I mean, it was the first time, like my partner at the time was like really into politics. And ultimately, he's not my partner because he went to law school and then wanted to go do politics. And I was like, enjoy that life. I'm not about it.

And my current partner is just like a great, you know, office guy who does spreadsheets and it's lovely. But like, you know, he wanted to go to the Democratic National Convention. And so I was like, great, I'll try and go to the Democratic National Convention. You applied for credentials. And they didn't have enough women. Like, they only invited dudes somehow. And then they had to scramble to fix it. And so there were a whole bunch of women that got invited late.

And I was one of them. And I lived in Vermont. So it was really easy to go down in Boston. My sister lived in Somerville. It was so easy. I just stayed with her. Every day, just took the subway into, wherever the fuck it was, convention center. And it was such a, it was where you got the idea, which we all know now,

but was a little novel to me at the time in how made for television everything was. You know, that there's just people handing out signs. like there's no organic sign waving at these things. Like it's all orchestrated to play for the cameras and blogging. Like most of the bloggers were like, I mean, A, guys and then B political bloggers. And I was just like a library blogger. So I was like, uh, let's see who mentions libraries. Nobody. John Kerry mentioned libraries and future president Obama mentioned libraries. And like, that was it. So I was like, well, that's pretty interesting. And then you just like go to parties. That's all anybody does. They just get. hammered and sleep with each other and figure out who the next president's going to be. Like, cool, I guess. But I got really disillusioned with it. I think, yeah, they should, they should, instead of, like, teaching civics classes, just let high schoolers go to stuff like that. Remember that, like, that, like, elementary school that they sent to, like, go see the national bird be selected and, and the kids had

chosen it? And then some, like, pedantic state Senate member was, like, like, no, this is a waste of taxpayer time and shut it down and like vetoed it in front of all the kids. Welcome to the real world, idiots. This is how it really happens. Yes. Oh, my God. Well, because civics are really important, but federal level shit isn't that. You know what I mean?

It's so not the process. Like, I mean, I've always been kind of outspoken anarchist in my heart, but also like, yeah, I'm an elected official in my town because the way to get things done and give people back. their, you know, leaky toilet overcharge money is to have a position on the board and you get elected to do that. And it's awkward because occasionally you talk about sort of humanless social media people here. I don't follow a lot of anarchists on social media because a lot of them are really purists about voting, which I get, I mean, less so now in this current ridiculous era that we're in. But up until fairly recently, before we saw like mutual aid and direct action actually being the literally the only thing that would work.

Yeah. You know, people were just like, ah, if you vote, ah. And I'm like, I don't know. Like, even if you're a Democrat, like, nobody's purely a Democrat, right? We live in a republic. Yeah, we tell people all the time, like, if you are going to be involved in, like, like, it's not necessarily like electoralism to, like, vote for things for your city or your neighbor. Like, like, it's not like waste.

It's not wasting resources. Like you're not like draining the energy of organizing movements. Right, right, right, right. By funneling for candidates and everything. Whereas like, but like we'll tell people a little time, like, get on your library boards. Get on your school boards. Because otherwise it's just like fascist moms who get on those. Right.

Although fuck moms for liberty. They got so fucked this last like election cycle because everybody hates them. They're not even fun to hang out with. You know what I mean? Yeah. Like they have bad politics and they're terrible people. people. Like, what a great combination. Everybody's like, we don't want to be on a board with you. We just want to sit around and like drink wine and talk about whatever and you suck. Yeah. We hope. I mean, we hope, right? But yeah, no, my best friend in town and I do a lot of like local organizing. We're trying to like get some people on the select board and blah, blah, blah. He's a socialist. We make it work. Like, it's fun. And now he's got Zoron. So like people actually know what socialism means. They're still not sure about me and my. thing but I mean yeah it's it's fun having the arguments and it's like people just live in the real world

like you you you know you go vote takes 10 minutes it's fine do whatever you want it doesn't matter to me oh yeah oh and I get to run the elections I'm in charge of the election like that's hell yeah interesting right I get to help people once oh my god Justin no but I get to like who know That's what happens in Vermont, man. Yeah. I get to tell people, you know, who never thought about registering to vote that they can influence people or people who are like developmentally disabled and wouldn't otherwise necessarily think it was for them that they're allowed to or they're like, I went to prison.

I'm not allowed to vote. And I'm like, in Vermont you can. Like, it varies. State to state. In Vermont, you can vote in prison, I think. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, you can.

It's like the one state you still can. I think there's a couple, but definitely us. It's like not many. There's not many. This brings up one of the like, I think like besides the like work that you do around like or like attention you've brought to like government surveillance and like library resistance to that, you know, the FBI has not been here. Canary Watch that you did, right? And and stuff like that. Like the other thing that I feel like I, like you are known for is a sort of like you are the librarian in places that. wouldn't necessarily have a library. Like, you are very good at doing this sort of, like, not even just a reference interview, but this kind of like, I am providing information in places into people who might otherwise

not get it. Like, you did that at, like, Burning Man? It was fun. And part of it is because I didn't have anything else to do at Burning Man. Like, part of the problem is, this is really just who I am, you know? Like, I can't go to Burning Man and be like, this is a, not me in the real world. Like, I'm always me in the real world. So, like, a lot of my friends, and again, this was like late 90s, early aughts.

I lived on the West Coast, so it was easier to go to Burning Man then and also it was just smaller. But a lot of it was like, I don't know what I'm going to do. I'm not really like an artie person. I don't really like to take a lot of drugs. I would prefer to keep my clothes on. Like, I don't know. I don't know. Oh, there's an information desk that I can do.

And there's a lot of people who have, for lack of a better word, like information needs at Burning Man because you've got to figure out how, like, how do I deal with this water situation? How do I deal with this electricity situation? How do I deal with this internet situation? How do I test my drug safely? How do I, yeah, like, those things are really important. And it's not like they stop, people stop having information needs because they're at a party or at an event or something. It's just that they figure they just have to lump it. This is why everybody like uses Jack JCPT all the time, right? Because they can't have a librarian with them, helping them. I mean, granted, not every librarian, but like, you can't, people want that idea of

having an answer in their pocket, but like smartphones have never really delivered on that because it was all like isolated apps and bullshit and people trying to sell you stuff. But chat GPT is a little more, and you know, don't get me wrong, fuck check PGP. But it's a little more like if it worked, which it doesn't, it's people's ideal thing, right? Like, how do I figure out of it? It's not. It's not. language processing in a way that like other search engines have never been able to do. It takes my dumb words and turns it into something that's an answer to what's in my brain. And people don't know that they're not any good at asking questions. If nothing else, chat TVT will make people a little bit better at being thoughtful about their questions.

Like it doesn't, it doesn't, the answers suck. But like maybe if you think about how to make a question that'll help you in your life, maybe I don't think so, though. I don't know. Yeah. I mean, like part of my thesis was like, I have. I had to study question information a lot because even just like the process of like searching in a library catalog involves question formation because it's like you have an information need.

How does that then get translated into a query? And then how do you then translate that query to an interface or a reference librarian, which then gets translated like what gets lost in translation at each step? Right. And like people don't really like we always are like there's no such thing as a bad question, but everybody is bad at asking questions, that is why reference librarians exist. It's because people are bad at asking for what they want.

They like, I know, like, if I were at, you know, like, so I, at parties I go to, there's usually a harm reduction org tabling at it that has thing, they have Narcan there, and they have, like, testing kits there for whatever people might be doing, right? And, like, I can only imagine, like, if I were someone who, you know, like, if I didn't know how to test it, but like maybe I didn't know

how to ask. Of course. Like, what am I supposed to do with this? Like, I know what I need, but like, I don't know necessarily how to translate that so that those people then know how to answer me, but that that's part of our job, right? Is to get that information. And, like, people think that only happens in a library, but it doesn't. that that's a skill that happens everywhere.

It's why when I have hired people, I always look for people who have food service or retail backgrounds. Oh, my God, so much. Yeah. Because you have to do that, like, interfacing between whatever. I mean, I feel like everybody needs to work retail, but like not if they don't want to for any longer than it takes to, like, just learn that sort of human interface thing.

And that's why I think, like, the whole world of, you know, weird, dumb billionaires is happening because they're so used to getting serviced, basically, for lack of a better word, that they forget how to, they forget the human part of why they want to be alive in the first place, I guess. I mean, I always ask, like, I wonder that. Like, well, why do you, why do you want this life if all you're trying to do is move to Mars or whatever? And maybe it's because they're, you know, novelty seeking and they have various kinds of things that they want. But the lack of empathy or willingness to understand that we're in a. society and we live in community with one another and that that's like one of the great things about being alive. I'm always like, I'm so sorry you don't have that because it's so great, but also you're ruining it for everybody else who's trying to have that. Stop it. So Westpickr Commons. Oh. We are 43 minutes into our teenage. Good job, team. I also have a job. I was trying to reel us in.

I'm trying. I have like two main jobs now, and one of them is I work at the public library, and I help people learn how to use computers, and I'm there. And I sub and I fill in and do other stuff, you know, little library, little town. And then my other job is I work for an organization called the Flickr Foundation. And I work on the community lead for this collection of online, like collection of photography that's called Flickr Commons. So it's basically like 115 cultural heritage organizations, which can range from like New York Public Library, big libraries that you've heard of to like tiny historical societies in Nova Scotia. And they just put digital imagery online. They get unlimited storage.

They get like old school social networking. Like people can leave a comment or they can like or they can have a friend, but not much. Right. It's very slow old web social networking. And then they're part of a community of practice. kind of of other people who are sharing this information online and the snappiest part of it. It's like two million photos now, I think almost, is that it's all public domain. It's all no known copyright restrictions.

So if you're the library and it's your photograph, but you're not sure who owns it, but you're pretty sure it's no one. You can just scan it, put it online, no known copyright restriction, which is basically saying we're not totally sure, but we're pretty sure we can make this available. And it's a huge archive of online photography with like pretty good. good metadata, depending on the organization, that's available to anyone and accessible through like HTML, like the old dumb web. And it's kind of great. It's been a weird week for us because the Flickr Foundation was founded like in 2022 with a grant from the Filecoin Foundation. They do.

Never heard of it. Yeah. I hadn't either, which is why it's not memorable to me. But there are a lot about like distributed web. They're like big distributed web people. Like, how do you put stuff on the internet, have it? But it's just, they have a lot of money. And they gave the Flickr Foundation a bunch of money that is like running out this year, like in a couple months. So the good news is I will probably continue to be like, I don't know if you guys ever watched that movie where it's like the end of the world, but there's the guy at the gas company who like still is like telling people that the gas will keep running right up until the world ends. I think it's called afterlife, the end. Oh my God. I hate not knowing stuff when I'm actually talking about something live.

I'll figure it out. I didn't post. Will you? No. I don't even re-listen to these. I just hit the cut silence button. Here's the secret. So all the times where I tell you to cut things and you have it, how dare you?

There's the secret to me. I always listen to every podcast that I'm on. It is so weirdly vain. I like listening to hear myself talk. It's so weird. That compulsion like goes away after a while. How old am I? How old are you?

I don't know, 40, 30 or 40. Wait, me? How old are you? You asked me a question. How old am I? Well, either one of us. How old are we? Well, you know how old I am because you see my Wikipedia page.

I'm just saying it hasn't worn off yet. Yeah. I mean, I not only have to talk, I have to listen to myself while I edit it because I've edited every episode of this. And then... So you listen to it while you're editing it. No. No, not anymore.

Oh, my God. Oh, my God. This is why we stopped doing a podcast at Meta Filter because nobody wanted to edit it because it's just. I'll edit it. Is that your knee? Is it warm there? Jesus. Oh, no.

I just, I have a weird like a leg thing going on where I have a weird hip. So my legs just go in all kind of weird directions. Wait, no, mine do that too. I was just like amazed that it was warm enough to be. Oh, yeah. I'm in Florida. I can't. Sorry, I didn't mean to make you say that out loud.

Now you'll have to edit a podcast. Yeah. They know I live in Florida. I only live in the worst. Yeah. So cold. But so Flickr Foundation, we do the Flickr Commons. Here's the link to like what's cool about it.

But the thing that's awkward about it, which was kind of why I initially reached out to you all, is that, you know, we try to encourage people like, hey, join Flickr Commons. It's great. You can put your stuff on the internet for free, slow web. It's great. Free unlimited storage. And people are like, well, storage is free everywhere or basically free, right? Like AWS, very cheap, like that kind of stuff. Build a website.

Uh, vibe code it. Whatever. But one of the things we really wanted is to sort of expand our reach, right? We're mostly like northern hemisphere, mostly Western countries. It's a problem, right? Because it means it's the same sameness as the internet. You know, it's a lot of sort of Western stuff represented. And when you have people of color represented, in many cases, it's almost as likely that it's

because of some, like, colonial gaze shit from, like, 100 years ago, and that's gays with the C. And so that, like, it's a bad, like, oh, look, here's some Japanese women. Oh, shit, they're all gaseas. And there's nothing wrong with, like, photographs of gaites, but it's not representing what all Japanese people look like or are like, but because, like, AI robots, like, slurp up all of these pictures, they get these ideas based on the sort of paucity of information from these archives. And like, that's an awkward problem. One, but when we try and incent more people from different backgrounds and different, you know, rich countries, poor countries, whatever, people in places that are more under-resourced are just less interested in putting all their shit on the internet for free,

right? What, they give it away so that Getty can just go sell it back to people because they've got better SEO on the website. And so it puts, it's, it's been an interesting problem at work to try to figure out if there's ways that like creators can still get some sort of rights to their content, while at the same time trying to make stuff free a la Wikipedia or whatever so that, you know, people can learn from it and people can use it for whatever they want. I mean, it's one of the glorious parts of like Wikimedia Commons is you can use that stuff for anything. And you don't have to figure out, like, who owns the rights? I don't understand it. And like, nowadays, I think people are just used to, like, taking stuff from the internet, but if you're somebody in a

cultural heritage organization, you have to be a little bit more careful. And so, like, that tension between give it away for free because that's how we build culture and that's how we learn about other cultures. And, yeah, except the people that are in the sort of dominant capitalist cultures will just steal everything for themselves, try and sell it back to you, and then try and keep you from the rights to your own things, right? Like, you see musicians on YouTube all the time being like, I put up my song, and then the record label took it down, basically. And but it's mine, but the record label. And so it's a really interesting time. And, you know, AI figures into this only a little bit. But because you know that they're clawing all the stuff, I think about like,

well, what would, what would AI think about Japanese people or whatever based on what's, what they can see in the Flickr Commons collection. And it's 2 million pictures. You would hope a lot. And in reality, not a lot. And how do you round that out without, I don't know, like telling somebody else that they need to give up their rights to things? Yeah.

And it's always the people that always get asked to give up their IP first is always like creatives who actually own their IP, educators who are making OER. like we always have this thing of like, oh, well, you should give it away because like it's important for you. It's like, but put on a graph, the amount of IP owned by corporations and the amount of IP owned by real human people. And like you won't be able to see one of the bars on that graph. Right. And it's like we're not asking them to give up all the IP that they hoard that they get from work for hire stuff. Or even some of it, a tiny amount of it, any of it.

Just to not sue people for using it for their dumb PowerPoint for their, you know, graduate presentation that they have. to put online. Right. Like we're pretty staunch like copyright critical, copyright abolitionist, anti-coporite, whatever, like on this podcast. But that doesn't mean we don't want people to get like paid for their for their stuff or like, you know, if they need it to, you know, like, because I think you're bringing up a very interesting tension here of like having a digital commons is good actually. And this is like in the fight against AI, something I've always tried to like harp against is like when people going like, oh, but they were using it for this thing without permission. I'm like, no, but that's not the problem

here, like, is because people are wanting to lock things down and have it so people can't use and experience culture. Like, copyright is a thing that has stifled a lot of creativity. But then people go, oh, well, so you do not want authors and artists to be able to live or have food or pay rent. I'm like, no, I want those things too. Like, I think there are other ways of doing it, but I think you're bringing up like an interesting tension of like when you're in the sort of we want to be able to build this kind of culture, but when it still exists within capitalism, how most ethically do we do that? I think that's like an interesting ongoing thing to build.

Decade tries to approach it differently based on what technology they have available, right? Like Creative Commons, we thought that was going to solve the problem, or not solve it, but at least adjust it a little bit. And I'm not clear that it hasn't helped, but it definitely wasn't, it's remarkable how few people sort of really understand Creative Commons. Like all the copyright nerds totally get it. Most other people have never heard of it, right? Like if I talk to a random neighbor, if they've ever heard of Creative Commons, they assume I'm talking about a different thing because they legit have not heard about it. And, you know, I would, I would hope like my library director would have heard of it. Yeah, kind of, you know. And, and, and like when Flickr Commons started, it was, I don't know, 16, 17, 18 years ago back when like given stuff away, you, it wouldn't just get slurped up by, you know, giant corporate overlords in the same way that it, a hundred percent. well now. In the same way we see like the direct to Getty pipeline of stuff going on. If it's high enough resolution, goes on Flicker Commons, winds up on Getty with a watermark, pay us 75 bucks. And

they're not going to mention, oh, and by the way, you could also get it for free. If you just go to the source, we forgot where that is, though. So how about 75 bucks? Good deal, right? Yeah. And it's hard to like, nobody wants to talk about copyright. Like, I mean, we all do, but like nobody else. Nobody who's fucking nerds. I know. I don't know. Nobody who's not a nerd about this or maybe a creator, which is not necessarily. Like, you know, it's overlap, but it's not the same. Like, tears. Are you Cory Doctor? Oh, like. Bless him. I just read in shitification and like. Friend of the pod. Yeah. I mean, love that guy, but also so didactic. And like a lot of people don't want to have the conversation with Corey, even though he's lovely, right? Like, he's lovely. Yeah. lovely guy, but also very much.

Yes, he does answer his email. He's like a real dude, yes. Yeah, he came on. It was really cool. I love him. I love him. But also, you see him on social media and he's a little intolerable. Like, if you're trying to introduce somebody to Cory Doctoro based on how he is on Massadon,

that person will never learn anything else about Cory Doctoro. But like, he gave a talk at a library copyright conference I went to once. And he was talking about like, look, I'm. know, and I borrow this for my talks like, I know I'm coming at this from a very specific perspective and it's probably way out on the end. And I'm not trying to get you to agree with me. I just want to move you in my direction. I want you to be convinced that my direction is the right direction to be moving in. And he's right, right? Like he knows how he is and he knows how he comes across. And I think he's fine with it because his job is to be way out there getting people to move closer to his

direction, right? Instead of just being some weird copyright centrist dick, like, you know, somebody right in the middle who's like, well, I can see, you know, what we really need to do is who doesn't like have a strong opinion because they just are trying to both sides it. Like, he's definitely Mr. No both sides and I love it. Very much respect that about him, yeah. Yeah. I get that a lot, too. I can't talk about that with my neighbors. It's complicated. It's complicated. and the word is wrong and it's not his fault. And I get that it's important almost to have it be in your face. Yeah. It still doesn't play in my town. And that's my tension that I deal with when I'm trying. Like his book was really good. I was like, I don't need to know anything about this. I know all

everything he has to say. And then I read the book and I was like, oh, actually, no, this is, this helps me frame arguments for people. That's awesome. But yeah, we read choke point capitalism for our episode with him and it was really good. And I, and I, like his fiction too. Like, you know, I have a bunch of nerdy friends, some of whom like his fiction and some of whom have strong opinions, not that direction. And, you know, I'm also like, I'll read his books. It's great. I like the fact that his brain can picture a world where things are better that is also this world. Yeah. And I love that. Yeah. And I talk to people particularly, because like I'm reading a book right now on like the history of copyright. And it's very like copyright was a mistake. It's very short chapters, and each one of them is like, here's what copyright is trying to do. Here's why I didn't do that. Here was the decade that copyright almost got abolished because everyone was sick of it in the 1890s. Like, you know, all kinds of weird, you know, how it changed over time.

And I remember not that long ago, I was on Blue Sky and I was talking about something and someone was like, no, copyright abolition is a bad idea because all the companies want to abolish copyright. I'm like, what do you think a tech company's main capital is? It's intellectual property. They don't want to abolish it. They want to take yours and they want to proprietize it. They don't own anything anymore except for IP and rights to stuff, basically. Yeah. Yeah.

I want to finally make them give some of their IP up instead of always asking teachers to do it. You know, I want IP to just be gone because it's just in many ways it's just a labor disciplining technology. It's like, remember kids, the abolition of private. private property includes intellectual property. Yeah, the leftism leaving people's bodies when you tell them to stop defending IP. Yeah. But that happens all the time. I'm like, I'm going to make some zines about it.

I can't decide if the zines should be focused on copyright abolition for librarians. Do I try and work this crowd? Or do I just find, I just try and like copyright abolition for leftists and try and convince that crowd? Because both of them are going to fight me on this. I need both of them to listen to me. I'm right. I mean, I feel like you could make two zines.

I'm probably going to have to make two, but you know, work smarter, not harder. Jay's exasperation. Yeah, I mean, they could have like six panels the same. Sorry, Sadie, what was that? Yeah, just Jay's sigh when Justin said, but they should listen to me because I'm right. But he knows I'm right. As it was about this, yes. And everything else.

My book, the book I wrote about like, you know, whatever, tech support in 2011, you know, I bought my rights back and then I public domained it and put it on the internet because you know what? You don't get paid a lot of money if you're an author who's not popular, right? I don't know if I received a single royalty check for the book I helped, right? Because like we wouldn't get royalty checks until the revenue had gotten. It was like a certain point and it was split and then after it was like split among four people. So. And it's got to hit a minimum amount before they bail out the check. Yeah. Every single thing I've ever written has been put out, even when they told me I couldn't. I had to self-pirate my master's thesis because there were proquest was like, oh, technically, we can't make it open access because technically your graduate school owns the IP. And I'm like, you know what? Researchgate. There it is. So that gave me a D.O.I. It's fine. Yeah, put it on Research Gate. It's fine. No one's, what are they going to do? Like copyright claim my own work against me. Like, fuck off. And they gave me good.

anecdote, yeah, of self-piracy. I get to tell people about self-piracy. Right. I I stole mine from the Internet Archive before I actually got the rights technically from the company. I had to buy them from the company, which, oh my God. But whatever, they were like, no one's ever done this before. And I'm like, well, figured out, I guess. Well, and that's another, like, interesting side hustle that I do is I work, you know, the Internet Archive, I assume. They have their print disabled print disability program. So if you're somebody

who with print disabilities, you know, they have more content less now since the lawsuit. But I, you know, one of the things treaty is librarians

can be qualifying authorities to say, oh yeah, that person has a print disability. And so I'm a person who can qualify you to get access to the Internet Archives

print disability program. Oh. If you know anyone. But it's great because I used to work for them a long time ago when I was on the West Coast. You know, I helped with Open Library and, you know, the Internet Archive, they are also great and also, like, they're not like a service-oriented organization, right? And I don't think they would argue with this. I have gotten emails from the

Internet Archive. Every time I open my mouth to talk about them, someone from the Internet Archive emails me and says, by the way. You and me both, Justin. Well, we'll see. You and me both, Justin. Well, we'll see. You'll see. I have enjoyed my time with them, but the qualifying authority thing is basically them being like, we know the law in this case. And I respect that. And so I don't work for them at all. Like I'm just a like independent volunteer. But I can help people get access to that, you know, you write in and you're like, I'm blind or I'm dyslexic or I'm whatever. There's a form. And, you know, I go through the forms and, you know, see if you qualify or not. And then can kind of thumbs up and thumbs down you. And then that goes to the Internet Archive. And then they, you know, they can turn you on or turn you off for access to their print of stable collection, which is how it should work and so rarely does, right? Like when my former landlady, a very elderly lady, tried to get, like, access to books on tape in Vermont, she had to, like, fill out a whole form and, like, come to the library. And then my library director, who in general is fine and also doesn't listen to podcasts,

but, like, doesn't really use technology in a way I think you should in this century, was like, well, I don't know how to blah, blah, blah. Like, I signed it. And they were like, well, you can't sign it. The State Library for the Blind, or, you know, it's the ABLE Library, accessible library, which is great. They have to do it. And I'm like, no, any librarian can do it.

And they're like, well, our process. And I'm like, Marrakesh Treaty. And they're like, well, and like, they're just, you know, it's rules and forms and boxes. And I respect it. But also, shouldn't we just be trying to get people access to information? Isn't that the thing? I mean, that's like the conversation about piracy that's all. always really complicated, right? Oh, if you can't get the books through Interlibrary

loan, should I tell you that Anas Archive exists? Yes or no. And also in the age of AI, and we're teaching people how to use AI. It's like, at what point am I allowed to just teach them how to do piracy? Because like, we don't care anymore. So like if- Clearly we don't care. I think I've shared this on the podcast before, but I think it's a really great story. And I was at the, I think is the Utah Library Association back when I still lived in Salt Lake City. and some librarians from one of the private universities in the Salt Lake area, I forget which one, talked about how they did piracy for their course reserves and about doing risk assessment for that and how they did it

because they were asked to get a film for a class and there was no legal way on this planet of getting that film for that class. But they found a copy on a torrent site. or something. Of course. And they were like, one, this is an act of preservation at this point. But also it's like, well, all of our video reserves, like go on this private server. It's only accessible by the people like in the class for that time period.

They can't download it or anything. And they were like, you know, at a certain point like librarians are going to have to be, get more comfortable with kind of breaking the law and, you know, being comfortable with piracy. because in some cases it is the only way we can do our job and it is an act of preservation. And I was like, hell yeah, you say that in that conference presentation. I'm actually very surprised you heard that at Utah Library Association. It was great. I know Utah contains multitudes, but still, like, because I remember there was like that

course reserves lawsuit out of Georgia, Georgia Tech, I want to say. Georgia Tech, I think. Yeah. 2012. Yeah. Oh, my God. But like, that was like sort of a big deal at the time. where we were like, okay, Georgia Tech was able to do this, so maybe you can do it. But there's,

there's not enough envelope pushers who are willing to go on the record. Like, one of the reasons I can shoot my mouth off about most of this is my library director doesn't listen to podcasts and Flickr Foundation doesn't care. You know what I mean? But like, if you had a job where your boss cared and listened to you, you'd have to be more careful about what you said. And I, you know, jobs are important. Jobs are important. I respect. especially, and they're harder and harder to get, right? As robots take more and more of their jobs, I can understand, but I think it makes people less likely to shoot their mouth off about like,

yeah, go fucking find it. And here's how to find it. Here's how NZB shit works. Here's how, you know, because here's how use networks, youngens. Like, let's talk about where content can come from because it can come from, like, I don't even torrent. Like, my partner got in trouble for torrenting something from some, some rights holder. And so we don't torrent anymore because we're afraid. Although honestly, I'm on a mesh network. So I use my neighbor's Wi-Fi. So it probably doesn't matter. But I don't want to get him in trouble either. So like we're all like straight to use that for our piracy needs if we're not like watching other people's complexes. But it's hard to talk about because you never know either who's going to be listening and maybe they have a problem with it or maybe they're going to start paying a lot more attention. Like I'm getting the point where I kind of don't give a fuck if somebody just judge.

just me for it. But like, you think about it. You know, I have friends who are authors. They should get paid. I'm clearly reading somebody's stuff who maybe isn't getting paid. Like, you think about it, right? Does somebody really lose money if I pirate the Muppet show? Were you going to pay for it anyway? Like, otherwise? No. Yeah. Exactly. Is Disney falling on hard times, you know, like, I don't, you know. Are they? Is Sabrina Carpenter falling on hard times? Is she? Is she? I'll Venmo her five bucks if she needs to hold onto it for me, but like, you know. And that becomes the awkward other issue, right? Is it's very hard sometimes to pay the creators in a way that's equitable for them while not also paying like the corporate overlords who are

less deserving of, but like, we've created a situation where there's now a huge structure in order to make an ePUb. It's one of the things I kind of like about the fact that like so many more people are self-publishing, so much more good content, is it's easier to pay creators directly and they can make an e-pub and it's not that hard or draw a picture or make digital imagery or whatever the things are, video, audio, any of it. It's easier to pay people directly, but it's still not as easy as it should be, right? And it's also hard to like make a living and like, you know, people who want to make a living doing their creative thing full-time. And then mixed with the, you know, the people that I know who were, you know, just regular artists who have a day job

and then also are, you know, a well-known comedian or whatever. And it's like, you know, and then get judged in that sphere for having a day job for like, you know, being a bartender or something. And it's like, well, very few people are going to make a full-time living out of this. And so, you know, like all the people who just lost their jobs at Wapho, like it would be great if some of them can spin off their own independent, you know, publications and get paid directly by me, like 404 media or whatever. Right.

But you need the brand recognition. You need the brand names to get out there. And otherwise you're just fighting an uphill stream of other people's slop and content. And like making a living out of that's really tough. And so like journalism should be a full-time job. Like what's one of the ones that should be a full-time job? If you write, you know, fiction erotica,

I'm not saying it's not important, but like you can do that on the side. You know, it's possible. probably get like a fan base that if they're like rabbited into your thing great like they can take a lot of research depending on your writing i used to i follow kj charles on socials and the she writes historical like queer like romances and the amount of research that she'll do around like she went on this whole tear one time about researching the history of body piercing during like the victorian era and it was just doing all these posts and i was like hell yeah keep post you guys

posting that stuff. It's a rule. Take my money. Yes. Oh my God. And then it's all a tax write off, which is extra cool, right? Yes. My radiator is making sounds. It's not picking up, luckily. Okay. My radiator is too quiet. Yay, New England.

So dry here. Because we were, because there were a couple of things you mentioned that, like, are interesting, like, how, like, the work of librarians go into making these things, like, You know, if you, if you want more people to start, like, participating in Flickr Commons, like, people have got to do the scans, people have got to find the money, people have got to find the time, the volunteer labor. And then, and then Getty just takes it and charges money for it. Which again is, like, you know, another problem. Like, you know, what about the labor that just was not compensated? You know, there should be, like, some sort of, like, you know, if you are

in my public library and you put stuff up public domain and then you can tell that your file is being sold on Getty, you should be able to, like, tap them with, like, a legal note and be like, hey, pay us like $20,000 that we had for that part-time worker to digitize all those things. If we had just copyright laws, yeah, exactly. And again, if you were able to do sort of like micro payments and move content around with like sort of, you know, some sort of watermarky way so that you could figure that out. Like, there's a way that could work technologically, but instead we're sending idiot

billionaires to Mars. Like, imagine, imagine, like, if you could like fractionally pay for, you know, every time you read something on the internet, right? people talk about this all the time. Like, you know, I read a news article, somebody gets a nickel, but if there was some automated way to make that all happen on the back end, because it's all arbitrage anyhow with these big payment corporations, right? They don't care. You just add up all the nickels and it's worth the transaction fee. Ah, but nobody wants to do it because, again, it's like nickel and dime shit and, uh. Yeah, like instead of more robust, like, in initial property

law that just ends like giving profit to corporations and stuff what we need is just better like royalty systems well yeah I mean this was this was the in the 1890s this was one of the things where they were like it's because when it was changing from like

book printing monopolies to the author is the one who owns the copyright as like well then why don't we just do like royalty payment systems instead of having any copyright at all so like if you are an employee at a place like you just get paid for that thing and get paid in perpetuity, you know,

five or ten percent for the proceeds of that thing that you created rather than ever having a copyright. You know, it's like if anyone ever uses it, then they have to pay you and that sort of thing. It's like it's not quite the same as the copyright. There's like different, it's sort of like mechanical licenses for music. It's like what if things were more like mechanical licenses? So those just end up going to record companies.

Yeah, again, it's all. Like, science. That's all of it. Weirdly, so like I, one of my, like my best friend from, from college is,

is a composer and musician. He makes really cool music. He plays all the instruments himself. And they are kind of like weird and ambient and experimental. And I, I dig his work a lot. My partner loves that kind of music.

Send me a link to their stuff. Yeah. Justin I'll send it in the, in the notes. He's a V-E-I-I-I-V-E. on band camp and on Spotify and stuff. And like, weirdly, he would actually get some checks from Spotify sometimes because his stuff would get added to like meditation playlists.

Nice. That are like auto-generated or whatever. And because it's that kind of ambient stuff that people like, and like because he's not part of a record company, he puts out all of his own stuff. Like he would, it wasn't a lot of money, but he would directly see profit from that. Whereas, like, he might make more money off Spotify, what little he has made from it,

than, like, people on record labels. Then, 182 whose record label takes it all. Yeah. Right. Exactly. Like, and then I think it was, like, recently Spotify, like, took away. It's like, if you have under a specific amount of listens or something, then you're not even, like, monetizable anymore or something.

Like, didn't that happen? It's just wage theft. We're just going to do wage theft, by the way. Yeah. How about if we just keep your money? Like, did I hallucinate? No, no, no, I remember that. Okay. I remember hearing something about that.

I don't have to be it out of that. It's a valid question now, but. I don't remember that specifically, but I mean, it sounds like, it's like, we're not going to monetize it. Well, then, like, do you not charge anyone? Like, what? Is it pro-rated? If I only listen to the non-monetizable stuff, do I get my money back at the end of the

month? I don't pay for Spotify, but like, you know, what the hell does that mean non-monetizable? Like, get the fuck out of here. It was something like that. It may have been slightly, nah, well, we'll have to, somebody will look it up. But at any rate, yeah. Or some sort of like if you're under a threshold for something. Well, it's like the whole royalty check.

You only get the royalty check if you make above a certain level. It was a version of that except for millions of people all at once. Probably. Yeah, it's like we're not going to send you your five cent check, which honestly makes a little bit of sense because it's, you know, it's not worth printing on the paper. But like, you know, whatever. I am interested. Does Flickr comments, because you're talking about the metadata earlier before we like wrap it up? Like, is there like a DPLA connection?

Because I was approaching. by DPLA for our to do metadata for like our archival collections and I looked at it and I thought this would be great. Does DPLA listen to this podcast? I don't know. They don't want to them.

They haven't get, they don't send me money like fuck them. They haven't sent us weird DMs on social media. But I'm sorry, Justin, go on. Yeah, but we were, it was kind of like, you know, it would be nice to federate it and have like, you know,

it would give us an excuse to clean up our metadata basically. Yeah. But I'm really good at my job. I'm good at OIA. PMH. I'm good at pushing stuff out into the open web. Like, I don't have to work. I don't need DPLA to make my stuff discoverable. But in fact, it wouldn't help. Yes, exactly. Yeah, that was my, eventually what I got to is like, well, there is as discoverable as I've

already made everything because I know how this technology works. Right. Not everyone does. So I can understand it as a service. But it was, it was not, there was not a valuable value proposition for us because I'm like, this is exactly as discoverable as it already is. Yeah. And for us, we've found that sometimes being co-located with a bunch of stuff can help a little bit, but no, no, not really. Like, if you're somebody who's already, like, what we've found is that Flickr Commons is not necessarily like an alternative to hosting it yourself, although I could argue stuff is more discoverable on Flickr Commons than it is on Digital Commonwealth, just because Digital Commonwealth is not super surfaced to, you know, Google or whatever. I can, I am pretty, I can argue, I think that Flickr. I don't know a whole lot of budget to Commonwealth. I know a lot.

I've been on it. Right, right. You know how to get there and sometimes if you search for stuff, you'll find it. Yeah, and we have our own, like, little dumb front end that's kind of cute and fun enough that, like, people who are really into, like, open access shit, they love it, right? And so what we're finding is that we're the alternative to a lot of people who otherwise we're putting stuff up on Wikimedia Commons. And the big thing about Wikimedia Commons is you absolutely lose control of your content, right?

Post it to Wikimedia Commons. And unless it's got a picture of a person who can say, I'm in that picture, take it down. The community owns it as soon as it's online. And I love Wikimedia Commons, but it's a different thing. And for cultural heritage organizations, sometimes that's tough, right? Because sometimes they want, I mean, they can edit their own metadata, but so can everyone else. And so being on top of that requires a lot more attention and bandwidth and they couldn't get the statistics that would be what they would show to their funders, the board or whatever that's like we have a whole bunch of, I mean, and don't get me wrong. I'm not trying to sell anybody on any of this. Though if you're, you know, Flick or Commons interested, great, give me a call. But the big thing is you still own your content? I mean, it's free on the internet, but you can also take it down. Like, of course, you can't get it back if it's out. But, you know, there's also like robust metadata on the back end that you can like adjust.

You can use sort of like tags and albums and groupings and stuff where it's on Wikimedia Commons. Somebody's decided that that's a picture of whatever and they put that in the metadata and then you fight with them and then suddenly you're arguing with somebody on the internet, right? And if nothing else, like, I'm a big Wikipedia fan. I use Wikipedia all the time. I like it. But it really is a community of like 1,500, 2,000 angry nerds and that everyone else who uses.

it, right? And so if you cross the angry nerd, suddenly you're having a fight, right? We built a tool actually to help move some stuff from Flickr to Wikipedia called Flickipedia, because we're super creative. And even then, like, getting a tool that would interface between our two things, because it lived, because it had to make calls to like, I don't even know the technical stuff, but like, because it had to make calls to the Wikipedia thing, we had to engage the Wikimedia, the Wikimedia community, and that's just challenging, right? It just takes work. Like, there's nothing wrong with that. But I think for a lot of people, it's not the kind of work they want to do. But if you've got the chops and you can basically do it yourself and your website's got decent SEO and you're already sort of cross-pollinating, I think the main thing that we have is like, someone could leave a comment, right? Someone could create new stuff by putting it in a, you know, in a gallery, in a group with other stuff. And, you know, it's fun, right? Every now and again, you see some photo on Flickr from like, you know, 1910, and then you see a comment that's like, that's my grandma. And you're just like, oh, we learn more about

this archival photo that we knew fuck all about because somebody recognized it because they were looking through old photos of Halifax. And like, I love that stuff, but like, it's hard to make the argument of why you should pay me to get to just look for those comments. But like, I think that's what makes open, what makes open culture special is that whole idea that more people can look at the things, right? And maybe learn something or know something about it. But yeah, technical chops, eh, right? It's all very like old web. But like, I don't know. Do you know a lot of library workers who have like that level of technical chops? Because maybe this is my Vermont bias speaking, but like, man, around here, we don't. I mean, the people I've surrounded myself with,

but, you know, I have to think like libraries. Yeah. And like even me, I can't. Yes. Yeah. And I've only worked in active libraries too. But I mean, I try to think about like, you know, a lot of my coworkers who don't work on the same kind of stuff as me.

Sure. No, I don't even know if they know what like OIAPMH is. I don't know what it is. Yeah. It's just way of pushing out metadata. It's nice. And yeah, I mean, like, there's a lot of thing about Wikipedia and Wikimedia in general that I think people don't realize how. like incredibly, it's a choppy sea.

It's like, I don't want to say confrontational. No. But it has a confrontational aspect. It has a ability to rescind. Like you make something, it's easier to undo what you did because that that stops vandalism, right? It's like, it's how it's designed. If someone makes 10,000 word edit, you could hit one button and undo all of it. Right.

It's meant to be that kind of adversarial system. And people don't understand that about Wikipedia. And that's why a lot of academics used to get bent out of shape. And it's like, I tried editing this thing. I'm an expert on. It's like, you're not allowed to look at the rules. Right. And there, but also, there's so much reading in Wikipedia, right? It's like, oh, this 30,000 word document. Ah, I had chat GPT read it to me and it said it was fine, right? Like, that's what winds up happening. Like, it used to be you just do the work and do the reading. Nowadays, people think like, uh,

reading, even though, I don't know, I love to read. That's one of the reasons I'm in this profession, but not everybody is. They want to, you know, see videos about how to do it or, fine. find it, isn't there like an easier way to explain how this Wikipedia thing works? Nope, absolutely not. I've got a friend, my socialist friend, he's getting his PhD in complex systems at the University of Vermont. I do not understand what he does almost at all, but partly what he studies is emerging, I don't even remember what it's called, but like emerging systems, whatever. He learns how. It's like old school like cybernetics and shit. I was going to see cybernics.

Yeah. It's like how things. This is so embarrassing. But at any rate, it's like how systems kind of grow and morph into whatever they morph into. And so some of what he studies is how disinformation or misinformation or how people deal with disinformation and misinformation and how that spreads through Wikipedia, right? Like how do we know what are reliable sources? How does Wikipedia decide what are reliable sources? Because you can get all the data out of wiki data, it's a good thing for studying. It's one of those like, oh, the lights better over here. Right? Like I'm studying Wikipedia. because I can actually get someone to give me the data, but it's still pretty interesting. But he doesn't know anything about Wikipedia. So our signal chat is just him being like, what the fuck is this? What is going on here? Why are these people mad at each other? And I'm like, oh, that person is a band user.

And you can tell that because of this, you know, nerd nerd, nerd. And he's like, too much reading. And I'm like, you're not that much younger than me, but he's a different generation where he doesn't want to read 30,000 words to figure out some kind of drama, right? he just wants to do his work. Couldn't be me. I will read 30,000 words to find out the drama.

I also will read 30,000 words. I read fast, it's fine. But like, I understand people's distaste for it. Yeah, I mean, I'm very interested in Wikipedia. I took classes on Wikipedia in library school. I had like a self-dis. I made my own course basically because my schedule was weird. And so I had like, I was just a Wikipedia in residence at my own job.

And that was my class. I love it. I love it. That's awesome. It was fun. But I still don't understand. Yeah. That's fun.

Yeah. Kathleen, Kathleen Cook. Kathleen Cook's the one who edits my Wikipedia page when I need stuff edited. Yeah. She was the professor that I pitched this course to. And I said,

can you let me? Yeah, because she was really into teaching Wikipedia. Yeah, yeah. So yeah, she was the one who signed off on that class for me so that I could take it because I didn't want to take anything else that was happening.

And the schedule was weird. And I was like, just let me do Wikipedia at my job on the clock and then I will send you the edits and we'll call this a Wikimedia class. I love it. Yeah, she was great. And so that was, but I still don't understand like a lot of like talk page etiquette. Like I never bothered to like learn a lot of the cultural stuff.

I don't understand like Grockopedia just came out and I'm very interested in it because I understand a little bit of like Wikipedia. And so I understand like what Grock was doing because I wrote. wrote like some very obscure religious Wikipedia articles, right? So I wrote about like very obscure deities, like Semitic deities, right? And so I know like where the sources of this came from. And so I go to look at Grockapedia and it's like, okay, tell me about Shahar. And I look at it and I go, okay, because Grock has been told to do a few things, never cite back to Wikipedia and never cite, you know, like certain websites. And so what it does is it adds references. It doesn't

add the footnote links. It just says references at the end. It doesn't really have footnote links. And then it will find things that kind of sound like the stuff in the body text that it stole from Wikipedia. And then it will back cite them as if that's where the information came from. And you can see very clearly that it's doing that. Which is fascinating. Yeah, which is really fascinating because it is a Wikipedia that is built entirely on like hallucinations intentionally. All I know about Grogapedia is my middle name is Charity. And if on Grogapagiped, it took it out. Mm-hmm.

They just don't have my middle name on it because woke. Maybe it's like, yeah, too woke. Middle name, too woke. Your middle name too woke. Sorry. Women can only have two names. Yeah.

Charities are those them words that they look for in the documents and then like, oh, that's on the bad list. No, no, no. Empathy, no charity. Some of the people in Wiki

in Flickr Commons are actually like people who work for the U.S. And so we had to like, when they went through the big like, you've got to remove all the DEI stuff. And, you know, we tried to sort of talk to them about like, well, do you? Like, could you make those like pictures private? Like, like, let's work with you on a way to not lose all of this information. And, you know, we had a whole sort of like side project, not my project, but like within the organization to just like save all the stuff that was actually going to wind up getting. taken down by people who were in organizations that were part of the, whichever branch of the government executive branch, I guess, that had to do that. And like, ugh. Like, I feel like any digital platform, like, one of the things that's hard about Wikipedia is that every single thing has to be out in public, right?

And one of the things you almost need to have in a 2026 mindset is a way to speak privately about certain topics somehow. You need to bring Mukatoo back. What? Remember Mukatu? No. What'd you call me? Oh, so this was, I wrote, it was, it looks like Mukertu or Murkutu or something, but it was this

in sort of like geared towards like indigenous digital collections. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. I do know what it is. Yeah. But its system is basically a way of like how do you have a digital collection and restrict parts of it only to some people, which is, you know, a fascinating question for like a digital collection. You know, like you don't want to make the whole thing private and even the stuff that is private. It's only private to some people. So. Well, and you see, you know, zinsters talking about that a lot, right?

Like, hey, I made this zine about sex work and it was fine, but then it got scanned by the internet archive. And now everyone's seen a picture of my butt. That isn't what I wanted. That's not what the zine was supposed to be, right? Like, the zine was supposed to be for the audience you made it for, right? But when it becomes digitized, it becomes oddly atomized. And especially, like, I've got a friend who's, you know, kind of a my age librarian who writes a zine. And one of the things that's now in the zine in, like, really big letters is don't fucking digitize. Like, that's not what this is for. But, like, that's not, like, that's not a copyright statement. It's just like you hope somebody's going to accede to your wishes, right? And, and, uh,

Or tell you about it, you know. Yeah, yeah. And then, I mean, I don't remember, God, there was this woman who I used to follow a lot. Again, we were talking about like following people on Twitter back in the day. But yeah, she was like a sex worker who had done zines. And then, like, for a while spent a lot of time talking about what it was like to find her content in the Internet Archive. And she's like, I like the Internet Archive. Like, this isn't about them.

It's just about the decontextualization of something that you want to be a little private, right? But there is no a little private, you know, it's just private or absolutely not private. I mean, maybe like friends lock, but like that's not a thing you can trust, I feel like. And especially with zines, like, I feel like to so many people, zines which are online, there's like most of the time that is such a, at least in my sphere, a lot of that is coming from like, the sort of like DIY anarcho, anarcho punk, kind of like, here's how you wheat paste, here's how you throw a squat party, here's how you, like, they're like organizing political, like pamphlet, you know, whatever zines. Here's the forbidden information.

Here's how you do your own abortion. That everyone is supposed to share and that there's redundant copies for a reason online. And so the people go, all zines are like, are like that, right? they're all free for everyone all the time when like I think sometimes like the sort of like anarcho movement you know

inspired zine is kind of outside of the realm of what most zines kind of are in their sort of like limited yeah like the limited distribution versus every web you know so many websites are now going to host a free digital copy

of this media version of scenes from like years ago. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And it's so much more personal now. You know, and I think also people are a little bit better at sort of managing identities, you know, so you can have personal stuff as long as it's not linked to you. But then, but then, you know, there's something great about being able to sort of share something about yourself within a closed community, but being who you, you know, this is my face. This is my name. And I think, you know, having alt is also like useful and important. Like, I'm all for being anonymous or pseudonymous online, but it is something that can be tricky to sort of figure out, like, how do you do a, how do you, how do you make personal statements to the people to whom you want to make the personal statements without having a whole bunch of weird, creepy eavesdroppers being like, hey, like, saw you talking about whatever. I've got some opinions about that. And then you're like, oh, right, the internet. Like, there should be sort of a half internet that you can sort of get to that's just some of the stuff, not all of the stuff.

Yeah, because I've been building like a zine collection at my library to try and get students interested in zines so that they have something offline to do. And like, you know, reading through like all the zine librarian code of ethics. And it's like, you know, you have to ask every single person, can I add this to the collection because there's all these different things? And there's a lot of them where I'm like, well, I don't, you know, if it's one, if it's like a mass distribution from the 80s, who do I even call? I'm just going to make a couple copies of a couple issues, put them out there. I don't put anything in the catalog. I've made some adjustments to it myself to keep in the spirit of them. It's like I don't put anything in the catalog,

so there's no metadata I'm creating about names and titles. It's like searchable. Yeah. So it literally only exists in the real world as printed out single copies that I create like one copy of. If it's like an art thing that's new and I'm buying it, it's like I usually send them a message and I'm like, hey, I'm buying this. I would like to put it in a collection.

But if not, I'm just going to keep it my own personal collection. let me know. And usually they're like, yeah, okay, fine. You didn't need to ask me. And it's like, well, you've got a code of conduct. I kind of have to ask you. It's like technically, no, we don't, but, you know, we were nice. Well, everybody on the internet just assumes that all their stuff's just going to get jacked all the time, right? I feel so bad for people who don't feel like they could have like an early blog that only their six friends read and that everybody else wouldn't read, you know, or screenshot and share on social media or whatever.

Like, it was kind of a fun time. And I also like this time, but they're different. And it's hard to sort of, you know, genie back in the bottle or whatever you say about it. I mean Jay have both talked about, like, when do we just say, we don't need to save this? When do we just say, like, this doesn't have to be preserved? Like, I've worked in special collections and archives. I'm comfortable with weeding old shit. And a lot of people aren't.

A lot of people are not okay with throwing away books. That's why they come to me. when your dad dies and all his books. I literally got a donation the other day. I literally got a donation. I get so many donations of people. And then every time I get them, I can tell the story of like how these books got to me.

And it's just like a cardboard box that says, dad's paperbacks and underneath it, a box of depends also full of dad's paperbacks. And it's like, this is your dead dad's paperbacks. And now they've come to me to throw away for you because you should have had the heart to throw these ones. Right, because they're value rounds to nothing.

I'm in the, I'm on my, you know, I'm the guy, the lady from the historical society, basically, who people email and they're like, when you take our whatever and either I say no or I say yes and I let the other person at the historical society like get rid of them. Partly it's because we don't have a collection development policy the way we should. So we can't say no the way the library does actually. It's one of the things our library really does correctly. It's like we've got a friends group. They're very selective. They don't take donations except for like certain things. The end.

But like, man, everybody, they don't want to get rid of their own stuff. Again, they can't bear to, I mean, I was like books. You can recycle them. You can like soak them in paraffin and use them for fire starters. It's fine. Like not every book has value. Like what was valuable about it is like the sentimentality to you. And that's real.

But like also. But it doesn't. doesn't transfer. Yeah, it can be done. It can be over. It can be like a temporary autonomous zone of your relationship with that book and you don't have to, it doesn't have to continue forever. Everything doesn't have to continue forever, right? Yeah. And I also notice that with like digital spaces. Like every time people were worried, Twitter would go away. And they're like, oh my God, I built my life on here. This is how we came up with John D. Fuxmith was this kind of thing. You might do it. Yeah. That's our sponsor. That's that's, we work at the

John D. Fuxmith Institute for getting it in. I love it. Yeah, so we are the archive of the John D. Fuxmith Society. He's our major donor. And then in the crypt underneath the library, that's where Horror Vanguard, our sister podcast lives. Love it. Yeah, we came with it because people like, oh, if I want to, who should I get my Twitter

archive to? Who should, who's going to archive my stuff? And we're like, no one. Do you have a bunch of money? You don't have a bunch of money to donate stuff. And are you named after you? Are you John D. Fuxmith? and you'll have a building named after you, no.

Okay. Otherwise, your shit doesn't matter. Yeah. And also, it doesn't have to matter. That's the joy of it to me, right? Like, I want to make sure, like, my mother did a kindness to me. Like, she passed in like, I don't know, six, seven, eight years ago. Oh, mine too.

Yeah. 2018, yeah. Yeah. And like, she was like a lady who had her shit together and was just like, look, my stuff is just my stuff. it was meaningful to me in life. It doesn't have to be meaningful to you after me. Do what you want. Do what you want with the house. Do what you want with all of these things. Like, please give a couple of special things to people who are important to me. The end. Like, I don't care what you do. I'm dead and practical. The end. And I love that because it just, my sister and I both just felt free to do whatever. My sister's a little

bit more like, oh, mom's special things. And so we still have too much of my mother's things. But like, that's a sibling problem, not a not a my mother problem. But I just feel like that's like such a kindness to like the people in your life to be like, it's just things. Like if you want to sell it all and make money off it, that's your business. Great. If you want to throw it all in the bin, that's your business. If somebody wants to shame you and say you're doing the wrong thing with it, which oh my God,

everyone did all the time, nonstop, your mother never would have. We had a huge dumpster out in front of the house and just, you know, big house. She lives in it for 50 years. There's a lot of stuff you have to throw away. I have one box. And people have opinions. Good for you. Yeah.

Good for you. I hope you're comfortable and happy with that decision. Yeah. I just have a box. I still have a stupid Facebook account, but. I have her stupid Facebook account and her stupid Flickr account. But I'm like, fine. I'll have my mom's ghost Facebook account for the rest of my life.

It'll be fine. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But like, you know, explaining to people, what's important and realizing that other people's issues with that are just that, their issues, right? Like, oh, I want you to have dad's special books. The fact that you can't give those to me is your issue, not our issue. You know, people ask me a lot because, oh, librarian, what do I do with

all these old books? And I'm like, if you soak them in Perip and they make really good fire starters. And people just get really mad. And I'm like, yeah, I don't care. We do actually have a Valentine's Day program that we do at my library that takes old books and makes like little like, you know, cut them up and make little hard stuff out of them. I appreciate that. Yeah. Yeah. I have a graduate assistant who's, I'm teaching me and her working on a lot of book art stuff because I just did a reference weed and we have so many books. Of course. Our dumpster, our dumpster rotted and then I filled it up with all the books I've been throwing away since I've been working here because everyone else is a hoarder and I'm the only one who's okay with throwing stuff away. And I'm like, well,

if I'm not going to be here very long, I have to be the one to throw it. throw everything away. So I'm doing just weeding project after weeding project because once I leave this job, no one's going to weed for another 20 years. So I need to do all the we need. You need to anonymously write this all up if you haven't and if you have, tell me where to read it because oh my God, that's me. Yes. Yeah.

I mean, it's not much to write up. It's just I do this and then I complain about it in the Skullcombe shit dog discord and I'm like throwing more books away today. They sends me fun, outdated like gay encyclopedias. Oh. I can't get it. They're old. I'm keeping them.

If it's my rule is if it's funny, I'm keeping it. It just moves to circulation. We had a big. At our library conference last year because so many libraries have this problem. And for a lot of the tiny libraries, they just can't even like move the content out of the building because they have to put it in a roly bin. So we were just like bringing boxes. Every library can pitch a couple boxes. We'll put it in this big dumpster.

It's all got to be recyclable. We'll put a big sign on the side of it that explains to people what the hell. hell's going on so that they don't shame us into oblivion because that's what I was. And it was a great service. It was a great thing that they did. And I'd like to see more, you know, any kind of cultural workers being able to like, be like, you know, the discernment is the job, at least part of it of like, keep this, do we get rid of it? And you find people on both ends, but honestly, let's be real, mostly on the hoarding end. You know, I have this cultural building. We're just going to fill it up until it's full and then yeah.

Yeah. And Jay's like, Jay said to me, he's like, you love weeding. I'm like, I don't love weeding. It's just I understand I'm the only one who can emotionally do it. And it's like, and that's my job and that's fine. I'll be the one to do it. And then I'll be the one who's unapologetic about it because I need to drag everyone more towards the not hoarding side. And I have to be really big. We never hoard. We're throwing all the shit away. Books is dead. I'm an emotional reader. A friend librarian. I love it. I love it. I love it. I love. I love it. Yeah, I have a friend drew this, there was a, there was a drawing that someone made for me that was the grim reaper and it said books is dead. I had that as my header for a long time. I love that. That is okay. God, who made it? I got to email her and ask her to draw it again so we can put it on shirts. But yeah, it's just books is dead. And yeah, it's, I know that I have to do it and I have to be the one to do. And if anyone complains about books in the dumpster, send them to me, I will tell them what's going on. I have no problem explaining it. Yeah, exactly. And I think that's part of it too. right?

Is that it's the hoarding problem, but it's also the like soft skill. I need to talk to somebody who's pissed off about it. How do we make that work? Yeah. And that's fine. I understand. But like, you know,

there's a certain point you have to tell people in the same way that people like, or worried about their Twitter stuff going away or when stuff's in the archive and it's like, do, you know, what if we lose this? It's like, well, does the person who's stuff this is wanted to be preserved?

Because like, with the expectation shifting that everything you put on the internet is just going to be stolen and swiped. we should be tending more towards the privacy side of making of pulling back because like you know the internet 30 years ago was let's put stuff out there. I was like like archival absence presentation I did that one time where I argued that sometimes it's a good thing. Uh huh. That was what four years ago, five years ago? Yeah, that was the New England or maybe just the New Hampshire Archive Association or something invited. I mean, New England or maybe New Hampshire Archive Association or something invited. me to do, I got to do an invited talk. I was like, oh, Arthur, yes, you can come up here, buddy. The big city, New Hampshire. Yeah, the big city, New Hampshire. National or Manchester or Concord,

those are your options. It wasn't even in any of those. So I think, and I think it was New England, because there was, there was some Boston librarians there too. But I, they invited me to do it on archival silence. Oh. And, like, in metadata. And I talked about a couple instances, I'm like, where it's obviously bad that this happened. But then I was like, but also have we considered that sometimes is a good thing? Wow.

And then I like played a little clip from F for Fake, my favorite Orson-Wells movie, where I was like, you know, even if it's archival silence, isn't always a good thing? Because I was like, sometimes it is. But even when it's not, like we have to get more comfortable

with letting things go. And the, the, that we will not always be successful in saving things. And then I just played a little clip from the end of F for Fake, where he talks about how all these works in stone and paint or whatever will all turn to dust one day. All these voices will be silenced.

And then he goes, but what of it? Keep on singing or something. Because I fucking love Orson Welles. And I was just like, yeah, you know, sometimes it's a bad thing. Sometimes it's a good thing. You have to know which. and also be more comfortable with failing. Yeah, and also it's the historian's job

to reconstruct over those silences. Like our job, if you're the archivist and you're seeing yourself as the preserver, your job is to do the best you can and your obligations are to the living. When you're dead and some historian who is not your living colleague comes along, their responsibility

or to their living people and they try and reinterpret the past for them, but you don't have to worry about hypothetical future people. You really don't. I mean, don't poison the water or whatever. But like you don't have to worry about their ability to do history. Your obligations are to people who are alive now. I worry ever so slightly that they're going to figure out how to

live forever at some point right after I am no longer living. Oh, that dude force swimming himself in an effort to live forever and he's just taking estrogen. I'm sorry. It is weird, right? I mean, live your truth, whatever it is. But that guy, Yeah. He looks so, he was looking worse and he started looking dewy. I'm like, mm. Right. We know what's going on here.

I was like, okay, girl. And also looks on the technology perspective, too. Like, if you're worried about Twitter, I mean, obviously that context, you can't save it. But like, I just backed up all my own tweets, right? Like, backed up all my own tweets left, kept my account so no one would take over my username. Yeah, my account's still there. And then I made my piece with it. And people will be like, yeah.

If you're doing that, you're part of the problem. I'm like, okay, yeah, sure. Sometimes, yeah, we're all different. But we're all part of the problem. Yeah, I did a big data dump of my Facebook and then deleted it. Yeah. I've still got the backup somewhere. I just did a data dump of my Facebook like a month ago because somebody asked me how to do it and it occurred to me.

I had no idea. I only did it because the entire time a buddy mine was deployed, we talked over Facebook chat the whole time. So there's like a whole correspondence of like part of the war in Afghanistan. that is technically in my personal files that I felt should have been preserved. Yeah. So it's like, okay, I'll save that for posterity or whatever. Sure. But, you know, other than that, that was kind of really the only reason I even bothered to do it.

Yeah, and like the rest of it, again, whatever. Like, you know, I wake up every morning. I feel like I remember slightly less than I did the day before. It's fine. Like, if you fight it, it just makes everything, I mean, I don't know. I'm maybe a little bit Buddhist at this end being like, oh, you know, desire the truth of all suffering and like wanting that stuff.

What? Yeah, I'm like, it sure is. I'm also Buddhist. Yes, from that great Jew Buddhist tradition in my family. But yeah, you know, I just grew up with. There's several in my sangha, yes. Yes, with those ideas in the air.

And I feel like it is a helpful framing device. I think, yeah, wow, there's a whole like thing you could probably do. Like, well, what's your background? What's your religious tradition? I bet I can tell how you feel about archiving. Mm-hmm. Yeah, I mean, we, we should charge a class, Buddhism for librarians, and then it's like the,

Buddhist meeting for librarians. Yeah. Yeah, honestly, could help. Let's let she go. Fucking balls. I'm very good at it. I'm very good at every time I move, I get rid of about half of everything I own. Well, my father used to say three moves equals one house fire, right?

Mm-hmm. I moved into this place and I haven't, like, a couple years ago, and I haven't filled it up yet. And other people are like, you haven't really moved in. And I'm like, no, no,

this is just all the things. It's fine. Like, this is the first time I actually have like a storage unit of stuff waiting for me to move. Because I'm like in between kind of. I'm trying to move up to Boston. And so like I'm in like a holding period in my life.

Boston Boston. Aw. Yeah. So we're waiting to see what happens. But yeah, the archival silence thing. Again, I learned about that from moral histories.

I learned about that from, you know, the IRA oral histories that were supposed to be secret or working with, you know, I learned about this stuff before, but I put it into practice when I was working in a border town and we were doing oral histories and all these people were undocumented. And I was like, this isn't good. We don't have archival privacy laws in Texas. So they don't even need a subpoena to come in and like request materials from us. There's no expectation of privacy in an archive. So we can't, you know, here's how we can did

and we did this whole thing we went and presented at the Society of Southwest Archivists and at the same conference where we were talking about everything you can do to like anonymize it to like delete the information

off the computer the copyright transfer we came up with because like you can't keep the copyright because we can't know who you are so you have to give us the copyright

at that same one there was someone from University of Arizona who had a Dreamers thing and they found out because they had a friend who worked in Border Patrol or whatever

at Border Patrol was listening to their oral histories, and they had to take the whole thing down. I bet they did. It's a little shocking they didn't think about that, but yeah. Because they're dumb. And like, why people believe that the laws on their side and if they're doing a good thing.

And that dreamer was a thing that was going to last as if like the moment there was a Republican administration who was anti-immigration, they weren't going to undo all the dreamers shit. Yeah, one of the good example ones that I found when researching for the presentation, I forget which library archive it was, but it was oral histories of people who had gotten abortions as well as like doctors and stuff

or like families and friends of people who had gotten abortions before Roe v. Wade was law. And even though it was legal in the United States, you know, and you know, this, these oral histories were taken and like in the time when Roe v. Wade, like this collection existed during Roe v. Wade times, the amount of redaction and like, redundancy redaction that that library did because they didn't know what would happen if Roe v. Wade ever got overturned and what the statute of limitations was because depending on the laws, what was in those oral histories could be felonies, but they just weren't at the time.

And so they would like have everyone redact their stuff and then send it to another person who would then go over it again. Like there was like tripled, quadruple redacting going so that they could still have these important stories out there, but like all, like, it was kind of amazing the amount of like redundancy that they did when redacting all of the all of the personally identifiable information. Well, and it just sounds super thoughtful, like very thoughtful about how this material could be used in a future you could envision that wasn't necessarily a good one. Yeah, which I mean, hey, like Roe v. Wade got overturned. Like, they weren't wrong.

Yeah. And the same thing at the. the university I worked at. We came up with this whole thing and we said, one, if a student is asking to do an oral history and undocumented person, ask them to not. And if they insist on it, here's how to handle the process. And we were very clear about like,

there is no unredacted version. There is the redacted version, and then any unredacted version is deleted. Yes, that was that other thing. The audio files are deleted. You don't work on your work computer. You don't use any OneDrive backups. you use a deep-freezed computer,

like all these things we came up with to absolutely. And then, like, Texas was pretty, was relatively normal. It wasn't doing all the Florida stuff at the time. After I moved out, they started copying a lot of Florida stuff. And so there's a lot of stuff there that, you know, even while I was there,

people in my library started freaking out about, like, we have a collection called DEI. And I'm like, it's in the institutional repository. That's my business. Don't you worry about it. And then they were like, I don't want it called the DEI collection. And I'm sure, like, after I left, that probably was something that legislators were like Googling DEI, UTRGB or whatever.

And it's like, you know, and they might have found it. But, you know, at the time, I was there and I was like, don't worry about it. But, yeah. Well, and it should, whatever the archival practice is, the whole thing about archival practice is it should be able to outlast you, right? You shouldn't, I mean, that's like the internet archive like concern, right? If it's not run by Brewster, is it going to be the same place? because he's got a certain amount of risk tolerance. And it's really like, you know, he's the guy. And whether or not that place would be the same with a different person running it, really interesting question. Yeah, definitely. And that's a whole resiliency question. Yeah. It's a political discussion too, which is the whole point of this show. Yeah. And a lot of people, I think, shy away from the political discussions because maybe they live in some kind of world where it's not part and parcel of labor, you know, of work, of, of of money of capitalism of how we live our lives.

And I'm not here for it is sort of what I always tell people. I'm like, I mean, thank God. Library has finally moved away from the like fake idea of neutrality, but there's still a lot of places where if, have they? I feel like even in my Vermont, well, maybe that's a Vermont thing. But like in my circles at least, you do at least get people who are like, oh, shit. It didn't really occur to me that, yeah, Having this stuff is seen as a political thing by people.

Like, I don't know. We don't see people trying to fake neutrality just to sort of appease, like, you know, our current weird fascist situation in a way that in the past, you could kind of believe you were, I mean, not me, but like when you were starting to talk about how you couldn't be neutral because libraries are inherently not a neutral proposition in society, that was like an argument we would have, like on, you know, ALA Council back in the day, whereas I don't think people have that argument anymore. Hope. Hopefully. I mean, that's literally the whole point of this podcast is like saying, stop thinking the status quo is like some like immutable law of nature and like liberalism,

which undergirds it is like the stable state of society. Like we're bringing like a leftist perspective that is like one that is explicitly not liberal. And it's like, what do you do? What do you do if you're bringing an anarchist conceptualization libraries? What do you do if you're bringing a socialist, like an actually socialist anti-capitalist ethic to libraries. What do they look like? What would they be? What assumptions that you think are natural are not? Well, I mean, yeah, even moving from purchasing to licensing content, I'm aware this is a whole door and like, oh my God, it's late for me.

But just that whole idea of when we made those shifts from like, here's a book, it's in a building you paid for. You can look at it to here's a thing. We license it. If we don't pay for it anymore, we don't have it, was like a professional. found shift that I don't feel like we talked about at the time. We only looked back and we were like, oh gosh, we weren't as thoughtful as we could have been

when we decided to make those switches. We could have, we could have, you know, tried to change the cockpit act or something in the 90s or something if we saw it coming. I mean, I remember the Sunny Bono act, like when people were talking about that and it just, I

wasn't aware at that time really as much, but like you look back at sort of which, like, inflection points or pivot points. And yeah, we had opportunities. But, yeah, I mean, you would have had to see it coming and it's not an easy shift to predict. But still, like, I feel like there are a lot of things that now as, as you know, as you're

an adult and then be an adult for a while, you start to realize, oh, people are talking about things for a long time before, like, someone had to make a decision. It's just no one listened. So that's the fun thing about getting older is you get to like, because now I like talk to college students and it's a point. there's enough of an age difference where I'm like, like, I've had to start saying like young lady, because I, because my general thing is like lady. If I, if I see a person, it's a lady person, I just go, oh, that lady over there. Yeah. But I feel weird doing that to a student now.

So I now have to say that young lady because like I feel weird. Young whippersnapper. Yeah. I mean my partner call everyone kids if there are any more than five or 10 years younger than us. Yeah. And I don't want to do that because like I went to the, I'm working at a place where I was undergraduate. They have a big problem with being like really condescending to their students who are all adults. Sure. And so I make sure never to say kids and all that stuff because they are, there's, it's a Catholic institution.

They're, they're very talked down to them. That has not, that is the Catholic tradition we have inherited is talking down to our students. It's talking down to everybody. And you treat people. Honestly. And you treat people like adults, they respond as adults. And so that's all you have to do is you have to stop treating them like children. Stop treating your student workers like children.

That's why they don't respect you. I am the librarian. I am today because Kathleen De Laurenti shouts out, who was my boss in undergrad, treated me like an adult and gave me adult work to do. Not treating them like your kid. Yeah, no, I got to do cool shit and it made me want to be a librarian. Yeah. So it's, yeah. I don't know why I was talking about that. Because we were talking about ladies, young ladies, kids and the generational, having the generational space to be able to.

Yeah, talking to students and saying. like, you know, there's something I start to notice the more longer I'm an adult. They're like, yeah, people talk about stuff and it's more that these ideas are in the air, but they didn't hit the critical mass or not enough people heard about them to really make a difference policy-wise. So I'm sure there are people in the 90s screaming about this, but, and I'm sure they felt very vindicated 20 years later, but, you know, that doesn't, that only goes so far. Well, and you don't just want to be the person to say, I told you so, you'd like to be the person who could have made a difference so that you didn't need to have to.

I don't get a whole lot of out of auto juices. I mostly just get more frustrated of like, could I have done this different? Like, you know, could I have reapplied a year or two later and tried it again? And maybe it would have worked that time. Right. That's mostly what I feel is like, could I, instead of giving up, could have I tried it another year later? And maybe I would have gotten through, you know.

Well, and for me, a lot of times I'm like, all right, well, what do I need to do differently tomorrow. Yeah. So we've gone two hours. Is there, is there anything you want people to check out that I can put in the show notes? No. No. And you want them to go look at? No. Okay. Good. Or do you want people to leave you alone? No, no, no. I love not being left alone, actually. I think people think that I'm out here living my fabulous life. And I am not. I am underscheduled and under programmed. And I love to hear from people who have interesting ideas about anything. Just don't call me on the phone, even though you can probably find my phone number on the end. internet. Content me in literally any other way. Let's get you booked and busy. No, I, you know, I tossed a bunch of links in the chat that are like links to some of the stuff that I found because,

of course, I multitask like Tara Robertson is the lady who was the sex worker zine digitizing person and you should read that blog post if you haven't because it's really good. No, you know, I'm just like you can find me on all the sort of usual idiot spots online or if you're coming through central Vermont, look me up and we'll have a cup of coffee. Like, it's great. I have a really nice porch. When the weather gets better, cool. No, no. Other than that, I just, you know, check out Flickr Commons. It's neat. Yeah, it is neat. I love stuff like that, but, you know, it's always like a question of like, are we, are we duplicating something that doesn't need to be duplicated? Like, it's a DPLA problem. Every time I see something like Flickrcom,

that's why I was excited to have you explain it to me because of like, what's different about it? Yeah. Well, and DPL like started out to be a place where content could be and then just became like yet another portal that didn't have a bunch of SEO, right? And then they became like URL in search of a revenue scheme. And I felt bad for them, right? Like, they're interesting people. I'm hoping this ebook thing goes in a direction that solves a problem for librarians because as of now, nothing they have done has solved a problem for librarians that I know. Like, like maybe other people, maybe it was really helpful back in the day. But yeah, yeah. There, there's, there's some hope. I'm, I just interviewed for a job. I haven't gotten the offer yet. It's open this week.

Hope when I get the offer this week. But I was talking to them about CDL and even though the internet archive threw a wrench in all of my fucking, my fucking job made my fucking job harder. I'm still mad about that. Thank you. You should listen to my episode that I got emailed about. Send me a link and then we'll just like back channel chat about it. Yeah. And then I also got emailed about a book chapter I wrote like years before that. And that was when the head of the way back machine emailed me. Robert? So I've almost, no, Mark, Matt.

You said we're not video recording, right? Yeah. Correct. Yeah, all right. How many divisions do they have? I need to get an email from every division. Okay, so I've gotten two division heads. I need to get to all of them to email me.

I mean, there's Chris at books, but he's actually a write-on guy. and Andrea who does, well, I guess Andrea does books and Chris does, I don't know what Chris does, but Andrea is cool. A email from Andrea. I need to piss off Andrea. Good luck. She's unpiss offable. She's my contact there and she and I get along like a house on fire. No, but I understand what you're saying. Like maybe offer before. I still have a job application out with Internet Archive, but I don't think I'm getting at. We all do. I was working for Open Library and actually wound up leaving the Internet Archive because I wanted to get paid more than 50

$15 an hour for being the only email contact point. And to be fair, it was 10 years ago, but also to be fair, it was 10 years ago. What the fuck? Wifeer 15 was 10 years ago. Yeah. I was stared at by a certain founder and told, well, but you don't code. And I'm like, yeah, I know. Thank you.

Thank you. We're getting an email for this episode. Someone. Mr. The head of Niles Crane's wine club that gets made fun of in that one episode of Frazier. Mm-hmm. You know about that, right? You know about the Frazier episode.

Do you know about this, Jessamine? I can imagine? I mean. Me and Jay was, we have a friend who, we have friends who have a relationship podcast we've been on. And they have a sub podcast of it, which is Frazier. And Jay, where they watch all the Frazier episodes, yeah. To watch Frasier. And we're sitting in bed and we're watching Frasier.

And Niles was talking about his wine club. And he goes, Brewster Kale, the president of my wine club. And we like, shoot. in the bed like 90 degrees. And we looked it up. Brewster was friends with the writers of Frasher. I mean, of course, right?

It was like a gunshot went off in the room. We were like, what? We had to like rewind. Right. For the chances. It was insane. Yeah, the writer was like, it's a unique name. We'll just use it.

Sure. So it was, it was like right as we put out the internet archive episode about the lawsuit. It was like around that time because I had been yelling about Bruce or Kale for like months to this point to Jay. Yes. No, I can only imagine what that would have been like if that had actually like affected your job as opposed to me just being like, eh, I really wish that had gone a different way because it was the right way. Yeah, made my job harder because now I have to explain to people, okay, yes, CDL. was said by a judge not to exist, but here's how we can,

here's how Bernie can still win. It's kind of like the argument. Our position on this podcast is it's like we are totally for abolition of, we want people to get things for free. I thought it was cool and based that they did that National Emergency Library thing. Hounst ever. I thought it was dumb to get sued. With you and with you.

And then lie about what you do. And predictable that you were going to get sued and not in a cool getting sued way. Yeah. Ruins Justin's job kind of way. You fuck with my job. It becomes my problem. And so many people's jobs. Yeah.

It's completely irresponsible. It was completely irresponsible to do. But there are people who are in that circuit and that circuit decision applies to who still want to do CDL. Of course. CDL is still a sound idea. It's so cool. It is a way to balance some of these things. I'm hoping if I get this position, they will let me do CDL.

They have the technical infrastructure. They just need the bandwidth. And someone who knows what it is and someone who wants to do it. The supervisor for this position was at the CDL conference recently that I was also at. I'm like, okay, cool, we can do this. We can actually do it, do the thing that we need to do. Right. Yeah.

So people are out there still wanting to do it. You just got to find the right place and you've got to find the right interest. And it's a risk management thing, right? A little bit. It's an easy risk management. I really wanted to pick up in music libraries because so many independent composers only make their sheet music available as PDFs. And there have been efforts to sort of make licenses for like, hey, can I print this? You know, like that kind of thing.

Can I print this and circulate it in my library? But also a lot of students just scan things and put them on their iPad. pads anyway. Right. Now. And I feel like music, because there are some like sort of digital sheet music subscription platforms. They had their pros. They have their cons. They have their privacy issues. You know, I, I like some of them, but I see the cons in them. But like if music libraries could sort of get on board with doing CDL, I think it would be a fucking game changer for music libraries. It would be a game changer. It would be so good. the infrastructure is still a problem,

but if we can fix the infrastructure and the tooling problem so that small conservatory library can afford that tool, then game changer. Yeah. The concept is a game changer, but we also need the tooling.

You know, that's something we, I don't remember what episode we're talking about, but it was like, Bipframe. We were talking about Bidframe. And it's like the tooling's not there. Concept sound, tooling's not there.

Right. And everybody's like, oh, eventually the AI will build it. And you're like, it fucking won't is what it won't because you can't extract value the right way with it. it. But maybe. I don't know. Make libraries

pay for it. Yeah. Yeah. Get money to pay your smart coding friend, you know, not enough money. I got $5,000 for a friend of mine to code something and they still let it slip and it's like, but you make too much money. And then I lost the money I wasn't able to pay

them. Yeah. Anyway, I still am working on that. So ending on that up note. Ending on that up note. If you want to code a weird open access project, hit me up. It's very easy. It's been so great having you on.

Yeah, this has been so fun. This was super fun to talk. I did not think I would be able to find two more hours worth of energy after my absolutely soul dream meeting. I am shocked. We have held you hostage. Yeah, thank for giving it. Yeah.

Come back on whenever. Good luck. Come back on. Yeah. This was big fun. When I have something else, who knows. Everyone invite Jessamine to your podcast. She's cool.

love doing podcasts. Yes. Underscheduled. Underscheduled. Underscheduled. And good night.