I do, however, look for opportunities to dig deeper—to be a librarian, not a blogger, and add research value, not regurgitate the web. My recent post, Premature Burial Device Patents, was one such opportunity. As keen to explain the search process as share the information, I fear I may have gotten a tad too library science enthusiastic for the audience. So I figured I’d elaborate more here. In short, gasp! massive, wondrous patent classification system! And Google Patents is a bit broken yet still manages to be reasonably awesome.

Inspiration struck for this post when one of those skim-friendly web lists came down the deathwire—10 Horrifying Premature Burials. This is not typical DeathRef fodder. It’s ad-laden, the photos are cheesy and the references, scattershot vague. But it did get me thinking—premature burial was a genuine fear, rational or not, around the turn of the twentieth century, and inventors of the time were up to the task. Be that task cheating death and saving lives or exploiting the fear of paranoid Victorians, who knows. But the patents for such devices poured in—plans and designs for spring-loaded escape coffins and electrical systems that detected corpse movement then triggered alarm systems above ground, to name a couple.

As government documents, US patents are in the public domain, and I wondered if they are online. I started with the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO), which, sure enough, provides patents online—full text (and full text searching) starting in 1976 and image-only patents since 1790. I couldn’t get the image plug-in to work, however (arrrrrghgh!) and search is impenetrable. All this data was at my fingertips but I couldn’t quite grasp it.

Wikipedia’s safety coffin article directed me to this marvelous page at USPTO. This was it—everything I wanted, as far as I could tell, in barely human-readable format. The 27/31 intrigued me the most is that what I think it is? sure enough—classification numbers.

Like most classification systems, the United States Patent Classification System is at first glance amazing. I wanted to swan dive into classes, wallow in all its sprawling facets. But I’m sure upon deeper inspection, it’s driven many a patent librarian or poor legal assistant insane. For my domain of interest:

Bingo. Keywords got nothing on a calculated brain putting things in their places. But what to do with this cumbersome interface?

Enter Google Patents (GP). With a search and view structure much like Google Books, GP has mined all of USPTO’s content and delivers it much more digestibly. All those image-only patents I couldn’t get to work are now slick PDFs I can preview in-browser, see as copy-pastable HTML or download as PDFs. Everything is also now full-text searchable (unlike USPTO’s pre-1976 black hole).

Unfortunately, however, that doesn’t make searching for the patents any easier. In the About GP page, it states:

I’m assuming word frequency and fields play a part. For instance, “coffin” mentioned a lot in a patent, especially in important fields, will increase its relevancy ranking. Great. But there’s so much that happens with web search ranking—a critical mass of users, search optimization, incoming and outgoing links, even domain extensions—that simply aren’t a part of a pile of patents, many of which have faulty information (whether an omission on Google’s part or from the start when extracted from USPTO). Fields are transposed, the inventors becoming their inventions. Other fields are left blank. Words are misspelled and other typos abound, likely from bad OCR.

In other words, Google Patents is familiar, clean and comforting, but keyword searching is still crap.

If you know exactly what you’re looking for, you may have better luck but not necessarily. Advanced search allows you to search by patent number, inventor, date and so forth. You can also search by classification, US and international, which initially thrilled me, but my magic numbers 27/31 for life signal devices rounded up only a handful of results, none of them relevant (like the martial arts uniform top or “duck on the rock” kids’ game). Out of curiosity, I tried searching for other classification numbers: some results appeared relevant while others, again, were way off.

I’m stumped. USPTO can easily retrieve patents based on classification—if they’re using the same data, why can’t Google? Searching by patent number also retrieves a lot of irrelevant results in GP. Despite specifying a field search, it still seems to be doing a keyword search. Many patents refer to other similar patents (including their numbers) to explain how this new one compares or deviates, which can be helpful if researching the evolution of an invention or process. But extraneous, completely different items end up in the mix, too, which frustrates and impedes.

Because I couldn’t generate a list of what I wanted in Google Patents, I used the USPTO 27/31 list to grab the patent numbers which I then searched for in GP to compile a list of life signal coffin devices for the DeathRef post. These are linked to the easy-to-view and use (once you find them) GP patents.

As the titles of these patents are often similar or vague, I annotated a few of them with quotes from the patents. This is where the plain text view came in handy—for easy copy and pasting. But what really blew my mind is the clipping feature found in the upper right:

With Clip you can select with a bounding box any part of a PDF then immediately grab the embed code for the image and presumably do whatever you want with it. I threw a handful into the DeathRef post. These patents have marvelous line drawings—I had planned to download PDFs or take manual screenshots, resize as needed, upload them to the blog then link back to the PDFs. The clipping feature did everything automatically and instantly. Wowza!

I don’t know whether Google takes a snapshot of the image and stores it somewhere, or if the code is a script that generates the image on the fly based on the bounding box parameters—I think it’s the latter. While it’s always good practice to have local copies of images in case something happens to ones stored elsewhere (beyond your control), this is a slick feature I haven’t seen before, from Google or anyone else. I suspect it’s the absence of copyright that makes this possible more so than newly discovered technical ingenuity, but still—so handy, so cool.

In conclusion, I love what Google Patents is doing but arughg! it could be so much better. I have a hunch making improvements on providing access to something in theory already available is of pretty low priority, however—and it does say it’s beta, so *deep breath* I can settle down. And in the meantime, be excited. For all the endless ventures and questionable agendas of the Google Empire, this one seems pretty innocuous—and neat.

March 12-15 I attended My First Library Conference, ACRL 2009, in three-hours-south Seattle. Schoolmates and I skipped classes and ditched work to play Tetris with a car trunk and try not to laugh explaining to the border guard the purpose of our visit to those United States. They look at you funny when you claim you’re a book-sort, even if you’re not, without fail, it’s true.

The conference was part total blast, part perplexing disappointment. The roadtrip mystique, the being-in-a-different-city-doing-non-routine-things, the chance meetings of acquaintances both meatspace, virtual and crossing over, discovering new nerd stuff and neat applications for the known, seeing hilarious, thought-provoking and inspiring keynote speakers, dodging Cheshire-grinned vendors and devouring free food = good. Wanting to run screaming from poorly organized sessions of ugly confusing tedious PowerPoints guided by pulseless monotonous nonsensical presenters = bad.

There is a difference between being nervous and being egregiously unprepared. I empathized with the former, but the latter? I was befuddled. Why wouldn’t you… practice? Attempt to push valuable content? Tell us something we don’t already know? Is the pressure to publish and perform so great we forget to make it interesting, show enthusiasm and invest ourselves in true knowledge transmission? Conferring with others revealed similar sentiments. It seems ACRL has some serious issues with quality control and relevance, which makes me fear for my profession. It was, after all, my peers and superiors presenting. But many sessions seemed aimed at non-librarians while simultaneously preaching to the choir, with precious little emphasis and evidence of What’s New and Unexpected: results, insights, epiphanies, the possibly plainly interesting and the transformative and translatable for one’s own institution.

I felt pain. I have been told—mentored—to avoid library conferences altogether and hit education ones instead, or whatever your subject discipline or niche, like technology cons, even if you don’t quite fit. It’s better to not understand half of what they’re saying if they’re saying something fascinating than already know everything about everything. Exposure to peripheral topics can yield interesting connections, reveal opportunities and position you to find or develop and apply to library land that authentically new, next big thing.

That said, I did see a few great sessions and spent a lot of time in the overflow floor section of the Cyber Zed Shed, which offered quick presentations on web tech, social software and mobile device use in libraries. “Like carpet time for big kids,” which would have been a clever resnark for Twitter, had I not been ill-equipped for the party. Not wanting to lug my laptop around, I went without, largely foregoing the communal joy and wonder of twittering the conference via hashtag (#acrl2009), though I did get a few words in. And it was fun. A little ridiculous but also… worthy? With exception to alerting activists to the location of staging riot cops and directing medics to the wounded at the RNC ’08, it was one of the only times I’ve seen (and the first time I participated in) the concrete usefulness of Twitter.

I love these sorts of things for the sake of experimentation and casual communication (and for the spread of humor, egoism, etc.), but oh! my! heart! to see it actually do something interesting. It can be a seldom occurrence, a rarity that makes me dubious, and critical, and not willing to sink my time into new toys. But I was glad to observe and play what I did, though I became increasingly jealous of #sxsw as the weekend wore on… perhaps one of those “peripheral topic conferences” I can hit up next year? I did learn that ACRL happens only every other year, which I did not know and am pleased to see. Given my experience, I can’t say an annual attendance would be worth it, though it was definitely a good time and the student rate is swell. I would not, however, pay the full, professional price ($400-500ish) without institutional funding.

Other highlights and tragedies: No Naomi Klein after racing to the registration booth five minutes before she was supposed to take the stage = devastating. I don’t have a job at which I can apply all the cool stuff I learned = bummer. I can talk about cool stuff in interviews = yay! As a new hire, I wouldn’t have the clout and unlikely the freedom to implement anything anyway = dar. The barnburner Experience Music Project social mixer dance-off = riotous. Author Sherman Alexie, damn! = charming, hysterical, extraordinary. And This American Life maestro Ira Glass magically appearing right next to me after his smashing closing keynote and signing my Minnesota Public Radio cloth bag with a fat green Sharpie = #omgomgomg. I squealed like a fangirl and clutched my grocery sack all the way home.

As most people reading this probably know, the latest Facebook debacle, as uncovered by The Consumerist, hinged not on their telling all your friends about what you thought were private transactions on completely unrelated sites, or hints of selling us off wholesale to market researchers. The onerous, out-of-no-where head-check this time comes from their updated Terms of Service (TOS), revised February 4 without user notification, which their TOS conveniently allows them to do.

The new license terms granted them the perpetual rights to all content a user posts or otherwise contributes to the site, even if a user later deletes that content or cancels an account. They also claimed control over content on a completely unrelated site if it contains a “Share Link,” a tool that helps readers post a link to that content on their Facebook page, if, you know, copying and pasting a URL is deemed too arduous. If that isn’t bad and bizarre enough, no one actually needs to click the link, ever, for the license to apply.

I currently have a “Share Link” -type service called AddThis on my personal blog, deepsicks, enabling a reader to easily bookmark and share the site (though not individual posts) with social link aggregators such as Reddit, Digg, StumbleUpon and yes, Facebook, along with a couple dozen others. This is how the internet works—through linking. Facebook essentially wants to turn a link into a license, thereby owning everything they touch or that touches them (and with their more than 175 million active users, you can bet that’s a lot). Even if they claim they would never enforce this in an unscrupulous way, the fact that the TOS language allows them to is deeply troubling if not outright outrageous. Because of my AddThis button, according to Facebook, they own my website. Forever.

I suppose this is the part where I should freak out and remove the link. I won’t. Not because I’m trusting or indifferent, but because I refuse to step light and wary around an entity that is trying to break the internet. What are they thinking, seriously? FB claims they would never use our content in a way we wouldn’t want them to, but for me they already failed that test with their “social advertising” nightmare-fest, Beacon. I have no reason to trust them to protect us from themselves, to have our best interests in mind. Why should they? Facebook is a business, and one using a precarious model— “free” for users, surviving off advertising dollars. I commend their success and innovation as a social networking site and certainly understand their desire to sustain themselves, as well as their need to have some licensing mechanisms in place so that they can offer their services at all. But I strongly oppose the direction they’re heading and especially the means by which they intend to get there.

Nothing a free service could “do to us” could be construed as “unfair”—unless it’s behind our backs without our consent, and that’s exactly what has happened (and not for the first time). The new TOS may not seem like a big deal, especially after they so quickly rescinded it—but this is presumably only because it got such bad press, not because they didn’t consider its implications beforehand. I’m starting to feel amphibious in this slowly boiling pot. These piecemeal incursions aren’t meant to dismay or horrify, only test our tolerance and inure us to and for progressively worse attacks on privacy and ownership.

No amount of PR backpedaling with a return to the previous TOS while they “sort things out” will cool my blood and persuade me to ignore my values and the premium I place on privacy. I have removed most personally identifying information and all original content from my profile with the exception of a single profile picture, wall posts, comments on links and photos that others have tagged of me. Facebook is a social networking tool, and that’s solely what I intend to use it for from now on. I suppose being really serious about my disgust would entail canceling my account, but I do find the service valuable for keeping in touch with the long tail and the occasional vegetative time-out. I have a website—two of them—where people can learn more about me through my writing and photography. Ironically, my main website, deepsicks, is released with a Creative Commons license. I gladly and freely give away my original, creative content—but I will not consent to having it taken away from me.

I see the occasional librarian / educator / student forum about Facebook and privacy, but I don’t think the discussion has been framed very well. Privacy is a lot more than “adjusting your settings” so your cousin can see your wacky, potentially illegal antics but not your parents or parole officer. Facebook and privacy is invariably conflated with two scenarios: Strangers will steal your identity or stalk you (though the latter is more of a FB benefit—showing off how awesome and fetching you are for potential equally awesome and fetching friends and flings). Or, the nebulous, nefarious “future employer” will look up your profile, see photos of you fantastically drunk / stoned / debauched / addicted to lolcats and/or spewing incoherent word salads in your 25 Things, and who in the office wants to put up with that? then toss your application in the shedder.

These are real concerns, surely. But what needs to be emphasized (by information professionals? irate bloggers? concerned citizens?) is the very territory Facebook would love to exploit. It won’t be fellow casual users invading your privacy, but Facebook itself, selling or otherwise allowing marketing companies and advertisers to use your information. Even if FB claims immunity, all the info is still right there. I can’t see FB lasting much longer without tapping into this further, willfully and blatantly—if they haven’t already, in ways unseen.

What unnerves me the most is some people—many people—don’t see this as a problem. Advertising has become an ingrained, habituated part of modern life, from entertainment to electioneering to self improvement and self expression. This could easily spin off into a ramble-rant, entire new post or post-grad thesis, but Facebook, “helping you connect and share with the people in your life,” in addition to being an enormous time-suck of human talent, is a mechanism for social normalization that helps us be good consumers of products and information—the latter to which FB just tried to claim perpetual ownership, the former which they are paid to make us want. I know a (small) handful of people who refuse to sign up, and they endure inane amounts of Facebook evangelism (shaming! begging! berating!), receiving multiple invitations from the same people frantic that their friendship doesn’t count if not part of the official FB tally, unable to conceive why one would choose not to conform.

“Free” is not free. Ever. I’ve seen some awe-inspiring and plain neat things resulting from social networking and internet mobilization, but that comes from the bottom up, not top down, and the powers that be, no matter what they say, will ultimately control which way the wind blows (unless, of course, everyone were suddenly to abandon it), especially as Facebook, victim of its own success, scrambles for a way to sustain itself.

For those who don’t agree, don’t won’t can’t see the forest for the trees, the writing on the wall, the meta in the metaphor, youall-drive-me-crazy and thisall-disturbs-me-deeply. But I shall continue to be suspicious on your behalf. I will fight for you when the crystal cracks.