Archive for the ‘Interviews’ Category

For this month’s Stacking the Tech column I had a chance to interview three Library of Congress librarians about all of their recent digital initiatives.

The Library of Congress (LOC) has established itself as one of the leading institutions making use of social media to engage audiences and build community. And they have made great strides since January 2008 when they first began their Flickr Commons pilot. They have since launched a blog, a Facebook Page, YouTube and iTunes channels, and a Twitter account which claims over 13,000 followers. Most recently they have begun experimenting with the Semantic Web/Linked Data and cloud computing. I was fortunate enough to have a chance to chat with three of their librarians about these initiatives.

I was thrilled to be interviewed by ALA editor Dan Freeman about my mobile Web Library Technology Report, the book series I’m working on with Neal-Schuman Publishers, and open source software and libraries. The interview went up on the ALA TechSource blog earlier today.

If anyone is interested in open licenses, I interviewed Jimmy Wales this morning on that topic. He was kind enough to agree to speak with me as a part of the course I’m teaching at San Jose State University on the Open Movement and Libraries. And since I am making all of my course materials openly available under a Creative Commons license I thought it would be useful to share this for those interested. I have also interviewed Stephen Downes of the National Research Council in Canada, and Nicole Engard of LibLime, and I have interviews lined up with more incredibly smart people so stay tuned.

Here are the questions I asked Jimmy Wales and here’s the link to the (10 minute) interview:

1. You are a member of the board at Creative Commons which is a worldwide project which straddles the gap between full copyright and the public domain, offering new choices for creators, can you start off by telling us a bit about more about that?
2. How is it that you first became interested in Open licenses?
3. Many people, including the authors of the Open Source Definition, the Free Software Definition and the PLOS’ Open Access Definition insist that commercial uses must be permissible in order for content to be considered free, how do you think this reconciles with Creative Commons’ non-commercial clause?
4. Wikipedia uses copyleft (GFDL) and you are also on the board of Creative Commons, both of which have licenses which demand that derivative works be licensed with the same original license, do you often find incompatibility issues?
5. The Wikia community is also using Open licensing of content, can you tell us a bit about that?
6. Can you tell us a bit about your latest project Wikia Search and how you are using open licensing there?
7. It seems as though you’ve headed initiatives which have contributed or incorporated nearly all of the topics we are covering in our course - open-source software, open access, open education, and open licensing; Why do you think it’s important to promote Open licensing and Open in general?