Next talk: Transformative Labor: The Invisible Work of Library Digitization, with Allison Chomet #lacuny18
Chomet: Starting with a quote from a 2003 article about bringing the library to “little schools” in Africa where people have their minds “closed to the idea of democracy.” Connection between digitization and ultimately nationalist, colonial project #lacuny18
Chomet gives some background on Authors Guild v Google. 2013 ruling by district court has stayed. Judge Chin ruled that this use transformed the character of use. #lacuny18
Chomet: Crux of legality of GoogleBooks is on transformative labor, turning books into digital objects. Enormous amount of work. #lacuny18
Chomet: GoogleBooks is the biggest name in book digitization — their project is very visible. But they are very secretive about their processes. Couldn’t find any information about average day at Google except Andrew Norman Wilson’s videos. #lacuny18
Chomet: Wilson worked next door to the Googleplex — a lot of workers left at exactly 2:15 every day. They were working scanning books. Wilson was fired for filming this. #lacuny18
Chomet: ScanOps workers had a different badge and were only allowed to work in one building & not circulate around the company. Workers’ badge instructions said to call security if anyone asked them about their work. Solidarity a flag for trouble. #lacuny18
Chomet: Wilson went on to make 2012 compilation of images that are mistakes in GoogleBooks (fingers, etc). Workers bodies made invisible—literally edited out. #lacuny18
Chomet: Most ScanOps workers were women of color — very different from Google’s overall demographics. Shift 4AM to 2:15 (and there was another shift overnight) and workers banned from amenities. Their work not considered central part of the project. #lacuny18
Chomet: This kind of work often goes undescribed. Scholarly literature seldom refers to it except when talking about (& criticizing) students as workers. #lacuny18
Chomet: this fits into labor hierarchies at almost any workplace. Some programs, like University of Colorado, use a different model; they asked students to create metadata as scanning #lacuny18
Chomet: Library digitization projects are often outsourced. The equipment is expensive. The Million Books project by Carnegie Mellon used tech/innovation workers in the US and scanners in China and India while praising their “skilled manpower” #lacuny18
Chomet: Backstage Library Works does digitization for a lot of libraries. Job listings require college degree and pay $12.50/hr for this work. #lacuny18
Chomet is describing the Mechanical Turk (the hoax chess robot with a chess master hiding inside). We rely on humans that act like machines. Automation doens’t replace human labor but makes it more complicated. Automated book scanners need hands to place books. #lacuny18
Chomet: The convenience economy is related to the rise of phone apps that eliminate friction (Uber, Seamless, etc). These companies are disinvested in labor — low pay, no protections or benefits & this is sometimes marketed as a perk (workers are more “free”) #lacuny18
Chomet: growing expectation that everything will be available & searchable online. Digitization isn’t exactly like Uber & research isn’t frictionless, but the expectation of convenience drives the idea of digitization. #lacuny18
Chomet quotes Shawn Wen: “It’s like magic, but it’s not magic .. the actual magic work is making the worker disappear.” #lacuny18
Chomet: Calling back to Emily’s comments about the subway. Subway was built by very low-paid workers, many of whom were hurt and some of whom died. Similarly, people who digitize books are creating infrastructure. #lacuny18
Chomet: Unions are the only thing that can protect workers in cases like this. Need to think about cases like the University of Colorado — pairing these parts of the work. But also think about digital infrastructure & places in workplace where labor is made invisible. #lacuny18
Chomet: stay alert to the heirarchies between “innovative class” and “working class” #lacuny18
Interesting question about “the beneficent employer” who benevolently grants benefits. Chomet: this is how some libraries are funded! Ends up being kind of feudal and certainly won’t be consistent. #lacuny18
Chomet: I don’t want you to walk out of this talk thinking I hate scanning! Some projects are totally worthwhile and educational. It depends on the model. #lacuny18
Polly Thistlethwaite with a parallel to the shock of colleagues when they learn that putting stuff in the repository involves labor. Need to understand the work so if we do outsource it, we know what we’re doing. #lacuny18
A question about how this work can be made visible! Are any collections providing credit to scanners? A couple members of the audience have experience with this. #lacuny18
Liz Jardine about her experience abstracting for ABC-Clio —they provided credit for each one (but not visible now that it’s EBSCO!) #lacuny18
Discussion of getting some data about the number of hours of labor it takes to do these scanning projects. Risks to putting data on stuff, though. #lacuny18
