Who Owns Ideas is a great introductory documentary about the history of copyright and current controversies in copyright. I wished however, that it had gone more into depth about downloading music and movies. I was reading a blog post of someone who attended a techy conference and was very offended by a young panelist who stated that youth feel no guilt over illegally downloading music. (As a side comment to me, someone mentioned that it is at least better than adults who pay money for bootlegged DVDs in Chinatown but that’s really a whole different issue.) I think this documentary nails it on the head. Theft implies ownership; and who really owns ideas? Who owns culture? If it is truly “insane” as Graham Henderson, CRIA prez says, to take music and not pay for it, one wonders about the type of “sanity” that has allowed corporations to privatize things like rain water, living creatures and dna, life saving vaccines and medicines, so on and so forth. In the age of late capitalism, experiences, ideas and brands and of course, intellectual property as it is now called, are all fair game, just as things like non-state aboriginal lands were fair game in the age of colonialism.

In any case, illegally downloading music is not as neatly equivalent to shoplifting or crimes like car theft, as it is so often compared to. The act of say, downloading an entire album off a torrent, is very different from a fangirl making a “mixtape” mp3 soundtrack of different artists for a movie she loves (complete with a Photoshopped virtual CD cover/back) and then posting it onto an lj community of like minded fans (for examples of what I am referring to, look up lj communities for any recent popular film). The motivations, results and contexts are entirely different. Rhetoric about file sharing lumps this wide spectrum of behaviour into one crime, which is highly problematic.

In the interim since I’ve posted, I’ve met and surpassed the 21 Challenge fundraising goal, got the school library staffed for next year, organized two really awesome programs (youth-elder exchange, academic skills workshops), sorted through a MASSIVE book donation from Yellowknife (23 boxes worth!) and made some huge orders from educational publishers. So June is going to be a month of slowing down, no more staying late late late at work, and weekends are now strictly for myself. Except now I’m blogging about work. Ha. The funny thing is, I’ve spent all this time in the library but looking back, I’ve hardly done any traditional library work. It’s been mainly presentations, proposal writing, PR, lobbying, and managing a gazillion little tasks. Would have died without my links and notes on pbwiki.

I’ve also been doing all kinds of awesome non-information studies related things and to be honest, a lot of the issues I used to think about down south aren’t relevant here, so my mind really has not been analyzing and crunching through topics related to this blog. It’s difficult to keep up with the technology and news here where no one has a clue what web 2.0 is, identity management is still about word of mouth reputation, and everyone turns to the radio or gossip vine first for news. It’s been a gradual, protracted unplugging from the net and a culling of what information I want to keep intaking and what qualifies as a time suck to permanently cut out. After 5 months of detox, I’m ready to return to my old cyborg state.

The campaign has been coming along with some fits and starts. It seems that the branding really hasn’t taken hold here, and remarkably, news of the campaign seems spread much faster through certain channels in Yellowknife! One really needs to be literal here. Hardly anyone in town refers to the 21 Challenge, it is always referred to directly, as the library project. The 21 tags are seen as “cute” and have momentarily raise people’s curiousity, but haven’t had the impact I’d hoped for.

Another difficulty is that my experience is based in methods of communication/promotion that are bound to the internet and most older people here do not read blogs and are not on any social network. While I’ve spoken on the CBC a few times now, had articles featured in local and territorial wide newspapers, submitted blurbs to local newsletters etc, the bulk of information remains online which is not the best way to reach the community. It seems to me that ties forged through face to face contact, community projects and individuals, are really what works, slow as these methods are.

On another note, I’ve learned something really important from the challenges of working on this project. Down south, it seems to me that it is common place to complain about the minutae of one’s work on a frequent and regular basis when things are difficult. I’ve come to realize that at least for myself, this manner of complaining is a sign of luxury; if I have the time and energy to bitch, then the problems I face in my work really aren’t worth bitching about.

No one local complains about the cold here because it is truly so harsh, that if everyone voiced their discomfort, nothing would ever get done. Even the “expats” learn quickly to brush off the extremity of the weather. It’s pretty much the same way about working to change negative trends here. Up north, the frustrations and obstacles can be so extreme or insurmountable at times, it would be foolish to begin adopting a negative attitude. I find myself now thinking “it is what it is” instead of a complaint. Instead of laying blame on other people or groups, which I find comprises a great deal of work related complaining, I remind myself to suck it up, look for solutions, and keep trying to hit my marks. And I don’t even think about the real possibility of total failure; don’t have the energy for it to spare. Sometimes I find myself sliding back into old habits, but I’ve found the need for efficiency eventually demands a halt to the slippage.

Since fundraising has not been going well, I decided to take a completely different approach than what I had been doing before. There are a lot of programs here that require funding so my challenge has been how to put this issue on the map. I’ve racked my brain and have turned to the southern way to get people to become invested and pay attention: branding and aggressive urban marketing techniques. This means taking the logic of consumer culture (which I actually loathe; one of the reasons I enjoy being in the north is relief from advertising) and applying it to a fundraising campaign. No wait, our exciting guerrilla fundraising campaign! Complete with easy to remember name, objectives, and catchy tagline: campaign site (And please don’t laugh at the logo. I did it in such a hurry!)

It’s just so southern. People do not really do branding here. There are no ads save those on television (radio is CBC and locally broadcast), and that is pretty much the extent of exposure to branding. It’s like postmodernism has completely ignored this town and it’s all WYSIWYG. Which means that instead of having a population that is well trained in ignoring extraneous information, where every product, cause or statement needs to outwit and outdo a thousand others, I am looking at a situation where there is zero competition for attention and very little feel for connecting a product or service with an abstracted narrative or image. I feel a little guilty framing this cause in such blatantly commercialized “language” but at the same time, I think I’ll probably be the only person who sees it this way because the values of consumer culture are more or less absent here. Does this make my job easy or will the branding be too “southern” to connect with locals? Certainly, I’m finding that showing up in person to discuss proposals, and getting people to trust you to speak at meetings and such is primary. We’ll have to see.

Next week, when the students return to school, I am hoping to implement a marketing strategy quite common in the city, the likes of which this town has never seen. I want everyone to be talking about it! Will update you all on how it works or doesn’t work.

That’s been one of my mottos these past few weeks. I’ve been busy trying to speak with organizations in town about the school library and I’m hoping that my efforts here will help convince the powers that be that the school needs a librarian. I’m finding one of the best ways to do this is to whip out the academic research that links the quality of school libraries to student achievement, and to do whatever you can do to dispell the myth that librarians are these fussy old shushing women sorting dusty books. You need to inject different terms into the mix like “media/information specialist” or “critical/central information resource” or “information literacy”. It’s remarkably easy to advocate for school libraries. We live in an information age and students need to learn how to utilize the internet beyond social networking. Plus, we are talking about youth. And don’t these organizations want to help the children?

I’ve also found that because the community here is small, it’s very easy to be able to reach the higher tiers of power that are usually inaccessible in the south. I run into CEOs and CFOs in the grocery stores, my roommate is the comptroller for the educational council, I take language lessons with the VP of the Gwich’in Tribal Council, and so on. Just last week, I have tried to convince the educational council board members, the NWT premier, and the board members of the GTC to support our school library. It’s wild. I had assumed I would be a librarian assistant so I only brought one formal business outfit up with me and I need to ask people to send me clothes because there’s nowhere in town to buy them. Did I also mention that meetings with these aboriginal organizations are kind of awesome? Only here will you sit in a totally modern board room discussing policy and budgeting resources with elders and be treated to a mini-feast of caribou soup, bannock, cranberry muffins etc. afterwards.

Anyways, I’m going to be compiling a resource for people in similar situations with links to studies and articles to aid librarians in their advocacy efforts, funding programs, tips for fundraising in the north etc. although this probably won’t get done until late April after I’ve run my mega mega fundraising campaign (marketing/fundraising in the north post to follow).