I love Aro Video and – as an Aro Valley resident myself – regularly borrow films from their store. However, I’m concerned that their recent campaign for censorship reform is cloaking what is primarily an economic challenge for small New Zealand businesses in social/moral rhetoric and emotive language.

Maybe that’s too harsh, I’m sure that is not their intent – but I do think it is interesting to see how economic and social issues collide (jostle for position?) around this issue.

Here’s what I understand, in simple terms:

• Films must display a New Zealand classification to be sold here.
• Films are classified in New Zealand when, before they are supplied to the public, “someone” submits it to the OFLC and pays a fee.
• Most of the time, this “someone” is a big fancy distributor to whom $1100 is not much more than a drop in the bucket. (When you’re looking at millions in Kill Bill sales, $1100 is nothing to get an R18 classification and sticker for your ultra-violent film so that sensible adults can buy it in New Zealand.)
• But big distributors only tend to import and stock what the “mainstream” watch and play. So when it comes to alternative titles – media consumed by smaller groups of the New Zealand population – noone is there to pay this fee.
• Because there are also less people to buy these alternative titles, less units are likely to be sold in New Zealand, meaning that the amount of profit to made from stocking these titles is far less, especially when you take into account that you’ll also have to foot the bill for $1100 to stock it in the first place.
• When you are a small store like Aro Video, and you have built your reputation on being able to find ‘just about anything’ for your customers, this can pose a bit of a problem. If you have to pay a classification fee on top of the cost of importing just one copy of a DVD for a keen customer, you are likely to lose money, not make it. Aro says they provide “a comprehensive choice of contemporary, classic and curious cinema including a significant selection of exclusive titles” – they trade off this reputation.

Now, here is where it starts to get interesting:

It isn’t illegal to own, and have in your own home, media that hasn’t been classified yet in New Zealand (as long as it’s not got content considered to be “objectionable” under NZ law). This means that, if you’re unable to find what you are looking for at a local retailer, you are able to go online and buy from online retailers located overseas, and have the item shipped here – direct to you.

The second interesting thing, I think, is that this is essentially what Aro Video was doing in the first place – in the past, when you asked them to find something you couldn’t find anywhere else in New Zealand, they would contact their overseas suppliers and purchase the item… but they would then sell it to you (with NZ label) over the counter.

These days, Aro Video finds itself getting “scooped” by online retailers like Amazon, because consumers can go direct to overseas suppliers, via sophisticated tools that aggregate together a great many of these different suppliers at once.

Thanks to the internet – everyone is suddenly able to see this network of suppliers, and import whatever we want to watch in our own homes!

So, this issue seems – at least to me – to be, not actually about “shortening the ‘long tail’ of consumer choice”… but rather about how free international trade is impacting on small New Zealand businesses…

It is also interesting to note that Aro Video is making money this way as well, their website states that they “also welcome international orders, so no matter where you are in the world, you can order (and even pre-order) films to buy from the website”.

It does seem to me that it might be easier for Aro Video to blame New Zealand Censorship law for being unable to obtain material, than to admit that they can’t afford to acquire and process everything that their ‘long tail’ customers ask for.

Perhaps part of the business model of an ‘alternative’ video store involves taking a financial hit on the import of rare titles in order to keep a reputation of being able to ‘find anything’. How much can you pass these expenses on to the customer? (After all, Aro Video is only $1 more expensive for a ‘general release’  than Video Ezy Wellington – would we pay more for a wider range of local rentals?)

Furthermore, it’s not quite as devastating as it sounds:

• This economic problem only applies to a very small section of films. A lot of ‘non-mainstream’ titles are traditionally brought into NZ through film festivals. Film festivals get a waiver of up to 75% of the classification fee, and this fee is fronted by the film festival organizers (this may be why film festival tickets are slightly more expensive than ordinary cinema tickets), not by retailers/rental stores.
• Much of the films brought into New Zealand may be cross-rated from Australia and the UK, meaning they don’t have to go through the OFLC, and may just ‘adopt’ our stickers. (Cross rating isn’t the be-all and end-all: if we’d followed Australia’s classification system to the letter, we’d have censored a lot more video games last year. Thankfully, our censors still look at the higher rated items, to classify them R18 so Adults can still access them even if Australia or the UK bans them).
• Many of the items Aro Video lists as unavailable actually have been previously classified in New Zealand, and are in fact available for import. Some of the list are banned due to objectionable content.

In a recent article in the Capital Times, Bill Hastings (New Zealand’s Cheif Censor) spoke about some of the issues. I was interested in his call to the video rental industry: “I would say New Zealand is missing out because the video shop industry is not being sufficiently creative in being co-operative… Why don’t these guys get together and jointly pay the waived classification fee for the title of a DVD, and then they can import as many as they want – they’d just have to pay the small amount for the classification sticker on each DVD.”

I can see, though, why this would be difficult to implement. Why would video stores, currently in competition with each other for customers, agree to collaborate? If other stores start stocking these hard-to-get items, won’t Aro Video lose its great reputation?

As a librarian, my personal view is that the onus is instead on cultural heritage institutions (particularly university libraries, where ‘works of cultural merit’ are concerned, but also public libraries) to band together and bear some of the cost of classification on the part of the public. I was quite surprised to see several Victoria University Librarians complaining, in the comments of the Lumiere blog post, that classification was “prohibitive” to their collections. (My recollection was that Victoria was considering collaborating with other university libraries to get their collections classified.)

I think that librarians (and New Zealand retailers too) have an obligation, as people who care about creative media, to promote public awareness, and support the process of classification… in order to protect access to these materials and future creative works. I think we’re fortunate to have an established system in New Zealand that looks independently and critically at what the appropriate audience is for material, as opposed to just banning it outright based on moral panic.

Although I actually finished my INFO580 research project some time ago – in October of last year – I’ve been slow in making it available here on the blog. A combination of work, Christmas, and taking an interesting paper on Web and Intranet Content Management over trimester three has really meant that I’ve barely thought about my research, and Second Life in general, since finishing the project.

Though I’ve been a bit busy lately, my paper (read the full thing as pdf) reflects my ongoing interest in the way that interfaces for engaging with information (particularly library interfaces) might be better designed to facilitate interaction, ease of use, and community. I’ll certainly be continuing to think about these issues in the coming months, particularly as I have been asked to contribute to the upcoming TELSIG National Seminar and talk about my research project and about Second Life Libraries, with the help of some rather brilliant Second Life educators – in June of this year.

Finishing this project marks the end of my Masters in Library and Information Studies. With the completion of this professional qualification, as well as the more recent “certificate of proficiency” I’ve obtained in Web and Intranet Content Managment, I’m now interested in continuing to explore Information Architecture and Interaction Design.

Coreopsis Major left clues in the form of call numbers at her library, at first on tables, then leading to books at various locations around the library, to take the finder of these clues on a treasure hunt around the library. Eventually, there’s treasure at the end.

(I borrowed these pictures from Coreopsis Major’s page on SFZero, go check out her project!)

Coreopsis was playing SFZero, a kind of Alternate Reality Game. In this game, players create “Characters” who perform all kinds of “tasks” out in the real world in order to obtain completion “scores” when they report back their progress on the website. In many cases, the tasks, submitted by other players to the game, are simple, yet ambiguous, designed to allow players to exercise huge amounts of creativity.

Coreopsis’ task – that spurred her to create her game – was simply “Leave Clues“. Other tasks are as simple and quirky as “Make it Work” (which players have generally interpreted to mean “fix something”) and “Irregular Animal Documentation” (“document an animal you rarely see”).

Tasks, and Characters (based on what tasks they perform most), are divided into “institutional bureaucracies” which embody particular themes of thought-provoking play. “The EquivalenZ project seeks to fulfill the originating fantasies of Virtual Reality”, “The city suffers from a Humanitarian Crisis and appeals for unilateral humanitarian aid, and basic human rights”, ” The Biome Group concerns itself with an exploration of the living structure of the City”, and so on.

I think SFZero as a project is especially cool because it is encouraging players to think about the world around them in new ways, adding playfulness to otherwise ordinary spaces and activities. In the process of re-thinking their everyday lives, SFZero players also impact others around them. Coreopsis Major’s simple treasure hunt creates a sense of mystery, adventure and exploration in the otherwise ordinary library activity of looking up and locating call numbers. I wonder what other ideas we could come up with to create excitement about common library activities, in ways that teach students basic skills at the same time.Coreopsis Major’s simple treasure hunt creates a sense of mystery, adventure and exploration in the otherwise ordinary library activity of locating call numbers.

Over the next few weeks I am going to be conducting interviews. A short and sweet breakdown of the project is as follows:

The interviews are:

• confidential
• individual
• one hour in length
• via VOIP or IM

Your answers:

• describe your experiences
• share your thoughts and opinions
• compare and critique the space

The research aims:

• to explore strengths and weaknesses of virtual world environments for libraries
• to pinpoint key challenges for libraries in virtual worlds
• to define best practices for virtual world library design

You can read official documentation about the project: There is an Information Sheet and a full Question Schedule that would-be participants should definitely read. You can leave a comment below this post, or on the project page on my website. Alternatively, you can email or IM me any time at timothy.greig@gmail.com. You might also like to meet me in Second Life. My avatar is named Aramis Maginot.

If you feel that you can’t participate in the formal interviews, but would like to add your comments anyway – regardless of the size of the contribution, you will be helping me to engage with and think about this exciting topic!

1. What challenges faced by traditional online library services/interfaces are able to be overcome by Virtual World Library environments?
2. What new challenges (or old ones) face the development of Libraries in Virtual Worlds?
3. How might these challenges be overcome? Can the design strategies used in Massively Multiplayer Online Games be a useful guide?

When talking about “Virtual World Libraries”, I am referring to initiatives such as the Info Island Libraries now being run in Second Life, spearheaded by the Alliance Library System. I’m planning that my research will involve interviews with a few the users of these libraries, to learn about their experiences of the online library environment. Here’s an excerpt from the proposal introduction:

Virtual World environments provide libraries with an opportunity to overcome many of the challenges faced by traditional online library interfaces, add some of the benefits of physical environments in a virtual space, and draw on some of the engaging features of online video game systems. This research project aims to unpack and explore these three areas, using a qualitative methodological approach. This will involve a case study of libraries being developed in Second Life, a popular Virtual World. This project aims to produce a set of guidelines for the future design of libraries in virtual worlds, building on the feedback of research participants in concert with video game design principles.

My full proposal is available for download in pdf format. My proposal was assessed by my supervisor for the project, Brenda Chawner. She gave me an A-. I’ve included a snapshot of her marking report on flickr (you should be able to read it if you view it in its original size). In summary, I’ve identified two main themes in her comments that I need to work on:

1. I need to emphasise other studies in the area of online/virtual library services and interfaces (which might include research into virtual reference services, online bibliographic instruction documentation, and so on) that show what the outstanding problems have been for these initiatives. The literature review in my final project will need to include both emperical research that shows what challenges have been discovered by researchers, and also assess the methodologies used by these researchers to obtain these findings. This should provide me with a road forward into my own research analysis. I would prefer to find this existing research data in the area of library studies, but may need to explore other disciplines, too.
2. Brenda would like to see a clearer connection between what my research questions are, and the ways I’m going to obtain answers to these questions from my research. Hopefully this will be helped by identifying those related studies mentioned in #1, which help me make sure that I am using research methods that have returned useful results in the past. Additionally, Brenda suggested that I be more specific about the population that will be included in my research. Hopefully this has become more clear as part of the process of submitting my Human Ethics Committee application – I’m in the middle of this at the moment.

I will hopefully be able to start recruiting participants quite soon, I am just waiting for one or two more things for my HEC application. So, if you’re a Second Life Citizen or Librarian interested in participating in the research, don’t go too far away!