Walt at Random

If you have personal awareness (or know someone who does) of the state of one or more of these libraries, could you send me email or comment below? (Email: waltcrawford at gmail.com). If it’s still operating but entirely as a volunteer operation or a reading room, I’d like to know that as well.

Arranged by state (alphabetic by postal code); unless there’s an “in X,” the city name is in the library name.

Update, 10:30 a.m., April 10, 2012: Given early responses (and Michael Golrick’s forwarding of the list to state library coordinators), I’ve resolved a number of these already. The resolved ones now appear as struck out, with the resolution (Closed or Open) at the right. [Responses being added as received.]

Alaska

Mountain Village Public Library Closed
Old Harbor Library Closed
Pilot Station Public Library Closed
Nellie Weyiouanna Ilisaavik in Shishmaref Closed

Alabama

Highland Home Public Library Closed

Florida

Surf-Bal-Bay Public Library in Surfside

Iowa

Montour Public Library Closed
Soldier Public Library Closed

Kansas

Summerfield Public Library

Maine

Cooper Free Public Library Closed
Sabattus-Town Square Library in Sabattus Closed
Somerville Town Library Closed

Missouri

Newburg Public Library Open

North Dakota

West Dakota Library in Carson Closed
Drake Public Library Merged with nearby library

Nebraska

Cook Public Library
Edgar Public Library
Royal Public Library

New Jersey

Cedarville Public Library

New Mexico

Dexter Public Library Closed
Elida Public Library  Open (but no longer qualifies as PL)

Oklahoma

Nash Public Library

Pennsylvania

Lake City Public Library  Closed; served by Rice Avenue Comm. Lib.

South Dakota

Volin Public Library

Texas

Turkey Public Library Open

Vermont

Ryegate Corner in Ryegate

Thanks!

I’m still around…and spending possibly more time on this “closed public libraries” thing than it might really deserve. Except that it’s interesting and, I think, says a lot about how much people care about local public libraries–something that’s probably the only real refutation you need of those who claim U.S. public libraries are going to (or, worse, should) fade away or disappear rapidly.

I’ve done all the fast scans and moderately-slow scans, and now I’m on the final leg (before writing it all up and drawing conclusions). That last leg is a killer, probably taking a lot more time than the other phases and requiring breaks after every three or four libraries.

Without revealing results in any detail, the title of this post will tell you something, given that I’m looking at public library closures over a 12-year period (1998 through 2008).

I’m seeing the occasional sad story that says nothing about loss of support for public libraries: For example, when a town is mostly washed away in a flood, goes from 480 people to 26 in the course of two years, and dissolves as a town…well, it’s not surprising that the library is still closed. To some extent, it’s the sad stories and the disappearing communities that make this phase slow and difficult.

Oh, and can I once again say how much I love (for an unusual definition of love) the hundreds (thousands?) of autogenerated webs of pages that make it difficult to ascertain what’s really out there? (That’s not hundreds of pages–it’s probably millions of pages in hundreds of autogenerated webs.)

If you have not yet read the April 2012 Cites & Insights, this post may not make a lot of sense.

The lead essay involves original research to attempt to determine how many public libaries (not branches!) actually closed in 2008-2009 and remained closed. My final number was 17, with two crucial caveats. Here’s what I say before discussing each of 20 apparent closures:

I’m not certain any of these libraries are actually closed. Some could be open but no longer meet IMLS requirements for being listed as a public library (e.g., paid staff and public funding) and others may be open but have no web presence.

And at the end, after reducing the list from 20 to 17 (because three of the 20 were pretty clearly still operating):

Some of these libraries may, in fact, be open but flying under the radar, with no current web presence: That’s not unusual for very small libraries. This is the maximum number of still-closed public library systems first reported closed in 2008 or 2009; the actual number may be slightly smaller.

South Dakota: Cleanup, Not Closures

I received the following on Friday, March 30, 2012, from Dan Siebersma, State Librarian of South Dakota, who’s given me permission to post it:

Thanks for the excellent article about public library “closings.” You are so right that our profession’s constant harping on the “Libraries are closing!” meme simply serves as fodder for those who want to see libraries as obsolete anachronisms.

To add another wrinkle to your story, I need to point out to you that the “nine libraries in small South Dakota communities [that] apparently closed in 2009” didn’t really close at all.  In the past, the South Dakota State Library had a tendency to count every collection of publicly-accessible books in every small community as a ”library.”  It didn’t matter whether there was a staff, a board, or any of the other technicalities of being an actual public library.

A few years ago, we decided to clean this up and made a concerted effort to differentiate between legal public libraries (those meeting the state’s legal definition) and simple “reading rooms” (community book collections in mostly very small towns). Because reading rooms don’t meet the legal definition of a library, and because they often don’t even have a staff, and because they invariably don’t have the resources to participate in the annual public library survey (which provides the data used by IMLS), we chose to drop these collections from the list of libraries we submit annually to IMLS.

So, those nine “libraries” didn’t necessarily close, the State Library changed their designation from “public library” to “reading room” and dropped them from the IMLS Public Library Survey.  Most of them are probably still operating in exactly the same fashion as they’ve always operated, though one or two may have actually closed because “the lady who took care of the books left town” or something similar.

At any rate, we do not count these as “closed” public libraries, so your count of closed libraries has just been halved…and South Dakota’s public libraries remain strong and stable!

I had originally planned to include my specific suspicion that South Dakota’s large number of closures in a single year was actually a cleanup effort, but failed to do so. I thank Dan Siebersma for this clarification. It doesn’t quite cut the 17 in half (I’d already flagged two of the nine South Dakota “libraries” as still operating in some manner), but it does cut it down to ten. For the entire United States. For two years.

I’d guess some of the remaining ten are also cleanup efforts, that is, libraries that simply don’t meet IMLS standards but may still be operating as community reading rooms.

Now, back to the ten-year study…which will, of course, only yield a “maximum possible closures” count, not a “definitely still closed” count. It’s not going to be a huge number–that much I already know.

Just a quick update, for anyone who might be interested:

• I’ve now done the first two phases of a multiphase project to see how many of the public library systems that disappeared from the IMLS annual report from one year to the next are apparently actual closed libraries. (Phase one: Identify duplicates. Phase two: Check libraries against 2009 IMLS database.) That’s eliminated slightly less than half of the 775 original possibilities. I’ll probably start Phase three tomorrow.
• That project is the second half of a surprise research project that grew out of questions asked here and elsewhere. The first half will be a major original essay in the April 2012 Cites & Insights. I have the draft essays for the issue in hand–but have to reread them in paper form (red pen in hand), then edit, copyfit, and prepare the issue. It will appear in very early April, I suspect–and conceivably extremely late March. (No link since the issue isn’t there yet.
• Still very much open to sponsorship or affiliation possibilities so that I can keep my hand in the library field with enough compensation to make it worthwhile, doing research and writing (and speaking). See earlier posts…

As I’ve thought about ways to keep my hand in–that is, ways to regain some level of earned income that justifies my continued interest in and work on library issues–I wondered for a while whether public library data analysis might be such a way. This rambling post is about that question. At this point, I think the answer is “probably not, but maybe I’m too pessimistic” rather than the “possibly so, if there was a plausible way to get funding” that I started out with. So instead of a neat & tidy prospectus, it’s a messy ramble.

Context

For those who like context, this post grows out of several related backgrounds:

• The 38-state universe study of public library use of social networks I did as research for Successful Social Networking in Public Libraries–brand-new research that I would dearly love to continue on a whole-nation basis, but that I can’t justify doing (it would take a few hundred hours to do and report) without five-digit revenues. That issue’s documented in various posts–and I’d still love to get some guidance on how this can work (other than “give it up. nobody cares” which I may figure out for myself).
• My recent query as to how many public library systems have actually closed and remained closed, the conversations I’ve had with a number of library researchers in attempting to answer that question, my actual research for the [crude] answers for 2008 and 2009 (which will appear in the April 2012 Cites & Insights) and my future research, with considerable assistance from others, for the [also crude] answers for 1999 through 2008, which will probably appear in the May 2012 Cites & Insights unless I can find a paying market for the results.
• Time spent with the IMLS annual reports and databases on public libraries in the United States while doing both of these projects, and with some state library reports as well…and going back to some comments from library researchers in email and blog post comments.
• Time spent examining the HAPLR Index and other sources (the LJ 5-star site seems to be unreadable at the moment, so I won’t link to it) and pondering their strengths and weaknesses, from my admitted bias of not wishing to Point Out Top Achievers so much as to provide overall patterns that allow libraries to gauge themselves.

Why Me?

Recent success in getting people to pay for Cites & Insights at all, or to sell my writing directly to librarians (C&I Books) as opposed to indirectly through publishers (admittedly with professional editing, indexing, cover design and marketing) is tending me toward this feeling:

Any idiot can write, and with the web most idiots do.

But there’s something else:

Most idiots aren’t any good with numbers–and very few of us are good with both numbers and words.

While I’ve been a writer longer than I was a systems analyst/designer/programmer, I’ve always been a “numbers person” to some extent: At Cal, I had an informal math minor along with my formal Rhetoric major.

I love to find patterns in numbers. I like transparency and honesty. I dislike chartjunk–and I’m probably more hardassed about chartjunk than serves me well, specifically the most common form of misleading charts: Those with non-zero axes. Even with labels, such charts inherently exaggerate differences and trends: You may glance at the numbers on the left axis, but what you see first is the enormous change.

As perhaps the most widespread and one of the worst examples: Stock market daily-change charts. Most stock-market quick charts I see are about as bad as they can get, as the axis and scale are always designed to make the day’s movement–no matter how minor–take up the full chart. The only leavening factor is that most charts are hour-by-hour during the day.

Yes, I know, given that stock charts tend to be fairly small, they’d be too boring to even publish if they used zero axes, and excitement usually trumps meaningfulness. Such are media.

I believe I could do both derivative and longitudinal studies (and I hear some minds snapping shut right there–”derivative” in this case is things like circulation per capita or calculated return on investment; “longitudinal” is looking at change over time) that would be honest, transparent, and written well enough to be usable by librarians who are nervous about numbers–but perhaps not by those who are “anti-numerate” rather than just innumerate.

I know there are interesting numbers that I don’t believe are well-reported.

I suspect that one issue in getting librarians to pay attention to numbers might be that some of the best reports–including those from IMLS (although they’re prone to non-zero axes)–are overwhelming. A 230-page PDF may be what’s needed to report properly, but that’s huge.

I wonder whether librarians would be well-served by, and would be responsive to, relatively brief reports, one for each state and library size group (the 10 HAPLR divisions work well), that provide some quick longitudinal charts, some information that looks not only at totals and averages but, more usefully (in my opinion), at medians and 80% figures (and the like), and both of those on some derivative measures that could be useful to see where your own library stands. (The brief reports backed up by a clear, honest, transparent description of what’s behind them.)

And I think I could do those, and do them well, with clear language supplementing a relatively small number of graphs and even smaller number of tables in each report.

On the other hand…

I wonder whether there’s much demand for this sort of thing.

Using the table of state public library data sources provided by Colorado’s Library Research Service, I clicked through to data for the first 30 or so states. I found a wide variety of results–from Connecticut’s first-rate (but long) reports with strong longitudinal work, Colorado’s excellent (if limited) reporting, California’s very good 5-year longitudinal work and Kentucky’s 25-year graphs and generally solid discussions, to a number of states with no summary reports at all, and a few with no apparent data. I’d say six of the 30 (or so) had some sort of longitudinal data.

And I wonder whether the rest don’t have such reports or data because there’s really no demand for it. (I wonder how many librarians actually read the IMLS reports–you don’t really need to go through the full 200+ pages!)

Not that I don’t see things missing in general–but I come away thinking that there’s really not enough interest to pursue this idea at all.

Inconclusion

Am I wrong? If so, and if there’s a path to actual compensation, I’d love to hear about it (via email to waltcrawford at gmail.com–spamments are still averaging >100 per day, so I don’t check them carefully).

Otherwise, well, “Walt, idiot, nobody really wants this, and they certainly won’t pay for it.” Heck, I can tell myself that.

[Note that "nobody wants this" isn't quite the same as "nobody needs this," but it might as well be from my perspective. In either case, I'd be a greater idiot to keep pursuing it.]

Several previous posts, and a lot more comments than this blog usually gets, relate to what I thought was a simple question back in November 2011:

How many U.S. public libraries (not branches) have closed in recent years and stayed closed for, say, two or three years?

That probably isn’t the original wording, but it’s my intent–and the question arises because there have been so many posts and articles that seem to take as an article of faith that U.S. public libraries are shutting down all over the place.

Thanks to various commenters, a change in IMLS policy as of 2008, and the wonders of web searching, I now think I’m getting a pretty good sense of the answer.

I’m not going to give that answer here. It will show up either in Cites & Insights (most likely) or, if I find a $$market$$ for an article, in some “real” publication. Suffice it to say that, at least for the two-year period I’ve investigated to date–the only period that’s really open to clear investigation–it’s not 1%, it’s not even 0.5%, but it’s >0. Although in terms of potential patrons directly affected…well, that’s part of the larger story.

Anyway, this quick update is to note:

• Thanks to others, and to figuring out how to get Excel to open and work with humongous Access databases, I now believe I have official lists of libraries (again, not branches) that were regarded as permanently closed in 2008 and 2009.
• I’ve done my own web investigation in the current state (or non-state) of those libraries. I haven’t, and won’t, follow up with possible phone calls or emails for those libraries I can’t locate as having returned to active status through web methodologies…
• I’m starting to write all of this up, including comments & investigation of other stories of closed public libraries. I’ll also explain why I’m focused on libraries rather than branches, why I think it’s important to have some clarity and facts in this area, and more…

And that’s it for now.

A little more than a month ago, I posted “Keeping it going: another update on library social networking et al.” Included in that post was an amplification of my need for funding to expand and continue my broad investigations into public library social networking.

Somebody (who shall go nameless) posted what appeared to be a cogent reply, noting the existence of the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation and suggesting that I try there. It was flagged for moderation, and reading the first paragraph, I almost approved it…until I got to the final paragraph, where it turned into a sales pitch for some product entirely unrelated to me, libraries or even the Gates Foundation.

It was spam–but not “pure and simple.” Some spambot had actually managed to parse the post well enough to come up with a seemingly logical response, one that wasn’t just parroting the post. Or maybe some human spammer figured I’d be so delighted with the suggestion that I wouldn’t read all the way through to the end of the post.

Didn’t happen.

Oh, as to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, for which I have the greatest respect:

I checked. The foundation doesn’t make grants to individuals. In fact, it can’t make grants to individuals even if it was so inclined: Its tax status and charter prevent it.

Also, for U.S. library-related grants at least, it appears that Gates always goes looking, it doesn’t accept applications.

I would love to have appropriate institutional affiliation or partnership. Any suggestions are welcome. I’m pretty sure that most other foundations (e.g., Knight) will have similar limits to Gates. (Some library school want to make a name for in-depth study of public library use of social networks? I could work with you, possibly…)

So far, no progress on finding sources of funding (or, really, knowing how to do so). The improbable possibility of Kickstarter is starting to look better…

Anyway: As the title says: Nicely played, spammer…but not quite nicely enough.

And I once again apologize to people who submit legitimate comments only to have them trapped as spam. I continue to average more than 100 spamments per day, so really don’t look carefully at each apparent spamment. If you think this has happened, please, please email me your comment at waltcrawford at gmail.com.

Most posts here don’t get real comments (loads of spamments, to be sure), but sometimes a conversation starts up and keeps going–and gets more interesting.

With that in mind, I’ll just point you to the earlier post “Public library openings and my problem with negativity,” which has spawned an ongoing conversation, especially with Bob Molyneux, that’s both interesting and instructive–and will probably lead to this casual question yielding an essay in Cites & Insights (or possibly an article submitted elsewhere).

Last November (November 25, 2011), I asked “How many US public libraries have actually closed?” Let me quote a little of that post:

When reading various posts and articles from various directions–some celebrating the promised end of public libraries, most bemoaning the decline of public libraries–I keep running into comments about so many public library closures.

LISNews, for example, seems to feature any story that suggests a public library might be in danger of closing, or that some source of funding has declined, and sometimes seems to have a “we’re all gonna die!” feel to it. It’s not the only one, to be sure…and I’ve noticed that threats or temporary closures seem to get a lot more coverage than reopenings, new library openings, or threats that were overcome. I know: “If it bleeds, it leads”: Journalism tends to emphasize the negative.

I got some interesting comments, but no real numbers, although there was one suggestion that the number was 0.4% since 2005.

Redux

Two months later (January 25, 2012), I posted “How many public libraries have closed? Redux.”

I noted the first post and lack of answers. I also noted that I’d asked the question again at LISNews in grumping about a story with the lead “In an age of library closings”–a fairly typical lead, since it appears to be common knowledge that public libraries are shutting down all over the place. Here’s what I said then:

Since you lead with that, I’ll repeat the question I’ve asked elsewhere (with no results): Do you–does anyone–have any actual data on actual library system closings? Not branches, not temporary shutdowns, but public libraries that actually disappear–or, let’s say, shut down for at least three years?

Has it been 1% over the last 10 years? 0.5%? 0.1%?

Have there been more public libraries (again, not branches–those are inherently more temporary) closed or opened over the last decade?

Or do we just conveniently talk about lots of library closures, despite lack of any real evidence that this is happening? I’m not trying to minimize the effects of branch “closures” or reduced hours, but I’d sure like to see some facts…

That question became a separate LISNews post. My dystopian friend Blake Carver came up with an “off the top of my head” list of closures and, as I would expect, his firm conviction that nearly all public library funding news is bad news. I quote:

That final paragraph is interesting. I believe most local news reporting is negative, because that’s the way news works.

A city increasing its funding for public libraries by 5% is not news; a city cutting its funding by 5% is news. Hell, look at the wave of stories and comments on the order of “OMG! California’s public libraries are all gonna’ close!” given the loss of somewhat less than 1% of public library funding…that is, what was left of state funding. The portion of those stories that followed the loss of $12.5 million with a note that California’s public library budgets total something like $1.3 billion? I don’t remember ever seeing such a story, actually…

Beyond that, we got Blake questioning my distinction between branches and library agencies, some interesting discussion of IMLS datasets, a pointer to an LJ site that really didn’t have any information on it, and some interesting refinements (that, sigh, I lost because my modem went down losing 15 minutes of work, work that I don’t intend to recreate at the moment).

Why do I care? Here are the last two paragraphs of the January 25 post:

But to me the primary effect of the “public libraries are closing all over the place!” meme is self-fulfilling prophecy and grist for the mill of libertarians and those who dislike public libraries: Oh well, they’re already shutting down like crazy, that’s just the way it is.

Which, as I suspected, is simply not true.

In other words, a consistent push toward negativity damages public libraries because it creates the perception that libraries are doomed anyway–that cities are already shutting them down.

 Some answers

So I went back to IMLS and looked at their annual publications, which actually do go back quite a ways.

If you’d like to look for yourself, go to the IMLS “Public Libraries in the United States Survey” page and click on “Publications” below that headline, not the Publications link on the left sidebar. As in the link pointed to below:

[Thank the Windows Clipping Tool for this--and my inability to draw a straight line for the funny-looking red arrow and sloppy highlighting.]

You should get a page titled “Public Libraries” with links for reports as recent as FY2009 and as far back as FY1989.

I looked at the reports for 2009, 1999 (a 10-year gap) and, given the suggestion that 0.4% of public libraries have closed since 2004, FY2004.

I also looked at three figures: Library agencies (“libraries”), Outlets (stationary, including branches) and Bookmobiles.

The number of outlets can be dramatically different than the number of libraries, especially in states like California that tend toward large agencies (and has 1,122 outlets as of FY2009, but only 181 libraries).

Here are the numbers according to IMLS, with my own totals:

Do you see what I see? The 0.4% decline from 2004 to 2009…simply isn’t there. The overall trend of either libraries or branches (“outlets” is libraries and branches combined) shutting down…simply isn’t there.

Yes, there are fewer bookmobiles–6% fewer in 2009 than in 2004. But there are more libraries, more branches, and more total service points.

Actually, there is a number very close to 0.4% from 2004 to 2009: Namely, there are 0.58% more total service points in 2009 than in 2004. (Note that the “total” number adds Outlets and Bookmobiles, because Outlets already includes Libraries–except for those library agencies that are wholly bookmobiles.)

The 2009 IMLS report says that there are more libraries, right up front–but makes a point that the number of libraries hasn’t grown as fast as the number of people. That’s a much trickier discussion. Are people better served by lots and lots of very small locations or by fewer, larger, better-stocked, better-staffed locations? I don’t think there’s a simple answer. Nationwide, there appears to be roughly one library outlet for every 18,000 people–but that’s one of those averages that is as useful as saying that a river with wide banks and a deep central channel is an average of five feet deep.

One point that surprised me a little: The IMLS definition of a library requires paid staff and public funding. Given that a number of small libraries appear to be entirely operated by volunteers, I assume they have some minimal stipend that qualifies them.

I do know that there are lots of libraries around that don’t meet these definitions. A family member even operates one of them–and it’s quite appropriate that it wouldn’t show up in IMLS reports, as it has no public funding of any sort and doesn’t pretend to be an actual public library.

My problem with negativity

I don’t believe it serves the library field to repeat the false notion that American public libraries are shutting down all over the place. (Note that qualifier “American”–I really can’t speak to the situation in the UK.)

For that matter, I don’t believe that always stressing the negative side of library budget issues is healthy.

For what it’s worth, the 2009 IMLS report does note that public library funding has grown in constant dollars since 1999…and the funding per capita has grown since 1999. No, it hasn’t grown as much as usage, but overall, libraries were better funded at the depth of the recession than they were ten years earlier.

I think that’s an important story. I think it’s important that Oakland, a city with enormous budget and other problems, made a point of not cutting library services in this year’s budget–but that story doesn’t show up in the library literature as much as any cut would.

I think that’s a shame. Building from strength works better than trying to stave off weakness.

That’s why this post’s title begins “Public library openings”–because, on the whole, more libraries and branches have opened than have closed.

A few months back, one of the many Library Society of the World FriendFeedFolk made an idle comment about setting me up as an institution.

I trust the person didn’t actually mean that I need to be institutionalized. Let’s assume that’s the case. I hope I’m still a few decades away from being institutionalized…

While I’d certainly accept an ongoing “consultancy” or, say, Jack-of-some-trades Emeritus position, with adequate funding (let’s call it $15,000/year plus inflation, for at least four years), somehow I don’t think that’s going to happen. I’d still like to hope that there’s a way to make a more project-oriented version of this happen–namely, the future outlined in “Prospectus: An Ongoing Public Library Social Network Scan” [which I've updated slightly since it was first posted, and which appears in differently-modified form in Bibs & Blather within the current Cites & Insights] and expanded in “A library is…”

Over the last few days, as I’ve reviewed the full second draft of Successful Social Networking in Public Libraries and started determining how to modify it for the third (submission) draft, I’ve realized and found out some additional items that may add meat to all of this.

The IMLS Oops

I knew all along that the best source of key data for libraries in all 50 states (plus DC and some American territories) was IMLS–but last August, when I tried to download and open the latest public library statistics, I found that it wouldn’t work: The Access file wouldn’t open in Excel and the flat file was not something I could handle. (The Access file is actually three linked .mdb databases.)

Either I did something wrong back then (quite possible), something’s changed on my computer (also possible–I do have Windows Update auto-enabled), or something’s changed elsewhere in the universe, because when I tried the same thing today, it worked.

This would have been nice last August–or, better, last June before I started any of the library scans–if only because the IMLS database includes the actual names that public libraries use, which either aren’t always used in the state spreadsheets (available from most but not all states) or aren’t in columns that I found obvious. As a result, some library searches were clumsier than they needed to be, and it’s even possible that I missed a few.

So: If I did have funding to do a complete sweep for 2012 and later years, I could apparently work with the national files even without buying new software. That’s a good thing. And having the actual library names in one neat column does make life easier…

The potential side-effects

If I could get ongoing funding for this project, I could be persuaded quite easily to treat it as a form of personal sponsorship (and yes, $15,000/year plus inflation would be about right), which would mean:

• PDFs and other electronic output directly from the studies themselves would be freely available and would carry a Creative Commons BY (attribution) license. (If there are spreadsheets, they’d carry a CC0 license, although that’s silly since data is fundamentally not copyrightable anyway.)
• I would retroactively change the Creative Commons license for Cites & Insights and Walt at Random from CC BY-NC to CC BY–that is, “use it as you will, as long as you give me credit.”
• I would treat all of my books for which I have full control as carrying a Founder’s License: That is, I’d dedicate them to the public domain after 14 years. That would include all my books before Future Libraries: Dreams, Madness & Reality–which is more than 14 years old, but I’m not in a position to make it public domain. (When Being Analog turns 14, in another year, I’d ask ALA Editions whether it’s out of print and thus has control return to me. If so, I’d make it public domain.)

So there’s an amplification. Any takers?