librarian.net

dear annoyed…

Thanks Dan Chudnov, for saying what many of us have wanted to say.

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pimped bookcarts

The Unshelved Pimp My Bookcart winners are up and available for the looking. Unlike the Bookcart Drill Teams where bookcarts have to have a semblance of structural integrity, some of these fanciful creations seem to have almost no functionality at all. See all the entrants here. My faves: Food for Thought (and handsome book vendor), Jetson’s Skypad Apartments, Spookmobile, and Research Help Five Cents!

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little pieces of things that might interest you

A few links that have been keeping me from inbox zero for the past few weeks.

• “…the increased popularity of the Internet in America has not been correlated with an overall increase in reported sexual offenses; overall sexual offenses against children have gone steadily down in the last 18 years” Note: this does not say “oh the internet is safe!” It just says that the internet getting more popular doesn’t correlate with sexual offenses against children. More from the Research Advisory Board of the Internet Safety Technical Task Force
• Speaking of Berkman people, I’ll be hanging out in the Boston area over the turkey weekend and likely going to this event that Saturday. Anyone in the area should consider going, it looks like fun.
• Evergreen is gaining traction as an ILS that works even for big/complicated systems. The Traverse Area just went live with their Evergreen implementation. Doesn’t that look nice? More about Michigan’s open source ILS project.
• I’ve been reading more lately. I read Cory Doctorow’s book Content (my review) and think it should be required reading for librarians or anyone else in the various digital content industries. If you’d like a copy, you can read it for free online, or if you’re a librarian or a teacher, you can request a donated copy from the website. I already gave mine away.
• FCC broadband bill passed. This might help Farmer Bob [my generic term for the people over on this side of the digital divide] get broadband.
• Pew Report “When Technology Fails” (and even really great technology sometimes does). The results will likely not surprise the librarians. “15% of tech users were unable to fix their devices” and “48% felt discouraged with the amount of effort needed to fix the problem.”

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ruminating about privacy

I was emailing with a friend this week and he was saying how it seems strange that librarans are so aggressive in their defense of privacy while at the same time the population seems to be more and more shifting towards openness and “hey here’s my list of books” behavior outside of their library. I always draw the line between what people reveal about themselves versus what their institutions reveal, or must legally disclose, about them.

I also often feel that one of the reasons we’re in this strange place is because many privacy issues are ones that technology could be solving for us. Yet, at the same time the technology we’re working with doesn’t allow us the granularity of making, for example, patron reading information available in the aggregate while still keeping the patron’s identity completely private. We have many patrons

Patron 1 wants to make sure no one ever knows what they are reading. Tells the OPAC to not keep his reading list. Knows his PIN. Wants to make sure the public access PCs don’t retain records of the sites he’s visited. Is a bit horrified that the library data we do keep isn’t in some way encrypted or otherwise protected.
Patron 2 wants to know every book she has ever checked out. Wants the library to leave the name of the book she has on hold on her answering machine. Wants her friend to be able to pick the book up for her at the library. Doesn’t remember her PIN and finds it vaguely annoying that she needs more than her library card number to use the OPAC.

A privacy solution that works for Patron 1 becomes a usability impediment to Patron 2. While libraries have the responsibility to keep both patrons’ data safe, they also have the responsibility to be usable and accomodating to both patrons. Technology, in my opinion, can address these issues but librarians have to a) embrace it b) request it from their vendors c) be willing to tolerate the learning curve that comes with any new technology.

I’m off to the tiny library today to help them with their slow automation project. In the meantime, these are the articles I have been reading about privacy lately. They’re about the information the mailman has, not the librarian, but it could apply to any of us at our job as well. The blog post is about an NPR story following a mail carrier on her route. She talks about what she knows about the world and the economy based on what people are getting delivered. She is supposed to keep people’s mail private, and she never mentions any names. Yet, there’s a lot of metadata in mail delivery, things the mailman knows. The blog’s author wonders how simple it would be to identify the people getting mail delivered from the information the mail carrier imparts. Feel free to read the rest.

• What Your Mailman Knows
• Abandoning the Envelope Analogy

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OCLC kerfuffle, summarized in a way I agree with

Stefano Mazzocchi has a summary of the issues in the new OCLC policy dispute. Worth reading, mostly free of handwaving. [thanks peter]

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What is up with me? Some talks and notes.

I just got back from Albany, New York where I was a presenter at Albany Public’s fifth annual Reader’s Advisory Conference. It was a fun day. I’m a night owl so I missed Nora Rawlinson’s talk in the morning. She runs the website EarlyWord which is a nifty blog+more about publishing and libraries. My talk was about Library 2.0 and what tools and tips there are in there for Reader’s Advisory.

I’ve been talking about 2.0 stuff for a while but I put together a whole new talk from the ground up just so I could get current links, examples and maybe some snappier slides. I’ve been using Keynote for more of my talks lately which allows me to have versions available for people in Keynote, PDF and PowerPoint formats. Anyone who wants to grab a copy of the talk, please feel free. I also uploaded a hyperlinked version of my Colorado Association of Libraries talk along with the slides so people can follow along and see what I was talking about.

Now that that’s all taken care of, I can say that my public speaking for 2008 is officially over except for some lingering receipts and invoicing. I really tried to push myself this year to say “Yes.” to as many people as possible and meet as many librarians as I could. It was at times totally exhausting, incredibly rewarding and, as always a huge learning experience. Next year I’ll be doing probably slightly less of the same as I help a local library here with their automation project and spend more time with my boyfriend and many good books. I will be at the Superconference and Computers in Libraries, among other places, so I’m sure you’ll be seeing me around.

Thanks to everyone who has ever been an audience member, a conference coordinator or an agreeable boss or co-worker as I’ve been doing all this stuff. It’s been a really rewarding year on the road and I hope I’ve been able to direct some of that positive energy outwards as well.

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What is up with the Google Books settlement?

I’m as confused as you are about the Google Books settlement. I’ve found a few analyses helpful.

• Principles and Recommendations for the Google Book Search Settlement by my friend James Grimmelmann
• ARL’s 23 page document A Guide for the Perplexed: Libraries & the Google Library Project Settlement

It’s a more “okay now walk the talk” look at what the settlement says explicitly, what it allows for, and how it should be handled.

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What is up with OCLC?

This all started with a little wink-wink posting about OCLC from Tim over at LibraryThing which was the first I’d heard about OCLC’s policy changes. As someone who doesn’t interact with OCLC or their data too much, I didn’t really understand this and had to wait for some clarification posts to understand both what was going on and how it affected people and projects like LibraryThing and Open Library. The upshot as I understand it is that OCLC is basically saying “Sure you can share your records, but not with people or organizations who materially compete with us” That’s my summary anyhow. Here’s the non-legalese policy on the OCLC site. Here’s the more legalese version. Here’s a wiki version of the changes between the “old” new policy and the new policy. Isn’t technology grand? Karen Calhoun a VP over at OCLC has written a defense of the new policy on her own blog; there is some lively discussion happening in the comments. There is also this podcast of Roy Tennant and Karen Calhoun talking with Richard Wallis from Talis (whose business model is also potentially affected by this policy change) about the ramifications of this change.

So, the policy OCLC has put up has been revised somewhat, doesn’t go into effect until February, and gives people a lot of time to think about what if anything they want to do about this. Tim Spalding has a business model that is compromised by OCLCs refusal to let their members share these records. The Open Library project is also possible compromised and Aaron Swartz has written two posts about the policy change: Stealing Your Library: The OCLC Powergrab and OCLC On The Run. He also directs people to the Stop OCLC Petition if you’d like to sign on to ask OCLC to repeal these changes. More community discussion taking place at MetaFilter, Inside Higher Ed, and Slashdot and code4lib is maintaining a wiki with links to more commentary. I’m still catching up on the back and forth and may write more later, but it’s interesting to watch this unfold.

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world usability day is tomorrow

If you’re into the whole usability idea — and more and more our interfaces to technology are all we have when interacting wiht the goods, services and government in our lives — then you might like to know that World Usability Day is tomorrow. I’ll noodle around a bit looking at my own websites and I suggest that you and your libraries do the same.
Technology should enhance our lives, not add to our stress or cause danger through poor design or poor quality. It is our duty to ensure that this technology is effective, efficient, satisfying and reliable, and that it is usable by all people. This is particularly important for people with disabilities, because technology can enhance their lives, letting them fully participate in work, social and civic experiences. Human error is a misnomer. Technology should be developed knowing that human beings have certain limitations. Human error will occur if technology is not both easy-to-use and easy-to-understand. We need to reduce human error that results from bad design.

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America’s Most Dangerous Librarians

Mother Jones had a good article (print version) about the Connecticut librarians ["radical bookworms" in MJ's terms, oy!] who fought the USA PATRIOT Act. It’s a little overblown, in my opinion, but has a good sequence of events. Worth understanding that though the National Security Letter of USAPA was deemed unconstitutional, many other parts of the USA PATRIOT Act are still with us and will be into this next administration. More Daily Kos discussion on this topic yesterday.
National security letters are a little-known fbi tool originally used in foreign intelligence surveillance to obtain phone, financial, and electronic records without court approval. Rarely employed until 2001, they exploded in number after the Patriot Act drastically eased restrictions on their use, allowing nsls to be served by fbi agents on anyone—whether or not they were the subject of a criminal investigation. In 2000, 8,500 nsls were issued; by contrast, between 2003 and 2005 the fbi issued more than 143,000 nsls, only one of which led to a conviction in a terrorism case.

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do you make stuff? library stuff?

Since my bank receipt today came with holly berries on it, I figure it’s time to start the holiday sidebar.

I’m not much of a shopper, but I’m aware that I am not particularly normal in this regard. So, similar to last year I’ll have a sidebar on librarian.net illustrating particularly excellent things that mike make good gifts for librarians. Feel free to add your own in the comments. Last year I got both of my parents woodblock prints from David Bull — a guy I know from MetaFilter — and am particpating in his affiliate program this year. I also have a pair of miniature book earrings from ShoeString press that are pretty nifty. Every year at MetaFilter we do a listing of shops run by MeFites, if there are librarian.net readers that have wares to hock, please feel free to drop me a note or put a comment below.

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techstatic has launched

I’ve been writing more and travelling more this year in compensation for not doing teeny library work as much. One of my newer gigs has been as a reviewer for Rachel Singer Gordon’s new project The Tech Static, helping librarians do collection development for tech titles. I did a short review of a DVD/manual for people learning Access 2007. There’s already a lot of good content up there. Add it to your feed reader and check the meta category for more background information.

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talk: technology + libraries what are we doing?

I gave a talk and did a little chitchat breakout session at the South Central Kansas Library System on Thursday. I’m in Colorado today so this is just a quickie update to say that slides and notes from my talk are available here: Technology and Libraries: What are we DOING? As always it was a pleasure to get to come to Kansas again.

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IMLS and the new administration

I’m sure I’ll be dribbling out these little notices for the next few months, but I just learned that Bill Ivey has been appointed “to lead the Obama transition team with responsibility for the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Institute of Museum and Library Services.” Here’s an interesting article about Ivey discussing how cultural pushes by administrations are not seem in the same way as actual public policies.

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go vote

I voted. I feel that only one candidate shares my values of intellectual freedom and privacy and the importance of public institutions like libraries. If you’re not against that sort of thing, please go vote today. Thank you.

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Happy Ninth Birthday LISNews

Happy ninth birthday to the entire crew at LISNews. Blake’s written a nice little “how it’s going” blurb and would like anyone who is interested to chip in and contribute. If you’re a nascent blogger and don’t feel ready for your own blog, consider adding the occasional comment or story over at LISNews.

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Harvard decides to opt out of Google book scanning

In light of the recent Google Books/APA settlement, Harvard has examined the details and decided not to be part of the project after all.
Harvard’s university-library director, Robert C. Darnton, wrote in a letter to the library staff, “the settlement provides no assurance that the prices charged for access will be reasonable, especially since the subscription services will have no real competitors [and] the scope of access to the digitized books is in various ways both limited and uncertain.” He also expressed concern about the quality of the scanned books, which “in many cases will be missing photographs, illustrations, and other pictorial works, which will reduce their utility for research.”

Update: According to the comments, I had this sort of wrong. Harvard is deciding to not have Google scan their copyrighted books but the digitzation project proceeds apace. Thanks Jon.

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podcast suggest: Unquiet History

For those of you who thrilled to Matthew Battles’ book Library: An Unquiet History should try out his podcast — similarly titled but not library-specific — Unquiet History. I’m currently enjoying listening to a short history of medeival urban garbage. Fun!

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2008 debates - I am a sucker for sexy factchecking

John McCain mentioned in one presidential debate that Barack Obama wastefully earmarked $3 million for “an overhead projector” for Adler Planetarium. If you’re like me, you were probably thinking “What? Projectors don’t cost that much!” It’s true, the regular kind don’t, but an Adler’s Zeiss Mark VI projector does. I enjoyed reading the press release that the Adler put out in response.

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Supreme Court decision concerning “free exercise”

I think this is important. It’s a case, one of hundreds, that the US Supreme Court declined to review. “There is no free exercise right to be free from any reference in public elementary schools to the existence of families in which the parents are of different gender combinations … public schools are not obliged to shield individual students from ideas which potentially are religiously offensive, particularly when the school imposes no requirement that the student agree with or affirm those ideas,” the court said. Some more details from a previous OIF post and the School Law blog.

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