librarian.net

Blake Carver has launched his new site LISWire this week. Working with Robin “birdie” Blum they are creating a site where businesses and individuals can send news releases and get them online and subscribable/linkable. I am looking forward to being able to send this URL to all the nice well-meaning people who send me press releases in email. I always write back to them, “this sounds great, do you have a URL where I can link to this information?” and now I can give them someplace to send it so it can be linkable by them and readable by others. Blake is inviting feedback on the new site, if you have a second, drop by and give him some critique.

Between now and Sunday, April 27, Radical Reference invites you to suggest subject headings and/or cross-references which will then be compiled and sent to the Library of Congress. You can either choose one previously suggested by Sandy Berman (pdf or spreadsheet) or propose your own.

As someone who has been the recipient of Sandy Berman’s cc’s on letters to the LoC, I think this is a great idea. Still waiting for SEX TOY PARTIES and TRANSHUMANISM in my classification schemes, I am.

I think the Read posters are fine. However, they are also amusing for various reasons, some more than others. Your Neighborhood Librarian takes a few to task in amusing ways.

I’ve been sort of sitting on this story for a few weeks because I was hoping someone would do a more comprehensive “here’s what really happened” post about it, but maybe that’s not going to happen. The loose outline is this, from American Libraries. Library worker notices patron looking at material online that she suspects is not just offensive but illegal. Her supervisor tells her to give the patron (who is deaf/mute and may have developmental disabilities) a note telling him to stop, which she does. The next day she decided to alert the police who come and arrest the man and seize the library computer. The library worker revealed her part in the arrest to her supervisor. Soon thereafter, the library worker was fired right before her probationary period as a library employee was up. The county says the two events — the arrest of the patron and the firing — were unrelated. Privacy laws prevent this assertion from being tested one way or the other which is one of the things that makes this situation so vexing from a “what really happened” perspective. The library worker is suing. Here are a few more articles on the subject.

• Firing of library worker causes uproar - LA Times.
• Family Friendly Libraries gives award to librarian
• Child pornography is NOT free speech - blog post on the LibraryLaw blog. Please note the bizarre assertion in the comments regarding something Judith Krug may have said over 25 years ago.
• City Honors Worker Fired for Reporting Child Porn
• Was Probationary Tulare County Staffer Fired for Reporting Child Porn?
  - from Library Journal
• Library bloggers’ coverage makes the news - note back and forth in the comments with differing versions of what realy happened

I really wish ALA had come out and made some sort of a statement on this, but I’m not sure what it would have said. For what it’s worth, I have not seen anyone leap to the defense of the library administrator/firing except in a “we don’t have all the facts” sort of way.

To me, the way this differs from the standard USA PATRIOT Act computer seizures and reporting is that in this case the assertio was that a crime was being committed. So, while going on fishing expeditions and seizing computers because you think someone might be doing something illegal is something that a library has the right to object to, saying “this patron is breaking the law in the library” is a different story altogether. I think even talking about child pornography issues online is difficult and complicated — an amusing side note is seeing which comments forms on the web people can’t type the word “porn” into — and intellectual freedom issues are tricky in a different way. I’m sorry this library assistant didn’t get better guidance and I’m sorry this is being tried in the media in sensationalist ways.

It’s Boston Public Library! Photos and metadata! Red sox in swimsuits! Neato. Meanwhile NYPL “soft launches” a redesign for their Digital Gallery. Go peek. Give feedback. [via spinstah]

Slate is looking for someone to work two days a week writing the Explainer column, answering questions about issues in the news. The application seems simple enough. You have to send your sample answers to a yahoo.com address which seems a little weird. All you people looking at how to become a freelance librarian, start here.

After Rochelle and Jenna and Laura. Some of these are by choice and some are just… weird broken parts of my brain but it hardly matters which now, does it?

• I can’t set the time on the clock in my car and it’s set to some crazy time [i.e. not like an hour or two off]. I’d like to, but this time of year if I’m not driving the car it’s too cold to be in it. Erica?
• My bank is in Washington state. While I do a lot of e-banking with them, I generally mail my paychecks to my bank to deposit them. This isn’t strictly technological in nature, but it’s definitely an old-fashionedness that looks like a tech-not.
• I can barely use my cell phone. I can take a picture. I can make and receive phone calls. I can text, but I still try to answer it when someone is text messaging me. I like to think I’d be a better study if the thing worked in my house.
• I have very little e-book curiosity. My interest in e-books is purely professional.
• I have an iPod I rarely listen to. I have an iPhone I don’t use much (both were gifts). I like to have them, but I usually just listen to the radio in my car and iTunes on my laptop at home.
• I have created more podcasts than I have listened to.
• I don’t play online games much. I play Scrabulous (come find me on facebook!) and that’s pretty much it. When you have a job that’s online, spending more time there just doesn’t seem as appealing.
• I use my TV to watch movies only, and even then pretty rarely. I was a Nielsen family earlier in the month and I sent the whole book back blank.
• I don’t have voice mail, just an answering machine. No caller ID, so please tell me who you are when you call.
• When I have to set the alarm to wake up, which happens rarely, I’m as likely to set it for PM as for AM. This is more of an absentminded professor thing than a tech-NO, but I’ve sortof never gotten the hang of setting an alarm on something without hands
• And lastly, because I grew up in the country, I pretty much don’t understand locks. I have a heck of a time with any door that locks, remembering which direction to turn the key, or rememebring my keys period.

I can do pretty much anything with any sort of computer, but that doesn’t mean I know everything or do everything with technology. How about you?

The New York Public Library is blogging. A little more backstory from Jay and Josh at the labs. It’s really neat to see the blog being used to surface content from the collection, not just fancy images, but all sorts of stuff: NY history, ephemera and even a little conversation.

My pal Hugh McGuire — you probably know him from Librivox, he swears on his blog too — wrote a post with some words to the wise: Defining What You Are For (just like porn). He explains how one of the reasons porn is so darned profitable is “[b]ecause the porn biz understands exactly what it is for” and then wonders if other institutions like newspapers and libraries really understand what they are for. It’s not primarily a post about libraries, but since Hugh is the president of the Board of Directors of the Atwater Library (a library with a drupal website and an apartment inside it, those who know me know that I hyperventilate as I type this) this is a topic near and dear to him.

But the real value a newspaper performs is not giving me good articles, it’s putting it all together. The mere provision of information is worthless now, because anyone can do it (even me).

This is why blogs - at least in the techno-intelligencia - win. Blogs are excellent selectors of information, while newspapers are pretty clunky at it - because for the past 300 years they existed in an ecosystem where information was scarce. Now information (and access to it) is abundant. So a site like BoingBoing becomes one of the most popular on the net: their craft is not providing information, it’s selecting it. And they’re good at it.

Slow reading points me to the Not in WorldCat blog, showcasing weird funky and obscure books that you can’t find in one of the many libraries Worldcat covers.

Worldcat.org is the public face of the largest combined (or “union”) library catalog in the world. Library folks usually refer to it as OCLC (Online Computer Library Center). Currently OCLC/WorldCat catalogs over 1 billion items from over 60,000 libraries around the world. This blog is not affiliated with OCLC/Worldcat in any way. It’s just an outlet for one bookseller/librarian (me) to feature unusual, rare and interesting items that exist outside of WorldCat’s vast reach.