The ironic thing about National Library Week is that many of the librarians are so busy doing programming that there’s less going on than usual in the blogonets. I’ve been scanning some nifty little projects as they’ve come down the pike here, figured I’d share them.
WeAreFree2 - not only is the library free as in no cost, it gives you the freedom to… do lost of things. This nifty little project from the San Francisco Bay Area Libraries marks the 50th Anniversary of NLW
Scott Douglas, the author of Quiet Please, Dispatches from a Public Librarian, was profiled in USA Today and the Orange County Register, though it appears they made him take off his glasses for part of their photo shoot. Do us proud Scott!
This is something that’s been in the “to post” hopper for a while. Kevin Kelly (of Wired fame) has a great report on his blog about a colleague who took a tour of the World’s Largest Audio-Visual Archive, the just-opened National Audio-Visual Conservation Center at the Library of Congress.
I went to see Meredith give a talk at a local library the night before last about Web 2.0 and the Future of Libraries. It was a small crowd, but decent for rural Vermont, and it was sort of neat to see the librarians I usually only see at conferences just getting to hang out. Meredith gave a good talk and the follow-up questions were, somewhat predictably, “Well what can WE do?” and I thought she had some decent concrete suggestions, one of the main ones was redesign your website. I’ll be talking more in a future post about things small libraries can concretely do with technology but this “what can WE do” is a question we should always be prepared to answer.
Between taxes and travel and houseguests and springtime, I’ve been reading less and posting less than usual. This week is National Library Week. Is there a good-looking National Library Week website that you’ve found? Post it in the comments please. I’ve been enjoying the AL Focus NLW videos which you can find on AL Focus and also at their account on blip.tv.
My “to post” bookmarks list is longish and though I try to spare you just a del.icio.us linkbarf, here are some links I’ve liked.
Miki Jourdan is a librarian for National Geographic during the day. At night she’s a dj for Radio Sweetheart. She has put together TWO HOURS of singls inspired by literature. Peek here for the schedule of when you can hear it.
Library Journal’s John Berry, looking for luck (another way of mentioning “OMG Flickr has video!”)
You’ve got two days. Go! I don’t want to influence your opinion much but I will tell you that I have already used the word “sadistic” once. I tend to agree with this comment on web4lib.
The review process comprises two stages. First, you’ll step through ten web pages that show and describe the proposed new graphic (visual) design of the ALA site. Each of these pages presents a type of page in the design. Each has a textual description (summary or detailed) of the page type at the top, and provides below it a screen shot of a sample page of that type.
But I do have a backlog of things to tell you about and only a medium amount of time to tell them to you, so I will be a little brief. I have been in New Hampshire peeking in at some of the election stuff and visiting with friends and now I’m really going to get going work and travelwise starting tomorrow. While I did my reading wrap-up here, I did my swimming and guestroom wrap-ups over at jessamyn.com. This year I may try to revive my “libraries visited” list now that I’ve got Flickr to help me out with the organizing, but it’s too early to tell if that will really work.
I’ve been to one library this year so far, the all-new Sargent Memorial Library in Boxborough MA. The library was way the heck up a hill and in a teeny building when I was growing up and we went there all the time. The librarians were always encouraging me to read whatever I wanted and my Mom stopped in often to get the new Ed McBain mysteries. The library outgrew its space and an all-new library was built and opened in 2005. I went there with my Mom yesterday and said hi to the library director who said she reads my blog (hi Maureen!). The last time I went to the old library as a patron I was probably in my late teens and I don’t think they even had computers yet. The new library is huge and lovely and has wifi. It’s also walking distance from the elementary school which is good news all around. It was fun to pop in there and get a real eyeful of how things have changed.
So here are a few things I thought you might be interested in, and my apologies for the brevity.
Speaking of back and forth the most recent Pew Report has some interesting stats about how people go looking for information. I haven’t read it yet, but there is some discussion over at web4lib both about how their conclusions seem a little strange relative to the data but also discussion about a study about user satisfaction, sort of an exit survey. The formatting on that page is terrible but it has links to more information.
This seems like it will be a fun party or set of parties at ALA, and c’mon bring a gently used book and get a FREE DRINK? Almost worth the train ride to Philly.
I’m not going to ALA. As I mentioned before, I’m not a member and Philadelphia in January is not my idea of a good time. However, I do stay in touch with many ALA-ers and Monika Antonelli brought this Task Force of the Environment Campaign “Cup by Cup for a Greener ALA” It’s very very simple
Bring a reusable cup to Midwinter
Fill it with a favorite beverage
Raise your cup and tell colleagues how you are helping the planet
Drink, repeat & support TFOE-SRRT efforts toward a sustainable ALA.
One of the things that is distressing about having these big destination events is the huge amounts of waste that are generated. Council alone prints up tons of paper documents that were already distributed electronically, many of which are recycled (hopefully) or thrown out (likely) right after the meeting.
Even conscientious librarians who might bring their meals if they were just going to work wind up buying bottled water and packaged snacks because they’re trapped in the wasteland that is vast convention centers. Spend a little bit of time beforehand this year and try to pack a travel mug, a few powerbars or some fruit, your own pen and notebook, and maybe some teabags or Emergen-C that can keep you from spending time, money and resources just keeping yourself fed, hydrated and in prime note taking shape. Enjoy yourselves.
As someone who speaks often on the digital divide and related issues, I’ve developed a pretty standard answer to the question of why the digital divide matters. It goes like this “We are a democracy. People who vote need to have access to as much reputable information as possible so they can make these and other choices. The internet is becoming an important ‘place’ to find this information. Unequal access to the internet creates unequal access to government.” The real reasoning is much deeper with examples — FEMA forms online, job applications, required email addresses for access to certain products and services — but that’s it in a nutshell. So, I’ve been dismayed at the lack of hot and botheredness about this issue that I seem to see within our profession. And it was weird to try to adjust the talking points when discussing the digital divide in a country without a democracy.
However, once in a while I see librarianship’s higher-ups really going to bat for the underdog. Recently the ALA and others submitted statements to the U.S. Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs hearing, “E-Government 2.0: Improving Innovation, Collaboration, and Access” lamenting the fact that as we move towards “E-Goverment” (ugh, it’s just government, don’t call it something else because you access it via a browser, do we call it telegovernment when you call someone?) libraries are often THE access point to government information and services and yet have neither a place at the table or a hand in the creation of the tools. This amounts to an unfunded mandate at a time when libraries are already grappling with budget cuts, CIPA and the shifting profession generally.
Public libraries serve over 97 percent of the total population. There are over 9,000 library systems and over 17,000 libraries including branches. Increasingly government agencies refer individuals specifically to their local public libraries for assistance and access to the Internet for citizen-government interactions. Yet public libraries are not considered members of the E-Government team. Libraries struggle with increasingly smaller budgets and expensive ever- changing technology in order to assist thousands of Americans on a daily basis because the public relies on them.
Happy Birthday OIF! I will be teaching a half-day continuing education seminar at Simmons on Intellectual Freedom and I have been digging through their extensive website for primary documentation and remembering just how extensive and excellent it is. Intellectual freedom principles were one of the major things that brought me to librarianship and THE thing responsible for my sticking with it. I am proud of the work the ALA does to support intellectual freedom, though the challenges are still coming far too quickly for my tastes and I worry about ALA’s ability to keep up with IF topics in a digital world that they still don’t seem to quite understand. One of the things I do on Wikipedia is keep the Library Bill of Rights free from soapboxing and point-of-view hectoring. It’s a tougher job than you might think.
I keep things unread in my newsreader when I want to refer to them later. Unfortuntely the “Mark as Unread” option in the menu of NetNewsWire is right next to “Mark All as Read” so I’d like to share these with you, before disaster strikes.
Andrea Mercado’s post Hacking Firefox: customizations for my library tells you all you need to know about why Firefox is such an excellent choice for a library browser. She discusses how to make the browser on their public access machines versatile yet secure. Very nice.
Laura Crossett taks about how to keep it real in small town American libraries. “We don’t beat Google by trying to best Google. We beat Google by being the thing–the things, really–that Google can never be.”
Fiona Bradley and Karen Schenider and Meredith Farkas all talk about ALAs obtuseness regarding “virtual participation” It’s a bit of a misnomer since people can, in some ways, participate virtually. However, they just can’t vote, attend Council meetings or do a lot of the other things that woud hve an impact. So they can participate virtually, sort of, just not significantly. I wish I didn’t have this icky feeling that this resistance to virtual participation was not just plain old technophobia on ALAs part but the actual desire to get more money into ALAs coffers via the Midwinter meeting. When that money is coming from librarians like Meredith and Laura and Karen and maybe even myself who would love to participate more, just at a somewhat lower cost, it rankles. I have really enjoyed my ALA vacation.
I explain the word “default” to my sudents often. To people new with computers, the ideas of the comptuers default settings is a little perplexing. Fred Stutzman highlights part of David Weinberger’s post about Facebook where he discusses how Facebook’s default privacy settings are all wrong. Completely and totally wrong. Don’t miss one of Fred’s earlier posts where he discusses how to turn the Facebook Beacon off to stop it from telling marketers more about you than you may be aware of.
You can get 75K plus decent benefits to be a usability officer at ALA. They say “senior” but to the best of my knowledge there aren’t any other usability officers there currently. I’m not sure where officer actually comes from, maybe some ALA-er can explain? In any case, if I were the Usability Officer after I changed the job listings to not spell Website with a capital W, I would ask very specifically what this requirement in the ad means.
The ability to work in a team environment and between two universes of Information Technology and Librarianship is essential in order to maintain an outcome-oriented, global vision.
I’m curious why those are deemed to be two universes instead of, say, two moons orbiting around one big planet of helping people do the things they want to do and go where they want to go. I’m sure Jenny is asking the same questions. I hope they find someone, but I wonder what affect that person will be able to have on the in-process-for-many-years-already website redesign?
Hi. My name is Jessamyn West and I'll be your librarian today. I work in rural Vermont as a library consultant and also am a moderator at MetaFilter.com. My personal blog is at jessamyn.com. Feel free to contact me if you have questions or comments.
