As you know, Vermont was hit hard by Hurricane Irene and a lot of resultant flooding. I am fine and my house is fine. I’m not sure what the library damage assessment is at this point but I’ve been hanging close to the Vermont Flooding facebook page and doing some “on the fly” reference with some of the local information I have access to. I came across this post on the Roxbury Free Library’s facebook page and smiled. I hope she gets a ride.

The Library of Congress just released its 181 page report “The State of Recorded Sound Preservation in the United States: A National Legacy at Risk in the Digital Age” talking about the challenges of digitally archiving sound recording. BoingBoing gives a nice summary “[T]he copyright laws that the recording industry demanded are so onerous that libraries inevitably have to choose whether to be law-breakers or whether to abandon their duty to preserve and archive audio.” More analysis from OSNews.

And if anyone’s wondering where I’ve been this week, the answer is “Mired in getting copyright permissions for the intellectual property in my book. Thanks for asking.” I have a pretty firm grasp of Fair Use and have been trying to follow the guidelines for Fair Use in Media Literacy Education. I signed a book contract that specifically says that I am responsible for assuring that my materials are being used with permission. Despite this, my publisher (who I am quite fond of otherwise) is risk-averse and wants to make sure I have permission anyhow. Permission that I assert that I don’t need for small screenshots of, say, Google search results or an ALA nested menu.

This gets even more confusing when some of the organizations involved claim that I need permission when I don’t. Since Fair Use, like the Americans with Disabilities Act, is mostly something that gets hammered out through litigation there is no strict set of guidelines as to what Fair Use is. So, big companies with a lot to lose err on the side of compliance with other big companies’ requests, requests that may be extralegal. So Google can’t legally tell you to only use the public domain offerings from Google Books (which they admit) but they make a polite request, a polite request that sounds a lot like a terms of service.

So right now I’m waiting to hear back from Facebook after filling out a form on their website asking for permission to use a screenshot. They say it will take 1-2 weeks. I am confident that my screenshot is fair use. My editor also thinks it is fair use. However they’re not willing to risk it. And so we wait.

I upgraded WordPress this week. Please let me know if anything is wonky.

This is an exchange from facebook with names changed to protect the innocent. It highlights something I find happening to me in the library world all the time — having to balance solving the problem with following the rules. The person posting the update needed an article. The rules said they had to pay $31.50 for an article. This didn’t pass the sanity check ["$30 for one article from a journal, that's crazy!"] and the librarian was grousing. They’re also grousing to a huge network of librarians, many of whom had free [or, paid for by their institution] access to the same content. I saw Nicole speak in Florida this past week and one of the quotes she repeats again and again is “With enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow” meaning that a particular coding problem that might vex one or two programmers is unlikely to vex, say, a thousand programmers.

My Jessamyn corollary to this is “With enough libraries, all content is free.” That is to say… if the world was one big library and we all had interlibrary loan at that library, we could lend anything to anyone. The funding structures of libraries currently mean that in many cases we’re duplicating [and paying for] content that we could be sharing. This is at the heart of a lot of the copyright battles of today and, to my mind, what’s really behind the EBSCO/Gale/vendors. Time Magazine is losing money and not having a good plan for keeping their income level up, decides to offer exclusive contracts to vendors and allows them to bid. EBSCO wins, Gale loses. Any library not using EBSCO loses. Patrons lose and don’t even know they’ve lost.

When I was blogging for BoingBoing I often came across content that I didn’t have access to. I was also confronted with, in many cases, unreasonable fees requested [$9.95 for 100 words, really?]. Me being me, I could always find a librarian with access to, say the Times Online archive, or old articles in JSTOR. But I also felt it was cheating. But I was also annoyed that being resourceful is also somehow cheating. And I knew that many of my patrons with fewer resources would just pony up. Where do we draw the line between enforcing other people’s rules and solving problems with our patrons? Now that we’re getting more and more networked, this whole idea of local content works for some things [historical photos, town history] and not for others [journal articles that are held in thousands of libraries worldwide]. Do we have a plan for moving forward?

For decades, we’ve assumed that inequality in relation to technology has everything to do with “access” and that if we fix the access problem, all will be fine. This is the grand narrative of concepts like the “digital divide.” Yet, increasingly, we’re seeing people with similar levels of access engage in fundamentally different ways. And we’re seeing a social media landscape where participation “choice” leads to a digital reproduction of social divisions. This is most salient in the States which is intentionally the focus of my talk here today.

I suggest you read it all, it’s not terribly long, but if you’re part of the tl;dr generation, the salient point for libraries is this

If you are trying to connect with the public, where you go online matters. If you choose to make Facebook your platform for civic activity, you are implicitly suggesting that a specific class of people is more worth your time and attention than others. Of course, splitting your attention can also be costly and doesn’t necessarily mean that you’ll be reaching everyone anyhow. You’re damned if you do and damned if you don’t. The key to developing a social media strategy is to understand who you’re reaching and who you’re not and make certain that your perspective is accounting for said choices. Understand your biases and work to counter them.

You think you’re my friend; I disagree. We may be able to work together in real life without needing to confront the basic fact that you like me but not vice versa. But if you Facebook-add me and say “We dated,” what am I supposed to do? Uncheck that box and check “I don’t even know this person?” Divergences are made manifest, sometimes to mutual chagrin.

Facebook’s reputation on privacy matters is terrible. When people use “Facebook” and “privacy” in the same sentence, the word in between is never “protects.” Facebook’s privacy missteps haven’t just drawn the attention of bloggers, journalists, scholars, watchdog groups, and regulators, they’ve also sparked mass outrage among Facebook users. An anti-Beacon group attracted over 70,000 members. and an anti-News Feed group over 700,000. Facebook’s pattern—launch a problematic feature, offer a ham-handed response to initial complaints, and ultimately make a partial retreat—hasn’t given it much privacy credibility. In short, consumers don’t, can’t, couldn’t, and shouldn’t rely on Facebook’s privacy policy to protect their personal information as they use it.

If you read all the way down to page 40 or so, you’ll get some analysis of legal attempts at social networking site use restrictions including DOPA which many librarians should be familiar with.

So, to that end, I’m making a small list of ways that I think libraries and librarians can use thse tools to further the existing missions of their institutions. It’s nothing new, but I’ve been pondering it lately and I think specifics, and links to examples can he helpful. Feel free to add more in the comments.

• Get your library a Flickr account. These accounts are now nearly free through a collaboration between Flickr and TechSoup. TechSoup has an article about how nonprofits can use Flickr. My advice: free image hosting and easy image uploading for staff. Consider uploading some historical photos that you can share with the people in you community. Check out what the Library of Congress has been doing and how much tagging and commenting is happening on their photos. It’s like a Letters to the Editor section for you archival photos. I use this photo quite a lot on my photoshop class, teaching people how to edit pictures.
• Anyone can get an account on Facebook. Facebook now has the ability for businesses and organizations to create “pages” (as opposed to profiles) where you can put information about your organization. You can see a few library pages here: NASA Glenn Technical Library, Iowa City Public Library, The National Library of Scotland. You can click here to create your own organization page. For people who are already on Facebook, which includes a huge percentage of high school and college age people, they can become “fan” of your organization which means they will get your updates. If you already have a blog, you can set your Facebook page to automatically read and republish your RSS feed inside Facebook. I do this with my personal blog so people who are my friends on Facebook can read my blog updates. The same way Google really let us get information out of the web, people are searching their networks on Facebook sometimes before Google.
• If you’re a librarian, think about getting on Twitter. You can read this post for background information about Twitter or this Library Journal article for more information about messaging services generally. This is not so much, as I see it, to communicate with patrons but to do two things. 1. create a short pithy easy to update RSS feed of news or information or links that you can repurpose to put on your blog, website, Facebook profile or elsewhere. 2. communicate with librarians who are on twitter in droves. When I was creating my talk I asked a question, literally hurled it out there into the aether, and got back seven or either useful responses within about an hour. That’s ready reference.
• Added later: think about a 23 Things type project. Vermont is doing this. It’s an easy way to give staff a casual fun exposture to a lot of social tools and let them see for themselves what they’re good for. Offer continuing ed credits or other fun incentives. The set-up costs and investments are nearly nothing and the ongoing investment is mostly time. One of the things I hear all the time is that staff are interested in new technologies generally but lack the time to explore and so get technostressed because they feel that they’re jumping in to some very public online activities without feeling competent in what they’re doing or what they’re there for. a 23 Things project can help that immensely.

The reason I think it’s important to show good examples and best paractices is because we’re still dealing with libraries like Mishawaka Library which thinks that blocking social software sites in their library because they can’t manage unruly teens is some sort of solution to a problem. I’m not saying there aren’t problems surrounding public computer and internet use in libraries generally, maybe there are even sometimes problems with teens, but really responding to the problem by blocking wide swaths of the Internet is not really going to help anyone understand the problem better. It just makes libraries look hostile and librarians look reactive. I’m sure there’s a larger post here about dealing with teens + comptuers + internet + understaffing + the fear factor of unknown online socializing, but I feel that it’s all of our responsbility as online community members of various stripes, to provide positive examples of social software online. This is mine.

In short SWIFT is supposed to be a 2.0 conference manager tool, nominally “social.” I signed up via Facebook and was a little chagrined to realize that my Facebook profile photo was imported into SWIFT without any specific assent on my part. The Edit link doesn’t work in the MySwift section of the site, so I guess I’m stuck with it. SWIFT also seems to know who my “friends” are which I’m assuming is information Facebook gave them. I have since blocked the application from Facebook — and let’s be clear, the application has no utility that I can discern on Facebook, it just mines Facebook data to deliver to its own site — and still my friend relationships are all over SWIFT. Not surprising, but still. I set up another non-Facebook-linked account and can’t edit that profile either.

I’m currently viewing “podcasts” (screencasts? vodcasts?) about how to use the tool. I went to the About page to see if I could figure out exactly what SWIFT is for, and the first paragraph is all marketingspeak

While conferences and trade shows remain highly lucrative and successful businesses, it is increasingly expensive and inefficient to capture and retain attendees. Today’s marketing investments do not take advantage of new social networks and peer influence in buying decisions. Exhibitors also face diminishing returns on their investments as they compete for buyer attention on the show floor.

Not super helpful. Do you know what this tool does yet? People seem to be indicating that the usefulness of the “platform” as the Computers in Libraries team calls it will become more apparent once there is actual content on the site. Others point out that the whole point of 2.0 technologies is more openness, not hiding content behind passwords and locking it up in your own silos. A few more comments in this direction are over at the CiL wiki.

There’s a beta testers’ group over at Google Groups which is closed to new users without admin approval. When I joined a support/testers group for the Twitter client Spaz, I just signed up. This is a choice someone made, the approval requirement. I’m getting a chunk of this information from the as-yet-unpublished FAQ which I received over email. It has photos of some of our favorite library celebs, at least one two of whom had no idea their photo was being published in SWIFT documentation. The FAQ also references the location of CIL2007 “media assets” which are in this directory, go look (note: now fixed). As near as I can tell, that’s all the recorded talks from last year’s CiL, just hanging out there on the open web. Mine’s D102 if you want to hear about Firefox.

I’m also a little confused by what I see as an essential conflict between the Terms of Service and the Privacy Policy. Both of them are your standard “we own the stuff you put online here” boilerplate, but the ToS specifically says “You further understand and agree that the Services may include certain communications from Company (such as administrative messages and certain newsletters), and that these communications are considered part of the Service and you may not be able to opt out of receiving them.” while the Privacy Policy says “Users who do not wish to receive email notifications or email newsletters may opt out at any time by following the links contained within the emails to Unsubscribe.” I’m not super surprised that “opt out” is a confusing topic for people new to the social software game, but I’d love to know what the skinny on this is.

Questions about the SWIFT privacy policy are referred to the Otter Group website without the benefit of a hyperlink to get you there. You may remember the Otter Group as the people who brought you ALA Bootcamp. Read their announcement about SWIFT which they call “a podcast directory for conference organizers.” A few buzzphrases about SWIFT make me pretty leery about the assertion that this creates any value at all for conference attendees.

• Otter: “Publishers can also use Swift to dynamically insert advertising messages from conference sponsors or other advertisers.
• Otter: “Users can also register with Swift (providing lead generation to organizers) in order to add their own content”
• SWIFT about: “As users join your community and add content to your pages, your natural search results improve.”

SWIFT apparently makes use of social software sites’ APIs but doesn’t really have one of its own as near as I can tell. It has RSS feeds for “subsets of information inside Swift.” but I’m not sure what that means specifically and I don’t see them yet. Maybe someone going to CiL can explain? I also notice that they have a blog but that the blog itself is at a different URL from the rest of the site. Nitpicky detail perhaps, but there is a certain trust that people give to companies that “eat their own dog food” so to speak and I’m not feeling it here. The blog itself runs on WordPress. Being logged in to the imswift website does not actually log you in to comment on the blog. Too bad, I was going to tell tham that their link is broken in this post. Also, since I now know they’re using WP, how about nice URLs with words not numbers? Better for SEO, at the very least.

I was googling for some more information about what the Otter Group is doing with SWIFT and found this blog. Its URL seems to imply that it’s an Otter Group product, but while it’s in a SWIFT template, none of the links are live. You may notice that instead of the “252 people are attending 2 conferences in 2 states” line in the header, you see “32,834 people are attending 97 conferences in 23 states this month” It also says I’m logged in as Kathleen (I’m not really). Oh my. I assume this is an alpha site design which previously served some purpose. It probably needs to go away or needs a big disclaimer.

Upshot: At first glance, I’m not impressed. However, as with most social tools, utility really is the proving ground for these applications. A quick scan of the user interface and the policies leaves me scratching my head. While I’m happy that they’re integrating popular tools like Twitter, del.icio.us, Flickr and the like, my question remains: why do we need an aggregator for these tools, tools that we’re already using and already aggregating? I like the idea of librarians and information worker people having their own social tools, but we’ve seen them doing great things with the tools that already exist, tools that are well-designed and serve purposes. Tools that solve problems. I’m not convinced that this is anything other than a marketing tool shined up to look like a social tool to end users. I hope I’m proven wrong.

• 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.

Actually the reason to me is fairly obvious. Facebook would like to keep you on Facebook. They would like to take your loyalty for other sites like Flickr and YouTube and shift it to Facebook so they can serve you Facebook ads while you look at the online content you were looking at anyway. The fact that when you are searching an online library catalog you are not technically searching the web may be a detail that might act in libraries’ favor this time, but it’s still an overall Bad Thing for the profession, in my opinion (though I acknowlege that this is a debatable point). I hope this Facebook thing can be resolved decently. I can see a few ways that it might be — returning search results to the FB interface, FB loosening up over OPACs for two easy ones. I don’t do much on Facebook except look up friends’ phone numbers and change my stauts every so often, but it’s got a killer grip on today’s students and young people (and oldsters like myself) and it would be nice if we could find a way to leverage that to help do our jobs better.

update: be sure to read the comments for Ken Varnum’s story of working successfully with Facebook to get the UMich catalog app on there.

Remember that a lot of the digital divide that we deal with now isn’t that people don’t have computers per se, it’s that they’re not in networks and groups of people that understand them and can answer complex questions about them. The library is often an integral link in this equation. A lot of my time at these talks is spent answering questions about how these social tools work, how I use them, how librarians might use them, and how kids and teens can use them safely and effectively. A lot of the print materials I’ve come across err on the side of caution which is not a bad idea but often there’s no “Hey you really SHOULD try this” couterpoint. I hope I was able to offer that somewhat.

Facebook recently opened up their site to other applications and there has been a huge explosion in what people are sharing on their profile pages. From my own subjective perspective, it seems like these applications are getting more people to Facebook and keeping them there, doing stuff. In my 2.0 talks I have often talked about how libraries could create “presence” using social tools and I’ve pointed to Facebook groups like Awesome Resources which is a group of 30+ librarians doing what librarians do best: sharing resources and helping each other find things.

When I went to Ann Arbor this week, I connected with Ed “Superpatron” Vielmetti on Facebook and it’s one of the fastest and best ways to get ahold of a small subset of my friends. When I was at the Berkman Center event last week listening to them talk about Digital Natives (versus tired old “digital immigrants” like myself) a professor mentioned that they did a show of hands survey of their incoming class to Harvard this year and asked who had a Facebook page. The answer wasn’t “most of them” but every single one of them. Granted Harvard skews in some ways towards the clueful and plugged in, but what an opportunity, knowing the one place that all of your students go online. I’m not totally sure if we know what to there once we get there, and I share the same privacy concerns as others about how much information we’re aggregating and personally identifying there, but I also feel that the UIUC search box is a little breakthrough application, sort of the way LibX was for Firefox. Exciting times, no?