The first is Obama’s immediate revocation of Executive Order 13233, an order by the Bush administration that, according to the National Coalition for History, “severely limited access by the public to presidential records” You can read the offical text of the order on the revamped Whitehouse.gov which I recommend a look at.

The second good news this week was the Supreme Court declining to review “a Third Circuit Court decision last July striking down the Child Online Protection Act of 1998.” In other words, COPA was struck down by a US District judge, a decision which was upheld by the Third Circuit Court of Appeals and then contested by the Bush Administration to the US Supreme Court who, this week, refused to hear it. You can read the timeline yourself on Wikipedia. The Supreme Court’s failure to act is pretty much the death knell for COPA, a law that never took effect. While not as applicable to libraries as CIPA, the law itself does touch on whether or not restricting or prohibiting materials as “harmful to minors” is itself a problematic restriction on speech. U.S. District Judge Lowell Reed commented “perhaps we do the minors of this country harm if First Amendment protections, which they will with age inherit fully, are chipped away in the name of their protection.”

Understanding the nature of the threats against Web browser and their plug-in technologies is important for continued Internet usage. As more users and organizations depend upon these browser technologies to access ever more complex and distributed business applications, any threats to the underlying platform equate to a direct risk to business continuity and integrity.

First off let me say that I’m quoting from news stories only. Our official staff position is “no comment” and I’m sticking to that. Here is why this is a library issue.

• The initial reports, when the girl was simply missing, was that she had met a sexual predator online via her MySpace page. That garnered the predictable media outcry as well as some very good stories about safety online.
• It also resulted in law enforcement coming to the library to take the public PCs. You can read the library director’s statements about this in this article in the Burlington Free Press. The librarians waited for a court order, and gave the computers to the police once they received one. The computers have since been returned. The library had an internet policy in place to guide their actions in this situation.
• As more details emerged it became clear that the MySpace angle was not just untrue, it was the opposite of what people had thought. The person who abducted Brooke had actually logged in to her MySpace page to try to create a fake scenario where she was meeting a “predator” when in reality she was meeting him. IP addresses from these interactions were given to law enforcement by MySpace and were, as near as I can tell, instrumental in helping them determine the sequence of events of this crime and narrow down the suspect list considerably. The older articles still reflect the “internet predator” angle when, like most abductions, the criminal was someone from the victim’s own family.
• And as far as data goes, danah boyd has a very good article about MySpace when DOPA was more on the table in 2006. One of her useful facts “Statistically speaking, kids are more at risk at a church picnic or a boy scout outing than they are when they go on MySpace. Less than .01% of all youth abductions nationwide are stranger abductions and as far as we know, no stranger abduction has occurred because of social network services.”
• The accused man is being charged, as of this writing, with kidnaping. This is because kidnaping at a federal level carries a possible death penalty sentence and is, I assume, a bargaining chip. The law regarding this is one that I wasn’t totally aware of “the 2006 Adam Walsh law — named for another abducted child — allowed federal prosecution of such crimes when they are facilitated by the Internet.” Worth knowing for any of us who provide Internet access to the public, I think.
• The library has set up a book display dealing with this very difficult topic — books on MySpace, the death of a child, dealing with grief — and encouraging conversations.

So, this is all incredibly upsetting and destabilizing to the community here. While I hope that you never have to deal with something like this at your library, there may be some instructive or useful pieces of information here that I felt might be worthwhile to pass on.

• Kimball Library, Randolph – serves 6,000 people, five PACs, high speed, wifi
• Tunbridge Library, Tunbridge – serves 1300 people, two PACs +1, dial-up
• Baxter Library, Sharon – serves 1400 people, +1, dial-up
• Roxbury Library, Roxbury – serves 576, 1 PAC, dial-up
• Ainsworth Library, Williamstown – serves 3200 people, 1 PAC +1, high speed
• Calef Library, Washington – serves 1000 people, 1 PAC + 1, high speed, wifi

There are 190 public libraries (pdf) in Vermont. Thirty-two serve populations over 5,000. Between all the libraries, they owned 1,122 computers at the end of 2004, according to their 2005 Biennial Roundup (pdf). Out of these 781 were available to the public as of 2005 (pdf). My “+1″ indicator above means that there is a staff computer in the library frequently used by the public; I’m not sure if this is reflected in these stats. 159 of these 781 computers had public Internet access, 130 had high-speed access. This access to computers and fast internet is not distributed evenly. The last library I worked at had eleven of these public computers with high speed access and I’m sure the Fletcher Free Library in Burlington has this many as well.

According to the DoLs Biennial Report Supplment, the 32 libraries that serve over 5,000 people, have 341 public PCs. Also according to this report, these 32 libraries get 60% of all visits to Vermont public libraries. Contrast this to the 40 libraries in Vermont who serve populations of under 1000. They have 50 public PCs total among all of them. Eleven of these libraries offer high-speed access. Many of the libraries did not report their statistics so there is some skewing, but seven of the libraries who serve less than 1000 people have no Internet access at all, and 14 have dial-up.

The total operating income for all public libraries in the state of Vermont is $16,524,383 of which $10,914,150 is spent on salaries and benefits.

• 80% of students surveyed are bothesred at least a little by advertising within websites though “only one-in-five believes ad-free websites have more reliable information.”
• The survey says “They access the web via high-speed lines, with over 40% logging on via cable modem, T1/T3 line, ISDN, or ADSL/DSL.” which has the obvious follow-up question of how the majority of them access the web, or perhaps whether the response was phrased oddly and is confusing like this sentence nearby “[O]ver 90% access the web remotely from the library via their home computer” which i think means they gain access to the web through the library’s web site?
• Students find librarians assistance with searching online no more helpful than that provided by teachers or friends “The mean satisfaction score for librarian-provided help is 7.8 (on a scale of 0 to 10), compared to scores of 7.9 for help provided by professorsor teaching assistants and 7.8 for classmates or friends.” I wonder if this would have a different result if it asked about print resources, or other in-library resources?
• There are further questions about print resources that show that 89% “use the campus library’s print resources” with books, journals and articles getting 75/70/64% respectively.

The survey also contains recommendations

The data strongly suggest that there are real opportunities for academic librarians to connect students with libraries’ high quality resources. A successful approach should incorporate the following tactics to increase libraries’ visibility on the web:

1. Emphasis on students’ and librarians’ common preferences for accuracy, authority, timeliness, and privacy
2. Tight integration of the library’s electronic resources with faculty, administrative, and other campus websites
3. Open access for remote users
4. Clear and readily available navigational guides–both online and in the library.
5. Relentless promotion, instruction, and customer service.

The study ends with some questions for further exploration which have a bit too much market-driven speak in them for my tastes, but I know libraries have to start thinking about these things in an academic environment, or at least that’s what people keep telling us. Two examples

• Students expect service providers–both electronic and bricks-and-mortar–to offer convenience, selection, quality, and a welcoming atmosphere. Can librarians create a customer-friendly experience to match the best merchants and consumer websites?
• Students want to know more about the library and its resources. Can librarians execute marketing rules for product definition, promotion, price, placement, and positioning?

I guess a secondary question to these last two is “Should they?” I honestly don’t know. OCLC has the 2005 numbers, I’m curious to know what they say. [iag]

Folks who know me know that my general answer to this question is “No, but….” Unfortunately, my ten minute phone conversation was compressed into a soundbyte that I don’t really recognize, and for that I apologize to anyone who has to defend the idea of the public library against evildoers and naysayers who say “What’s the big deal anyhow? It’s all online.” I don’t think the problems the public library is facing have much to do with the Internet, but they do have a lot to do with the idea of relevance, people’s shifting priorities in tight fiscal times and the whole changing idea of community and public spaces.

For the record, the question I was asked over email was “Do we still need libraries in a digital age?” My email response, which I followed up with a phone call, was this.

Yes.

Is your question really “Do we still need books in a digital age?” in which case, the answer is more complicated, though ultimately yes.

I guess my question for you is “Whose digital age?” because where I work, at public libraries in Central Vermont, the digital age is unfolding much more slowly and to much less fanfare than it is elsewhere. In a state where only 15-25% of the residents use broadband, the digital age is as much about hurdles and the threat of being left behind as it is about bold and shiny technological innovation and synthesis. Libraries and librarians help people not get left behind by technology, by democracy, and by people who think that libraries and technology can’t coexist and thrive symbiotically.

We need libraries in any age, they’re the human scale measurement for the information age.

jessamyn west
librarian.net

Clearly I need media training. Thanks to the prophet for the scan of the article.

Books remain “the best interface for text yet invented. Some of their comparative advantages include: their lightweight, portability, high contrast and relative cheapness. In short, they are far more efficient than the scrolls and oral lore they replaced”.