I was happy that I caught the tweet early when the Men of the Stacks calendar came out because it’s been fascinating to watch this project grow and blosson. If for some reason you haven’t heard of it, the website is here and they have a facebook page here. Thanks to some nice photography, some cute librarians and a good message, this project has taken off, been mentioned in international news outlets, hit boingboing, Oprah and the Village Voice. The calendars cost $5 to produce through MagCloud and are sold for $20 which means for every calendar that gets purchased $15 goes to the It Gets Better Project. There’s a thoughtful post by the MotS administrator Megan about bullying and jerks online and why this sort of thing is so important. My favorite thing is probably close to what Will Manley says, this is “an image buster with a sense of humor.” My second favorite thing about this is, hey, I know those guys! A lot of the fellas in the photos are librarians we’ve known online for years and years–Brett and Trevor and Von and Gabe are people I know, and the others seem like people I’d like to know–and so we can smile along with them and say “Way to go guys!” Can’t wait to see how this evolves.

There is a lot of data in the world. Librarians are good at using census data to help people find families, get local information and just learn something about the way the world used to be. Here’s a neat post about using hte census data from the last 120 years to learn something about librarianship as a profession. Did you know that the number of self-reported librarians peaked in 1990 and has declined almost 30% since then? I am somewhat curious if this is just because people with library and information science backgrounds are calling themselves all manner of things now [Is a taxonomist a librarian? How about a metadata specialist?]. You can read the full post, with graphs, over at Oxford University Press’s Social explorer.

She Was A Booklegger: Remembering Celeste West is a collection of essays, excerpts, and photos that attempt to capture the spirit of Celeste West, a woman whose influence on feminist librarianship, publishing, journalism, and activism was monumental. After West passed away in 2008, a few friends and admirers (Toni Samek, Moyra Lang, and K.R. Roberto) decided to embark on a project that would honor West’s work and life. This book, which acts as a comprehensive and compassionate obituary, was the result.

The headline seems to be “conservative academic forced out for Christian views” ( the headline on Horowitz’s FrontPage, for example, is “Savage Injustice” ) but the story is nothing of the sort. As much as the right wants to depict our colleges and universities as dominated by leftists and radicals the truth is that complaints against Savage were dismissed, he was backed by his supervisors and his position was secure. The headline should have been “University protects conservative academic’s right to express Christian views” because those are the facts of the case, which have been known from the beginning and which have now been established by a court of law.

“As for the intellectual property, I try not to get too worked up about it. There’s a lot of people angsting about piracy and copying of stuff on the Internet, publishers who are very, very worried about the whole idea of ebook piracy. I like to get a little bit of perspective on it by remembering that back before the Internet came along, we had a very special term for the people who buy a single copy of a book and then allow all their friends to read it for free. We called them librarians.” [thanks karl]

the end of Moore’s influence [which] came when, years later, she tried to block the publication of a book by E. B. White. Watching Moore stand in the way of “Stuart Little,” White’s editor, Ursula Nordstrom, remembered, was like watching a horse fall down, its spindly legs crumpling beneath its great weight.

It’s a wonderful read; even though the librarian in it is wincingly marmish and pretentious, she’s also well-read and driven. It’s a great look at an imperfect person in an imperfect profession with some bonus trivia about Stuart Little in there for good measure. Please consider reading it.

Allen was a fan of Webster’s Second (the second edition of Webster’s New International Dictionary, published in 1934), bow ties, motorcycles, and sailing. He abhorred exclamation points (one quote I have written in my notes from his class reads “If you were born before 1960, you have three exclamation points to use in your life; if born after 1960, you have six, because of inflation”).

Do libraries still care if their information is being tracked, if they don’t should they?

NOLA ALA Council spurred this initiative. Soros funded.

Dan Roth – Wired senior writer

Privacy from a business perspective. “No one talks about their privacy policy” in business. Talked about a past disaster losing tapes with private info on it. Deep storage place said “that happens all the time”

“if you can’t get journalists excited about this how are you going to get people to write about it and get average people to care about their private information being lost”

People try to say “we’re more private than Google” way of brand differentiation. Ask.com and Microsoft.com

Ponemon, interviews Chief Privacy Officers & Marketers. CPO said we don’t share info, marketers said “oh sure we do”

Free Economy, companies embracing this as a business model “Arms race brewing” as companies who depend on free start competing, they serve up more private data about users.

Fortune tech coverage too

Beth Givens – Privacy Right Clearinghouse

Eleven years as a librarian. Privacy pie: info privacy (PRC, EPIC) vs. constitutional privacy (ACLU, EFF). Small staffing. They give people practical information about protecting personal information. Scott McNeely “You have no privacy get over it” [from Sun]

Informational self-determination is the way they describe it in Germany. Canada and Europe do a better job

Fair Credit Reporting Act gives you the right of access to your credit report – LEGALLY. Credit report is limited – LEGALLY.

Principles of Fair Info Practices [FIPS]
- access
- consent
- purpose specitification
- accuracy enforcement
- colleciton limitation
- security, accountability & uage limitation

“privacy policies are really disclosure policies”

Giving up is not the answer – suggests taking every opportunity we can to opt out. “Privacy basics and opt-out opportunities”

Identity Theft smartiepants – cares about consumers

Cory Doctorow – author/blogger, BoingBoing & etc.

dystopian novel – Transparent Society – we have to give up privacy but we are allowed to spy on our governments the way they can spy on us.

Architecture is politics, building networked societies and systems we wind up involving the systems that grow out of them.

Social networking – “I’m pretty upset about it in a lot of ways”

How can you say information is private but not secret? [obvious retorts: peeing, sex]

The more raw power you have the more power you have about the disclosure of your personal information.

outsourcing – we don’t even have the option to set policies on, for example, our RFID tags

Discusses regulation being the solution. You could make a brakeless car and it would be cheaper, but

Vendors are not treating libraries as first class citizens w/ its DRM and etc. Libraries have a moral obligation to do this for their patrons.

This is a business model that no one wants.

Undermines personal security and social security. In surveillance societies, no one trusts each other. There’s not enough social cohesion to form societies. We get surveillance instead of policing. “cameras are forensic, they only solve crimes after the fact”

Thinks it’s harder to find information as we collect more and more.

QUESTIONS
Kent Oliver Q What’s at stake overall?

Beth – we will lose it, just like minority report, worries abotu biometrics tracking us everywhere
Dan – what happens when our health records can be read by our employers
Cory – “personal information is like Uranium” a little bit is no big deal but combined in huge databases is toxic. “all this information we’ve created will be like smog, there will be no way to destroy it” “you’re loading the gun and handing it to all their successors forever.”

Minority Report & GATTACA mentioned

Q. Isn’t the horse out of the barn? How do we get back to before we gave away all this data?

Cory – pmog [justin hall's multiplayer game], sxip
Dan Roth – consumers have no idea why we should care
Beth – check out your own profiles and see what people know about you. Get the “right of access” into law.

Kate – How to be invisible, should we all try that?

Beth – you can’t really do that or you have to rely on other people
Cory – “I don’t think privacy should be a hair shirt” This is the American dream sybaritic. DEFAULTS MATTER esp in the free and open source world .talk to just ahndful of geeks and you can make enormous contributions across the world.
Dan – talking to HP chief privacy office talking about how they took care of privacy issues in the EU where it’s required but NOT in the US where it’s not necessary.

Kent – how do we make the average person care

Cory – Pablo “hackerbot” hacky idea about letting people know what can be known about them [prius example]
Beth – creative ways to educate and inform people “talking the talk and walking the walk” how do we get the message across creatively.

Kate Q. how do we balance users wanting details but us trying to protect privacy?
Cory – encryption

Librarian Q. how do we talk to or administration about this
Beth – data breach will be ugly and expensive to clean up
Cory – best way to avoid a data breach is to not have the data

Q. bought a house, 9/11, now I feel all my data is everywhere. tips how to leave less personal information?
Beth – create a living trust & put property in the name of the trust. “the younger you start, having a PO box and only a PO box…” “working with young people in so important”
Cory – 1. take control of your tech 2. taking control of your debate “this doesn’t make us safer” “if you want to keep people safe you have to keep them safe from the important threats” 3. regime change

Q. surveillance society “the bigger danger to me is more like social control”
Cory – safety and security are not platonically divided. does being safe from terrorists mean being less safe from governments?

Q. isnt there some sort of “cool factor” to sharing all this personal information?
Dan – talked about reading the family blog of a private squirrely CEO

Q. our inconvient truth, we need to be talking about information footprints the same way that people talk about carbin footprints
Dan – people will ignore you if it looks like you’re going to make things more difficult for them, people feel like giving away private information gets them something
there’s a third alternative between being a refusenik and giving in. taking control of the information they can gather from you.

Tiny Tech/High Tech – How Small Libraries Can Use Technology Sensibly

This post is a day or two late because I already wrote this post yesterday, but due to some confusion about how to differentiate between a draft and an actual published post in WordPress 2.5 I managed to delete it before it went live. This is entirely my own fault and yet the interface to the new WordPress [if you haven't upgraded, do so quicklike] is different enough that it makes certain parts of WordPress operate differently. This, in turn, changes my user behavior because my muscle memory wants to click certain places and look for certain visual cues for things. And again, when I’m wrassling with confusing interfaces — and this one is mostly that way because it’s new and I’m not used to it — my thoughts turn to the OPAC and the small wonder that people even come to our libraries at all sometimes when we make our materials so difficult to retrieve, sometimes.

In any case ROFLcon was a good time not just because it was fun and I got to see my boss Matt Haughey speak on a panel but also because there were a lot of librarians there. It was a pretty small conference but in addition to Casey Bisson who took some great photos, I also got to meet Wikipedian librarian Phoebe Ayers and Nathan from Shushing Action as well as some Simmons library students and just a few people who were like “You’re a librarian, that’s SO COOL!” It’s always gratifying to be somewhere where the nerd and librarian forces are strong.