librarian.net

As with last year and the year before, I tracked the libraries that I visited this year. I usually take pictures if I can. I use Daytum to track visits. The graph it produces is weird because the one big chunk is the library I work in but the other big chunk is called “twenty-four more items” which is sort of a weird way to display data. If anyone has a better lifetracker app they enjoy, please do let me know.

I went to forty-four different libraries for eighty-three visits total, I’m sure I have forgotten some. It’s a big increase over last year. Here’s the short annotated list of what I was doing in libraries last year. I have a few library photos in this Flickr photoset.

• Kimball Library, Randolph VT – this is the library where I work as an on-call part timer since I live up the street, and also where I check out books
• Hartness Library, VTC, Randolph VT – this is the good college library nearby me where anyone in the state can get a library card
• Westport, MA – the library in the town where my father lived and where I still spend a good amount of time. Great booksale.
• Fletcher Library, Ludlow VT – I was part of the e4VT program here and taught a basic skills computer class with ARRA grant money, a lovely old school library
• Ann Arbor PL, MI – gave a few talks over a few days and got to hang out here, love this place
• Milwaukee Public, WI – a library I hadn’t been to in a long time, an impressive building that maybe used to be a zoo?
• Howland Green, New Bedford MA – one of New Bedford’s “not the main library” libraries.
• Terraza PL, Austin TX – a cool little branch near where I was staying.
• UNT – Willis – got a tour, enjoyed the open spaces
• Hudson PL, MA – a small funky branch right by a river
• Chapel Hill NC – in the mall for the time being, but pretty neat for a temporary library
• Lubec, ME – lovely and small with great furniture and mosaics outside
• Central Branch, Portland OR – long been one of my favorites
• Marquette, Milwaukee WI – got a tour from a friend and saw the abandoned old entrance
• SIBL/NYPL – the best place to check email downtown
• Southworth PL, Dartmouth MA – another small branch in Southern MA
• Emily Fowler Library, Denton TX – got some local history and learned about local architecture here
• Central Branch, Austin TX – another perennial favorite – got some books for the plane
• Ryerson Library, Grand Rapids MI – an impressive library with a lot going on inside
• Pierson, Shelburne VT – underneath the town hall with a good board game collection
• Kalamazoo Public – neat and fancy, got a tour of the basement
• UNT – Eagle, Denton TX – checked out the new learning commons getting set up
• Denton North Branch, Denton TX – a weird side-of-the-highway large branch
• Kent District, Kentwood MI – neat suburban library with some cool public art and terrific views
• Bar Harbor, ME – got a tour while they were setting up for the booksale
• Lawler PL, New Bedford MA – another small New Bedford Library, sort of sad looking
• Roanoke PL, Roanoke TX – a small library doing a lot with what they had
• Twin Oaks PL, Austin TX – a fancy new little branch
• Bailey-Howe, UVM, Burlington VT – one of my faves, especially the special collections in the basement
• TWU, Denton TX – got a tour from my friend Greg and enjoyed the history and the air conditioning
• Maine State Library, Augusta ME – a great hideout after a long day conferencing
• Ransom PL, Plainwell MI – one of the little libraries we saw driving from Kalamazoo to Grand Rapids
• Kilton PL, Lebanon NH – tour from my friend Virgil! Neat new branch.
• Olin College, Needham MA – tour from the head librarian, neat materials science collections
• Alling PL, Williston VT – a small library good for checking email when on the road
• Hartland VT – my friend Mary works here!
• Allegan District Library, MI – a pretty straightforward library
• Parchment PL, MI – a diaorama of the parchment factory is hidden in the basement here
• Peabody Institute, Danvers MA – a beautiful building with a lovely landscaped grounds, nice for hanging out
• Putney PL, Putney VT – warm and small with a lot going on for a teeny place
• New Bedford PL, New Bedford MA – beautiful old building sort of clunkily repurposed, always great for a visit
• Ferguson Library Stamford CT – went to a CLA event here and bought expensive books from their booksale
• Holland MI PL – fancy and with turtles
• Brooks PL Brattleboro VT – some neat open source stuff going on there, got a tour after giving a talk

There’s a lot going on in the news lately. It’s a busy time of year. Several people have sent me this image over facebook and elsewhere. What people may not know is that there is a library at Occupy Wall Street and one at Occupy San Francisco. And possibly more. Like many other temporary autonomous libraries, details are distributed and not always accurate. I suggest, for interested folks, keep an eye on the People’s Library blog (specifically this call for librarians if you want to get involved and these library ground practices) and get in touch with the folks from Radical Reference tonight if you’re in NYC. If anyone knows of either Occupy Ann Arbor or Occupy Milwaukee have libraries, please drop me a note. I’ll be on the road for a little bit.

Thanks to Library Bazaar, I now know about the Kickstarter project of Robert Dawson who is traveling the country taking photos of libraries. If you’re not familiar with Kickstarter, it’s a way to crowdsource fundraising for creative-type projects. I’ve supported a few things including the GET LAMP text adventure documentary and a recent MC Frontalot video. If Dawson is coming to your town, or even near it, I’d suggest giving him a call.

“The way you talk about the [digital divide] changes people’s view of who is responsible for resolving it…. This issue has been around for years, but its meaning is in constant flux and is manipulated by political agendas.”

I’ve switched some of the tools I use for keeping current over the past few months. I’m finding that I use RSS less and less for keeping up on blogs and rely more on Twitter lists and searches to sort of keep my hand in. I also read a lot of print material still [some of my best "things to think about" things are still coming from the pages of Library Journal and Computers in Libraries magazines] and am trying to keep to my book-a-week plan for 2011. Oddly I also get news from seemingly random places like other people’s facebook walls and I made a little image-milkshake over on a site called MLKSHK. You might like it.

I have a standing search for “digital divide” on Twitter that just auto-updates itself onto my desktop via TweetDeck. The thing that is so interesting about this, to me, is how often the term gets used and for how many different things. This morning there are discussions about the digital divide and gender, how the EU is trying to narrow the digital divide (referring to access to broadband) and a report about how switching to online social services in the UK would adversely affect people who are digitally divided already, mostly talking about seniors.

Which leads me to the paper I read recently which was really pretty intersting and on topic: Who’s Responsible for the Digital Divide? Public Perceptions and Policy Implications (pdf) It’s not long, you can read it, but the upshot is that depending how we define the digital divide, we will develop different strategies to “solve” the problem. This is not just hypothesized in the paper but addressed scientifically. So if the problem is lack of compturs, we throw computers at the problem. If the problem is broadband, we work on network infrastructure. If the problem is education we design sites like DigitalLiteracy.gov and then wonder why a website isn’t teaching people how to use computers. Tricky stuff, endlessly fascinating, thorny problem.

Still getting back to my routine after having a great time at both MLA and CLA. Will post lsides and comments later, but for a morning pick-me-up, read this article in praise of public libraries. You will enjoy it.

In 1872, the right to know led the Worcester Massachusetts Public Library to open its doors on Sunday. Many viewed that as sacrilege. Head librarian Samuel Green calmly responded that a library intended to serve the public could do so only if it were accessible when the public could use it. Six day, 60-hour workweeks meant that if libraries were to serve the majority of the community they must be open on Sundays. Referring to those who might not spend their Sundays at worship Green impishly added, “If they are not going to save their souls in the church they should improve their minds in the library.”

I’ve been reading with interest the news stories lately about Epsilon. For those of you who don’t know Epsilon is a company that does marketing. Many companies give Epsilon customer lists and Epsilon uses that information to, say, email you about the latest Hilton Honors promotions. Except that there was a data breach and Epsilon lost up to 250 million email addresses along with information such as who those people were customers of. So, for example, they’d have my email address and the knowledge that I was a Hilton Honors member. So, a lot of people got emails in the last mont from companies saying “Um, be especially on the lookout for phishing attacks” and a lot of people were asking “Why did Epsilon have my email address in the first place, didn’t I sign a privacy policy with Company X?” And the answer is complicated. When you let Hilton Honors use your information to send you marketing information you are, in a way, letting them give the email address to marketing companies.

The reason I care about this at all is two reasons. One, there is a useful analog with libraries and how they handle their email lists of patrons. Obviously patron data is private and comes under whatever privacy laws a state has and whatever policies the library has. But is a library allowed to market to patrons? Or give these lists to peopl to market on the library’s behalf? This was the concern when the public library in Dixon California emailed patrons to let them know about ongoing library renovation plans and asked them to consider making donations. People who are not pleased with the library renovations, the Dixon Carnegie Library Preservation Society, is arguing that the librarian acted improperly when they gave patron email addresses to a consulting company without patron consent. Now let me just state I pretty well side with the library on this one, but it’s sure to be an increasingly contentious topic as libraries have more and more diffrent kinds of patron data to keep private.

And the second reson is just a cautionary tale. Many people with iphones are aware by now that the phone tracks where you go. I mean it has to in order to be a phone, but it stores this data in unencrypted form on both the phone and the synced compueter, forever. This means that anyone with access to a simple open source tool such as this one can make lovely maps like the one above. Good to know, and good to understand. As libraries move more towards mobile applications and mobile awareness generally, understanding how this sort of data works will be an important part of making sure we know how, when and why to keep it private.

Sometimes it’s hard to explain why augmented reality apps might be useful in a library setting. Until now. QR codes, and an app that tells you when your books are out of order. Rowr.

Interesting to look at the various ways libraries are reacting in policy fashion to the HarperCollins “You can have 26 checkouts at this price” decision. Library Journal has a recent round-up.

This list of information came to the VT Libraries list, via the IFLA list. I found one copy of it online in a sort of random place and it’s a few days old but it’s got a nice comprehensive-seeming outline of what’s going on in Japan and especially in the Japanese library community. IFLA has also made their own resource page which is full of pointers as well as comments from notable Japanese librarians. People who read Japanese will probably get a lot of information from the Savelibrary wiki which has up to date information and a lot of links. The photo comes from this thread (original thread in Japanese) where librarians were posting photos of their institutions just after the earthquake. If you continue to scroll, you’ll see some better photos now that recovery work has started.

Those of you who follow my antics know I was at an all-day meeting for the Digital Public Library of America project on Tuesday. While I have vague ideas what I was doing there, I have to say that I was still surprised at how few other representatives of rural and/or digitally divided folks were there. You can see the invite list here. I felt lucky that many of my viewpoints were ably represented by Josie Parker from Ann Arbor Public Library, Tony Marx from New York Public Library and Molly Raphael incoming president of ALA. Also in attendance were some of my favorite free culture folks: Brewster Kahle from the Internet Archive, Chris Freeland from the Biodiversity Heritage Library and my friend Richard Nash who runs Cursor Books. I also got to sit right next to Steve Potash from OverDrive right when everyone wanted a piece of him. That said, you can read the list and I’m sure you only vaguely care who I had dinner with. The meeting took place using Chatham House Rules meaning that in the interests of people being able to speak freely, nothing people said would be directly attributed to them.

So, let’s talk about what actually got me out of bed early on a Tuesday morning and has had me all hoppitamoppita since then. I’m going to use the “more inside” thingdoo on WordPress for possibly the first time ever. (more…)