Category: access

Karen Coyle has an excellent blog post about some of the ridiculousness we’ve been getting used to lately in terms of copyright and copyright notices. This includes libraries that say you can’t make a digital copy of a public domain imags that they make available (debatable but still odd-sounding) a copyright notice on a blank book and what the heck is up with the innocuous sounding Computer & Communications Industry Association.

This brief but popular story about an Australian teenager doing an end-run around a government sponsored pornography filter doesn’t have much to do with libraries. However, it has some applicability to our CIPA situation here in the states in a few ways.

1. Filtering is expensive but no one knows how expensive. Should a porn filter for your library cost $100 or $1000 or $10000? Should you pay less for one that works less well? Is it even acceptable to have one that doesn’t work? Do any porn filters actually work completely well, any at all?
2. The filter in the story was created, at a cost of $84 million, and would be made available free to every family in Australia. This is in addition to the government wanting to require all ISPs to make a filtering option available with their services. A quick read of this second article indicates that the filters aren’t just for porn, or rather there are varieties of the filter one of which also filters chat rooms. Now chat rooms can be used for porn but they can also be used in many other legitimate ways. I’d argue legitimate uses account for almost all chatroom use among children and young adults. So, beware of mission creep. If you’re trying to stop kids from looking at explicit sex pictures, that’s one thing. If you’re trying to stop them from communicating with others or being communicated with in ways you don’t approve of, be above board about it.
3. Any librarian who has to work with filtering software knows the ways that kids or others get around it. There’s the Google cache hack, the Google images hack, anonymous proxies, proxies from home and many many more. If you can get to the internet at all, you can figure out, usually, how to get to the rest of the Internet.

Want to try it yourself? Here’s some instructions.

Now that I’m somewhat affiliated with the MaintainIT project I am trying to put my crabbiness aside and interact more with WebJunction. I’m thinking about even trying to attend a webinar about Practical Techniques for Supporting Public Computing. I stepped through the instructions for getting their helper applications set up and it went pretty smoothly albeit very slowly. I’m going to see if any of the librarians I work with here are interested in trying this process out, including the set-up which involves disabling pop-up blockers, sending and receiving audio via their application, as well as running a bunch of java applications. I’m interested to see if it was as simple for them as it was for me.

The only part I was dissatisfied with, from a personal perspective, was the overly-cute “door hanger for E-learners“. First of all, learning is learning and calling something E-anything really sounds like you discovered the Internet yesterday. Second, for a two page PDF that basically just says “I’m busy” with the WJ logo [actually it says “I am participating in an online course that is critical to my job performance” among other things, but I am overly sensitive to hyperbole so maybe this sounds normal to other people] why is it a 2.3 MB file? Just because most public libraries now have broadband doesn’t really mean we should be using it up with overly-large files. For the libraries that don’t have broadband, this is a forty minute download.

So, my constructive feedback, up to this point.

– the webinar software works well, I’m pleased it works on my Mac
– I’m glad WebJunction is functional, I’d like to see it look decent on Firefox on my Mac. I sent in a help request about this little problem
– I wish WebJunction had URLs and filenames that gave me some idea what was behind them. Why isn’t the door hanger called webinar_door_hanger.pdf or something so when I dump it on my hard drive I know what is is? Why aren’t we optimizing our web pages for Google?
– If you’re in advocacy work, it’s sometime tough to draw the line between what level of branding is appropriate to keep you able to do your work and get grants and what amount is actively getting in the way of delivering services. I’m really happy that WJ is using more platform independent means of content delivery despite the fact that they’re at least partially funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (as is MaintainIT). I hope they continue to support libraries in whatever technology choices they decide to make. A search for Ubuntu on WebJunction only gets no hits in the site itself and nets a few discussion topics, though this one should be required reading for any library thinking about making the big expensive step to Vista.
– No more 2 MB PDFs please. Since we’re working with people who, in many cases, are not that tech savvy, I feel that every choice we make should specifically send the message that technology is manageable, understandable and hopefully fun. There are best practices for usability just like there are best practices for accessibility and we should be working hard to move from “hey it works!” to “wow, this works WELL.”

update: I take back what I said about cross-platform support. What I emailed WebJunction asking why one of their pages didn’t look right on my browser (see photo above) the email I got back said, embarassingly:

Hello!

At this time, WebJunction does not support Macintosh browsers. However, I will make note of the display anomaly you reported for future implementations.

Thanks!
M____ B______
WebJunction Training & Support Specialist
support@webjunction.org
800-848-5878 x0000

If it’s 2007 and you can’t design your web pages to be at least readable on a Mac browser, you should rethink your commitment to enabling “relevant, vibrant, sustainable libraries for every community” (emphasis mine) in my opinion. I appreciated the speedy response, though. update: and someone else explained to me how my browser was probably caching an old stylesheet from that page and if I just did a shift-reload it might clear up the problem. Guess what? It totally did. No love for the no-mac-supporting tech support, but at least the website isn’t broken. Cautiously optimistic I am….

I skipped the debates that were covered on YouTube. I’m politically active generally, but I don’t get more or less active during election years. However, this event is as good a time as any to trot out the old Digital Divide topic and our perspectives towards it. In short, the digital divide is still with us and in some ways as people think it’s getting straightened out — more access to broadband for more people, more options for getting online at work or school or the library, more “affordable” broadband available — it becomes even more of a pervasive problem because people think it’s solved. Don’t have a computer or can’t afford one? Go use the one at the library! Can only get dial-up at home? Use the broadband at the library, they even have wireless! Don’t understand the internet? Need to type a letter? Need to learn to type? Go to the library, they do all that computer stuff now! This neglects a few very salient points.

1. While the library has computers and internet access, almost always, it rarely has enough computers. We learned this from the Public Libraries and the Internet report put out by the Information Use Management and Policy Institute at FSU that I have discussed previously.

2. The library very rarely has sufficient staff or volunteers to be available for novice computer users to help them with basic computer skills as a regular service that the library provides. Some libraries offer classes. Many will help you get a Yahoo account. Many have someone nearby the computers for basic questions. However very few have the sort of one on one tutoring available that is necessary for these novice users. It’s hard to teach adults to read in classes because many of them don’t read for a range of different reasons. Technology is no different. We have funding available for adult literacy in most places, where is the funding for adult technology literacy?

3. Technophobia and technostress. As with reading, many adults who cannot use computers have stress or anxiety about this. Many of them don’t learn to use one until they are forced to by having to apply for a job, interact with their government or because of a disaster. If we’re lucky, they learn because they have a new grandchild, a hobby that partially can be done online, or a remote friend that they would like to stay in touch with. Helping people learn technology is, in many ways about helping them get over technostress. I had a friend visiting recently who went to use her laptop at the local wifi-enabled public library (not my library, another library). She went to plug it in and the librarian warned her not to, saying that there was unstable power that could “blow up her computer.” She advised my friend, who was also a librarian, to charge the laptop at home before bringing it in to the library. My friend said she would, except that she was staying in a cabin without electricity and so this was impossible. Now, it doesn’t have to be a basic service of a library to offer electrical outlets to everyone who needs one. However, the sort of FUD involved in acting like plugging something into the wall is dangerous or to be avoided is the sort of “computers are hard” mentality we see passed on to patrons in libraries across the country every day. (update: or worse)

4. Many libraries that do offer broadband to the public have to offer a filtered version because the only way they can afford to pay for a broadband connection is by taking E-rate money that invokes CIPA regulations. That’s a shame. People on the other side of the digital divide have a much higher chance of their only internet access being filtered access, that’s not very democratic.

In short, we’re not ready to be people’s bridge across the digital divide, though I’m pleased as hell that we’re doing something, especially in the face of most everyone else doing nothing. Let’s look at broadband penetration rankings (full report). The US is 15th out of the 30 members of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development. So, every time you see more and more candidates on Twitter, Second Life, YouTube and whatever, keep in mind that while it may be cool that they’re reaching your demographic, they’re totally missing others. [thanks jen]