access

DOPA, what? A wrap up, post vote.

I probably should have mentioned in the title that my post yesterday was discussing DOPA. It’s certainly been a topic today, here are just the posts that I saw in my aggegator today.

Walt Crawford is normally fairly apolitical but even he sees that this is “a thoroughly bad idea”
Michael Stephens, also not an aggresively political guy links to David King’s image and a longer post at ALA Techsource about the Flickr fear that is making some people lash out at libraries that use Flickr.
Sarah Houghton makes a short list of the people who voted against DOPA (not even MY rep? damn!) and discusses what she thinks this means for the future of E-Rate.
Alane Wilson at It’s All Good calls it “a disaster” and notes what it could mean for Open WorldCat
Marshall Kirkpatrick at TechCrunch describes the one-sidedness of the vote as “shocking” and points to a few more sources for learning about DOPA.
David King, also not mister superpolitical calls the law scary and says we need to think about how this is going to impact your library’s digital services.
ALA issued a “we’re disappointed” statement that is good but doesn’t mention the resolution passed by Council supporting social software applications (that I can’t find because it’s not on the damned site yet. update: Rory posted it here.). I am very worried that after their expensive CIPA defeat they may not fight DOPA as hard as they might have.
Joshua Neff discusses someone putting porn in his library group on Flickr and how self-monitoring seems to mostly work for this sort of thing.
The AASL weblog talks about how DOPA will impact school libraries.
Emily Alling talks about how this bill is about way more than MySpace.

And then there’s the blogads on Technorati which just say “Looking for Dopa? Find exactly what you want today.” Har har.

crap, filtering bill on the move

Posted on 27Jul06 by jessamyn

Straight form the Center for Democracy and Technology: “The House of Representatives has passed a bill that would force schools and libraries to block chat and social networking sites as a condition of receiving federal E-rate funding.” This bill is also known as DOPA, also known as bad news for libraries. Putting the Federal Communications Commission in charge of what can and can’t be accessed in libraries is total madness. Granted, this is the same as CIPA where only libraries who receive universal service support have to be subjected to it. The phrase “harmful to minors” which is not a legally defined term will be the standard for what gets filtered under this legislation. I guess I have just a few questions

1. If CIPA didn’t fix this problem — and recall, it was supposed to — why will this bill succeed where it failed? Have filters gotten better? Have the “bad guys” gotten dumber?
2. Doesn’t this create a class system of libraries where the ones who can forego federal funding can make choices that the ones who cannot are unable to make? Isn’t this sort of anti-American?
3. Doesn’t DOPA not solve any problem at all if it’s not applied to all schools and libraries and, in fact, the entire Internet, really? Does anyone have any data on where teens access the Internet besides school and the library? Is anyone doing anything about those places?
4. Isn’t having the FCC publish an annual list of chatrooms and social networking sites that “have been shown to allow sexual predators easy access to personal information of, and contact with, children” just creating a how to list for pedophiles and, as such, totally counterproductive?
5. Have any of you Representatives ever used a social networking site or a chat room?

showing movies @ your library.

Posted on 20Jul06 by jessamyn

I noticed when I went to one of the libraries I work with that they had received their public performance rights to show movies at the library, apparently as some blanket deal from the Department of Libraries. I read the documentation that came from Movie Licensing USA, an outfit that provides public performance licensing to schools and libraries. With a cost that they never state but call “reasonable” this group will give you a piece of paper that seems to say that the MPAA will stay off your back if you want to show movies @ your library. Well, not all movies, just ones by the major studios that they represent. You also can’t advertise the showing of your movie to the general public. If you want to put a listing in the newspaper you can only do so in the vaguest of terms — without actually using the name of the movie you are showing. They suggest ideas like “The library will be showing a tale of wizardry by the author JK Rowling.”

While the company won’t give you information about copyright law in general — ALA has this page for the curious — they seem more than happy to tell you what you are NOT allowed to do under copyright law. The printed materials that come with the license are even more bizarre and talk about “avoiding the embarassment of a lawsuit” as one reason a library might want to obtain public performance rights.

If your library is looking into obtaining public performance rights, the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction has a good list of questions to ask a licensing service.

Open Access to Ranganathan

Posted on 10Jul06 by jessamyn

I know, I know, I’m like a Ranganathan fangirl. “The library is a growing organism! blah blah blah” But this is Ranganathan news that is current! And cool! The Digital Library of Information Science & Technology Classics Project has gotten permission from the Sarada Ranganathan Endowment for Library Science to provide open access to many of Ranganathan’s works. There is some preliminary material scanned from the Five Laws of Library Science available already.

interested in nextgen OPACs?

Posted on 07Jun06 by jessamyn

You might be interested in the Next Generation Catalogs for Libraries list, newly created from some ideas batting around on the web4lib list.