It’s easy to morning-after quarterback big computer disasters, but eleven days seems awfully long for an OPAC outage that was caused by a disk drive failure. When my ISP has a disk drive failure, they’re back up in an hour or two and restoring the data in the background over the rest of the day. It would have been really interesting to have been able to read a library blog about this outage and get updates on how the restoration was going, wouldn’t it? Instead we can peek at the Google cache to see what the library web site looked like, and see how it looks now. That sort of potential transparency is scary, but ultimately builds patron/customer/funder confidence, and helps with messes like this one. Michael Stephens has been discussing Darlene Fichter’s idea of radical trust, or put more simply “trusting the community.” and I think it’s something we’ll all be hearing more about, if not actually talking about. Trust me.
Category: ‘puters
presenting, computers, tech battles
I’m really happy that David had a good time at my talk at TLA. I’m glad I can get a message across that’s not just “Here’s why you should think exactly like I do.” I went a different direction with my talk this time and used images almost exclusively and then just sort of talked around them. This minimized the “Let me read you my slides” effect and also made me more comfortable ad-libbing somewhat. I’ll try to do this more in the future.
Apropos of this is The May issue of Info Career Trends (I like the text version since it’s all on one page, read the current issue in HTML here) which has lots of articles about being a good speaker and presenter, coming at the same topic from slightly differing perspectives. One of the things I enjoy about the library profession generally is the opportunity to not only give presentations for other librarians, but also to hear other librarians present. I’ve known Jenny and Michael for years and have never seen them present together. I enjoyed their presentation even though it was on a topic that I already know a fair amount about; they’re solid, engaging presenters and a good team with complementary personalities.
Rachel from LISJobs also has a blog, The Liminal Librarian, that many others have already mentioned. I’ve been reading it for a few weeks now, but particularly liked her most recent post on geeks vs. nerds which was a response to an article Rory wrote recently (more further reading in this post).
I don’t see the profession as having a huge schism, but I do see it as spawning many new and necessary sub-specialties. We’ve seen the rise of the YA librarians in the past decade, and the rise of the tech librarians is not particularly different. In some ways I think the view of the schism is a result of the dearth of print materials and the multivariate nature of tech questions and tech issues generally. If you’re refinishing a bureau, you can find a book that will tell you how to do it. The same is not at all true if you’re signing up for an email account, making an airline reservation online, or trying to print a weird-sized pdf. As libraries make their decisions to provide public access computing, they need to deal with the predictable outcomes. What happens when we offer people computers that they don’t know how to use? Or, going back to the USB drive question on web4lib, what happens when we offer people computers that don’t work like their own computers?
Jenny has a series of posts from Patron Day at Ann Arbor District Library and one little quote stood out in her recounting of Ed “Superpatron” Vielmetti’s presentation: “a friend of his said [the library] is the only place I know of where the computer is less functional with the library catalog than it is at home!” One thing about being in what John Blyberg describes as a “tech depressed” area is that I know the same is not true for many of the teeny libraries that I work with, but still, shoudln’t we be aiming higher?
RFID best practices
The American Library Association was one of many companies and public interest groups that helped create a set of best practices for RFID. They include these three general principles about RFID, as it relates to privacy:
Technology Neutrality: RFID technology in and of itself does not impose threats to privacy. Rather privacy breaches occur when RFID, like any technology, is deployed in a way that is not consistent with responsible information management practices that foster sound privacy protection.
Privacy and Security as Primary Design Requirements: Users of RFID technology should address the privacy and security issues as part of its initial design. Rather than retrofitting RFID systems to respond to privacy and security issues, it is much preferable that privacy and security should be designed in from the beginning.
Consumer Transparency: There should be no secret RFID tags or readers. Use of RFID technology should be as transparent as possible, and consumers should know about the implementation and use of any RFID technology (including tags, readers and storage of PII) as they engage in any transaction that utilizes an RFID system. At the same time, it is important to recognize that notice alone does not mitigate all concerns about privacy. Notice alone does not, for example, justify any inappropriate data collection or sharing, and/or the failure to deploy appropriate security measures. Notice must be supplemented by thoughtful, robust implementation of responsible information practices.
Are USB drives a security risk?
Michael Sauers has posted a summary of some of the interesting discussion happening on web4lib. The upshot? Michael’s opinion “[T]here’s no security risk from USB drives that can’t be solved in ways that won’t also hurt the other 99% of your patrons.” He offers two pieces of advice to make risks lower still: 1) alter the BIOS of the computer to disallow booting from USB drives and password protect it and 2) use Deep Freeze or some other software that will return your computer to it’s default settings on reboot (good for many other reasons). See? Problem solved. How about letting patrons use their USB drives now?
Engaged Patrons
There is no reason not to try this. EngagedPatrons.org “provide website services connecting public libraries and their patrons. We handle the programming; you reap the benefits of being able to offer your users a more engaging and interactive web presence.” The head honcho, Glenn Peterson, has been working on the Hennepin County Library website for a decade. A decade! Free to qualifying public libraries. Do you have a single thing to lose? No, you do not. [thanks rick]