Second Life is one of those things that I mention in my talks about 2.0 stuff and outreach but I don’t have a lot of first hand experience with it. I don’t have time to be in an immersive community other than the one I work in, and the people in my real life communities aren’t really spending much time there. I’m always looking for examples of organizations (non-profits in particular) using Second Life as a tool to do whatever it is they’re already doing. I enjoyed reading Mike Janssen’s piece on what WGBH (a local Boston non-profit public broadcaster) learned from putting on a performance in Second Life.
why search, and search engine law, matters
My friend, lawyer and law professor James Grimmelmann, has written a short interesting article called The Google Dilemma about why people should care very much about how search engines work and what regulations and laws guide them. Using a few examples which may be familiar to many librarians he makes a great case for why corporate policy at Google matters and why people shoudl understand how Google works generally.
If the Internet is a gigantic library, and search engines are its card catalog, then Google has let the Chinese government throw out the cards corresponding to books it doesn’t like. There may be sites with full and honest discussion of the June 4, 1989 crackdown accessible on the Internet from China. But when those sites aren’t visible in search engines, we’re back to our ï¬eld full of haystacks.
OCLC – “from awareness to funding…”
Dear OCLC,
I’m sure you do this for some very important reason, but spending $16 to express mail me a copy of a report that I didn’t ask for (though it does look quite interesting) seems wasteful. I go to the post office once a week and all express mail does is make my postmistress agitated. Honestly, the only thing more puzzling was receiving that glossy flyer advertising the new Sweeps Cash Casino right alongside the unwanted report—an odd pairing to find in my mailbox, considering I rarely gamble. While WorldCat is closer to being useful for me—showing one copy of Jane Eyre actually in my state before those one state over (the closest copy being about a quarter mile from here)—I’d love it if you could apply this money to some sort of teeny-library scholarship fund so that we could benefit from WorldCat in Vermont instead of just hearing about how we can raise more money to pay you with.
Thanks.
Jessamyn
open shelves classification – a project in search of a leader
I’ve always thought that one of the troubles with librarianship was that there are always more great ideas and projects than anyone has time for or can get funding for. As a result we outsource projects to the people who have time and money and thus lose control over the end product. I have no idea if Library Thing’s open source Open Shelves Classification Project is going to wind up looking like a library product or a vendor product, but I’m curious to find out. As Tim Spalding says “You won’t be paid anything, but, hey, there’s probably a paper or two in it, right?” I haven’t seen much chatter, blog or otherwise, about this just yet but I’ll be keeping my eyes open. Whether or not this project it ultimately successful, I think it’s an interesting grass rootsy way of looking at ideas of authority and rejecting the top down let-us-have-you-contribute-and-then-sell-it-back-to-you models we’ve been working under.
a difficult time, a difficult task
I work occasionally as a fill-in librarian at a local public library that serves a community of about 5,000 people. This is the community I am moving to next month, up the road from where I live now, and while technically it puts me out of the “rural” designation, it’s still pretty rural. Last week and the week before there was a horrible tragedy that rocked the whole community. Short form: a local girl Brooke Bennett, went missing and her body was discovered a few days ago. The most likely suspect at this point is an uncle who is on the state sex offender list.
First off let me say that I’m quoting from news stories only. Our official staff position is “no comment” and I’m sticking to that. Here is why this is a library issue.
- The initial reports, when the girl was simply missing, was that she had met a sexual predator online via her MySpace page. That garnered the predictable media outcry as well as some very good stories about safety online.
- It also resulted in law enforcement coming to the library to take the public PCs. You can read the library director’s statements about this in this article in the Burlington Free Press. The librarians waited for a court order, and gave the computers to the police once they received one. The computers have since been returned. The library had an internet policy in place to guide their actions in this situation.
- As more details emerged it became clear that the MySpace angle was not just untrue, it was the opposite of what people had thought. The person who abducted Brooke had actually logged in to her MySpace page to try to create a fake scenario where she was meeting a “predator” when in reality she was meeting him. IP addresses from these interactions were given to law enforcement by MySpace and were, as near as I can tell, instrumental in helping them determine the sequence of events of this crime and narrow down the suspect list considerably. The older articles still reflect the “internet predator” angle when, like most abductions, the criminal was someone from the victim’s own family.
- And as far as data goes, danah boyd has a very good article about MySpace when DOPA was more on the table in 2006. One of her useful facts “Statistically speaking, kids are more at risk at a church picnic or a boy scout outing than they are when they go on MySpace. Less than .01% of all youth abductions nationwide are stranger abductions and as far as we know, no stranger abduction has occurred because of social network services.”
- The accused man is being charged, as of this writing, with kidnaping. This is because kidnaping at a federal level carries a possible death penalty sentence and is, I assume, a bargaining chip. The law regarding this is one that I wasn’t totally aware of “the 2006 Adam Walsh law — named for another abducted child — allowed federal prosecution of such crimes when they are facilitated by the Internet.” Worth knowing for any of us who provide Internet access to the public, I think.
- The library has set up a book display dealing with this very difficult topic — books on MySpace, the death of a child, dealing with grief — and encouraging conversations.
So, this is all incredibly upsetting and destabilizing to the community here. While I hope that you never have to deal with something like this at your library, there may be some instructive or useful pieces of information here that I felt might be worthwhile to pass on.