Walt Crawford received his termination notice from OCLC. I was really hoping he’d be one of the people they kept and apparently so was he. He’s now 61 and looking for work. In the library profession this shouldn’t be impossible, but it’s always a pain in the ass. If you’ve got a need for someone with his background, experience or attitude, don’t wait, drop him a line.
can you control public domain images? should you?
Peter Hirtle has a great post over at the LibraryLaw blog about the Smithsonian’s attempt to control reproduction and subsequent use of the materials they have made available digitally and online, many of which are in the public domain. A group called Public Resource decided to push the envelope on the Smithsonian’s terms of service, specifically their copyright notice, and downloaded all 6000+ images and made them available on Flickr where they still are. Hirtle questions the legality of what Public Resource has done, but also questions the copyright that the Smithsonian asserts.
Again, I wish the Smithsonian didn’t try to assert control over its images. And while I think that Public.Resource.Org crossed the line, it is ridiculous that anyone else can now take any of public domain images Public.Resource.Org has distributed and do whatever they want with them. (Any contract limiting use of the images can only be between the Smithsonian and Public.Resource.Org.) That is just one more reason why repositories should focus on providing good services to users, rather than attempting to establish monopoly control over images from their holdings.
Update: I made this for you.
Using wikipedia to drive traffic to a library website
Carolyn Dunford and Ann Lally from the University of Washington outline their creative project in DLib this month. They registered as Wikipedia users and created content [links or articles] that supported or used the UW’s digital collections as source material. One of my favorite things about this idea is that, thanks to the way Wikipedia works, you can both read the article and see a list of every change they made to Wikipedia via their registered handle.
VLA Wrap-up
I just got back from VLA where I gave two half-talks over two days. It’s fun getting to hang out with local librarians. Most of the time I view conferences as a way to meet up with friends and see new places, but the VLA conference is actually good for old-fashioned networking (with new friends who I will see new places with in the future, I am certain).
My first talk was about CSS and I mostly did the intro while Jessica Allard did the bulk of the talk. My second talk was What’s What With Wireless. I gave an overview and then Carl Zeller from Teconic, who I had worked with when I was at the Rutland Free Library, did the safety and networking aspects of it. It was great to do split talks. I think the audience really gains a lot from multiple perspectives even if, as with the wifi talk, the presenters aren’t even always agreeing with each other.
Last night I went over to UVM and hung out with the Vermont Area Group of Unix Enthusiasts (VAGUE) and had pizza and talked about Ubuntu and yes, my little video which has now passed 27,000 views on YouTube, almost surpassing the population of my county. I talked to them about Koha and LibLime and Evergreen which no one there really knew about. They repeatedly apologized for the dark dank basement as if I was familiar with perhaps being someplace else, but I really like hanging out with nerds and geeks. I plan to go to the developers conference in Boston and let them know what library/librarian users might like to see out of an open source desktop OS. I encourage other librarians to go.
A few other things I learned:
- The VLA Intellectual Freedom Committee is working on strengthening the library privacy laws in the state of Vermont.
- The new incoming VLA preseident-elect is the assistant director of the library I used to work at, and I got to meet him at the conference.
- One of the Department of Libraries’ Regional Consultants uses Ubuntu and has some experience in/interest in using Evergreen as an ILS.
- The current (as of yesterday) president of VLA has some interesting ideas about new directions. I introduced myself to her and said “hey I’m short on tact, but I’m pretty good at getting technology projects working, consider letting me help out with the back end on your projects” and she seemed to think that was a great idea.
I’m sure there’s more but I’m operating at a sleep deficit and a keyboard overload so I’ll add in more when I remember it. Thanks to everyone who made my trip to Burlington fun and interesting.
some end of the week short links
It’s been a busy week this week. I had eight people come to computer drop-in time on Tuesday which was a tech frenzy of PayPal and email and inserting graphics and Yahoo mail address books. I’ve had a few of these links hanging around for a while waiting to find time to write proper posts, but I figured I’ll drop them in here. I see a lot of blogging as playing hot potato with a bunch of web content. You find it, you pass it on, the next person passes it on. The more content you shift, the easier it is to quickly ascertain which things you need to save for longer perusal and which need to just get passed on for the next person. I’ve read and absorbed these and thought you might like them.
- The Hollywood Librarian movie is premiering at ALA in DC this Summer on June 22nd. Ann Seidl has a clip available on YouTube, and one of my signs is in it. [thanks jacqui]
- Big congrats to Amanda for the launch of the Endeca powered catalog at her place of work. Look how fancy!
- Casey posts some stats about Wikipedia from what Pew is telling us(pdf). You can ban it or block it but people are using it. So what do we do?
- One of the most favorited posts from MetaFilter this week is the Things Found In Books post
- T. Scott is one of the many folks who have been reflecting on the idea that younger librarians have some time period of “dues paying” they must go through before getting their ideas heard and possibly implemented. This was the main thing that kept me from seriously considering running for Council again. Good long post and some great comments as well.
- Don Wood’s Library 2.0 blog is consistently a good read. This is a slightly older post about a great partnership. MySpace is teaming up with the Illinois Library Association to promote online safety. What a good idea.