while you were midwintering….

Posted on by jessamyn

Hi. I’m back and very tired. Midwinter went fairly well from my perspective. Council meetings seemed effective. I got to see most of the people i tried to see and had some nice serendipitous meetings with others. My company was part usual suspects and part people I’d never met before including a healthy dose of library students. I learned things. I took a lot of public transportation in an unfamiliar city. I stayed within my budget and I got home feeling smarter than when I left. I have a stack of paperwork that I’d like to share parts of with you but it will need to wait until the weekend.

In the meantime, while we were all at the meeting, this happened “City stalls FBI access in library” referring to the librarian at the Newton Free Library in Massachusetts who wouldn’t let FBI agents in to search library computers without a warrant after there had been emailed threats directed towards Brandeis University sent from one of the library computers. According to an article in the Boston Herald, this was done with the mayor’s knowledge and backing but everyone seems set to blame the librarian anyhow. This was a big enough news items to be the butt of a lot of jokes on talk radio by the time I was driving home from the airport. I’m just starting to read about this story, but correct me if I’m wrong, couldn’t the agents have just asked for the data on the computers, using the USA PATRIOT Act as their legal justification? This seems like a case where they were reluctant to for some reason. The Boston Globe article on the subject says this

[B]y the time a warrant became an issue, law enforcement officials had determined there was no imminent danger and decided to cooperate with Newton officials, Marcinkiewicz said. She said no arrests had been made as of yesterday afternoon. [emphasis mine]

National PATRIOT Act call-in Day

Posted on by jessamyn

It’s a bit of a stunt, but ALA Council is doing a National [USA] PATRIOT Act call-in day at 10 am CST today. All Councilors are going to turn on their cell phones and call their legislators to ask them to

  1. Include language in Section 215 to require a statement of fact linking the person whose records are sought to a terrorism investigation.
  2. Include language to allow a Section 215 recipient to post a meaningful challenge to the FISA court order.
  3. Include language allowing a section 505 recipieint to post a meaningful challenge to a National Security Letter.

Of course, when I’ve been calling my representative, I’ve been going beyond this and expressing grave reservations about Section 215 specifically and other parts of the USA APTRIOT Act generally (specifically concerning wiretaps and electronic communication generally), but this language appears designed to be something that everyone on Council can get behind. So, if you’re free in a few hours, go find your representative and pick up the phone.

Vermont Libraries I have known, the visiting continues

Posted on by jessamyn

I am linking alll the libraries I visit this year under the visit06 tag. Here are two more.

The Hartness Library System at Vermont technical College – I am a frequent user of this library. It has the best collection of any of the libraries for the stuff I like to read — wonky non-fiction mostly — and it’s right by the pool where I swim. There have been few times that I’ve had to do something at the circulation desk where I wasn’t greeted by the puzzled face of a desk worker trying unsuccessfully to do something. I’m not sure what OPAC they use, but it seems to be complicated. They have no overdue fees which means when I’m not at the pool I sometimes keep books late. The last time I brought a book back quite late, I asked if I could renew it even though it was over a month overdue. The librarian — who had been called out to help with the OPAC because the nice lady at the desk couldn’t figure out how to check the book back in and then check it out again — asked me, while holding the book, “Well, how long do you think you’ll need it?” A legit question I guess, but I was really just asking about the renewal policy, I’m sure they had a policy. However, since it’s a small-town library, social concerns like how long I needed the book came into play. This is the good news and the bad news. I said I didn’t know, it was just a pleasure book anyhow, and decided just to put the book back on the shelf and come back for it another day. When I came back the next day, I checked the tag in the back – no one had checked the book out in six years besides me.

Tunbridge Public Library – I help this library out with computer things as part of my job. They have no web site. When I asked if they’d like me to make them a web site they said no, not really. They use dial-up and have a network so that four computers in the library can share it. There is no broadband service available in their town except for satellite which is prohibitively expensive. I sat around and we talked about teaching some basic email, digital pictures, and shopping online classes in the Spring. The librarian wanted some help with her email, she’d been getting email from Amazon about her account and it was confusing her. We looked at the email — a phishing scam which was what I suspected — and I showed her how to look at the web address in an email, and then mouseover it to see if it matched the web address in the browser status bar. I then showed her how to read a web address backwards, to start with the top-level domain to see where an email is really from, like checking caller ID to see what state someone is calling from. This was met with appreciative and happy exclamations and I got to drive home feeling like I’d really helped someone, just by telling them what i know about computers.