accessibility in library web sites in KY, a sad state of affairs

Posted on by jessamyn

Library Web Accessibility at Kentucky’s 4-Year Degree Granting Colleges and Universities a paper by a Kentucky web development librarian. Guess what, despite the fact that the ADA pretty much mandates accessible web sites, we’re not seeing them.

Based on low levels of compliance with the basic principles of Web accessibility and the potential of legal threats, institutions need to take accessibility issues more seriously. While the impetus to do so should fall under the rubric of professional ethics rather than avoiding a legal threat, either reason will suffice. Much like issues involving copyright, librarians embrace, on ethical terms, the protection of intellectual property while, at the same time, the threat of litigation hangs over our heads. Ethics may be important but they are also cheap. Litigation, on the other hand, is expensive. On issues such as standards, librarians understand how ignoring cataloging standards could have a negative impact on accessing collections. Can we afford to ignore Web standards when doing so impacts accessibility? [unalog]

xISBN blog to watch out for

Posted on by jessamyn

I almost never link to new blogs with less than a few weeks of posts in them, but Glenn Fleishman [you may know him from such hits as isbn.nu] has a proven track record and is a delight to read. His new blog ISBlogN which tracks the “authority problem” with the ISBN system for most people’s real-world search needs. He’s got big plans, it will be fun to watch them unfold.

Authority doesn’t mean that the information is correct. Rather, it means that you have authoritatively settled on a single form of a category of information that might be represented in several ways. It’s a way to collapse lots of individual information that is fundamentally about the same think into a single set of information that is mapped to the same thing. This is closer to how people conceive of what they want from a book search than any of the tools I’ve seen….. I believe that with a little effort and some coordination, along with the tenets of Feist v. Rural, the Internet community could develop a WikiBook-a-pedia, or a compendium of updatable bibliographic information along with authority and chunky linkages that could be distributed freely.

hi – 05oct

Posted on by jessamyn

Hi. I was invited to go to the ALA’s Office for Information Technology Policy’s Workshop on Libraries and the Information Commons today. It’s in Cerritos CA at the end of the month and I’m going to try to make it. If anyone else is going or has some pointers for Info-Commons type stuff to read in the meantime, please let me know about it. I’ll be starting with the Washington Office’s Issues Page first of all.

Posted in hi

from the mailbag, don’t mess with librarians

Posted on by jessamyn

From my friend the law professor. “Last night I went to a discussion among a famous local Rabbi (who is also a professor), Jamie Gorelick (member 9/11 Commission and former Assist. Attny Gen. for Clinton), and Viet Dinh (G-town law prof, former AA General for Bush, author of the USA Patriot Act, and poster boy for conservative causes…). Viet made a comment at one point that I think you would like — he said what he had learned from the response to the Patriot Act was ‘Don’t mess with librarians.'”