Hi. Please pay your taxes so the government can continue to fund public libraries, at least a little bit. My blogging class at PALINET was cancelled for May which is a bit of a disappointment. I think I was a bit naive going into it. PALINET solicited me to teach the class, but perhaps they were also expecting me to aggressively promote it as well. In any case, people didn’t register, the class will not be taught, I have a free weekend, plus one blogging/RSS class all ready to teach if anyone is looking for one. Please say hello if you see me at BloggerCon.
ALA elections
ALA Council has been discussing the hybrid election a lot this week. If you voted in the ALA elections, whether electronically or with a paper ballot, and wouldn’t mind letting me know how you found the experience [easy? hard? fun? unfun?] I could pass on some data to my Council colleagues. Thanks.
hi – 14apr
Hi. I’m working on finishing up my talk for the Simmons folks, so I’ve been a little scarce around here. This will probably continue for the remainder of the week. A few little notes. I have a Gmail account. This means I get advertised to even more than in the rest of my daily life. You can see what I mean here. The only messages in my inbox are about cheese, see my ads? Yes I’m concerned about privacy, having read the privacy policy, program policy and the terms of use. I’ll report more when I’ve had it for more than half a day. In the meantime, read Mark Pilgrim’s report on how accessible Gmail is [not very], and send your cheese-related email to jessamyn at gmail dot com. Here’s an interesting quote from the World Privacy Forum’s open letter to Google [pdf]
The lowered expectations of email privacy that Google’s system has the potential to create is no small matter. Once an information architecture is built, it functions much like a building — that building may be used by many different owners, and its blueprints maybe replicated in many other places. Google’s technology is proprietary, but the precedents it sets are not.
google bombing
Speaking of Google, I have very mixed feelings about the librarian Googlebomb meme that is going around now. On the one hand, it’s fun and LoC and LII deserve positive attention. On the other hand, another recent Googlebomb — the one for the word “jew” — was done with significantly less good intention. One of the new paradigms we need to deal with in the Internet age, is the authority question. It used to be easy to trust the authority of print materials because they remained static. Once the encyclopedia is printed, unless someone rips the pages out, the information is inviolate. You may or may not agree with it, but you know that everyone reads the same words. Citing a web site for your information involves a “date accessed” indicator and, if you’re really being careful, a cached copy of the page. Information changes. While this fluidity is more indicative perhaps of the “real world” of information, I feel that my job as a librarian is to use the tools effectively and be aware of their accuracy. While I find the planned outcomes of the librarian Googlebomb amusing and generally positive, I ultimately feel that it’s a cheat — a way to use tech-savviness to affect sources that others feel are more objective. If the Googlebomb precedent hadn’t been set already, I feel that librarians would not feel that this was an appropriate way to manipulate an index. Ultimately, this is Google’s responsibility to deal with, but shouldn’t we be helping?
update: Steven appears to have called it off.
library strip club — with shower room
Is it possible I haven’t linked to the Library Strip Club yet?
The club actually does have volumes lining the entrance, but the clientele come here for a different type of learning experience. And they visit often enough to keep The Library busy even on school nights. [thanks andrew]