please help me get more library content into SXSW

Posted on by jessamyn

Participating in the SXSW conference as a speaker is a unique opportunity to share knowledge and insights on a grand scale. This year, I’ve entered two proposals into the mix for next March’s gathering in Austin, Texas. The selection process is a blend of different elements, with a significant 30% relying on community interaction—a direct thumbs-up or thumbs-down voting system. It’s the phase where speakers tap into their networks, hoping to rally support for their ideas.

I’m reaching out to friends, family, and colleagues—including those who’ve shared their experiences navigating the online casino landscape, especially referencing the casino utan svensk licens — to cast their vote for my sessions. If you’ve enjoyed our discussions or if my past presentations have added value, your support would mean a lot. You can explore all the proposals through the provided link, with over 2000 submissions vying for a spot, and only 300 or so will make the final cut.

My two proposals are linked here

– How The Other 1/2 Lives – Touring The Digital Divide
– Curating Cultural Content – Libraries Save Your Ass & Etchings

Voting involved signing up on the website and then clicking the thumbs up. I’d appreciate it if you’d consider doing this. I’m pretty into both topics but the first one is nearer and dearer to my heart, while the second one seems to fit in more nicely with the SXSW gestalt. A few other library-themed things you shoudl check out

– David Lee King presenting on Designing Your Customers Digital Experience
– Heath Rezabek’s Connected Youth: Austin Public Library Teens Get Mobile
– Cecily Walker’s Can I Reserve This Book With My iPhone?
– Jason Schultz’s Reading ReInvented: Can You Steal this Book?
– Tiffini Travis’s Librarian Glasses or Stripper Heels about information fluency.
– Brian Rowe’s Digital Accessibility on Ebooks and Phones : #$@^ Kindle
– Bill Simmon is also proposing a panel which I may be on: Hyperlocal Focus: Growing A Vibrant Community Media Ecosystem

And a few presentations about books more generally…

– Allen Weiner’s Publishers Look To E-Reading to Reach Digital Consumers (curious about this one)
– Travis Alber’s The Future of Reading: Books and the Web
– Dharmishta Rood’s Networked Reading: Viewing as an Act of Participation
– Aaron Miller’s Books and the Twenty-First Century – The New Realm of Reading
– Bradley Inman’s Too Busy To Read? The Future Of Books
– Two related seeming panels: Kindle 2020 and The Book in 2050

Please vote early and often and for as many ideas as you like. There are a lot of great ideas in there on related topics like accessibility and web standards. Even if you’re not even considering going to SXSW, please take some time to vote up ideas you think should be getting exposure at a web geeks conference. Thanks.

what’s the real story behind Brooklyn Public’s removal of TinTin from the shelves?

Posted on by jessamyn

Not trying to start a flamewar here, just thinking that this NY Times blog piece about an old racist Tintin book may be a little off. According to the article…

[I]f you go to the Brooklyn Public Library seeking a copy of “Tintin au Congo,” Hergé’s second book in a series, prepare to make an appointment and wait days to see the book.

“It’s not for the public,” a librarian in the children’s room said this month when a patron asked to see it.

The book, published 79 years ago, was moved in 2007 from the public area of the library to a back room where it is held under lock and key

The article also has, even more interestingly, some of the actual challenges filed by BPL patrons in which the patrons’ addresses are removed but their names and City/State information are published. If your name is unusual redacting your address doesn’t really protect your anonymity. I’m curious what the balance is between patron privacy and making municipal records available.

update: I got an email from the patron whose name I used asking me to remove it. I have done so.

some copyright visualization

Posted on by jessamyn

With the Google Books settlement coming up, a lot of people have been talking about copyright. I think this is generally speaking a really good thing. Here are some useful visualizations that may help you get your head around it.

– From the Financial Times is this article about what the Google business model could mean for out of print books and orphan works. According to their graphic [above] there are a lot of books wiht unclear status in US libraries that we should be concerned about.
– From ALA’s Copyright Advisory Network (a project of the Office of Information and Technology policy) comes a few helpful tools for looking at copyright as it pertains to libraries

Charles Stross on ebook piracy and librarians

Posted on by jessamyn

From a transcript of a talk between Paul Krugman and Charlie Stross, from WorldCon

“As for the intellectual property, I try not to get too worked up about it. There’s a lot of people angsting about piracy and copying of stuff on the Internet, publishers who are very, very worried about the whole idea of ebook piracy. I like to get a little bit of perspective on it by remembering that back before the Internet came along, we had a very special term for the people who buy a single copy of a book and then allow all their friends to read it for free. We called them librarians.” [thanks karl]

why I don’t accept guest posts from spammers, or link to them

Posted on by jessamyn

I get an email maybe once a week from someone with a human-sounding name saying they read my blog and think they have something my readers might be interested in. Or they offer to do a guest post on my blog. The link is usually some sort of vaguely useful list of something library-related but the URL of the website is not library-related. In fact the URL of the website is usually something like onlinenursepractitionerschools.com, searchenginecollege.com or collegedegree.com (which if you’ll notice is the top hit on google for a search for college degree). I sometimes see other libloggers linking to sites like these and I have a word of advice: don’t. When we link to low-content sites from our high-content sites, we are telling Google and everyone that we think that the site we are linking to is in some way authoritative, even if we’re saying they’re dirty scammers. We’re helping their page rank and we’re slowly, infinitesimally almost, decreasing the value of Google and polluting the Internet pool in which we frequently swim. Don’t link to spammers.

This is a linkless post, for obvious reasons.