“Quite a trick, being able to posture as a radical, while at the same time being fawned over by the mainstream media” says the Conservator blog about the recent AP wire story about activist librarians. I thought so too; Jenna Freedman and I are quoted heavily.
Author: jessamyn
two posts on michigan library tech
Two worthwhile stories from Ed Vielmetti’s blog Vacuum.
- Sony rootkit music off the Ann Arbor District Library’s purchase list – a story about Ed’s librarian telling him of their decision to not buy music from Sony that installs “rootkit like” technology. These music CDs install nefarious software on a user’s system, ostenisbly to prevent illegal copying, and DRM circumvention and is highly controversial.
- Interlibrary loan system MiLE in Michigan irrecoverably hacked – hacking is malicious vandalism, granted, but this is a confidence shaking security breach. Electronic ILL service in a good deal of Southeastern Michagan is broken beyond recovery until the roll-out of the next version of the software, at least a month away. This is a large-scale failure that should have been avoidable. Disasters sometimes happen. Are you preapred for yours? Joyhn Blyberg from the Ann Arbor District Library outlines steps libraries should take to secure their system, not later, now.
we’re the government and we’re here to help. what do you mean you can’t use a computer?
Rochelle has just given a great example about why the digital divide and technology skills are so damned important. How do you choose one of the over sixty Medicare prescription drug plans? By typing in all of your prescription information into a complicated buggy jargon-filled web page of course.
my talk at UAZ SIRLS
I’m back from Tucson/Phoenix. I had a great time getting to spend the day with the students and faculty of the University of Arizona School of Information Resources and Library Science. I gave a variant of my digital divide talk The Information Poor & the Information Don’t Care Small Libraries and the Digital Divide (the notes look the same but all the talks are really really different). While I was in Arizona I also got to see the downtown branch of the Phoenix Public Library, the North Valley Regional Library (my first big suburban library!) and the Tucson Pima Public Library. I also did a quick walk around the University of Arizona library but got quickly distracted by the amazing art exhibit Reading Our Remains (waxed and sliced books, fascinating) and didn’t take a lot of other pictures.
hi – 11nov
Hi. I’m in Phoenix today, giving a talk tomorrow at University of Arizona’s SIRLS Graduate Student Symposium. Yesterday we did what I always do in new places, went to the library. We saw my friends’ suburban library the North Valley Regional Library and also the Burton Barr Central Library in Phoenix. I have a bunch of observations, it was a lesson in compare and contrast, but I’ll just link to a photo I took in the Phoenix public library parking lot.