Yes, that’s me among other luminaries speaking on technology trends in public libraries, this Fall.
Author: jessamyn
dorky picture fun
New Jersey librarian Amy Kearns has started a Flickr group called Librarians Desks, share your own. Does anyone remember an older web site that had pictures of all the reference desks one librarian had worked at? Send me a link if you find it, this site is definitely the next step.
some great DRM examples
Two examples of how smart people who are good with technology have gotten setbacks from doing perfectly legal things with digital media saddled with DRM. Read: Jenny the Shifted Librarian tries to watch a movie and Hilary, Rosen, former head of the RIAA tries to listen to music.
You can’t have it both ways Miss Rosen. If you want DRM, someone is going to have to control that DRM. And if you don’t think they won’t use that control to their ultimate advantage, you obviously didn’t learn anything from your association with the music industry.
[thanks alan]
NHLA conference this week, come say hi
The New Hampshire Library Association is having their annual conference in Manchester this coming week. I’ll be there giving a talk about blogs and a talk about robots. Please stop by and say hello if you’re there. I’ll have some new stylesheets for my talks.
Are Mao and Hoover the best you can do to advertise the library
Minneapolis Public Library’s friends group has a new campaign hyping the new library they’ll be opening next year. It features Mao and Hoover, assumedly because they were librarians. There’s an email campaign that finds the “edgy” approach these ads take bordering on offensive. From my inbox:
The Iibrary is supposed to stand for freedom of information, access to all, and democracy. Mao and Hoover are the antithesis of these things – both of them ruined many lives, prevented free speech, and used fear to gain power. Mao killed, tortured and imprisoned thousands of people. Hoover was instrumental in doing surveillance against people during the McCarthy era. He spied on Martin Luther King, and was a bigot, a homophobe, and a racist. In the 60’s, during the Berrigan brothers’ trial he even had a real librarian imprisoned because she refused to testify against them! Why then, use these people’s images – at all- when there’s so many better people to pick from?