Month: April 2004

hi – 14apr

Posted on by jessamyn

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.
Posted in hi

google bombing

Posted on by jessamyn
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.

sirsi corporation typos – yes I am a total adolescent

Posted on by jessamyn
This may be the only time I link to a puff piece about the Laura Bush, but it was too good to ignore. Sirsi, the vendor that many of us use for our OPAC services at our libraries has managed to get not one, but two egregious typos in an article about the First Lady… or should I say the Fist Lady? Maybe they’ve just got a Democract doing data entry? As my friend Michael says “there are no such things as hunting accidents” in Vermont, does anyone really accidentally type “pubic library”? Apparently the “fist lady” appelation is not that tough to come by, neither is “pubic library“.

” I think everybody loves Barbara, and still loves Barbara Bush. She was a terrific fist lady”
“Offering her own philosophy on living, the woman who was called Fist Lady to the World leads readers on a path to confidence, education, maturity, and more.”
“Lucy Hayes was the first Fist Lady to have graduated from college.” [thanks owen]