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.
Month: May 2005
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?
ALA wins lawsuit over broadcast flag
Big big news. The American Library Association, Electronic Frontier Foundation and friends just won their joint challenge to the FCCs weird Broadcast Flag regulations, decision can be read here. Not only does this mean that the FCC has to back off from trying to require all digital video receivers to have special Digital Rights Management embedded [that’s Congress’s job, the courts say, if they choose to do it] but the courts also agreed that the ALA, and by extention librarians and educators, had standing to file this case in the first place. Here’s an example from one of the librarian’s affadavits cited in the decision.
There is clearly a substantial probability that, if enforced, the Flag Order will immediately harm the concrete and particularized interests of the NCSU Libraries. Absent the Flag Order, the Libraries will continue to assist NCSU faculty members make broadcast clips available to students in distanceeducation courses via the Internet, but there is a substantial probability that the Libraries will be unable to do this if the Flag Order takes effect. It is also beyond dispute that, if this court vacates the Flag Order, the Libraries will be able to continue to assist faculty members lawfully redistribute broadcast clips to their students.
Get more links and some discussion here, plus the great quote from the decision “Congress does not…hide elephants in mouseholes.”