“If television’s a babysitter, the Internet is like a drunken librarian who won’t shut up.” Read the rest over at Cat and Girl [thanks matthew]
Month: August 2005
What We Want, The OPAC Manifesto
Andrew Pace reminds me that I used to have a wiki, way back when. This wiki was a place where, among other things, I had a roomshare page for ALA as well as the OPAC Manifesto which was going to be an article in Searcher Magazine. However, the final version was not quite Searcher material, so I shelved it temporarily while I thought about wikifixing and promptly forgot about it. The OPAC Manifesto is back for your viewing [though not editing] pleasure. Thanks very much to people who helped with it. Feel free to link or republish in any not-for-profit venture, just cite it and credit it.
update: for those of you who missed this topic before, the manifesto was set up on a wiki so that anyone could add or edit ideas on it. The intro and outro are mine, the rest was collaboratively built.
USAPA lawsuit?
Sabrina points to some disturbing news from the ACLU about a PATRIOT Act related attempt to demand library records. Thanks to the gag order, the actual ACLU lawsuit has been heavily redacted but it’s summarized in news reports. Note that this is NOT a Section 215 challenge as near as we can tell, though the case in question does seem to pertain to a library or an entity holding library records.
how is wifi like the railroads?
Ubiquitous wifi is only a social good for those with laptops. The coming of the railroads was the make or break point for small towns across America. If the train came through, you were home free. If it didn’t, well…. I drive all over the little towns of Vermont. I see cemetaries on the sides of mountains where, at one point, there were clearly enough people living there to sustain a community and probably a church. When we were all walking, we all had equal access to roads. Then some towns got the railroads, and with it the services, tourists, trade and attention that came with it. They thrived. Some towns faded away to a small cemetary at the end of a dirt road. Municipal wireless can help this problem, but only if we pay attention to who it’s serving, and who it isn’t.
As was the case with ownership of and access to railroads in the industrial era, control over and access to broadband connectivity is defining global, regional and individual success. In turn, it is shaping whether African Americans, Latinos and the poor will continue to live in economically strip-mined neighborhoods like Philadelphia’s Kensington.
[laz]
tie-dyed librarian interviewed by mary minow
Mary Minow has a fun interview with the librarian responsible for editing and annotating the upcoming book The Complete Annotated Grateful Dead Lyrics and discusses how the Dead’s policy of allowing free taping of all their shows helped the band, and also how that aesthetic does or does not translate into the world of print.
The marketing model of allowing free distribution of the music just flew in the face of all the common wisdom. In a way, the file-sharing programs that are the target of such vilification from the mainstream music business world today are the direct descendants of the Dead’s approach. That said, they have been (rightfully) quite cautious in allowing this project to go forward as a print-on-paper book.