Jenny posts a follow-up to her earlier post about organization membership and guest speakers and conference registration fees and the weird relationship between them. A few of us were trying to do some damage control on the Council list where it became clear that people were misunderstanding the issues, either accidentally or because of a radically different worldview than some of the rest of us. I’ve been asking friends of mine in other professional organizations and it’s become clear to me that some organizations have similar policies, many do not, and most people who don’t have just a flat-out “it’s an honor to be invited to speak and you should expect nothing in return.” seem to be surprised that exceptions weren’t made for Michael and Jenny not because of who they are but just because of their extentuating circumstances [not attenting the conference, paying all expenses in Michael’s case, etc.] and peoples’ ability to be flexible about things like this. update: Meridith makes a very compelling “librarians should not be martyrs” point with plenty of stats to back up her vision of a more just professional association.
Month: December 2005
on reading: books v audio books
I count audio books on my reading list, same as all other books, as long as they’re unabridged. Two links about audiobooks, the New York Times writes in defense of audiobooks in Loud, Proud, Unabridged: It Is Too Reading! while audible.com has been strutting around with this “edgy” ad campaign at dontread.org, while I applaud their chutzpah (and their printable DON’T READ posters) I’m always a little squicked out when a for-profit entity sells me stuff through a .org domain.
Speaking of audiocontent, take a listen to this recording of Ranganathan talking about Dewey from a 1964 recording (it’s noisy at the beginning, stick with it)
hi – 18dec
Hi. Posting has been a bit sporadic here because my old iBook had its fourth logic board fail. So, this is a short story about technology for you. My iBook had left me in the lurch three times thanks to its faulty logic board. This is a known flaw and has been repaired for free each time it has happened. This last time, when I started seeing signs of impending logic board death, I called Apple and said “I have put up with this long enough. Please send me a laptop that will not need replacement of vital parts every eight months” To my suprise, they agreed to send me a new G4, one G faster than my last laptop. I mailed back my old laptop, after wiping the drive. This meant that I had to backup my entire hard drive locally before getting a new laptop. Fortunately in this household that is not difficult. Since so much of my personal data is online, this was less onerous than it would have been maybe a year or two ago. Calendar, contacts, booklist, websites, bookmarks, are all backed up redundantly online in various places.
I got the new laptop about two weeks later, which is longer than I would have preferred, but I can’t see Apple being really gung-ho on sending me a new free laptop. Yesterday I began the long process of re-downloading and re-installing all the software on my old machine. It took about 4-6 hours, including system updates. If I had dial-up it would have taken weeks, literally weeks. Backing up my home directory meant that I saved my system preferences, my desktop images, my email configuration information and yes, my bookmarks. Being tech savvy meant that all this took me was time. The few times I stumbled in my file restoration [I accidentally removed the mechanism for keyboard entry and couldn’t type on the thing for a little bit, ha ha!] I had the know-how to straighten it all out. I know sometimes listening to my “But what about the information poor…?” harangues can be tiring, but a situation like this which was complicated but manageable for me might very well have been the end of someone’s online life in the community that I work in. For every senior that is happily clicking away at some AARP websites, there are others with computers and Internet subscriptions who have hit some sort of wall, usually just a know-how wall and don’t have a solid plan B. In my librarian utopia, libraries can help be that plan B.
Little Red Book ILL gets patron a visit from Homeland Security
A student did an ILL for a specific version of Mao’s Little Red Book and wound up getting a visit from Homeland Security. Obviously, there is more to this story than the short news article, but the article alleges that the Department of Homeland Security monitors Interlibrary Loan requests.
update from the bs detector alert: An ALA Councilor notes that there are two versions of this story circulating with different names attached which definitely sounds fishy and makes it worth further investigation into what exactly is going on. Other councilors have emailed the prof from UCSC mentioned in the second article and he said it was the first he’d heard of it. I’ve emailed the reporter and one of the professors cited in the recent article and I’ll let you know what I find out, if anything. Fellow Councilor Rory Litwin has posted this follow-up to the Council list with more first hand information from one of the profesors involved. I posted a follow-up including some feedback I’d gotten from the reporter of the most recent article. BoingBoing is faster with the summary action than I am.
This is all coming on the heels of some unpleasant revelations about the current administration’s use of the National Security Agency to surveil domestic targets without getting FISA court approval. Who would have thought that this decade would be the one where all llibrarians learned what FISA stood for? How many of you watched CSPAN a little more carefully than usual this weekend [or is my house the only house that does this] to see what happened with the USA PATRIOT Act?
2005 year in review
John from Library Link of the Day has posted his annual Ten Stories that Shaped 2005 over at LISNews. I’ve got comments turned on for this post [I think], what are some other big LIS stories from 2005?