a blog of awful library books

A blog borne of frustration, but amusing to read: Awful Library Books.

Mary Kelly and Holly Hibner are public librarians in Michigan and cannot understand why librarians won’t weed the junk from circulating collections. The authors sincerely hope that public librarians will embrace maintaining a quality collection and share similar examples of awful library books.

[thanks eli!]

digital media and accessibility, the kindle 2

I don’t have a Kindle. That said, I accept the inevitability of the idea that more and more of our reading content is going to be delivered digitally. That’s why I think it’s important to understand these tools even if they offer limited utility for us or our patrons at the time. The Kindle has “accessibility” features built into it that allow a book to be read out loud via the Kindle. This is great news — and probably also legally necessary — for people with various reading disabilities ranging from visual disabilities to text-based learning disabilities. However, the Kindle also allows publishers to remotely disable text-to-speech (TTS) options in books that you may already have on your Kindle. And publishers are doing this, a little, at the urging of the Authors Guild.

The Authors Guild, for their part, has issued this statement about the situation which, on first reading, does make a certain amount of sense. As a librarian I’m more concerned about the overarching issues of digital rights management and the notion that even though you’ve nominally purchased a book (perhaps at a loss for Amazon) you still have an item that is, in part, controlled by its creator who can alter the item according to the license terms you agreed to. A little more about this on Slashdot.

Talk: Social Software & Intellectual Freedom

I gave a talk at MLA on Social Software and Intellectual Freedom. It’s hard to sum up the topic in 75 minutes. I did about an hour of talking and opened the floor up to questions which seemed to go well. If my talk had a thesis it was “Make sure your privacy policy expands to include social networking; don’t chastise people for what you know about them online; don’t be frightened.” but I think it was a little rambly. It did, howerver, come with a huge list of links which is what more and more of my talks lately have. I talk about 30 things and then give a lot of well-curated “and here’s where to go for more” sources. In case anyone is curious, the sldies and links are here

Thanks to MLA for having me down to Springfield. It was a nifty conference in a nice new building.

oh Library of Congress, I am sorry you are not leading the way

Erica says it better than I can — regarding the discrimination lawsuit the Library of Congress lost because it rescinded a job offer from a hired applicant who disclosed that he was transitioning into becoming a woman — “Hey, Library of Congress. Cut that shit out.” Thanks to the wonders of YouTube you can hear Diane Schroer herself talking about transgender discrimination.

what is the cloud, please

People at drop-in time who are just learning to use email have been asking me if I know what “the cloud” is lately. I assume the NY Times wrote something about it. I know it well enough to explain it to someone who also doesn’t know what Bcc is, but I wasn’t sure I understood it enough to be talking to other librarians about it. Here is a good First Monday article that spells out a lot of it: Where is the cloud? Geography, economics, environment, and jurisdiction in cloud computing. Some more discussion about how this affects libraries from the latest Library 2.0 Gang podcast. [thanks justin!]