Tag: ala

bring your favorite mug or water bottle to ALA

Posted on by jessamyn

I’m not going to ALA. As I mentioned before, I’m not a member and Philadelphia in January is not my idea of a good time. However, I do stay in touch with many ALA-ers and Monika Antonelli brought this Task Force of the Environment Campaign “Cup by Cup for a Greener ALA” It’s very very simple

  1. Bring a reusable cup to Midwinter
  2. Fill it with a favorite beverage
  3. Raise your cup and tell colleagues how you are helping the planet
  4. Drink, repeat & support TFOE-SRRT efforts toward a sustainable ALA.

One of the things that is distressing about having these big destination events is the huge amounts of waste that are generated. Council alone prints up tons of paper documents that were already distributed electronically, many of which are recycled (hopefully) or thrown out (likely) right after the meeting.

Even conscientious librarians who might bring their meals if they were just going to work wind up buying bottled water and packaged snacks because they’re trapped in the wasteland that is vast convention centers. Spend a little bit of time beforehand this year and try to pack a travel mug, a few powerbars or some fruit, your own pen and notebook, and maybe some teabags or Emergen-C that can keep you from spending time, money and resources just keeping yourself fed, hydrated and in prime note taking shape. Enjoy yourselves.

why exactly the digital divide matters

Posted on by jessamyn

As someone who speaks often on the digital divide and related issues, I’ve developed a pretty standard answer to the question of why the digital divide matters. It goes like this “We are a democracy. People who vote need to have access to as much reputable information as possible so they can make these and other choices. The internet is becoming an important ‘place’ to find this information. Unequal access to the internet creates unequal access to government.” The real reasoning is much deeper with examples — FEMA forms online, job applications, required email addresses for access to certain products and services — but that’s it in a nutshell. So, I’ve been dismayed at the lack of hot and botheredness about this issue that I seem to see within our profession. And it was weird to try to adjust the talking points when discussing the digital divide in a country without a democracy.

However, once in a while I see librarianship’s higher-ups really going to bat for the underdog. Recently the ALA and others submitted statements to the U.S. Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs hearing, “E-Government 2.0: Improving Innovation, Collaboration, and Access” lamenting the fact that as we move towards “E-Goverment” (ugh, it’s just government, don’t call it something else because you access it via a browser, do we call it telegovernment when you call someone?) libraries are often THE access point to government information and services and yet have neither a place at the table or a hand in the creation of the tools. This amounts to an unfunded mandate at a time when libraries are already grappling with budget cuts, CIPA and the shifting profession generally.

Public libraries serve over 97 percent of the total population. There are over 9,000 library systems and over 17,000 libraries including branches. Increasingly government agencies refer individuals specifically to their local public libraries for assistance and access to the Internet for citizen-government interactions. Yet public libraries are not considered members of the E-Government team. Libraries struggle with increasingly smaller budgets and expensive ever- changing technology in order to assist thousands of Americans on a daily basis because the public relies on them.

ALA’s Office for Intellectual Freedom is 40 years old today

Posted on by jessamyn

Happy Birthday OIF! I will be teaching a half-day continuing education seminar at Simmons on Intellectual Freedom and I have been digging through their extensive website for primary documentation and remembering just how extensive and excellent it is. Intellectual freedom principles were one of the major things that brought me to librarianship and THE thing responsible for my sticking with it. I am proud of the work the ALA does to support intellectual freedom, though the challenges are still coming far too quickly for my tastes and I worry about ALA’s ability to keep up with IF topics in a digital world that they still don’t seem to quite understand. One of the things I do on Wikipedia is keep the Library Bill of Rights free from soapboxing and point-of-view hectoring. It’s a tougher job than you might think.

a few remaindered links on a variety of topics

Posted on by jessamyn

I keep things unread in my newsreader when I want to refer to them later. Unfortuntely the “Mark as Unread” option in the menu of NetNewsWire is right next to “Mark All as Read” so I’d like to share these with you, before disaster strikes.

  • Andrea Mercado’s post Hacking Firefox: customizations for my library tells you all you need to know about why Firefox is such an excellent choice for a library browser. She discusses how to make the browser on their public access machines versatile yet secure. Very nice.
  • Laura Crossett taks about how to keep it real in small town American libraries. “We don’t beat Google by trying to best Google. We beat Google by being the thing–the things, really–that Google can never be.”
  • Fiona Bradley and Karen Schenider and Meredith Farkas all talk about ALAs obtuseness regarding “virtual participation” It’s a bit of a misnomer since people can, in some ways, participate virtually. However, they just can’t vote, attend Council meetings or do a lot of the other things that woud hve an impact. So they can participate virtually, sort of, just not significantly. I wish I didn’t have this icky feeling that this resistance to virtual participation was not just plain old technophobia on ALAs part but the actual desire to get more money into ALAs coffers via the Midwinter meeting. When that money is coming from librarians like Meredith and Laura and Karen and maybe even myself who would love to participate more, just at a somewhat lower cost, it rankles. I have really enjoyed my ALA vacation.
  • I explain the word “default” to my sudents often. To people new with computers, the ideas of the comptuers default settings is a little perplexing. Fred Stutzman highlights part of David Weinberger’s post about Facebook where he discusses how Facebook’s default privacy settings are all wrong. Completely and totally wrong. Don’t miss one of Fred’s earlier posts where he discusses how to turn the Facebook Beacon off to stop it from telling marketers more about you than you may be aware of.

ALA finally hiring Usability Officer

Posted on by jessamyn

You can get 75K plus decent benefits to be a usability officer at ALA. They say “senior” but to the best of my knowledge there aren’t any other usability officers there currently. I’m not sure where officer actually comes from, maybe some ALA-er can explain? In any case, if I were the Usability Officer after I changed the job listings to not spell Website with a capital W, I would ask very specifically what this requirement in the ad means.

The ability to work in a team environment and between two universes of Information Technology and Librarianship is essential in order to maintain an outcome-oriented, global vision.

I’m curious why those are deemed to be two universes instead of, say, two moons orbiting around one big planet of helping people do the things they want to do and go where they want to go. I’m sure Jenny is asking the same questions. I hope they find someone, but I wonder what affect that person will be able to have on the in-process-for-many-years-already website redesign?