Tag: ala

Google’s book people talk to librarians at Midwinter

Posted on by jessamyn

Library Journal has a thorough article reporting on the panel on the Google Books settlement that happened at Midwinter.

Mitch Freedman, past president of ALA, wondered about changes to the “free to all” ideology of libraries, asking whether Google would permit, as do other databases, site licenses for public libraries. [Google’s Dan] Clancy said that, given the consumer market, there was no agreement on remote access, but that could change down the road. “Authors and publishers were not comfortable with remote access.” While Freedman said that issue was resolved with database publishers, Clancy responded that those publishers don’t have a model aimed at consumers. He noted that “the challenge of selling into this market is not Google’s core competence,” so consortial discounts are authorized in the agreement.

How long do you forgive bad tech? What do you do next?

Posted on by jessamyn

I’m aware that accessing someone’s conference planner is not the same level of hackery as stealing their credit cards or breaking into their email account. However, I would just like to say that having an event planner where the password is not only the same for every user (until it’s changed) but also printed right there on the web page, turns the whole idea of having a password or any sort of security into a big joke. How do we teach librarians what good technology looks like if this is how we make them interact with us? For the record, using just the ALA Staff list, I was able to log in to someone else’s event planner in under a minute. The vendors get their password in an email, not much better.

I went to this page from Nicole’s post (I’m not going to the conference) just to see if it was really true that the page claims it is “best viewed in IE” which is yet another “tech don’t” in the world of 2008 browsers so much so that it calls into question all the rest of the site.

I don’t belong to ALA anymore. I did my time, paid my dues, donated a lot of service time to the organization and tried to be gentle and patient as they steered a big organization through the minefield of technological change. The Event Planner has been an outsourced, broken and insecure tool since they started using it. I’d like to see ALA do better, but my optimism that this will happen is flagging.

ALA’s Emily Sheketoff talks about library issues for the new administration

Posted on by jessamyn

Emily Sheketoff is one of my favorite ALA employees to listen to. She always comes across as intelligent, sane and someone who has a deep and broad grasp of library issues in this new millenium including library technology issues. Here is a thirty minute interview with her on C-Span that aired a few weeks ago in which she talks abotu what some of the upcoming challenges will be for both libraries and the incoming administration in the coming years. I suggest you watch the entire thing.

Library stimulus request is not a bailout

Posted on by jessamyn

Dear Tom Jackson, when economic times get hard, people use libraries more, not less. ALA’s request for stimulus money from Congress at a time when “73 percent of all libraries nationwide provide the only free Internet access in their communities” is not at all the same as bailing out the big three US auto manufacturers. It would be great if we could unite as a country and set priorities so that, yes, urgent medical care for children was possibly higher on Congress’s “what to fund” list than library’s electric bills but our economy doesn’t work that way. Access to good information is as important, if not more important, than it was six months ago and libraries provide critical services for these tough times. Sincerely, a rural librarian [thanks nicolette]

Supreme Court decision concerning “free exercise”

Posted on by jessamyn

I think this is important. It’s a case, one of hundreds, that the US Supreme Court declined to review. “There is no free exercise right to be free from any reference in public elementary schools to the existence of families in which the parents are of different gender combinations … public schools are not obliged to shield individual students from ideas which potentially are religiously offensive, particularly when the school imposes no requirement that the student agree with or affirm those ideas,” the court said. Some more details from a previous OIF post and the School Law blog.