Tag: digitaldivide

On Donated Technology

Posted on by jessamyn

This week at work I went back to one of the teeny libraries to help them get their three donated computers running. There is a local insurance company that upgraded and gave the library their old computers. For a library that has two computers total, including the one the librarian uses for all her work, this is a boon. Sort of.

I plugged in the computers and turned them on and was greeted with a Win2K registration screen of the “enter your product key” variety. I asked the librarian if the computers came with software and she said “just what’s on them.” You may have read about this part in last week’s post. I asked the librarian to call her friend and see about the product codes and we’d try again. I work at this library about 90-120 minutes a week. This week I showed up and the librarian said that her friend has said the product key was on the side on a sticker. “Doh!” Sure enough, there were 25 characters and I dutifully typed them in. No go. Turns out the sticker on the side of the machine is a Win98 product code and somehow, mysteriously, these computers have Win2k Pro installed on them. No one knows how. I ran down the options with the librarian. 1) Buy an XP license or three from Tech Soup. 2) Hassle her friend to figure out wtf is up with the software on these computers. 3) Wipe the drives and install Ubuntu.

I’m pushing for #3 and the librarian just doesn’t want to do #2. My friend on IM is pushing for a fourth option, a Linux thin client solution where all the machines run off a central server. It’s an appealing idea but I’m not sure if I can even explain it in a way that makes it sound like less of a risk than a life rich with Windows nonsense. So, we start with #3 and figure we have #1 as a backup. I start downloading Ubuntu and it’s going to take two hours, minimum. My class starts in four hours and it’s an hour away, so this project is going to take at least one more week to accomplish. While I’m futzing with the computers I notice that one of them doesn’t seem to be running the monitor correctly, or not at all. I do a bit of brief troubleshooting and determine that both monitors work but only one CPU seems to work to run the monitor. I look in the back of the computer and notice the vent fan is pointed sideways. I have no idea what to make of this. I do know that if we want to get rid of this computer in any sort of approved way it will cost us money.

Meanwhile we’ve bought 50′ of ethernet cable to wire up the computers in the basement (we’ll pay the electrician to drill the hole in the floor and run the cable), cadged a donated switch from a friend, bought three surge protectors and carried three computers and monitors down a narrow flight of stairs. I spend the last 30 minutes of my time there uninstalling IM clients — well not uninstalling them but setting them not to autorun on boot and not autologin when they start. The librarian was getting a bunch of messages for studman1234 when she started her day. She’s a practical gal, but everyone’s got their limits. I didn’t have time to run Windows Update or do any defragging.

I told this story to a local friend of mine who said “Geez, you can buy a new Dell for less than a thousand bucks, what a headache all of that is.” I had to explain to my friend that the library runs on a budget of less than 20K so a thousand dollar computer (and I think it’s more like $500 now) is not really in their universe for now. I’m sure there are well-meaning people who would love to help the library out, but it’s tough to find the time to sit down and compose thoughful and considered letters to them when you’re open 18 hours a week.

So, I don’t want this to be an entire “looking the gift horse in the mouth” post, but mostly I wanted to highlight that there is a range of costs associated with “free.” Most libraries I know don’t even want to take tech donations because they’re concerned that just this sort of thing will happen. On the other hand most of them are running Gates Foudation hardware from several years ago and they’re thinking about upgrades and considering their library’s future technological directions. Meanwhile I bought an old IBM X31 Thinkpad from ebay and I’ve been messing with it in the evenings to get it running the way I like it with an open source OS and software. It cost less than $300, but that’s only really a bargain if I don’t count the cost of my time. Since it’s a hobby project for me, I don’t, but when I’m on the clock it’s nice if things don’t take forever.

some portland follow up and discussion of speed

Posted on by jessamyn

I finally got to meet Anna Creech as well as a bunch of other great librarians when I was in Oregon. Anna has some notes from my talk as well as the two other speakers who gave presentations on the first day, Anthony Bernier and Rachel Bridgewater both of whom gave really interesting presentations that I was delighted to find myself sandwiched between.

All of us spoke a lot about recent data from the Pew Reports, many of which I was copying and pasting graphs from into my talk at the last minute [see geocities vs. myspace and encarta vs. wikipedia] and I even got to mention the Digital Divide a little. I was sorry that I wasn’t able to include information from Speed Matters, a site set up by the Communication Workers of American urging that the US develop a comprehensive broadband policy to ensure equitable broadband access for everyone. I just learned about the site from FreeGovInfo which discusses some of the different ways we still have a digital divide.

There is an income digital divide: more than 62% of households with incomes over $100,000 subscribe to high speed broadband at home while just 11% of households with incomes below $30,000 subscribe.

There is a rural/urban digital divide: only 17% of adults in rural areas subscribe to broadband compared to 31% in urban and 30% in suburban areas.

And there is a farm/non-farm divide: only 15.8% of farm households have adopted broadband.

Here’s some specifics about the Vermont situation and Verizon’s plan to sell off local access lines in Vermont, New Hampshire and Maine. Here in Vermont that’s about 85-90% of the state’s phone lines. While I loved living in Topsham with our local telephone company Topsham Telephone, there’s a real problem when big businesses who were given favorable legislation to obtain monopolies in industries like telecommunications are then allowed cherrypick and jettison the less profitable areas.

This will affect me personally, as well as people in my town and county who are still waiting to have DSL available in their locations. As we learned from the Pew Reports, people who have faster connections do more online. More government information and resources are being moved online. More online content is becoming inaccessible to people who only have dialup connections. Getting broadband to the libraries is part of the equation, and an important part, but what are our other obligations to get our patrons and our neighbors on to the information superhighway at speeds that are adequate to do what they need to do?

two “day in the life” anecdotes

Posted on by jessamyn

Library Oral History Project
I went to the Calef Library in Washington and after debugging a knotty problem about why one computer could get on the Internet and one couldn’t (weird cables and someone being creative with the wiring who was not the librarian) I headed over to the town offices where the library was spearheading an oral history project. They got a lot of the older people in town together — one of whom called herself new to the area because she arrived in 1946 — and asked people a few short questions: What’s your name, where did you live and what did you do for fun?

People talked about taking horse and buggies around town, discussed old buildings that burned down, people who had passed on, and walking two miles back and forth to school each day. The most memory-jogging topic seemed to be a notorious schoolteacher who half the people in the room had been taught by. Apparently she was a bit of a task master and mention of her name always brought laughter. I’m not sure what the eventual plan for the videos are, but it was an easy set-up, one video recorder and someone to point it and a microphone hooked to a boombox so that people could be heard from across the room. You can see a few more photos under my Flickr oral history tag.

Young Library Patrons

Then I went to the Tunbridge Library to help them debug their Internet connection which had been flakey and was currently down. As much as they love their new broadband connection, the dial-up connection was a bit more reliable and often easier to troubleshoot. Now there’s a router, a hub and a switch all of which have wires coming in and out of them and a ton of on/off/other buttons. It looked to me like someone had pressed one of the “other” buttons which took down the network. I set it back up and wrote a list of troubleshooting steps that they can use next time. It’s sort of a big responsibility when the library calls/emails you and lets you know their Internet access is down. In areas like this, there is a pretty short list of people who can troubleshoot something like that, though I’m working every day to try to expand that number.

At the library we also made a plan for them to get a wireless router, a hosted domain and a website. For under $150 in set-up costs, they’ll have a presence on the web, custom domains for their email addresses and a high speed wireless connection in a town with very little broadband saturation. It feels just like the rural electrification project, very exciting.

I know I sort of bang this drum a lot, but the Digital Divide isn’t just about not having access to the Internet, it’s about not living in an Internet-aware culture. So in the same way that poverty is really about paucity of options — so not only do you not have money or resources but no one you know has money or resources — the Digital Divide is really about not having access, having erratic access, or not knowing what to do with that access once you have it. Every time I see a web page with ads designed to look like page elements, or pop-ups designed to look like Windows error messages, I cringe because I know that the people I work with are likely to have trouble with them. While I go on the road and talk about library 2.0, I’m still explaining to many of my students that no, they haven’t won a free laptop no matter what the blinky ad on the page says. I feel sometimes like teaching computer skills is all about explaining to people why they should dip their toes into a culture that seems hellbent on deceiving them, misleading them and ripping them off.

hi – 12oct

Posted on by jessamyn

Hi. I’ve been scarce lately. Not that you need to know this thanks to the wonders of RSS, but I’ve felt scarce lately and that’s important as well. I spent this past week starting my Digital Pictures class, teaching two people to use computers for the first time, checking in on the Internet/wireless install at two of my tiny libraries, staffing my drop-in time and driving back and forth to Massachusetts to assist family members with a bunch of medical upsets, most of which have mostly passed. I generally don’t update here when life trumps blogging, but it’s worth a reminder that jessamyn.com sometimes reveals what this site doesn’t dwell on, for the curious.

I have a lot of travel coming up. I’ll be speaking at NELA here in Vermont and an ACRL event in Oregon. Next month takes me to Michigan, Wisconsin and Hawaii. It’s an odd combination of talks, Digital Divide issues on the one hand and Hot New Technologies on the other hand. I feel like that mayor in A Nightmare Before Christmas, with the two faces that oppose each other.

As the days get shorter I’ve also been in strategy mode. I like my job, the things I do in my life and I’m thrilled every time I get an IM or an email from someone saying “Hey I tried one of those things you talked about in your presentation and it really worked well!” I’ve been spending some time thinking about scalability and the problem of the technologically left-behind. We like technological solutions to problems because they often scale. If you can make software that solves a problem, you can replicate it and that problem solving spreads. IF, and this is a big if, if you have people that have a computer and can use software. Writing books to inform and educate adults who can read scales. Teaching adults to read doesn’t. Adults who don’t read have a variety of reasons why this is the case and often carry a lot of baggage about not being able to read.

Adults who can’t use computers are in the same boat. Many of these people come to libraries. One of the students I was working with this week had tried to go to the library, my old library. He had needed to fill out a job application for Home Depot and had very little computer experience. The library had 30 minute time computer slots (when I was there I recall it was 45, but in any case it wasn’t enough). There was a way for him to save his work on the website, but neither he nor the librarians he worked with could show him how to do this. He waited, and found me and my drop-in time a few weeks later. I worry sometimes that if we’re providing computers and internet access to people and then make them really only useful to people who already know how to use them, we’re reinforcing a bad bad trend.

As John Blyberg discussed in his Going to the Boneyard post about library detractors and our own abilities as marketers, lobbyists and activists, if people are saying we’re not serving them, that we’re irrelevant, maybe we’re not doing what we do correctly? I think there’s a difference between the “there’s something in my library to offend everyone, even me” sentiment and the article that John and many others are responding to claiming that libraries are obsolete but it’s not a huge difference. As a profession, we have a hard time standing up for ourselves, and a hard time defining our new directions. This makes us susceptible to attack. The nobility and rationality of our arguments isn’t always going to see us through. We need to be proactive and firm about our messages: DOPA is bad legislation, MySpace isn’t a threat, libraries are good places for kids and teens, reading bad words won’t make you a bad person. We need to develop solutions that scale.

The localness of libraries is their charm but also has the potential to be their undoing. I took a friend for a drive returning library books yesterday (five libraries!) and the difference between the little library in the poorer town and the little library in the bigger town was striking to her, whereas I’m more used to it. We’ve seen legislators and the Department of Education step in and deal with some of this inequality when it happens to schools, whats our large scale solution when we see this sort of thing happening to libraries?

My NDLA talks, from Fargo

Posted on by jessamyn

I’m sitting in the back of the NDLA business meeting as this conference wraps up. What fun! It was the North Dakota Library Association’s 100th year. They had Michael Gorman and Loriene Roy, both of whom gave really interesting speeches which I listened to while eating some truly tasty food. I’ll give a little wrap-up later, but for now, here’s links to my two talks.

The Information Poor & the Information Don’t Care: The Digital Divide and Rural Libraries
Evaluating New Technologies for Libraries – High Tech on a Shoestring