LISNews Librarian And Information Science News

That’s what it looks like to me from reading this news article. Even though I’m not thrilled about that, I don’t see anything in the library’s policies that woud prevent this from happening. Does your library have a privacy policy? Some more discussion on Slashdot.

A List Apart, the ne plus ultra site and community for people who make websites is doing an annual survey to learn more about the people in the larger web community. If you make websites, please take their survey.

I’ve been sitting on this link for a while but I figure it’s worth tossing out here. Secrets of book publishing I wish I had known what authors should know about how most (not all) publishers work.

I thought this blog post containing a librarian’s response to a challenge to the book Uncle Bobby’s Wedding — an easy reader book that has a gay wedding in it — to be a model of responsiveness and informativeness and, at the same time, upholding the policies and procedurs of the library with politeness and compassion.
Finally, then, I conclude that “Uncle Bobby’s Wedding” is a children’s book, appropriately categorized and shelved in our children’s picture book area. I fully appreciate that you, and some of your friends, strongly disagree with its viewpoint. But if the library is doing its job, there are lots of books in our collection that people won’t agree with; there are certainly many that I object to. Library collections don’t imply endorsement; they imply access to the many different ideas of our culture, which is precisely our purpose in public life.

There’s a lively discussion going on in the comments sections as well as on MetaFilter which is where I first read about it. Nicely done, Jamie Larue.

I’m moving house this week, so I’m living out of my inbox more than usual.

I’ve been getting emails about a Library Hotline article I was quoted in, from my talk at ALA. I gave a presentation with Louise Alcorn as part of the PLA track at ALA. My talk was called “Six Things You Maybe Didn’t Know About Rural Technology” You can see the pdf as well as links to Louise’s presentations on this page, there’s some great stuff about technology for small libraries. It went well and was well-attended.

LH covered it well but they did use this one line “How many of you know that tax forms must be filed online next year? she queried the audience. Many didn’t” What I actually said was that for many libraries they must help patrons GET their tax forms online. Small misquote, no big deal. It’s even possible I misspoke. In any case, I only knew about this when I started getting emails. Often if I post something in error to librarian.net I’ll get a comment about it, maybe two. In this case, I got ten emails within maybe a week or two from librarians asking me about this, and looking for more information about what they thought was a policy they hadn’t heard of. I replied that it was an error and finally wrote to Library Hotline who graciously agreed to print a correction.

This sort of thing always reminds me that in many ways large parts of our profession still rely on print-only sources for at least some of their keeping current. I know that every time I get a copy of Computers in Libraries or School Library Journal I always think “Oh hey I should write about that on librarian.net” and am always sad to not find the content online and linkable.

A little-known nifty thing about Google Books is that books already digitized via GB, whether in copyright or not, can be made available to students with visual disabilities. More inside scoop on the MBooks project at the BLT blog and at the MBooks accessibility page.
We now have a system in place for students with visual impairments to use MBooks [i.e. the digitized collection] in much the same way. Once a student registers with OSSD, any time she checks out a book already digitized by Google, she will automatically receive an email with a URL. Once the student selects the link, she is asked to login. The system checks whether the student is registered with OSSD as part of this program, and whether she has checked out this particular book. If the student passes both of those tests, she will get access to the entire full-text of the book, whether it is in copyright or not, in an interface that is optimized for use with screen readers. Currently, this system is available to UM students with visual impairments. We are investigating the possibility of including students with learning disabilities as well.

The incident with the library computers being taken by law enforcement that I mentioned a few weeks back has now made a splash in the big media. Girl’s case had library, cops in privacy standoff. It’s interesting to see how the headline of the same AP article changes depending on who is using it. In another place it’s titled Library confrontation points up privacy dilemma or Kimball Library required warrant to view Brooke Bennett’s record’s

So, I’m officially on a vacation which means I’m tootling around Portland Oregon visiting libraries and seeing friends. I am pleased to report that I am liking this vacation business and will endeavor to do more of it. My project as I mentioned earlier was to stay caught up on RSS feeds because I was starting to become one of those “who’s got time for all this?” people which was simply unacceptable. To that end, I used some stuck-in-airport time to cull down my list of RSS feeds I was following — deleting blogs that haven’t updated since 2005, removing blogs whose feeds have moved — and make sure everything I was following I was actually reading. I suggest you take some time to do the same. For the record, I follow about 150 feeds total. That includes friends, family, librarians, a few music blogs and some MetaFilter-work stuff. My next project is to catch up on all the music that needs listening to.

I have a short list of links to make sure I mention and then I’m all set and “caught up” in whatever that means for someone like me. I hope your Summer is treating you well.

• School Library Journal is doing a 23 Things project and have opened it up so that anyone who wants to can follow along and learn about 2.0 tools a little at a time.
• Brian Herzog links to an OMG-ish news story discussing the availability of R rated movies in the public library and what their library’s response has been.
• Erin Blackwell has written a very loving obit for Celeste West, one of the editors of the original Revolting Librarians.
• Molly Kleinman sent along a great post from the lute (librarians use technology every day) blog giving tutorials about how to use the command line.

Second Life is one of those things that I mention in my talks about 2.0 stuff and outreach but I don’t have a lot of first hand experience with it. I don’t have time to be in an immersive community other than the one I work in, and the people in my real life communities aren’t really spending much time there. I’m always looking for examples of organizations (non-profits in particular) using Second Life as a tool to do whatever it is they’re already doing. I enjoyed reading Mike Janssen’s piece on what WGBH (a local Boston non-profit public broadcaster) learned from putting on a performance in Second Life.

My friend, lawyer and law professor James Grimmelmann, has written a short interesting article called The Google Dilemma about why people should care very much about how search engines work and what regulations and laws guide them. Using a few examples which may be familiar to many librarians he makes a great case for why corporate policy at Google matters and why people shoudl understand how Google works generally.
If the Internet is a gigantic library, and search engines are its card catalog, then Google has let the Chinese government throw out the cards corresponding to books it doesn’t like. There may be sites with full and honest discussion of the June 4, 1989 crackdown accessible on the Internet from China. But when those sites aren’t visible in search engines, we’re back to our ?eld full of haystacks.

Dear OCLC,

I’m sure you do this for some very important reason, but spending $16 to express mail me a copy of a report that I didn’t ask for (though it does look quite interesting) seems wasteful. I go to the post office once a week and all express mail does is makes my postmistress agitated. While WorldCat is closer to being useful for me — showing one copy of Jane Eyre shown that is actually in my state before the ones one state over; the closest copy actually being about a quarter mile from here — I’d love it if you could apply this money to some sort of teeny-library scholarship fund so that we could benefit from WorldCat in Vermont instead of just hearing about how we can raise more money to pay you with.

Thanks.
Jessamyn

I’ve always thought that one of the troubles with librarianship was that there are always more great ideas and projects than anyone has time for or can get funding for. As a result we outsource projects to the people who have time and money and thus lose control over the end product. I have no idea if Library Thing’s open source Open Shelves Classification Project is going to wind up looking like a library product or a vendor product, but I’m curious to find out. As Tim Spalding says “You won’t be paid anything, but, hey, there’s probably a paper or two in it, right?” I haven’t seen much chatter, blog or otherwise, about this just yet but I’ll be keeping my eyes open. Whether or not this project it ultimately successful, I think it’s an interesting grass rootsy way of looking at ideas of authority and rejecting the top down let-us-have-you-contribute-and-then-sell-it-back-to-you models we’ve been working under.