LISNews: Librarian News

From the Knight Foundation and the Aspend Institute, it is "assembled to recommend both public and private measures that would help American communities better meet their information needs.
A well-informed citizenry is critical to democracy. News, journalism and other information conduits play a central role in informing society... As the Hutchins Commission did in the 1940s, and the Kerner and Carnegie Commissions did in the 1960s, this Knight Commission will formulate a national agenda calculated to improve the flow of news and information." In an early memo, libraries are mentioned as one of the partners they want to consult.

As seen in the past, hurricanes are big news. We worry about loved ones and the electronic communications bring us ever closer. As noted in the response to Hurricane Katrina, communications were a major issue. Rumors easily spread out of the Superdome and due to those massive communications nets those rumors whipped up pretty drastic hysteria.

What can a librarian do in this? The first thing to do is to be patient. While librarianship is sometimes considered a helping profession it must be remembered that a drive on our parts to help must be tempered with caution. The time to start thinking about donations of physical goods is best after landfall rather than before. The best thing that can be donated before landfall is money because that is far more fungible than a roll of toilet paper might be in terms of procuring goods. Money allows for those directly impacted to make decisions about how to respond rather than such being made in a disconnected place. The after-action reports from Katrina showed that while folks outside the impacted area might have been well-meaning sometimes the bulk donation of some types of physical goods was not quite effective.

Communications will be presumably impacted by this event. LISTen will not be reporting on Gustav. Rather than get details second-hand from LISTen a pointer is given below instead to an experimental podcast from the National Hurricane Center that may be issued as often as hourly. In this case it is best to get it directly rather than filtered. Care must be taken to ensure that telephone communications are not disrupted by attempting to contact loved ones that might still be in the projected impact area. If you receive a message that circuits are busy, it is best to wait as it may be a while before congestion clears. Many emergency response plans prioritize telephone traffic to support emergency response traffic first so continually trying might only cause you grief rather than relief. Individuals impacted by the storm should have registered with the American Red Cross "Safe and Well" system which is set up to help alleviate circuit congestion issues.

Even though it is a holiday weekend in the United States, the hard part is having to wait. Folks abroad also may have worries too. The links below are commended as ways to keep yourself up to date as well as for sharing with others who may have concerns.

Useful links:
American Red Cross "Safe and Well" Site
Tip sheet by the American Red Cross on hurricane evacuation
American Red Cross Gustav Newsroom
American Radio Relay League's links to resources
List of groups from National Voluntary Organizations Active in Disaster who you could donate funds to that might aid relief efforts
Jim Lindgren at The Volokh Conspiracy highlights a report about charities that performed best in responding to the 2005 storms
Details about the National Hurricane Center Podcast
Gustav Information Center on Ning
Podcasts available from The Weather Channel
CNN reporting on Hurricane Gustav
RSS feed for CNN hourly news audio
RSS feed for CNN twice a day news video -- Read More

CNN, among others, reports that an earthquake ranging 5.6-5.8 hit in Chino Hills outside Los Angeles. It will be days before a final magnitude score for the earthquake is settled upon. The report by MSNBC notes that location is key to whether damage occurs.

Much of this brings up a point we don't think about in librarianship too much. If we rely on a remote server that gets hit by a natural disaster, what do we do? Do we have local backups? Is there something we can fail over to?

A prime example of a problem is Twitter. The majority of Twitter's servers are located in one of the most geologically active areas of North America. If an earthquake hit, Twitter would be probably toast without a backup outside San Francisco.

Great centralization may be great for cognitive processing but it is so vulnerable. During the Cold War it was found that a way to disrupt the Soviet side was to blow up a factory. Typically all production was centered in a single factory. If you hit the shoe factory, there might not be shoes for a while. If you hit the radio factory, folks might have to turn to smugglers from Western Europe to bring in Telefunken devices and other such things.

While there are Web 2.0 sites with great promise, the biggest worry is excessive centralization. If a site goes down, what do you do? If you had important documents saved only to GoogleDocs, what do you do when it goes away? The recent Amazon S3 outage showed just how fragile cloud computing is as it requires a near-perfect world without disruption in which to operate effectively.

There are some moves afoot for decentralization. The PGP web of trust is one great example of decentralizing a backbone to a public-key encryption system. identi.ca is based off a program licensed under the GNU Affero General Public License. The underlying software, known as Laconica, allows for decentralized microblogging across multiple servers. A major step forward in creating resilience is decentralization.

When the one big server blows up, where will you go for your data? -- Read More

Why Newspapers Shouldn't Allow Comments: a newspaper is not a blog—not even its online version. Conversely, a blog is not a newspaper. Comments are thought to be an added value to a newspaper's site—providing another reason to read. You come for the article, and stay for the interesting discussion. The only problem is, there is no interesting discussion. Almost never. Not even from the mythical supersmart New York Times readers.

The mythical supersmart LISNews readers almost always carry on interesting discussions!