LISNews: Librarian News

LISNews is celebrating its 11th birthday. The podcast is getting set to celebrate its 3rd anniversary in a few weeks. As always it seems to be my perennial worry in production comes down to infrastructure.

We've had some major backbone failures recently. Our cable broadband provider had a major outage event Monday that has us offline for a while. The only other alternative locally for broadband is asynchronous digital subscriber line and even that has reliability issues locally. In the 17th of 50 states in what should arguably be considered a first-world nation, access to the Internet is hardly reliable at all. While there was an attempt in the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 to ameliorate such digital divide issues through the provision of grants, that entire funding program was scrapped to provide the funds to shore up local education agency budgets in the United States reportedly to prevent teacher layoffs.

For now we have GPRS service on a prepaid basis as a stopgap recovery measure in the event of a back-end failure. That is only a stopgap patch and is not a permanent fix. Air cards and the like are available out here but the network connectivity is at least two generations behind what you might find in your average urban metro. There are areas within easy driving distance that are some of the most remote on the planet with no cellular carriers providing any coverage at all.

For Internet-based transmission of multimedia content, this area is hardly optimal. It also highlights the possible failure of the vision of a cloud-based future. For a cloud-based future to truly work, wide-area saturation of minimal access levels would be necessary. Radio waves handle that easily through physical propagation that follows simple laws of physics which makes broadcasting possible. With a network of networks like the Internet, signals do not necessarily have the same metaphorical landscape to propagate across that the ionosphere provides radio waves. Radio waves can move at the speed of light under optimal conditions. While the Internet can open new means of communicating, it does not provide the same relative uniformity the physical world around us has been able to in terms of communications medium.

Three years of podcasting has been interesting. The fourth year is appearing to be one of new challenges that have to be faced. We spent the summer of 2010 preparing for the loss of effective Skype access by improving our communications links. Skype is great...when you have a fast enough data link to support it. With the way our local infrastructure is starting to fall apart, we just do not have that anymore. Between now having to keep costs down let alone scheduling complications that we previously did not have, there are real reasons there have not been as many interviews as previously.

Keeping the program published on a regular basis is the next challenge we have to face. We'll be continuing to price alternative means of accessing the Internet and, if necessary, taking steps to begin alternative links. Time will tell where things progress.

The Desk Setup

Like many technologists, I may have had some vague notion that librarians had something to contribute to discussions about information and metadata and standards and access, but my concept of what librarians did and what they knew probably had more to do with stereotypes and anecdote than on an understanding of reality. Which is a shame. Although in the last few years I think we’ve done a really good job of making clearer connections between libraries and technology, I don’t think anyone is surprised when librarians are omitted from discussions about and between prominent technologists, such as the one facilitated by the Setup. (Note: by “librarians” I mean anyone who works in, with, or for libraries. Hat tip to Eli Neiburger for saying what I’d been thinking, only less clearly, for some time before he said those words out loud.)

This week's somewhat (still) delayed episode brings a zeitgeist review, a news miscellany, an essay, and a notice of a possible future event.

Related links:
WikiLeaks readying new document dump -- AP
No Swedish Green Card for Julian Assange -- Reuters
No Swedish Green Card for Julian Assange -- BBC News
Radio crosses borders that block the Internet -- Radio World
BBC World Service could lose half its staff -- Media Network blog at Radio Netherlands Worldwide
BBC World Service to lose radio dramas in 2011 -- Media Network blog at Radio Netherlands Worldwide
Canon introduces new copier that can selectively block jobs due to keyword recognition -- IT.com.au
German Chancellor Angela Merkel claims multiculturalism has failed in the Federal Republic of Germany -- AP
A tardy tax office imperils Des Plaines libraries -- Chicago Sun Times
Driving directions from ALA national headquarters to Des Plaines city hall

This week's episode brings a book report, an essay, a news miscellany, and a look at the zeitgeist from the last week on LISNews.

Related links:
Website of the musician Earl B. Hall
Tech News Today #91
Ars Technica on increased international Internet capacity
The Register on broadband increases in the UK
Ashtabula County as described on Wikipedia
Promo material on the longest covered bridge in the United States, located in Ashtabula County
CNET on GOOG411 being killed off
The Register on GOOG411 being killed off
Google via SMS...a service utilized by Erie Looking Productions from time to time during broadband outages
Scientific American appalled at broadband in the US
Daily Kos proposing Google Bombing during the 2010 congressional election cycle
The Register on The Wisdom of the Crowds Being Wrong

LISTen: An LISNews.org Podcast -- Episode #124 by The Air Staff of Erie Looking Productions is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
Based on a work at twit.tv.