December 2000

A trio of stories on Peer to Peer sharing [aka P2P, not to be confused with B2B, B2C or Y2K].

This one from Wired talks about how a new company, CareScience, is working to set up a P2P exchange for medical records.


Salon has One on PopularPower, and the emerging P2P business world. There are several companies hoping to make some money off of the latest internet buzz words.

If none of that made any sense, read This One, a nice look at what P2P is all about.

There may come a day when ILL is done like this.

It happens infrequently, but it has happened before. Occassionally a third candidate enters the race for ALA President. Occassionally, that third canididate has also won. This year Maurice (Mitch) Freedman is running, in addition to Ken Haycock and William Sannwald. ALA put out a press release announcing Mitch\’s candidacy. The text of his campaign flyer is inside, if you want to read further.

It happens infrequently, but it has happened before. Occassionally a third candidate enters the race for ALA President. Occassionally, that third canididate has also won. This year Maurice (Mitch) Freedman is running, in addition to Ken Haycock and William Sannwald. ALA put out a press release announcing Mitch\’s candidacy. The text of his campaign flyer is inside, if you want to read further.Maurice J. (Mitch) Freedman for ALA President

Why Im running for ALA President:

I want to be ALA President because librarianship is not simply a profession to me. Keeping Americas libraries free, open, uncensored and well funded is my passion. My career has been on the front lines of Librarianship.

I know how to organize people and resources, to lead in tough situations, and to achieve results.

If elected, I will:

• 
  Fight restrictions on access to information in all formats
  
• 
  Advocate for increased status, salaries and visibility of all librarians and library workers
  
• 
  Develop programs & policies that help us put a human face on cyberspace
  
• 
  Lobby for fair use regardless of format
  
• 
  Help ensure that our libraries bridge the digital divide
  
• 
  Combat the privatization of public information and libraries
  
• 
  Promote programs to increase the diversity of library staff and library users
  
• Promote recruitment, education, retention and pay equity for youth services librarians
  

Qualifications:

I …

care deeply about libraries and my entire career demonstrates the depth of my commitment in all of the settings in which I have worked.

have a strong commitment to the mission of libraries as a public good and as an essential means to inform society and maintain our democracy

can understand and articulate issues, and know how to work creatively toward solutions.

have developed consensus building skillsas head of a cooperative systemthat are especially valuable for dealing with the needs of competing units and perspectives in ALA

know how to use technology as a means to better serve the user, and have been recognized for this, e.g. as a recipient of the LITA Award for Achievement
have been a staunch defender of intellectual freedom

was the only librarian who participated and testified in the ACLU/ALA lawsuit to overthrow New York States harmful to minors Internet law

received the ACLU/Westchester Award in large part for the role I played.

successfully automated cataloging at the Hennepin County Library by creating an authority controlled book catalog that was state-of-the-art in photocomposition, computer filing, usability by the public, and that employed bias-free and contemporary terminology.

as Executive Assistant, was part of the management team at LC\’s Processing Department for two massive projects, the National Program for Acquisition and Cataloging (NPAC), and the Mansell National Union Catalog of Pre-1956 Imprints. It was great training for future challenges.

Selected ALA & Other Assignments (too numerous to list all):

• 
  Elected to the ALA Council for five terms
  
• 
  President of LITA
  
• 
  ALA Pay Equity Committee, Chair
  
• 
  ALA Committee on the Status of Women in Librarianship, Member
  
• 
  ALCTS Planning Committee, Member
  
• 
  PLA Committee on Cataloging Needs of Public Libraries, Chair
  
• 
  SRRT Action Council
  
• 
  Chair of the intellectual freedom committees in Minnesota and New York
  

Experience

• Director, Westchester Library System, 1982-
  
• Associate Professor, School of Library Service, Columbia University
  
• Coordinator of Technical Services: The New York Public Library Branch Libraries
  
• Manager, Technical Services Division, Hennepin (MN) County Library
  
• Manager of Library Processing, Information Dynamics Corporation
  
• Executive Assistant, Processing Department, Library of Congress
  
• Assistant Head, African-Asian Exchange Section, Exchange & Gift Division, Library of Congress
  
• Outstanding Library School Graduate Special Recruit, Library of Congress
  
• Publisher & Editor-in-Chief, 2000-, The U*N*A*B*A*S*H*E*D LibrarianTM,
  The How I Run My Library Good LetterSM
  

Consultant on four continents for such libraries as:

• National Library of Latvia,
  
• Pusan (Korea) National University Library
  
• Jomo Kenyatta Library at the University of Nairobi
  
• Mississauga (Ontario) Library System
  
• State Library of California (a statewide networking & interlibrary resource sharing study)
  
• City and County Public Libraries of San Diego, and numerous others.
  

Extensive Publications on technology, public libraries & intellectual freedom

Education

• Newark (NJ) Rutgers, BA
  
• University of California, Berkeley, School of Librarianship, MLS
  
• Rutgers University, PhD
  

Petitions for Freedman Committee: Leigh Estabrook, University of Illinois, GSLIS; Martin Gomez, Brooklyn Public Library; Deborah Jacobs, Seattle Public Library; Samuel Morrison, Broward County (FL) Public Library; Sarah Pritchard, UC Santa Barbara; Harriet Selverstone, Norwalk (CT) Schools; Sherrie Schmidt, Arizona State University

Carol Ann Hughes, the head of collections at Questia.com, has a new article out in Dlib called Information Services for Higher Education
A New Competitive Space. She writes, \”Any organization that undertakes an educational mission in our society is now and will increasingly be surrounded by alternative information service suppliers … it is likely that … alternatives will come from the for-profit sector.\”

I sometimes like to pretend I\’m an Information Architect, like George liked to pretend he was an architect on Seinfeld.

R. E. Wyllys has posted a lesson that talks about how Information Architecture and Library Science. To paraphrase the lesson:

It provides information about various ideas associated with the term \”information architecture\” shows how information architecture is closely related to, and embodies most of, the long-standing principles of library and information science.

Check it out at U of Texas

Likely to take some bite out of the new laws being passed, peacefire has released a program that can shut off all of the major filtering programs.

ZD Net has a Story or you can download it at peacefire.org.

\”The porn industry in this instance really loves (it), It\’s a shame for kids and parents. It\’s a reason why Congress keeps passing laws.\” -Bruce Taylor of the National Law Center for Children and Families

The fallout over the Children\’s Internet Protection Act continues here in the U.S.

Wired has a Story
\”This is the first time since the development of the local, free public library in the 19th century that the federal government has sought to require censorship in every town and hamlet in America,\” said Greg Hansen, an ACLU attorney, in a statement.\”

One more story can be found at ZD Net

Competitive intelligence according to Janelle Brown is a growing but terribly dull profession.[more]

Although the plot may not be as action-packed as the reviewer would have liked, the new book from Adam Penenberg and Marc Barry\’s,\”Spooked: Espionage in Corporate America,\” may still prove interesting to the serious corporate librarian.

Her company is called \’The Organized Library\’ and Judith Tapiero makes a living out of managing corporate information chaos.[more]

Catch this article from 1099 the magazine for the independent professional. Yet another example of what the innovative librarian can do in the age of information overload.

Peter Murray writes \”Last month a call for participation was posted to several mailing lists for a survey on
web proxy use in libraries. A report based on survey responses is now available at:
pandc.org/proxy/survey/report.html

Seventy-four responses came in from the survey. By far, the most popular use of
proxy servers in libraries is for remote resource access. The turn-key solution
EZproxy was by far the most popular, followed by Innovative\’s Web Access
Management product and the freely available Squid and Apache proxy servers.

Proxies for filtering and proxies for bandwidth conservation are equally popular
reasons in libraries. Microsoft Proxy server is a popular package for these
uses, but a wide variety of software packages are in use. Proxy servers are
also being used to gather statistics on resource use.

The report has numerous anecdotes and information from specific libraries,
including URLs to user documentation, description of systems, and software
packages.

Interested in adding your own library\’s experiences to the report? You can
still take the survey at the URL below; I\’ll periodically recompile the
responses and update the report:
pandc.org/proxy/survey/survey.html \”

Congress Passes Labor HHS Education Appropriations Bill with Filtering Rider Attached

In a 292 to 60 vote, the House of Representatives has passed the Labor HHS Education Appropriations Bill (HR 4577) with the McCain- Santorum-Istook-Pickering Internet filtering rider attached. The Senate also passed the bill with a voice vote (no voting numbers available).

The filtering rider mandates that libraries and schools use valuable resources to install and maintain unreliable Internet filters, or be stripped of key federal funding. With this bill, the federal government has seized control over families and communities and blocked their power to make decisions about the ways they protect their children.

From the ALA