June 2003

The State Librarian of North Dakota has announced that the state will set up a state-wide filtering system to deal with Monday\’s CIPA decision. Not much more here.
Doing a little more searching about North Dakota brought up this site, EduTech, which provides filtering services to ND\’s K-12 computer network. They are taking the \”harmful to minors\” clause to heart, making sure that the following are blocked: \”Alcohol, Anarchy, Chat, Criminal Skills, Cults, Drugs, Gambling, Hate Groups, Obscene & Tasteless, Personal Ads, Pornography, Public Web Proxies.\”
Tasteless? Someone call that Grandma Underpants woman and tell her that she\’s got allies in North Dakota.

A roomful of folks expecting to hear about the retirement of Supremes Rehnquist or O’Connor heard instead that Supreme Court Librarian Shelley Dowling would be retiring after 15 years of service. A tiny bit here.

The Beeb Is Reporting Researchers from the Penn State School of Information Sciences and Technology (IST) found that people are getting frustrated with search engines and making snap judgements about websites.

Typically surfers visit only the first three results from a query, with one in five spending one minute or less on a linked web document.

I’m sure I fall into that camp.

Sharon Roney writes “Here is a very well written article “The Law Nobody Missed” regarding the Supereme Court Decision on filters. I know we have discussed this to death but this is really insighful and gives librarians a lot of credit saying that this was a null issue for years since the original ruling which was struck down.”

The Washington Post Has A Good One Too. Librarians for Porn is from NewsMax, while This One Says Ruling worsens problem of library anti-porn filters. I also noticed An Announcement from Lindows.com that says “LindowsOS 4.0 with SurfSafe is the first operating system to
comply with the Child Internet Protection Act (CIPA) making it ideally suited for schools, libraries and other environments needing a safer computing experience.“

Buffalo Bill writes “Holly Auer, reporter for the Buffalo News says sell your jet ski, leave your tangled-up badminton net in the garage and toss the filthy old Slip ‘n Slide in the trash. There’s a much better hot-weather sport out there for athletes and loungers alike – summer reading.
But it’s so much more than a sport – it’s a movement, and perhaps for some, a seasonal addiction. While smutty Jackie Collins paperbacks remain fabulous seasonal diversions, true summer reading far transcends the stereotypically mind-numbing beach read genre.
“

This has been an interesting year for California librarians. The recent Supreme Court decision regarding CIPA comes as the latest smackdown in a series which has included severe funding cutbacks and a continuing wrangle over the effect of the Patriot Act. For a library student, these past few months have served as a living laboratory of the connections between publicly-funded libraries and the larger society.

This has been an interesting year for California librarians. The recent Supreme Court decision regarding CIPA comes as the latest smackdown in a series which has included severe funding cutbacks and a continuing wrangle over the effect of the Patriot Act. For a library student, these past few months have served as a living laboratory of the connections between publicly-funded libraries and the larger society. The more interesting term papers and theses will be written about the federal government’s incursion into the contents of library records, but the heavier consequences will come from the duller impact of funding shortfalls. Perhaps some clever student will take a long look at the situation and conclude that the CIPA problem and the diminished state funding of libraries represent the same difficulty in differing form.

At first glance CIPA seems to be a problem of censorship, or more properly, of the assumed right to use the Internet without interference. That is the situation on its face, but the deeper reality comes down to a funding problem; as the saying goes, it always comes down to money.

Failure to comply with CIPA will result in loss of funding under the E-rate and LSTA programs. It is natural enough and certainly necessary to oppose CIPA on this basis, but when all is said and done, the matter’s core lies a layer deeper than this.

The potential or actual loss of federal funding through non-compliance with CIPA is not the illness itself but a symptom of the same malady which plagues public libraries: dependence upon variable funding schemes, reliance upon a sort of serial beggary in order to pay for things which ought by reason and right to be regularly funded by some agency of government. The library in many localities is held together with a ragged net of grants, special programs and donations laid upon a base of ‘regular’ funding which experience (and especially recent experience) shows is about as reliable as rain in the Sahara. These programs, supposedly intended to put icing on the public library cake, are too often relied upon to make up the batter; the process, as anyone who has sweated over a budget knows, involves a desperately ingenious sleight of hand; the public sees a Potemkin-village library and assumes all is well, but the staff know otherwise, and the sweating never ceases.

Your larger library systems keep somebody on board simply to chase down grant money; the smaller ones do what they can to plead poverty or some other element of uniqueness or singular intent to qualify for the largesse of some private foundation or public entity. This is not the way to run a library. The process is not only unreliable but pits one institution against another in a sort of beauty contest, a musical chairs arrangement that ensures losers, bleeds the resources and energy of the library and diverts attention from the real problem. Right now many of our libraries are participating in a lottery; their opposition to CIPA arises as much or more from the government’s threat to ban them from buying a ticket to the next drawing as from any revulsion over the loss of civil rights. This is wrong; we have come to a bad place and should expend some energy trying to get out of it.

The solution to this is to work toward the creation of a genuine and universally understood per-capita standard for library funding which would function as a reliable, permanent reference mark and floor of support. Even if the level initially set was below current funding, the adoption of a universal concept and a design for funding would form the basis for increases and eventual adoption of a higher permanent standard. Only a fool would underestimate the difficulty of such an endeavor on the statewide level, but we would be more foolish to continue on the current path, playing a sad lottery in order to support this most worthy of publicly-funded institutions.

Michael McGrorty

Jessie Blum writes “After telling people how to behave on the Internet and introducing fines for those who don’t flush toilets, Singapore now has noise police to keep volumes down in its public libraries.

Lee Siew Hoon, a National Library Board spokeswoman, said Thursday more than 10 people now patrol six of the island’s libraries urging users to pipe down and switch off their cell phones as part of a “library etiquette campaign.”


Full Story
“

A man took care of his family’s $100 in fines at the Kansas City Public Library by forking over 600 packages of ramen noodles. He also asked that all the fines of anyone with his surname, Mohammad, be taken care of as well. A little blurb here from the Kansas City Star.

Jen Young noticed Alternet is Running A Story on the Public Library of Science.

The group traces its immediate history to Varmus\’s project PubMed Central, a service associated with the aforementioned PubMed, which was supposed to make the full text of articles available to anyone who wanted them. Unfortunately, the scientific publishing business – exemplified by corporate giants like Elsevier, which puts out thousands of periodicals and books – didn\’t exactly embrace the idea of making its copyrighted materials available for free.

Someone else points over to The NYTimes and a similar story. They say the Public Library of Science, which includes scientists, doctors, researchers and their public supporters, plans to announce legislation on Thursday that would give taxpayers greater access to scientific data.

SomeOne writes \”The USC News Service Has This One on a new tool created by USC researchers organizes vast collections of e-mail. Designed for the information age, it offers interesting applications for archivists and others. Called \”eArchivarius,\” the new system uses sophisticated search software developed for Internet search engines such as Google to detect important relationships between messages and people by taking advantage of inherent clues that exist in e-mail collections. \”