Tinfoil + Raccoon

CiL Day 1

Oh, where to start?  Last night I slunk up to my room early, tired, socially overwhelmed, and wanting to go home.  Today, I'm back in the groove and very much appreciating the Computers in Libraries experience.   Attended two sessions that gave me lots to chew on and one that had me cracking up the whole time. The chewy ones were: a) how the New York Observer overhauled its website from straight-up news reporting to become more of an online community, using open source and social networking tools; and b) a quick, but dense overview of how mobile search and searchers are different, with a quick overview of bunches of search mobile-specific search apps.  I will wait till I can get my hands on full-sized keyboard before I tackle those notes.

The presentation that had much of the room in stitches was the Library Society of the World panel discussion and demo.  All I'm going to say about it right now is that it was a powerful, if silly, example of community-building via social networking applications (with bonus Rick Astley soundtrack). Outside of making me laugh, I was particularly pleased at being given an opportunity to do some outreach before the session. I was headed into the room when the door monitor stopped me and asked, "are you one of the bloggers?" As I proceeded to give her an entirely too-complete answer, she politely stopped me, dropped her voice and confessed that even though she had a blog, she didn't understand RSS. I gave her as brief a jargon-free tutorial as I could. After a couple minutes, her eyes lit up and she finally understood what RSS was. She had more questions, all of them very basic stuff, so I gave her my email address and said I'd be happy to help her along. It was a great interaction and an excellent reminder of how the patrons I provide service to daily aren't necessarily looking for the newest and hottest stuff. It's good to be mindful of this as I run around the CiL candy store this week.

On My Way to CiL

My open-ended ALA sabbatical really started when I witnessed  the birth of my accidental family, the ragtag, attention-deficited kids of The Library Society of the World about a year ago.  But today, I am officially off the teat and climbing out from under the saggy, smothering bosom of my library association mama and looking to see if I can get my minimum daily professional development requirements elsewhere.  After years of longingly following the adventures of Computers in Libraries  (CiL) and Internet Librarian attendees from afar, I am just hours away from my very first CiL.  I'm not sure what my expectations are, in terms of professional development.  My last several years of ALA attendance was almost wholly spent in governance activities.  It's been a long time since I went to a conference as a n00b and as a learner/consumer.   

I'm also going so that I can get the lay of the presentation land.  It's time for me to think about sharing my expertise from out behind the keyboard, so I'll be studying presentations and presenters as much as I will be their content.  Mostly, though, I am excited about meeting my new Library Society of the World and Twitter pals, and seeing old friends again.  All the snazziest PowerPoints in the world are nothing compared what I expect to get from the intensive, fun, F2F with some of the funniest and smartest people I've had the pleasure to meet.

Don't cry, Mama ALA!  I'm not running away or disowning you.  I just want to get out of the yard and run down to the playground to see what the other kids are doing.

Is Your Library in the (Adult Entertainment) Zone?

A couple weeks ago, I was grumping to a non-library friend about a surge in the number of porn trolls at the library.  I'm not talking booty-shaking videos, I'm not talking scantily clad women or pictures from naturist sites. I'm not talking breast cancer research. I'm talking hardcore, purely prurient, obscene, boom-chika-wah-wah stuff.  At my previous library we had filters, courtesy CIPA, that we were legally obligated to turn off when requested by an adult patron.  We were advised by city legal that we, as librarians, could not determine what was obscene, and should not be policing content at all.  So, we steered the trolls to recessed monitors and tried not to get too much of an eyeful when asked to turn off the blocking software.

We don't block or filter at my current library, which I'm fine with, since it's been my practical experience that it would just create a different set of problems. Owing to a snazzy new incident reporting system, though, we're much better able to track habitual problem patrons of all stripes, porn trolls included. At this point, anyone who is viewing obscene material gets one warning and told that they will lose internet or library privileges if it happens again.   

It doesn't happen ALL the time, every day, but when there are several IRs in a week, many of them for viewing obscene material, it wears me down, personally and professionally It's got nothing to do with being a prude (don't even go there with me)--it's just a generally stressful situation for a lot of librarians and occassionally, patrons when it happens.     

So, back to my friend. After I finished whining she quipped, "You guys aren't zoned for that, are you?"  It was a funny, throw-away line, but the more I started thinking about it, the more sense it made, so I decided to see what our municipal code had to say about Adult-Oriented Entertainment. Some municipalities have specific zones set aside for adult entertainment businesses.  Ours does not, but does have specific guidelines for Adult-Oriented Establishments, per Chapter 7.01(T)*.  There are two critera that we do not meet, making us ineligible as a venue for viewing adult-oriented entertainment. Briefly, the partitions between viewing booths computer workstations are not tall enough (need to be 6') and our flooring material is (ewwww!) not non-absorbent.  Sorry Porn Dude, you are in the wrong zone. Buh-bye.

******

* I really appreciate our municipal code for giving us such precise language to work with. See 7.01 (T)(1)(g&h)

What are Your TechNOTs?

Jenna Freedman picked up on my post in which I confess that I ain't all that when it comes to tech applications, and comes clean about her techNOTsaviness.  Her confessions include:

I'm dreading this whole DTV conversion, cuz I have an oldish tv at home, and no cable.

I didn't have sound on my computer at home for years because I'd misplugged the speaker cables. And I used to be a theater electrician, so I know something about plugging.

I won't call this a meme or call anyone out, in particular, but what about you? Are you perceived as a techie or a "computer person" by your friends, but have areas of tech brown-out or ennui?  C'mon! Share your ignorance and techrankiness with the rest of us.  Who are we to mock? I just made my first chart, ever, in Excel only yesterday. In fact, it may have been my first ever use of Excel for a real project.   

Digital cameras leave you cold? Do you still literally DIAL your phone?  Still holding out for a revival of Betamax? Do you feel faint when a patron whips out an SD card and asks how he can put his picture on Match.com?  Do you think about a career change when you read proposed tech competencies for librarians? I know I have librarian friends whose only computer access is at work, by choice.

I'm not looking to hear from those with active loathing of all things tech, or from any evangelizing whiz kids (unless you are an evangelizing whiz kid with a secret shame you need get off your chest).  Most of us fall somewhere between Lud and Geek.  This confessional assignment is for you.    

Historic Steamboat Photos

Anita Doering, Manager of Archives at La Crosse Public, just sent a link to the now-live collection of steamboat pictures that marks the launch of the UW La Crosse Historic Steamboat Photographs collection. It's part of the University of Wisconsin Digital Collections Center. Anita says that the project was launched with about 500 photos, but that there are a few more to go. Pretty nifty. More about the project.

The UW-La Crosse Historic Steamboat Photograph collection consists of over 40,000 black and white photographic images of steamboats on the inland waterways of the United States, primarily the Mississippi, Ohio and Missouri rivers and their tributaries. The photos depict steamboats in every phase of their life span — from construction to destruction — and every aspect of their daily operations from the 1850s to the present.

Confessions of a Technofaux

Michael Stephens wonders if my fondness for Kindle (despite its uselessness for libraries) could be characterized as “technolust.” I chewed on this for awhile and came to the conclusion that I need to come out of the closet as kind of a technodud. I think I may be a bit ahead of the curve, measured against all of LibraryLand, and a bit more ahead compared to library users but am definitely on the uphill side of the curve compared to my fellow bloggers.

Basically, my interest in the Kindle, and my occasional forays into ebook reviewing have had very little to do with technology and everything to do with my steamy relationship with the written word. I'm still very hopeful for an excellent ereading experience in my lifetime. I love to read and I love to write. I came to blogging not because it was a new tech app, but because it gave me an easy way to start writing again. I don’t love gadgets. I don’t exactly hate gadgets. The most charitable thing I can say is that I am gadget-neutral and tech tepid. I present you with the evidence:

I have a ridiculous cell phone. It’s a Pocket PC that has baby versions of Windows and Office. Mr. Raccoon, goddess bless him, is frequently giving me new software apps in an ongoing attempt to make my phone more than a deluxe Solitaire machine. Basically, I use the phone to visit Twitter, Gmail and weather.gov, to take kinda crappy pictures when I don’t have a real camera, and to play Scrabble, Bubble Breaker or Solitaire when I’m stuck some place and forgot to bring a book. I don’t sync it to anything. When I do remember to carry it, the ringer is always off in public.

Despite being an early booster for gaming in libraries, I’m not a gamer. A lot of games make me carsick. Seriously! The Raccoons, Jr. have tried to get me interested in the DS, but I just don’t enjoy gaming. This is not tech-specific, though. I don’t like playing cards and I’ve never been much of a board game player (well, except Scrabble). I did kind of like those old school text-based games I remember from my 386. “You are in a brick dungeon. There are two exits. One exits west. The other exits south.”

I never did learn how to program my VCR. Seriously!

The biggest TV in my house is 19”. And there’s nothing flat about it.

I’ve never taken to online voice chat, especially when there are more than two chatters, and I don’t go out of my way to listen to podcasts.

I haven’t had a boom box or stereo for a few years. Just today I realized that my DVD player, which is hooked up to some most excellent speakers, plays CDs. So, now I have a stereo. Juniorette guffawed when I shared my discovery. “You didn’t know that?!”

I don’t have an iPod or mp3 player. I think my phone-on-steroids can serve as an mp3, but have never cared enough to put music on it.   

If you can present me with a tool that is truly useful to me or to my patrons, I'll have a go at it. I'm not tech-averse, and I can be sporting and adventurous when presented with something beyond my immediate grasp. I've gapped my own spark plugs, and have even looked under the hood of a PC to install memory. So, what tech tools do I use and value? Twitter, Meebo, Gmail suite, Bloglines, Typepad. If someone gave me a Kindle or a Sony Reader, I'd be most grateful. What I love about all these apps is that they are all about readin’and writin’. Now that’s hot, Mr. Stephens!

Amazon says Okay to Loaning Empty Kindles

Big thanks to Norman Oder at Library Journal for passing along what LJ learned from Amazon about libraries loaning the Kindle to patrons.

Amazon spokesman Drew Herdener told LJ that a loan of a Kindle without content is OK but sharing a device loaded with content "with a wide group of people would not be in line with the terms of use."

Did you hear that, folks? If you have a Kindle, you can share it with patrons AS LONG AS THERE'S NOTHING ON IT.  Does anyone have a Black's Law Dictionary handy to look up the precise meaning of "wide group of people?"   If we buy a print book from Amazon, can we only loan it if we tear out all the pages and just check out the gutted cover?  I'm gonna pass on any further commentary about ToS, as I bet y'all have something to say about it. I will, however, probably do one last review before I pass the  Kindle on to another staff member.  After I've scrubbed it of all content, of course. 

Never Mind Legal Issues; Kindle not good choice for most libraries

(edited 1/30: Changed post title with qualifier "most libraries.")

(Screeching brakes)  Whoa. Wait a minute.  Stepping back from my Kindle krush and putting aside the question of whether or not it's legal for libraries to loan them, I considered the Kindle issue through the eyes of a public library manager who has to make decisions about how to get the most out of a budget. Duh!  It's a no brainer. There is no way  I could justify deploying Kindles, given the present model. The machine itself is 400 bucks and can hold up to 200 titles. Let's say that the average price of a Kindle title is 10 bucks. That all adds up to almost $2500 tied up in a resource that can only be used by one person at a time.  For that much money, I could buy more than 100 titles for check-out, a few reference sets, a year's access to a database, a bunch of cds, audio books, or DVDs,  a couple of display units, some comfy furniture, conference registration plus travel and lodging for a couple staff members, a contract with a coffee vendor, honorarium for program speakers.... 

How does it make any sort of sense for a library to loan out a $2500 resource to be used by one person at a time for 2-4 weeks? That's the equivalent of allowing only one person at a time access to Ancestry online for two weeks.  Or to check out the entire World Book set. Those ideas sound outrageous. Because they are.  It would demonstrate impeachment-level poor stewardship. Even if the price were to come down drastically, it would still be an irresponsible allocation. Now, if Amazon or someone could come up with an affordable e-reader with the same functionality as Kindle, that patrons would want to buy, along with becoming a vendor of affordable, multi-format ebooks that libraries could offer to patrons for EASY downloading, that'd be something to text home about. 

If there are practical reasons why loaning Kindles is a good thing for libraries to do (outside of trying to prove our out-of-the-boxiness), please educate me.

Loaning Kindle to Patrons a No-No for Libraries?

(Update 2/8/08: Amazon says that the Kindle can be loaned as long as it doesn't have any books on it.)

(Update 1/28/08  5:20 pm: Someone left a comment saying that they had checked with Amazon and gotten a very different response than the one I got from customer service.  Amazon!? Yeah, you! How about some clarification? Please read the comments, as some of them add to the discussion.)

(Update 1/30 10:50 am: I've submitted a request through Amazon Media Relations to get a definitive answer about Kindle, and to ask about any plans to work with libraries.)

(Update 1/31/08 8:38 am: Here is an earlier post, at LibraryLaw Blog, questioning what Kindle ToS meant for libraries.)

I've been reviewing the library's Kindle since it was placed in my hands last week. Most of the review has focused on the machine itself--features and usability. But today, I had some questions about the service itself, so I called the Kindle support line at Amazon and thought that this warranted a separate post.

Right around the time Kindle was released, I read the Terms of Service, curious to see if or how Kindle readers could be used in public libraries. My interpretation of the TOS said "NO,"

You may not sell, rent, lease, distribute, broadcast, sublicense or otherwise assign any rights to the Digital Content or any portion of it to any third party

Shortly after the Kindle came out, I saw a few posts about libraries that were loaning the Kindle to patrons. I've been waiting for follow-up posts saying that Amazon had come down on those libraries for violating the ToS, but haven't seen anything. 

This past weekend, I took our library's new Kindle home to test drive it, and found that it was very easy to add new content, via Amazon's 1-click order service.  When I got to work this morning, my phone was ringing--it was our business manager asking if I had made purchases for the Kindle.  When I said yes, she wondered how I was able to do it. Her assumption was that anyone else who played with the Kindle would have to enter Amazon/Kindle account information (email and password) to download new material. This made me further wonder how the libraries loaning it were able to keep borrowers from downloading stuff, so I called Kindle support.

I only had to wait a few seconds to get to a live person, and was immediately asked for my email address. Since I have an account with Amazon, my address was verified.  I was then asked to answer my security questions before getting help with the Kindle presumably registered to me.  At that point I interjected that I did not have a Kindle, but was reviewing one that was owned by my library and just had some basic questions.   The support person was more than happy to take my general questions.

I explained that the library where I worked ordered one just to play around with, but that we had no plans to let patrons check it out, as I understood the ToS prohibited that sort of "distribution." When I asked for a definite answer, he verified that libraries who loaned the Kindle were violating the ToS.

That response more or less explained my second question, which was about how easy it was to download content.  Since the Kindle is, legally, only supposed to be used by one user, the ordering/content-getting process was made as easy as possible. The support guy indicated that there was a way to prevent others from downloading, but I think it entails disabling your payment method in your Amazon account, which also prevents the owner from downloading content.  My question is, what if you buy a Kindle and share it with your kids, but don't want them downloading stuff to the machine?  It seems that there should be an easier way to be able to lock and unlock this feature.  Or, does Amazon literally expect customers to adhere to their non-transferable ToS, even within a cohabiting family?  Are we, as a library, in violation of the ToS, even though we're not loaning to patrons, but sharing the machine for educational purposes?  Can we demo it to patrons at the desk or at library outreach events?

The questions I really wanted to ask, and which probably would not have received straight answers are: How hardcore will Amazon be about ToS violators?  Will public libraries be getting cease and desist letters?  Or is it more of a don't ask/don't tell deal? It's kind of hard to fly under the radar when you are applauded for innovation in Library Journal. If you have seen any stories about public libraries getting a smackdown from Amazon, please send along!  (updated 1/29) Or, if you are in a library that circulates Kindles, please let us know how it's going and whether or not you had/have concerns about being able to circulate the machines.

Bottom line: The Kindle has no application for public libraries. (updated 1/29) Jury is out on whether Kindle can be circulated by libraries.

Assistant Branch Manager position in La Crosse

Admit it. You are dying to live and work in the beautiful Upper Midwest as an Assistant Branch Manager slash reader's advisory warrior. Well, today is your lucky day!  La Crosse Public Library has two charming, well-loved branches and one s t r e t c h e d thin branch manager who needs a second mate to help her with daily operations and programming and who is a passionate booktalker with broad cultural literacy and solid reference skills. It's a salaried, non-management position and the benefits are quite good. Here's a link to the job posting.  Pop me an email if you have any questions about the job, the library or the community.

(update 1/28/08: My newish colleague in Youth Services, Hedgehog Librarian also posted the job and added this: "We've got a hedgehog and a raccoon-- what can you add to the mix?"  Any other self-described animal-like librarians out there?)