Damn you Greg Schwartz, for making me listen to your podcast to see what you had to say about me! Fascinating stuff, though once again I would have rather read it quickly than listened to it slowly. Greg on the other hand, probably liked getting to talk rather than type for a change. Plus, he has a mellifluous voice, so it was a painless and rewarding eleven minute intro to the podcast world, thanks Greg. I wonder if my "Why I don't listen to podcasts." pronouncements sound like my friends when they tell me they just don't use RSS, or me when I explain why I don't TiVo. There are two parts to these arguments I think

1) I don't need the new technology to improve the experience I have ["I read blogs pages by page, who needs RSS?" or "I have an answering machine who needs voicemail?"] versus the subtly different

2) what the new technology brings me is something I don't feel that I need in the first place ["I don't need a cell phone.", or "I don't need an MP3 player."].

There's more room to move and convince in the first kind of argument than in the second. As for my personal choices, I have an answering machine, MP3 player, RSS reader and no cell phone, all pretty much intentionally.

This has more to do with technology adoption generally than podcasting in specific. Greg makes some really good points about the strengths of getting your news and/or new music this way. If you listen to a lot of radio, you should look into podcasting. The radio I listen to here has my traffic reports, weather updates and the status of the parking garage demolition. I'm sure over time I'll be refining my "why I am not listening to your podcast" line like many people greet me with the "why I am not reading your blog" line but right now my answer is "I'm waiting for the local podcasters" Tell me if you find them.

Aaron details more on what he is doing with Flickr at his library. Since part of my job over my last six weeks at the library is to make the web site maintainable by other staff, I've been looking for ways of simplifying and streamlining web updating processes. I installed WordPress so even though my library doesn't have a blog yet -- we're still getting staff on email, everything in due time -- they do have a simple web interface for editing and uploading new content. Flickr will automatically crop photos to 75x75, among other sizes, so I built that size image into our home page. Flickr gives people easy URLs for uploaded images and has even simpler ways of showing revolving images on a non-blog site via a badge system they concocted. Did I mention that it's free for basic users? I don't own Flickr stock or anything, I'm just always really happy to see clean usable tools that are feature-rich enough for me and yet easy enough to use and understand for my Mom or the folks from work.

Two more little Flickr exercises and then I promise I'll leave it alone: Eric is looking for librarians to send postcards to his son Odin to encourage a love of reading. I sent mine. Also, I installed a "safari theme" for my Firefox browser and am finding it to my liking. How is it like and not like Safari proper? See this little graphic for some point by point comparison.

A somewhat creepy implementation of RFID technology. thanks fiona

I have always enjoyed Andrew Pace's writing and his Technically Speaking column in American Libraries. This month he talks a little bit about the awkward acronym that reflects the awkward systems that are OPACs.

I've been helping my law student boyfriend deal with looking at citation/bibliography software that will do Bluebook formatting, so I was primed and interested to see CiteULike which is a tool for maintaining a del.icio.us-like citation database for academic articles that you find online. Haven't used it yet, looks intriguing in a taggish sort of way. [nothing]

Check me out! There's an article this week in my alternative weekly about my email class and technology in general in Vermont's libraries.

Erica Olsen astutely and succinctly puts her finger on it. A lot of library web sites suck. If they're not flat out ugly, they're deficient in other ways like usability, accessibility, poorly customized templates or just plain old lack of updates. They ignore conventional widsom about web design standards and fail to use clear page titles, citeable URLs, coherent navigational structures and, amazingly, meta tags. They have bad, or severely lacking, search capabilities. I'm not sure why this is true, and libraries certainly aren't the only profession so afflicted but we are one that should know better. Erica's not all snark though, she also includes a list of examples of good design in a subsequent post.

Berkeley Public Library is going RFID in order to reduce theft and worker injuries. The outlay of cash comes at a time when the library can ill-afford it. From what I've been hearing, this will cost roughly 50 cents a book and has also been the impetus for a massive weeding campaign where books not deemed wirth a fifty cent RFID tag are being tossed.

It really seems to me that one of Google's biggest strengths is taking things that others offer in a saturated-with-ads way and giving it to you with a clean and simple interface, and easy permalinks. In case you're wondering what my commute to work is like [and I'm home today, snowstorm] that link goes there. Big bummer, doesn't work with Safari.

One thing we know about the web is that it's very easy to index and store and retrieve text, and very very difficult to make ISAR systems for other sorts of media. We've seen an inkling of what's to come with Google Video which uses the nifty hack of indexing the closed captioning to give entry points into visual content. Of course, as we know, closed captioning isn't perfect.

Moving on.... there have been a few library bloggers podcasting lately, including Open Stacks' Greg Schwartz [welcome back!]. Matt Haughey has been talking about podcasting on his blog for a while now. It's an interesting idea, and a great way to push regular audio content, if you're already creating it. I'm personally very rarely plugged in to my 'pod for that long at a stretch, and I'm just not sure the usual format of "hey get this MP3 stream automagically in your feed" works for the way I currently consume media, but I'm willing to be persuaded otherwise. I'd love to see some good indexing/search features so you didn't just have a title/author to go by: where's all the spicy metadata?

On the other hand, visually disabled patrons who have been after us to get more information accessible via the voice mail system [new titles, possibly even book chapters] might find this really incredibly useful. This whole post was really just a way to get around to mentioning PennSound, a directory of poetry recordings. While the site has some interface design issues, it has a great vision and so far a pretty good execution. I feel like I could spend entire days digging around in poetry audio archives [a favorite], perhaps I should try podcasting that?

A good point to remember from a panel discussion that Stephanie attended, discussing Google Scholar. "Users don't care. They want quick, they want cheap, they want easy....As much as we want them to enjoy finding information, they don't."

What is missing from a lot of library weblogs? Fun graphics! Thanks, Aaron for making a whole new graphic out of my old tired Encyclopedia Britannica.

Speaking of folksonomies, I would like to mention that the very first time I came across this group tagging phenomenon, it was not at del.icio.us or flickr, it was at the Gimp Savvy Copyright-Free Photo Archive where they have selections of unindexed images and invite users of the site to help classify them. Just by looking at their list of tags, which they call master keys, you can see how this works and does not work. In specific, see this example.

Jenny chimes in on what the library overlap is or could be with the social bookmarking services we've been seeing get so popular lately. She's doing a tech summit to tell librarians about it which I'll be sorry to miss.

Some non-ALA stuff. Sethf has reposted a worth-reading post that's a bit of a DIY "how to" on how to exercise your fair use rights with PDFs that have cut and paste functionality removed. Why might you need this? He also has a post addressing that.

Having a library web site is just the beginning of reaching your patrons. You can analyze your web server logs and learn what they're looking at, and not looking at, to learn to serve them more effectively.

A quick nod to librarians in a longer article about Wikipedia. What do you think of this quote?

Because your library IS an Online Service Provider, and because your library has a commitment to patron privacy, you should read the EFF guide to Best Practices for Online Service Providers.

Why searching Google for online resources is like buying a CD at Wal-Mart. [libinblack]

All librarians who interact with multimedia at all [that is to say "all librarians"] should start understanding Digital Rights Management issues now. Jenny has a few good anecdotes about why buying items with DRM can be the equivalnet of bad customer service for libraries.

The new LISFeeds covers 131 blogs and even has a search function. The new and today's items options means you can do a quick check-in with the LIS world with one click. Plus, it's attractive. Nice job Blake [and Steven for getting the whole ball rolling on this in the first place, mazel tov on the new job].

While this is just a series of slides, I think a narrative can be made that combines them in lieu of the actual talk that was given. Library Technology 2004: The Current State of Library Automation and Future Trends. Of particular note: bigger libraries, and more of them, are going with similar vendors so consolidation of large library resources becomes simpler and searching gets more federated. And, on the next to last slide, "Small, rural libraries continue to struggle with automation." Too bad. [unalog]

I'd like to see this Google/library overlap really hit the popular culture consciousness. I'd like to see folks songs about the bookmobiles and people writing me letters at my library saying "I will still come there, even if all the books are available online" I'd like to see some good library art and some good library rallying songs and manifestos. I don't think we have to be anti-Google to do it, I think we just need to stick up for our own wonderful selves and explain why the idea of a publicly owned space for enhancing your own info-lexicon is a social good and one worthy of funding, support, and appreciation. Google will always be a wonderful tool for librarians and others to use, but Google will never belong to me. Google will never have a comfortable chair, and sometimes you just want a comfortable chair.

Are libraries looking at RFID implementation in other industries? The Ska Librarian, who is now also an agribusiness librarian, sends this link to a 2005 RFID survey from Beef Magazine.

Breaking news: Google + libraries = ??? Will Google's ads appear by Harvard's libraries' content? I'm sort of dying to know how this is going to work out.

The stylesheet that I used for my recent talk and all the other talks I've given over the past few years is available for use by anyone else under a Creative Commons license. Amanda used it, with some modification, for a nifty talk on Weblogs in the Classroom. The advantage to doing your talk in HTML is that it can be immediately made available on -- or even given from -- the web with hyperlinks [as we see more and more people at conferences with laptops, isn't this useful?], it can be standards compliant, it's available to anyone with a browser, and a quick tweak of the stylesheet gives you the talk in notes format for printing. I also like to think that it's easier to use and easier on the eyes than Powerpoint, but that may just be snobbery on my part. In any case, please avail yourself of it if you think it would be useful to you.

How do you find out what political issues are coming up that affect libraries in Australia? Go to the ALIA web site, click "advocacy" subscribe to the RSS feed on this page. Just look at all the RSS feeds they have! The ALA web site search gets a lot of results for RSS, but it seems to be the name of a section of RUSA.

'What is our strategy? We do not have a strategy. But the information flow in the blogosphere has its own Way. The Way is our strategy: personal, fast, connected and networked.' The quote comes from this article about blogging in China, but maybe, just maybe, could also be used to apply to libraries? If not now, then in the future.

I'm sure you've all heard the maxim "the internet inteprets censorship as danger and routes around it" but did you ever wonder how? Paul Jones from ibiblio has been preparing a talk on Censorship on the Net and has put a short list of resources on his blog.

New regular feature at Resource Shelf: new librarian web domains. Anyone know the guy who registered nakedlibrarian.com?

Aaron has a great list of tips for making sure your tech works at your library. I can not stress #4 enough. If you want to provide public access computing and you don't have time or money to train the entire public on your weird banjaxed system, make the computers in the library work like the ones they use at home and at work, or provide clear instructions when they don't.

I was consoling a friend yesterday who is an expert in online and database searching. "Everyone wants to hear about Google" he said "my job is becoming all Google all the time" I paraphrase, but we all know how it is. I've become increasingly leery of Google lately as they form more and more partnerships with fee-based publishers and vendors and also index their sites for Google's master index. Can anyone explain to me why a Google search for jessamyn ineligible academy [backstory] nets me five results, one of which is a PDF, with no accompanying "show as HTML" link, and flavortext that is from the article itself [or its abstract] that is not available via the linked site except through a subscription? I'm sure there's an obvious explanation -- like maybe the article was online for free and now it's not -- but why no HTML link, and where did that text come from if it's not in the linked page? I sent Google a note and trolled their FAQ for details, but all I can deterrmine is that, according to the current FAQ, Google isn't supposed to do that. I'd love to hear some reasons why it does.

Note from a reader, apparently Google Scholar may crawl full text, and show the abstract in the results, even if it only allows access to a citation. Is it too much to ask that Google have a way to avoid these fee-based results, or mark them somehow? I know how to remove PDFs from my search results, but not how to remove all non-full test sources. Even my library can do that. Then again, they're not trying to make money off of their search results.

The titles that libraries are removing to remote storage facilities often are the same ones that have the least rich library records, thus dooming them forever to being less and less frequently accessed. What to do? Enter the Library of Congress Catalog Enrichment Initiative.

Jeremy at Digital Librarian has a few more words about Google Scholar [or as some are calling it, schoogle] that sums up a lot of how I feel about it. [see also: metafilter and slashdot]

Shirl Kennedy and Gary Price give us an overview of Google Scholar. A few quick facts to supplement their about page.

• Google won't say what it does and does not consider "scholarly". My search turned up lots of books which then allowed me to do either a "library search" [worldcat, natch] or a web search [Google] for the title which I found strange.
• no ads on Google Scholar pages
• Some citation linking, some full text, same old problem of getting a good cite and then hitting a subscription database wall.

Why doesn't the library community band together to do some collaborative software development and free ourselves from vendor tyranny? If you just like to watch, keep an eye on the open-ils blog as they work through some of the decisions involved in creating a large library automation system.

One of the search engines that ALA is contemplating the replace the one on their site is the Google search appliance. I'm still mucking about with the various options, but it seems that there are definite benefits to having a search engine that many if not most ALA members (and the public) already know how to use.... or do they? Tara links to Google's cheet sheet and then adds a few additional syntaxes you might not know about.

Michael Stephens has an article in Library Journal Technoplans vs. Technolust about the difference between being a gear fetishinst and having a solid technology plan.

I just posted a short chat interview with Matt Haughey the Creative Director of the Creative Commons project about copyright and librarians and music.

Glenn Fleishman talks about wifi in libraries. His overall impression is that libraries who offer it are tending towards offering it only to patrons. Michael Sauers also has a small list of wifi in libraries and elsewhere. When I talked about the wifi issue at the Nantucket Atheneum, I received a lot of email from librarians spelling out what they were doing with their wireless access. Most made it available only to cardholders, a few had open nodes and a few even turned it off at night. I have two "local" college libraries with wifi, one has a campus-wide open node, one just started using MAC authentication with a backup login procedure if you're a guest. Some places like Boston Public Library require cards but make cards available to [I believe] anyone in the state.

While I think the jury's still out on the possible perils of providing free unmetered wireless access -- by which I mean no big lawsuits yet -- I see one potential downside to limiting access to cardholders. Login/registration solutions such as those offered by FirstSpot and BlueSocket and others cost money including ongoing maintenance fees and create one more layer of technology between us and the patrons we serve. There are times when this is necessary, but my own personal ethos says that we need to be very careful with each new technological hurdle we put between our patrons and the services and information they want. We do this with cost, trying to limit financial barriers to library services; lets make sure we're doing it with technology as well. I'd like to see some good justifications for making wifi patron-only, as opposed to, say limiting upstream and downstream transfer limits or using monitoring software like AirMagnet or others. We have already seen the copyright arena become a battleground with people self-censoring because they're not sure what the rules are. We're supposed to be the experts, let's act like experts.

There will always be software and hardware vendors who wants to paint a worst case boogeyman scenario about why we need to buy their security products. I'd hope that librarians will educate themselves enough about the technology and the culture surrounding it that they can make informed decisions that value openness and access not fear and vendor hype. [stuff]

Aaron's posted a brief transcript of one of the text messages he got at the library which uses a lot of IM-speak. Let's remember that the more people use IM, the more "ask a librarian" sessions can seem like another place to chat and goof around. We already have the problem of library students and other people "testing" the system. Is there a problem with virtual reference only working as long as it doesn't become too popular?

Jenny is back on the scene with a Movable Type based site. As you may or may not know, this site runs on Movable Type as well. I've got other sites running on WordPress, Blogger, or even just old hand-coded goodness. In preparation for the Information Commons symposium this weekend, I've been thinking a lot about online products versus online content. We all know how smart Jenny is technologically, and yet she was temporarily brought down by non-functioning software. Jessica is also a smart cookie but has been drowning in comment spam. I like to think I'm pretty bright, but I'm dead in the water when ibiblio goes down, or gets a DoS attack.

How many times do libraries say their internet connection isn't working when what they mean is Internet Explorer has been taken over by browser hijacks? How much do we wince when we see AOL advertisements claiming to be able to "fix" the internet? In my beginner email class, people have a lot of questions about attachments, thinking that "the internet" is causing their frustrating attachment woes instead of conflicts between proprietary software. Wouldn't you like to read a news article that described a new virus in terms of the operating systems and/or software that was vulnerable instead of just painting the danger with the widest possible strokes? There's a larger point here, beyond just pointing out deficiencies. As librarians, we need to be able to deliver information. If the technology is keeping us from doing that, we should hope that we're not so married to the information delivery mechanism that we can't retool and endrun and deliver the goods, not just say "computers are hard" or "we've got a licensing agreement" or "this software doesn't do that" and throw up our hands. It's been fun watching folks grapple with this in their weblog worlds, I hope we can apply the same troubleshooting and solutions to our libraries as well.

What does he mean by self-censorship? Check out this ISP example from Copyfight

If anyone asks you about the whole "libraries and weblogs thing" anytime soon, just send them straight to this page and then ask "any questions?" I bet there won't be, except maybe "why don't I know more about this woman?"

I am feeling better so I am messing with Google Print. Andrea inquired whether, in addition to showing us places where we could buy these books, Google Print might use its comfy relationship with OCLC Worldcat to also show us where we could borrow these books. The reply she received was not encouraging. Tara has more info on Google Print from a discussion with a Google rep. Google does specifically say they are not a library in their FAQ.

• Publishers can join for free. Google serves their "relevant" ads next to publisher's content & splits the ad revenue with the publisher. I was pleasantly surprised to see a book by McFarland [my publisher] available.
  
• Google print currently only accepts -- and dismantles -- print copies of books and cannot currently accept pdfs or other digital formats. This will be a great bar trivia question a few years from now "which company destroys the most books? Google!"
  
• Google claims that "pages displaying your content have print, cut, copy, and save functionality disabled in order to protect your content." and yet that's not strictly true [see figure 1 and figure 2] The page image actually displays as a background image in a weird inline stylesheet, but it's just a jpg with a URL like any other image on the web. More explanation here.
  
• Tara has a few more tricks up her sleeve. Can't afford Library Journal? Read it via Google Print.
  
• According to Jason Kottke's non-scientific method, Google Print had about 8,000 titles on December 2003. This was back when you could search for the acronym ISBN in the URL, limit results to Google Print, and get a title list. There's no longer a handy ISBN in the URL, you'll notice his title links from that entry no longer work.
  
• Once you're looking at a book, searching for a word like "the" can give you a rough idea of how much of the book's content is available
  
• scary line in publishers terms: "Google may retain and use for its own purposes all information You provide"
  

This ebook/library press release [which was emailed to me in its entirely in my comment box] makes the "virtual library" that patrons get to use until the new library is built sound about as fun as watching the Macy's Parade on a tiny black and white television. Residents of Cherry Hill do get to visit the Cherry Hill Digital Community Center [sponsored by Sirsi, makers of non-Netscape compliant OPACs] which the library web site says is "an online place" available for residents. I've got nothing against eBooks conceptually, but can we agree that, just like Google Answers, they're supplemental to other library services, not replacements for them? Just like the profession's reliance on major book distributors has narrowed our easily-purchased titles to a smaller subsection of available books, so does the eBook program's interaction with big name publishers subtly, or not so subtly, shift the library's collection focus from comprehensive to popular? Library/business/vendor partnerships can be a really good thing, but they have to be entered into thoughtfully and consciously. Do you think overdrive's privacy policy is the same as your library's?

Andrea looks at Cantfindongoogle.com a list of failed searches. When people ask me, as they often do "how do librarians stay relevant in the age of Google" I tell them that Google is a very powerful tool that very few people know how to use well. I've been reading Tara's Web Search Garage lately and even I'm learning more about how to massage information out of Google. Sometimes it's as simple as explaining to the patron that if you're looking for LTD Consortium, it's going to be pretty important to use both words. Or maybe telling the patron who is trying to find the Boston Museum of Fine Arts that the key word to include in her search is "Boston." This is second knowledge to me, and many of us, but it's not to my patrons. Google is so fast and so useful that I've taken to remembering some web pages just by the search terms that I can use to find them, since I can never remember their URLs. I'm also pretty good at ballparking whether some information that I need either can or can NOT be found in Google before I waste a lot of time looking. That's powerful stuff, and a useful skillset, so it's good to remember that some people don't have that mojo, either because they haven't learned, don't care, or give up too easily.

Karen Schneider has a great post summing up some of the major problems with the existing E-rate discount program and why libraries and schools might be better off lobbying for a different solution than reviving this one.

Library ELF is a little beta web service that will tell you when your library books are due and send you email reminders to return them. This is, of course, something vendors should be doing, but many aren't. My only beef? How about offering a plain text email option, or maybe just an RSS feed alert instead? [catalogablog]

A few bad apples may be spoiling the E-Rate program that provides Internet and phone service to a large amount of the country's schools and libraries. There are tighter spending rules, a lower mandatory contribution from the telcos [thanks FCC!] and possible delays on cash outlays extending into 2006. Now might be a good time to contact your elected official and make sure they are aware of this issue and actively working to resolve it. If E-rate money isn't forthcoming, what does that mean for CIPA? [thanks rebecca]

Washington State has a statewide virtual reference project that has an online core competencies training curriculum for virtual reference. Lots of good linked reading and exercises.

Meetup.com now includes librarian meetups. While the closest one to me is 130 miles away, this might be fun to pursue in Vermont. [juice]

Jon Udell has come up with a bookmarklet that is non-ISBN dependent that does pretty much what our little hack does. Plus, he talks about this whole REST-versus-SOAP debate where web services are concerned which is new vocabulary for me but worth learning. In old-school library news, a whole class of 4th graders said "No WAY!!" when I told them [and then showed them in the online database] that Tony Hawk was my age and had four kids.

Thanks to Steven Cohen and Michael Fagan and Andrea Mercado [and me, and Michael and Andrew whose emails with similar code I didn't get til this morning], the WorldCat Lucky Bookmark lives! While I agree with Sarah that we can't expect our patrons to grok the bookmarklet thing, as much as we might like them to, this one is [nominally] for staff. Go nuts team!

Lucky 'Cat [in same window]
Lucky 'Cat [in new window]

Librarians, please go make your own library lookup bookmarklet for your patrons and install it on all of your public access machines. Make it available on your web site. If patrons are smart enough to be using Amazon to look up books, they should also be able to use this bookmarklet. I'm going to try to figure out how to add this functionality to my booklist, now that I have made ISBNs a field in my database [and just added a "buy this at Powell's" link]

If anyone would like to help Andrea and I with a little Library Lookup app of our own, we'd sure appreciate it. Full details are over on her site. I'm aware that this issue was almost dealt with a few months back and OCLC even has their own bookmarklet page but this is a little different. It combines the bookmarklet whizbang stuff with an OCLC query to take the user from Amazon right to a list of regional libraries. Sometimes you don't know which library has your book and often time, you don't know which one to ILL it from. Handy? Sure, if we can get it working right.

What's really involved if you, say, wanted to write your own search engine? [unalog]

Roy Tennant's article for Library Journal about the pitfalls of trying to use an OPAC to find articles online is now itself online. I love it when people tak about disturbing failures of our profession.

Wikis were one of the more foreign things I discussed at my talk. It's easy to point to Wikipedia and say "Look, a collaboratively built encyclopedia!" but it's more difficult to explain how a librarian could use it in their own libraries. Today Teleread has a post about using a wiki for a book discussion group where groups can collectively annotate a book club web site. I think this is what the National Science Digital Library was hoping for with its Annotation and Review Services wiki but it seems to have suffered from neglect. Here's a neat little wiki about blogs.

Do you think it's bad if search engines start receiving revenue for traffic they direct towards other for-profit sites? I'm not entirely sure I understand this article about the Google/Reed Elsevier talks. I also wonder what this means for Scirus which, by its own account, was giving Google a run for its money.

What if your search engine really worked like a librarian does?

But back to my number two boyfriend: Google. As you know, all librarians are in love with Google and we are all anxiously awaiting the days when it will put us out of a job.... OK I am kidding. However, we all love to talk about Google. Here are two non-librarian perspectives on Google. One which tells us how people search Google and other search engines. Is it any surprise that Google says that "Searchers become expert searchers very quickly" using Google? No, it isn't. The second article is by a sysadmin pal of mine who went to a talk about Google's place in research and librarianship. He was a bit suprised at all the gushing admiration he saw. He wrote this post: Google is Good? Talking about how while Google may not be evil, it both is and is not, good.

WebJunction finally wore down my resistance. After several attempts to get paid work for them over the years failed, I wrote them an article for free. The good news is that they're all incredibly nice, flexible on deadlines, and not heavy-pencil editors so my article is pretty much how I wrote it. It appears in their Focus on Systems Librarianship section [which is full of good reading by the way] and is called "Those Darned Users! how to serve your users without sacrificing safety, privacy, or your sanity."

Re: shoddy OPACS "hey, librarians, it's your own damn fault."

Why nobody wants to be a librarian in Compton, a random nub from bash.org. Here are a few library-themed nuggets: netflix for books, computer emulates palm pilot, emulates book, charge male escorts on library card, meaning of leet.

Jenny has a very astute post wondering why our OPAC vendors don't care about us in relation to the "my checkout list as an RSS feed" meme that has been going around. I, too, have been staggered by the lack of responsiveness I have gotten from vendors about even basic functionalities like Netscape compatibility [Sirsi doesn't have it], or customizability [changing the colors on your OPAC should be stupidly easy, not maddeningly hard] to say nothing of more complex features like using CSS for layout, or RSS for content richness.

For me, this just drives home the true nature of the buyer/seller relationship and the OPAC lock-in. Support is expensive, and if it doesn't lead to more sales it's just barely worth the money of the vendor because where else is your library going to go? Do you really have the time, energy, or money to shift all of your records to a new vendor who probably doesn't have a better track record than your current one? Does your systems librarian need more work to do? Can you be allayed with promises that the next version is going to fix the problems in the current version, and ignore the fact that a new version will probably break as many things as it fixes?

For every librarian like Jenny who is going to bust some heads -- and more power to her -- there are ten librarians who can just barely keep their OPAC running, much less customize it to suit their specific needs. Don't believe me? See how many people running our current OPAC haven't customized the interface nearly at all besides entering the name of their library. I know how hard it is to customize the damned thing, I congratulate them for even being able to do that. While we're contemplating why they don't give us RSS, let's also be remembering that they don't give us much else either, particularly for libraries less tech-savvy than Jenny's. We've gotten over marvelling at the fact that the OPACs work, now I for one would like to see them working well. I bet they have RSS feeds planned for the next roll-out, but they'll probably try to sell them to us. [update: catalogablog puts up some links to open source options you can manage yourself, and don't forget oss4lib]

As far as my unofficial survey of libraries using WiFi, I only got a few responses. Most libraries said they disable their WiFi when the building itself isn't open, citing security and bandwidth concerns. A few just leave their access point open and said they don't care who is using it. A few have patron-only authentication. Some are part of campus-wide systems where the library is one of many nodes and they do nothing particular as "the library" as opposed to part of the WiFi network. It's a whole new paradigm. Along those same lines, here's a column about things to consider when securing WiFI in a public library

Aaron and TechnoBiblio discuss the results of AOL's Second Annual IM Survey and what it might mean for reference services especially in libraries that haven't chosen yet to do virtual reference. Now, granted, a "trends" survey is a different animal than an actual scientific survey, and AOL has much to gain by people thinking that it and other IM clients are fairly ubiquitous. However, it's hard to deny the numbers. I'm an old lady and I'm sure I send more IMs than I do email [although I also think that's a false distinction in many ways] and I would use it a lot more if more people I knew were using it. Remember, it's not just an AOL thing. There are many open source clients that you can use, even to chat with your pals on AIM. I would like to see some real numbers comparing libraries that use virtual reference software and libraries that use IM clients for chat reference comparing cost, usage, ease-of-use, and overall successfulness.

So, not to belabor a point, but the final post in this "man gets hassled by cops for using WiFi outside of a closed library" is up. In a weird turn, the Atheneum has now posted a policy saying, in essence, their WiFi hotspot isn't supposed to be used when the library is closed. Am I missing something here? Isn't it easy enough to just shut it down if you don't want it to be used? Or password protect it after hours? Are the police going to enforce this policy? Is there any legal precedent for that? What's going to happen when the whole island becomes a hotspot? Or is this enforcement of free WiFi supposed to drive people towards the pay services? I'd be really interested to hear from librarians who offer WiFi: What is your policy for patrons using WiFi 1) outside the library, and additionally 2) when the library isn't open? Thanks.

More from the fellow who was told by the police to not use his laptop + WiFi outside of the Nantucket Athenaeum. [lisnews]

Man gets hassled by the police for using library's WiFi while seated outside the library. Apparently you need to be inside to use the wireless signal, so said the policeman anyhow. As you know, I have also been guilty of this, slap the cuffs on! [update: this guy didn't seem to have any problem doing the same thing...] [thanks shannon]

If any of you were at all curious about follow up to the link I posted a few days back [about the link to a Republican web site appearing on the "hot links" section of all iBistro OPACs, a Sirsi product] I swapped a few emails with Sirsi Central about it.

You know, I know this is just me having a hard time getting with the program, but I really miss being able to look at the card in the back of a library book to see how many times it had circulated. I liked the idea that this information was available to both staff and patrons, as if information about the public library books somehow belonged to the patrons as well as the staff. I liked knowing when my books were due by looking in the book, not keeping a little slip of paper that represented all my books. I liked not having to be sure to remove that piece of paper once I was at the library so that some other patron wouldn't find my reading list tucked into one of those little pockets that we still put into our library books, even though there are no cards to go in them now. Sort of like what this author says.

We all know about Brewster Kahle and the Internet Bookmobile [I hope]. Here's how the project is working out in India.

An excerpt from that controversial Playboy interview with Sergei Brin. You'll notice he never mentions Google Answers.

You all know how much I love political activism, but is it strictly kosher for an OPAC vendor to be making partisan political statements with the links they add to content-included catalogs? Check the Hot Links section on the Lackawanna County System, for example.

Infopeople has done the seemingly impossible. They have created a library catalog tutorial that works with just about any online library catalog. It's a little generic but I found that even though my OPAC at work is pretty much nothing like the one they illustrate, people can still understand how to map from one to the other. Point your users to it, it's really helpful.

Walt has started a little blog page to post announcements when he's done a new issue of Cites & Insights. It includes announcements and brief tables of contents. You can subscribe to the Atom feed if that's what deweys your decimal.

Something to chew on... say you were designing a public library from the ground up, and had no major funding hurdles. Would you still go with Windows? What else could you use? A slashdot discussion. [unalog]

An idea whose time has come: Radical Reference. Originally planned for the RNC protests, it has already expanded to fill other pressing radical informationneeds. Here's a recent article from the NY Sun about it. A little more information at the NYC Indymedia site. Now that's more in the MYbrarian model, don't you think?

Google Guide is a site that helps nvoice and experienced users learn more about how to effectively use Google. The author has written How to do Everything with Google and has released this tutorial site under a Creative Commons license. Apparently she did some serious research on Google Answers to prepare.

Meanwhile, while the DoJ's memo trying to get depository documents destroyed has made the big time, OutragedModerates.org is offering goverment documents via P2P networks, including a draft of PATRIOT II, a DoJ report on USA PATRIOT Act violations and the 9/11 Commission's report. Please check out Download for Democracy. Remember: "the net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it"

Google circa 1960

The Librarians Against Bush web site now has its own blog. [thanks pam]

Search Engines: Clogged with Commerce and Begging for an Upgrade asks whether our search engine results are being clogged with for-profit sites at the expense of solid information. For commerce sites can afford good design, placement and Googleability. Can your local community-based center?