overdrive/netlibrary meeting – a dramatic reenactment

I went to a great meeting today. It was a collection of Vermont librarians interested in possibly purchasing digital audiobooks for use in their libraries. It was an informal no vendor meeting to discuss and compare options, look at what did and didn’t work in New Hampshire with Overdrive and get everyone on the same page regarding what has and hasn’t already been done and how the systems work. It was fun, I met some new people and I learned some things. I IMed with a friend from the meeting (yay for library wifi – thanks Brown Public Library) and told him I was talking about downloadable audiobooks and he thought I was in a vendor meeting. He transcribed my likely scenario thusly.

Vendor: DRM DRM DRM DRM
Library: FREE AND OPERABLE
Vendor: DRM DRM DRM DRM
Library: F*ck you.
Vendor: Whatever.. good luck finding another vendor
Library: Grawr. DRM :(

So true. We had maybe two viable options for a library-grade downloadable audiobook service. The weird part is that patrons can more easily buy their own content, but to get the “checkoutability” it requires DRM and that puts this into the arena of the heavy hitters vendorwise.

number one, huh?

The funny thing about the blogoland is that people are always trying to figure out authoritiative ways of ranking people so you can… I don’t know, compare your status with other blogopeople? Technorati does this with some success mainly because they are married to WordPress in such a tight way that they get a lot of data, and also because people seem to go along with or take stock in what they say. When PubSub was coming out with its link rankings it was an interesting attempt to quantify something we could feel and not quite see, and yet the numbers didn’t seem to really mean anything, or map on to anything with any degree of predictability. Predictability is when you the blogger think “If I link to this story about a book banning over the work scrotum, that is probably going to attract a lot of inbound links which might affect my popularity ratings in places like Technorati.” We may be considered link whores if we do this deliberately, but we’d be a little clueless if we didn’t understand how these things work.

All that is my lead-in to mentioning that this blog is #1 on a list of ranked blogs — Top 25 Librarian Bloggers (By the Numbers). To my mind this is mostly saying “Jessamyn’s blog has been around the longest” which is mostly true. Jenny had a blog-type site before The Shifted Librarian, but it’s not around now. What’s Gnu was the first library-oriented blog I read but it’s only available now at the Internet Archive. People I read regularly — Meredith, Michael, Stephen — didn’t make the list due to some quirks in the decisions OEDB made on who would be included. A few other people who did make the list ponder about it: Walt, Ryan, Sarah, Von, Jason and, of course, Anonymous.

A few other interesting points. Google’s Librarian Central is on the list despite having a Technorati rank of zero. Somehow they have a Google page rank of seven, how about that? The top 25 were picked from a field of 55 which seems a little sparse. Meredith’s recently posted survey results indicate there are hundreds of library and librarian bloggers. With the exception of the Law Librarian blog the rest of the top ten are what I consider “old timers” (though I may be wrong about the Librarian’s Guide to Etiquette which I was sure had been delighting me much longer than just two years) which supports what I asserted earlier, that a lot of page rank and Technorati rank and DMOZ inclusion (seriously, DMOZ?) have to do with longevity.

In any case, it’s always nice to have an excuse to read more librarian blogs that I might not see in my daily travels. Also, I should mention that today is my birthday. So, if you’re so inclined, tell me in the comments what your blog or website is #1 in… whatever the heck it is. It will amuse me, spread the link love around, and give everyone a little more to read. We could all use more to read.

how to make a “we’ve got ubuntu” announcement

Doug Lord from the Connecticut State Library passed along a neat little post from the Conntech listserv from the Cheshire Public Library announcing their new Ubuntu computer. Notice how psyched they sound, how easy the install is, how familiar the applications sound. Got some old hardware? Try it yourself.

question: book club book swapping?

A reader writes “I’ve volunteered to be on a committee to develop our regional book club in a box program. Are you aware of a network where libraries can trade or otherwise share book club or (fill in your city/campus here) reads program books? We have virtually zero money and need fifteen copies of each title; our current titles have been practically exhausted by our readers. Any advice you can offer would be much appreciated.” If anyone has experience with something like this, if you could leave some information in the comments, thanks.