access

Who has access to collections?

mist in the valley of East Randolph — Mist in the valley of East Randolph, from the National Archives on Flickr Commons

This started out as a cranky email and then I decided to write this up instead and be (somewhat) constructive.

I was listening to a local history podcast which I love called Before Your Time. It’s a joint project of the Vermont Historical Society and Vermont Humanities (where I used to be a board member). They look at one item from the VHS collection and talk about what it tells us about the history of Vermont. It’s a well-produced podcast which is full of facts and yet also brief. I liked this one in particular because it’s about forests and one of the people they interview is my county forester and I like listening to him. The other two people they interview are a librarian at VHS and a man who was a past director of VHS and wrote a book about Vermont maps. One of the things they both mention is how much they both wish that their collections were used more. In fact the former director says towards the end of the podcast

I hope people who listen to the podcast take the initiative to go to some of the great collections. You can’t be more than about 25 to 50 miles away from excellent Vermont history collections if you’re living in the state, whether it’s Bennington Museum in the southwest, Sheldon Museum in Middlebury, the VHS here in Barre, UVM Special Collections in, in Burlington, extraordinary resources that are open to anyone who wants to come in and use them

As I was listening to this I thought to myself “Yeah why don’t I go to the Vermont Historical Society collection more often? I like that place.” and then I remembered: it costs $9 a day if you’re not a VHS member or a student. Continue reading “Who has access to collections?”

Lobbying my rep about the Move to Amend project

Posted on 31May2331May23 by jessamyn

On Wednesday I spoke to the assistant to my congressional representative’s assistant encouraging her to be a co-sponsor of the We the People amendment. I prepared remarks because otherwise I tend to go on.

“I’m an elected official in my town, Randolph Vermont, and I work all the local elections. I also work in the public library where we struggle constantly against giant publishers who hold the ebook market under their absolute control, deciding prices and terms while also being the only game in town, not truly subject to market forces.

Nationally, public libraries are struggling under constant book challenges in public and school libraries. These challenges are frequently brought by centralized fake parenting organizations (in that the people who organize them may be parents but they are not usually parents of people in the schools and towns where they bring these challenges, they just find a local parent and tell them what to do) and are forwarding a dangerous white supremacist and anti-LGBTQ agenda while donating incredible amounts of money towards elections from school boards to Congress. It has to stop.

People need a level playing field so that we will truly live in a democracy and one person gets one vote and where corporate non-persons (that never die, that have special interests, that legally exist to accumulate capital, that *shouldn’t* have free speech in all cases) are suitably regulated and only enjoy privileges that are given to them by people and regulated by governments.

We are seeing, nationwide, situations in which a majority, a large majority, of Americans support or believe in a thing (abortion rights, legalized marijuana, the rights of our gay and trans friends and neighbors) but are having their voices drowned out by the “speech” of big money trying, and often succeeding, in influencing legislation via gerrymandering, fake grassroots organizations, and undue influence in elections.

And it’s a Vermont issue. Nearly one fifth of Vermont towns have passed resolutions at town meeting (over a decade ago) affirming that they feel money is not speech and corporations are not people.

Legal privileges for businesses, even non-profits, are subject to the political process already in place. Artificial persons should not have civil rights though the people who make them up absolutely should.

Money is not speech and corporations are not persons and people have rights over corporations which have the privileges we give them.

I work for my town. I believe in democracy. I want to live in a country where every person gets a vote and every non-person gets no votes.”

CIL reprint: Your Digital Life After You

Posted on 02May2202May22 by jessamyn

This article was originally published in Computers in Libraries magazine in 2017. Some of the advice may be out of date.

Practical Technology – Your Digital Life After You
by Jessamyn West

More and more, our lives are lived online. When my father died six years ago, we were pleased to find a Google Document with the usernames and passwords to every account he ?owned?. He was an engineer and so this was not terribly surprising. Most of these accounts were things like bank account?s and cable subscriptions, but a few were email accounts and (small) social media profiles. This made a complicated time much simpler.

What if we hadn’t been able to access his information? Jan Zastrow has written a great article on digital estate planning which mentioned some of these ideas. Here are some specific tech tools you can use to help you archive and prepare your legacy on social media sites and content repositories.
Continue reading “CIL reprint: Your Digital Life After You”

How we announced we’re strongly encouraging salary/hourly pay scale in online job postings

Posted on 17Aug21 by jessamyn

I am the lead on the Vermont Library Association website. One of the things we do a LOT of is post jobs. Many of these jobs are in small or rural libraries and don’t always pay well. We made a decision to start strongly encouraging people to post the pay range and here was our explanation for why.

We’ve been talking amongst ourselves on the web team and wanted to put in a friendly encouragement for people to put salary or hourly $$ ranges and description of benefits in their job ads if they’re posting them on the VLA web site.

We’d like this for a few reasons, primarily because of equity and diversity issues. This slightly tongue in cheek blog post has a good enumeration of the reasons that this is a positive move for employers to make.

https://nonprofitaf.com/2015/06/when-you-dont-disclose-salary-range-on-a-job-posting-a-unicorn-loses-its-wings/

And here’s a slightly more serious post from NTEN
https://www.nten.org/article/youre-not-serious-about-equity-if-you-dont-post-salaries/

Summarized

People don’t want to apply for a job if they don’t know the salary and if it will pay what they need a job to pay (i.e you will get more and better applicants if you include this information)
Transparency with salaries leads to better equity among staff (i.e. “harder negotiators” don’t necessarily get paid more, people know what to expect)
If the salary isn’t on the job ad, ask yourself why it isn’t (I know many of our jobs don’t pay well, but this is a separate issue, not one that should lead to pay being left off of a job ad)

If people would like to discuss this as a group, or email me directly, please feel free. Thank you for considering it.