access

WebJunction “redesign” status update

WebJunction is in the middle of a design refresh project, which I guess is somehow different from a plain old redesign. For a site that is becoming a state portal for a great deal of library content nationwide, it’s distressing that only 27% of their survey respondents found the site very easy to use. It also concerns me that for a site that has been around for so long with such esteemed and established partners, they seem to still not be section 508 compliant and accessible, or at least that’s how I interpret “We are in the midst of defining some 508 remediation work“.

The only search box on their home page goes to Worldcat which seems odd considering that many of the WJ members are not Worldcat members. The entire state of Vermont for example doesn’t have many Worldcat member public libraries, but when you go look at the Vermont portal… oh hey they don’t have a Worldcat search box at all! I can’t find a discussion forum on the Vermont portal that’s had any activity since August. What I’d love to be able to do, personally, is figure out which content on the Vermont portal is specific to Vermont and what is just general information that is supposedly of interest to Vermonters. This is unlikely to happen, I think, because then it might be more clear just how little Vermont-specific content is on this portal, a portal that I’m fairly certain the Department of Libraries paid for, and may continue to pay for. The “new” Focus on VT Library Programming section mentioned on the main page is over a year old, so maybe we haven’t renewed the lease.

It is an improvement over my state Department of Libraries home page (yes that’s a 2002 copyright statement, WJs is 2004)? Absolutely. Are big projects like this difficult to do, especially when you need to cater to a group of people with a very wide range of technical abilities? Almost certainly. However I think some problems can’t just be solved by one more web page, even if it does “Improve traffic by enhanced synergy”. WebJunction does a lot of good things for a lot of people, but if you don’t already “get” the web, or if you’re not very tech savvy, WebJunction is harder to use than the average website. This passes on the “computers are hard” myth. This keeps people from getting help, because more and more people help by saying “Hey it’s on WebJunction!” Well, what if WebJunction doesn’t help? The libraries I work with are more likely to have wireless, Flickr accounts or blogs than WebJunction logins. Why? Because those things are easy, and tiny libraries find them to be worth it.

DOPA, what? A wrap up, post vote.

Posted on 28Jul0629Jul06 by jessamyn

I probably should have mentioned in the title that my post yesterday was discussing DOPA. It’s certainly been a topic today, here are just the posts that I saw in my aggegator today.

Walt Crawford is normally fairly apolitical but even he sees that this is “a thoroughly bad idea”
Michael Stephens, also not an aggresively political guy links to David King’s image and a longer post at ALA Techsource about the Flickr fear that is making some people lash out at libraries that use Flickr.
Sarah Houghton makes a short list of the people who voted against DOPA (not even MY rep? damn!) and discusses what she thinks this means for the future of E-Rate.
Alane Wilson at It’s All Good calls it “a disaster” and notes what it could mean for Open WorldCat
Marshall Kirkpatrick at TechCrunch describes the one-sidedness of the vote as “shocking” and points to a few more sources for learning about DOPA.
David King, also not mister superpolitical calls the law scary and says we need to think about how this is going to impact your library’s digital services.
ALA issued a “we’re disappointed” statement that is good but doesn’t mention the resolution passed by Council supporting social software applications (that I can’t find because it’s not on the damned site yet. update: Rory posted it here.). I am very worried that after their expensive CIPA defeat they may not fight DOPA as hard as they might have.
Joshua Neff discusses someone putting porn in his library group on Flickr and how self-monitoring seems to mostly work for this sort of thing.
The AASL weblog talks about how DOPA will impact school libraries.
Emily Alling talks about how this bill is about way more than MySpace.

And then there’s the blogads on Technorati which just say “Looking for Dopa? Find exactly what you want today.” Har har.

crap, filtering bill on the move

Posted on 27Jul06 by jessamyn

Straight form the Center for Democracy and Technology: “The House of Representatives has passed a bill that would force schools and libraries to block chat and social networking sites as a condition of receiving federal E-rate funding.” This bill is also known as DOPA, also known as bad news for libraries. Putting the Federal Communications Commission in charge of what can and can’t be accessed in libraries is total madness. Granted, this is the same as CIPA where only libraries who receive universal service support have to be subjected to it. The phrase “harmful to minors” which is not a legally defined term will be the standard for what gets filtered under this legislation. I guess I have just a few questions

1. If CIPA didn’t fix this problem — and recall, it was supposed to — why will this bill succeed where it failed? Have filters gotten better? Have the “bad guys” gotten dumber?
2. Doesn’t this create a class system of libraries where the ones who can forego federal funding can make choices that the ones who cannot are unable to make? Isn’t this sort of anti-American?
3. Doesn’t DOPA not solve any problem at all if it’s not applied to all schools and libraries and, in fact, the entire Internet, really? Does anyone have any data on where teens access the Internet besides school and the library? Is anyone doing anything about those places?
4. Isn’t having the FCC publish an annual list of chatrooms and social networking sites that “have been shown to allow sexual predators easy access to personal information of, and contact with, children” just creating a how to list for pedophiles and, as such, totally counterproductive?
5. Have any of you Representatives ever used a social networking site or a chat room?

showing movies @ your library.

Posted on 20Jul06 by jessamyn

I noticed when I went to one of the libraries I work with that they had received their public performance rights to show movies at the library, apparently as some blanket deal from the Department of Libraries. I read the documentation that came from Movie Licensing USA, an outfit that provides public performance licensing to schools and libraries. With a cost that they never state but call “reasonable” this group will give you a piece of paper that seems to say that the MPAA will stay off your back if you want to show movies @ your library. Well, not all movies, just ones by the major studios that they represent. You also can’t advertise the showing of your movie to the general public. If you want to put a listing in the newspaper you can only do so in the vaguest of terms — without actually using the name of the movie you are showing. They suggest ideas like “The library will be showing a tale of wizardry by the author JK Rowling.”

While the company won’t give you information about copyright law in general — ALA has this page for the curious — they seem more than happy to tell you what you are NOT allowed to do under copyright law. The printed materials that come with the license are even more bizarre and talk about “avoiding the embarassment of a lawsuit” as one reason a library might want to obtain public performance rights.

If your library is looking into obtaining public performance rights, the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction has a good list of questions to ask a licensing service.

Open Access to Ranganathan

Posted on 10Jul06 by jessamyn

I know, I know, I’m like a Ranganathan fangirl. “The library is a growing organism! blah blah blah” But this is Ranganathan news that is current! And cool! The Digital Library of Information Science & Technology Classics Project has gotten permission from the Sarada Ranganathan Endowment for Library Science to provide open access to many of Ranganathan’s works. There is some preliminary material scanned from the Five Laws of Library Science available already.