Category: access

Government Information in the Digital Age: The Once and Future Federal Depository Library Program. The Federal Depository Library Program run by the GPO is changing, dramatically. How will this affect you, and your patrons’ access to goverment information? James Jacobs and Shinjoung Yeo have made a preprint of an article they’ve written available.

Though this article in D-Lib is a bit of a “complex text” it’s worth reading if you’ve been asking yourself “How can I try to ensure fair use rights in the brave new world of DRM-ed content?” No matter what happens with DRM over the next few months, librarians that manage DRM-ed content are going to have to get a whole lot more tech-savvy, and quick.

Now that organizations are starting to get their own blogs, people are starting to have some of the blog-policy questions, which is something you get when trends becomes more institutionalized. Karen has been working on blog ethics for a while and her recent post discusses CLA’s new blog and their stated intent to make the blog feeds a CLA member benefit. She discusses the whole idea of member benefits which confront the more wired idea of getting and giving content for free. ALA has back issues of American Libraries as a member benefit. At my library we used to have nine public access computers but only one for non-patrons that could access email. The three other “email computers” were a patron benefit. Not only was this system not particularly useful to our patrons — many people who want Internet access at the library specifically want to check their email — but it made us, as librarians explaining the system, look like we didn’t “get technology” We had to make the computers do something that they wouldn’t do normally in order to put a barrier between what we wanted to give away for free, and what we wanted people to pay for. Similarly in the CLA case, blogs made with any current CMS have an RSS feed. Whether or not you link to it, it still exists, right?

I have been really interested in the Broadcast Flag and its ongoing legal battles as more DRM-ish pro-business anti-consumer legislation that could negatively impact libraries. This was even before I learned that the ALA was challenging it in court. Learn more about the Broadcast Flag from Cory Doctorow.

A sidenote to the podcast talk: if you want to participate in podcasting, you’ll probably also want to have broadband since Greg’s 11 minute podcast is about 5MB. This got me thinking about the digital divide again, and how it relates to new technologies. One of the things I love about RSS is that it actually saves me bandwidth because I’m not loading a lot of formatting and ancillary web page fluff that I’m not interested in [for the truly lovely sites, I’ll still go look at the pages, natch]. The content to bandwidth ratio is high. I only got cable modem recently in Vermont and my house up North still has dial-up. There is one ISP there with a local number and they don’t even have have a web page. It’s a different world. My options there are dial-up, satellite broadband, or nothing.

As of mid-2003 17% of Vermont households had broadband. I’m sure that number has shot up, but how high? I’ve been reading through the Vermont Telecommunications Plan from the end of 2004, and it’s fascinating stuff. 66% of Vermonters surveyed in late 2003, early 2004 had Internet access at home. Of them, roughly 25% use cable or DSL with the rest on dial-up, WebTV or other workarounds.. So… a little quick math… and we’ve got about 15% of Vermonters who have cable Internet or DSL. I’m sure this number has also increased, but how high? That’s about 100,000 people more or less. Want to know why it isn’t higher? Check out these two graphs I pulled from the report, paraphrased “Why I haven’t used the Internet recently” and “Why we’re not getting faster Internet at work” What does a library, or a librarian do about this?