Category: access

If you are a resident of Colorado, Delaware, Illinois, New Hampshire, or Oregon, and happen to be blind or visually challenged [or if you know someone who is] you can access audiobooks online in Windows Media format for free from Unabridged.

Welcome to the club of the misfiltered, Oregon Libraries! According to Sethf, the Oregon Libraries Network web site is classified by N2H2 as “pornography” and hence is unviewable by 40% of schools in the US, according to their statistics. You can check to see if your own site is filtered. More over at LISNews. Here are the result from a few of my pages:

Two good posts in the archives over at Catalogablog. David talks about folksonomies, the word we love to worry about, in the same week as he discusses the fate of the Hennepin County Library Authority files, which are sadly inaccessible. When I was taking the bus down to ALA, Greg and I were in the bus terminal discussing Dewey and another guy leaned over and said “are you talking about Melvil Dewey? Are you guys librarians?” When I said that I was, one of the first things he said was “Do you know Sandy Berman?” I was happy to say that I do.

One of the things we did at Council was debate national ID card types of situations in a possible US future where one card would serve as driver’s license, library card, citizenship card, etc. ALA strongly urged the powers that be to be concerned with the privacy implications of such a movement and, at some level, was just against the national identity card idea. In the UK they are grappling with a different sort of privacy issue: fingerprinting children to use their prints as unique identifiers for library cards in schools. Is this another case of solving a problem that doesn’t really exist with fancy gadgetry?

Wacky and weird subject headings, a collaborative wiki-project from the folks at The Marginal Librarian. [thanks beth]