One of the largest challenges with serving “the public” is that you’re answerable to the public for your decisions. So when a conservative think tank issues a report that says your libraries are full of extremist literature and you reply that you’re trying to achieve a balanced collection, how do you think people are going to respond? This news story reminds me of this post to the library_mofo group on LiveJournal (sorry, if you’re not a member of the group you won’t be able to read it, but membership is free) where a newly minted MLIS grad starts a job in a Catholic school library and has to figure out what to do with the well-meaning but seemingly inappropriate donations (hate speech, graphic anti-abortion flyers) she receives from library patrons. If you’re seeing that the connection is having a good collection development policy and effective communication with the media and your library administration, you’re most of the way there. In the work I do over at MetaFilter, our last resort to people unhappy with policies is to tell them “well perhaps this isn’t the right community for you, you are welcome to leave at any time” but this is a much stickier issue in a public library, even though we do see libraries doing this from time to time. [thanks eoin]
Federal court rules USA PATRIOT Act’s National Security Letters unconstitutional
The EFF has just reported that the gag order provisions in the USA PATRIOT Act concerning National Security Letters are unconstitutional. This is NOT the Connecticut case, but a related one concerning the records of an internet service provider. Here is more explanation from the ACLU and a link to the decision (pdf). The decision claims this gag order provision of the USA PATRIOT Act is unconstituional because “it does not afford adequate procedural safeguardd, and because it is not a sufficiently narrowly tailored restriction on protected speech.”
brian dettmer, book carver
“Brian Dettmer is an artist/surgeon who carves books into intricate, astonishing & precise new pieces of art.” [mefi]
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.