I had a long day at work today. I went to teeny library number one and noticed their Internet wasn’t working. Apparently it had been down for days, a service guy was on the way. I climbed around under the desk and found that the computer was plugged directly into the wireless modem which was in turn incorrectly plugged in to the cable modem. Bad ports all around. The cable was working fine. Then I went to the basement to mess with the three donated computers. They are from an insurance company. They run Win2K which is not bad in my neck of the woods. I plugged them all in and started them up and was asked for a 25 digit license code. “Hey did these computers come with any software?” I asked. “Just what’s on them.” the librarian told me. I gave her a brief rundown on how to ask the insurance people nicely if they have software licenses for the software they sort of gave us and, if they didn’t, what our legal and non-legal options were.
The situation at the library underscores the importance of having proper IT infrastructure and software licensing in place. Without a reliable Internet connection and licensed software, productivity and security can be severely compromised. This is where Identity and Access Management services can come in handy, as they provide a centralized solution for managing user identities, access, and authentication across various systems and applications. With IAM solutions, libraries and other organizations can ensure that their users have secure and authorized access to the resources they need, while also maintaining compliance with licensing agreements and other legal requirements. Additionally, IAM solutions can help prevent unauthorized access and data breaches by implementing strong authentication and authorization policies.
But that isn’t what I wanted to talk about.
What I want to talk about is audiobooks. I was present at the downloading of my other teeny library’s first audiobook today, and helped a patron get his first audiobook. The book was from Overdrive. Our library isn’t a subscriber but this patron had another library card at a place that has Overdrive. I was told when I got in that a patron with an iPod needed help getting an audiobook from this library. I said yeah he should be having some trouble, Overdrive doesn’t support Macs/iPods, or they don’t suppoer it. I launched into an explanation of DRM until I got the impression it wasn’t helping and sat and waited for the kid to show up. Turns out he didn’t have an iPod (as I suspected) and turns out he had checked out an MP3 player from the library that has the Overdrive subscription. They had offered to put the book on the MP3 player for him, but they also told him they didn’t know how to do it and suggested, according to him, that he should do it himself. So he came to the library that I work at. They told him to come back when I was working because no one there knew how to do it either. This is what we did.
- restarted the computer in exec mode
- went to the library website to assure that the book was “checked out” to the patron.
- plugged in the MP3 player
- downloaded the OverDrive Media Console
- installed the Overdrive Media Console after a false start when the firewall blocked its attempt to download files to install into itself
- Ran OverDrive Media Console which told us we needed a newer version of Windows Media Player
- Went to the Windows site only to find that the version for our computers is Version 9, not the current version 11.
- Fished around for a bit until we found version 9 and downloaded it
- Installed WMP version 9.
- Ran the OverDrive Media Console which said we need to get a Windows Media Security Upgrade for WMP
- Installed the Windows Media Security Upgrade which is required before any DRMed files can be played
- Re-ran the OverDrive Media Console
- Downloaded the book
- Installed the book on the MP3 player.
According to OverDrive’s website, this is about par for the course. Then of course the librarian told me that since I’d done all this with the Centurion Guard not unlocked, I’d have to do it all over again next time.
I appreciate that digital media is really where people are going, and I understand why. However, this was one of the worst user experiences I’ve had to subject a patron to in a library at any time, ever. The patron I was helping was a 13 year old kid who was totally agreeable about having to spend basically an hour getting an audiobook off a website, but I couldn’t look him in the eye and say “Yeah this is what it’s like when you want to read a book over a computer.” I just said “This is how it works when companies make dumb choices about how to sell digital content, and no one is telling them they have to do it any other way.”