Author: jessamyn

Stealthy RFID

Posted on by jessamyn
San Francisco Public Library tells voters it will hold a public forum to discuss RFID technology before it goes on the budget and then … doesn’t.

“City Librarian Susan Hildreth … downplayed the decision to include RFID funding in the library budget, because the action can be reversed at a later Library Commission meeting.”

hi – 02mar

Posted on by jessamyn

Hi. I resigned from the ALA Website Advisory Committee today, preferring to focus my website reform efforts from within ALA Council. I haven’t been feeling that effective lately, and my personal threshold of “how long I think I should have to wait for change to come” is significantly shorter than most people who are used to working for ALA. This made me impatient and grouchy and not a helpful team player in the long path to getting the ALA website accessible, functional and user-friendly. As always, I encourage people to send feedback to the ALA webteam, as I have constantly done, they really are trying to make the best of a bad situation.

Posted in hi

More books equal better brains.

Posted on by jessamyn
When I worked for The Princeton Review, one of the things we used to tell students was that the only thing that really significantly correlated with test scores was income. If you had more money, you’d generally do better, no matter how you had done in school, how much you studied, whatever. It definitely motivated kids to prepare for test, but it also made me really sad. Now that standardized tests are becoming mandatory, people in Florida have noticed that better libraries mean better scores, even as the amount spent on most of those libraries is “pitiful”. [thanks mac]