I was explaining to a drop-in time student today the difference between dial-up and broadband and satellite internet and wifi. She is buying a laptop. Her first computer. She is 83 years old. She is also probably going to be my future landlady. I said that even though she was in a place with no telephone, she could go to the public library with her laptop and get online pretty easily. All the little public libraries in my area have free wifi, and in most cases it’s the only place in town to get it. MaintainIT linked to a good set of sites where libraries (or anyone) can advertise their wifi for free. People zooming through town will know they can get online with their laptops at your library. Neat.
Month: June 2008
home for the summer
And I’m home for the summer. Well except for ALA. This long weekend I went down to RILA and gave a talk, one of my favorites, about social software and intellectual freedom and privacy. Then I got to see my family, all of them, and then I went to a Connecticut Library Consortium meeting and talked about 2.0 stuff. Notes from that talk are here. I had a great dinner with some of the usual suspects which was a fun chance to swap brilliant ideas about out future perfect library world. Driving home from Hartford was like going back in time. First the tall buildings recede, then the roads get darker, then the billboards go away and finally I’m alone on the highway on a hot steamy night listening to a shrinking number of radio stations. It was a good trip. Thanks to everyone who hosted and helped and graciously listened to me.
One of my goals for the summer is to get over my user interface design issues with WordPress and start spending more time putting interesting things on librarian.net. I will probably ask MetaFilter for a nice way to interact with WordPress that is not directly via their [overbusy, overscrolling] form. If anyone has suggestions, please feel free to let me know.
quickie plug for an ALA event
Hi there. I’m heading down to RILA this rainy morning but I wanted to mention for those of you who are ALA-bound and looking for activities, my pal Kim Cooper [from SaveLAPL fame] will be leading a full-day Raymond Chandler bus tour heading through Los Angeles on Tuesday July 1st. More details on the website. I’m leaving the day before otherwise this is a bus I would be on.
This tour will dig deep into Chandler’s life and his fiction in downtown Los Angeles, featuring stops at the Oviatt Building, Lady in The Lake’s Treloar Building, the Barclay Hotel (aka The Van Nuys, site of the icepick murder in The Little Sister), Bunker Hill and Union Station.
“needing the stupid things” Luc Sante on the book collection that devoured his life
Luc Sante is profiled in the Wall Street Journal talking about his book collection and its relationship to his space and his sanity. I’m not sure I’ve ever mentioned this, but I have a whole house that just sort of holds on to my books. The real explanation of why me and my books don’t live together anymore is longer and more complicated but let me just say that I know exactly where Luc is coming from and this article delights me. Don’t miss the sidebar history of private libraries.
I would very much miss books as material objects were they to disappear. The tactility of books assists my memory, for one thing. I can’t remember the quote I’m searching for, or maybe even the title of the work that contains it, but I can remember that the book is green, that the margins are unusually wide, and that the quote lies two-thirds of the way down a right-hand page. If books all appear as nearly identical digital readouts, my memory will be impoverished. And packaging is of huge importance, too — the books I read because I liked their covers usually did not disappoint. In the world of books, all is contingency and serendipity. Books are much more than container vessels for ideas. They are very nearly living things, or at least are more than the sum of their parts.