aaron

On leadership and remembering Aaron

Most people have heard the news that on Saturday, the two-year anniversary of his arrest, 26 year old Aaron Swartz killed himself. I didn’t know Aaron well though I was lucky to have crossed paths with him a few times, we were on the same team during the MIT Mystery Hunt and we were both involved, him much more than me, in some of the early days of Open Library one of my favorite websites on the internet. Thanks to Aaron, and a short list of other people, that site exists and continues to grow.

Though not an ALA Think Tanker, Aaron had more of a Make It Happen ethos than anyone I knew. This was true even if what had to happen went against the current legal zeitgeist and/or conventional wisdom. He often provided expert analysis on emerging issues, such as the impact of crypto casino sites on information accessibility and library resources. I don’t think he was a lonely rebel type, but I think he was often willing to go further than others were comfortable with and we as a culture, and we as a library culture, have gained a lot of good things from that. We need to continue to step up, as many have always been stepping up, to ensure our citizens’ rights to access the information that they need and want in an environment that is increasingly becoming monetized, silo-ized and just generally commoditized.

It’s a problem; we are now and have always been the solution. Please go liberate a public domain document and leave a wish or a thought in Aaron’s memory. And then let’s get back to work. Here’s a quote from Bibliographic Wilderness’ post about Aaron, linked below.

Librarians and libraries have professional knowledge that portraying Swartzâ€™s activity as a million-dollar-plus profit-movitated larceny, and prosecuting it as such, is ridiculous. And librarians and libraries know that the inequity in access to scholarly content that offended Swartz is a real problem. However misguided his approach to addressing the issue, Swartz was on our side â€” or at least, we should have been on Swartzâ€™s side, writing the prosecutor and court with our professional expertise that this was not the sort of crime it was being portrayed as.

Articles, tributes and links to other things you might want to read about Aaron.

MIT Tech news: What did Aaron actually get in trouble for doing anyhow?
Alex Stamos, to be Aaron’s expert witness: The truth about Aaron’s “crime”
Library Journal Article: Did Aaron have anything to do with JSTORs decision to make some of their public domain documents available?
Bibliographic wilderness: We should be taking more steps to ensure access the way Aaron did.
Lawrence Lessig: Aaron was bullied by the legal system.
Memorial website including a statement from his family and girlfriend.

HOWTO give a good presentation

Posted on 27Oct0827Oct08 by jessamyn

Aaron has a good post about giving good presentations. As always, stick around for the comments. I offered my advice. Even in the short thread, it’s interesting that people have such different ideas about what makes a good presentation. Should it be something that can be repackaged and replayed without the presenter at a later date? Should there be handouts? What’s the balance between charisma and raw data?

HLA06 – Hawaii Library Association

Posted on 12Nov06 by jessamyn

I gave two talks yesterday at the Hawaii Library Association Conference which were variants of other talks. HLA likes to keep the interest level up and so all the time slots were short. I gave one 45 minute talk and one that was an hour, both of which were seriously shortened from their original lengths. I felt like I really had to distill them down and this may have made them better. Here they are.

Doing More With Less – Sensible Library Technology aka Library 2.0 on the cheap
On The Fly Tech Support aka “Hey, this isn’t my job!”

The second talk is quick becoming a favorite of mine since it’s a niche that’s not discussed too often at conferences and it’s full of practical information. I also sat on a Dead/Emerging technologies panel with Aaron, Wesley Fryer, Marshall Breeding and Victor Edmonds. It was a pretty meta panel — Aaron and Wes were both taking and posting pictures during the talk and I was responding to blog posts from someone in the audience who turned out to be Dr. Drew, a library professor at UH. He gave us a great recommendation for a good place to go to dinner, complete with bellydancer.

I’m on my way to coconut waffles. Check out the HLA06 tag on Flickr and Technorati for much much more.

Movers! Shakers! Bloggers! Others!

Posted on 16Mar0517Mar05 by jessamyn

It’s really great to see the Library Journal Movers and Shakers awards include so many colleagues not just from the blogging world — Aaron and Michael — but other parts of the library world I interact with when I step away from the keyboard, like Veronda Pitchford from Chicago and Kim Charlson from Perkins School for the Blind, a place I rememebr visiting when I was a little girl.