The (much deserved) hype surrounding the iPhone has spread to the publishing world. HarperCollins has released 14 Books for the iPhone. This lame attempt is unlikely to finally get ebooks right (an impossible task in our highly DRMed world), and might get people excited for only a limited amount of time. I do see the iPhone as an interesting piece of the eBook puzzle, though, considering it is the first high PPI device that people are carrying around on a daily basis.
I read about this right before I read Jessamyn’s post (with comments worth reading) about Overdrive, audiobooks, and the iPod. I love her attitude about making the most of a crappy DRM situation and using the inevitable patron iPod denial as a teachable moment about free audiobooks online.
Similarly, I doubt libraries will be circing titles to patron iPhones anytime soon. Instead we can tell them about Project Gutenberg and iPhone formatted PDFs from manybooks.net.
UPDATE: Jennifer Peters-Lise of the Seneca College Libraries wrote in to tell me that the Facebook ban in Ontario has trickled down to the city of Toronto.
I can’t remember if I mentioned that towards the end of April I was up in Vancouver, BC giving a talk about social networking sites in the context of intellectual freedom. Since then, my great guide to Vancouver, Heather DeForest, and now another Canadian librarian have emailed about a Facebook controversy going on in Ontario. Shannon LaBelle sums it up well so I’m just going to publish part of her email here!
Last week, Facebook was blocked on Ontario government computers. Here’s the story that appeared in the online edition of the Globe and Mail about it on May 3, 2007:
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20070503.wfaceboo0503/
BNStory/Technology/
Interestingly, shortly after the blocking was reported, the Globe and Mail had a story about how Canadian Members of Parliament in the federal government are using Facebook to connect with their constituents:
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20070503.wl_facebook0504/
BNStory/Technology
Today, Michael Geist, Canada Research Chair of Internet and E-commerce Law at the University of Ottawa, shared his comments on this issue on his blog:
http://www.michaelgeist.ca/content/view/1925/135
There seems to be a disconnect similar to the one going on in the head of Illinois Senator Matt Murphy (R).
Thanks for the heads up, ladies!
Things at the North Plains Public Library have been busy and interesting. Besides daily troubleshooting tasks, budget planning (finally done, yay!) and making some small changes around the building, I’ve been working on ensuring the library meets the requirements for full membership into the Washington County Cooperative Library Services (WCCLS). I’ve considered all of this stuff essential foundation building activities and haven’t made time for non-100% essential tasks. There just hasn’t been the time.
This time crunch highlights the value of using a weblog as a Content Management System for a small library website. The North Plains Public Library Website is a (not extremely customized) WordPress install and it does just what it needs to do. There are a few other tricksy things going on in the site too. The library tour is powered by PictoBrowser and Flickr. The Best Sellers page is the NYT Books feed rendered as HTML.
More than the time saving web gizmos that make the site, I really enjoy the NPPL Staff page and am hoping to get some photos up there at some point. Staff were not reluctant in the least to share a bit about themselves and it makes for a richer website.
One thing that was great about the process of developing this small website is that it was not a case of thinking of a neat new way to make a library website. WordPress was just the tool that made the most sense (though of course it isn’t ideal). Another web technology found its way into the library’s work flow for the same reason. Using a Google Spreadsheet to organize the collaboration of multiple employees that are infrequently in the same room works so well. No longer do multiple staff members need to keep track of multiple documents that get revised monthly. It is all centralized for us to access at will. Ideally everyone would have their own google account, but for now staff are sharing the library’s main login. Simple.
I hope this mini case study of a time strapped library helps expose the “I don’t have time for social software” excuse to be just that: an excuse for not wanting to expand and learn.
This afternoon I drove to Salem to meet with State Librarian Jim Scheppke, and some of the state library staff to talk about the future of the Oregon School Library Information System. OSLIS is, among other things, a resource sharing cooperative for school libraries across the state. We generated some great ideas for “OSLIS 2.0,” and if things come to fruition it has the potential to be BIG.
After lunch I got a tour of the library, which has reference service, internet stations, and a reading room open to the public. I snapped some pics of the neat stuff, including a huge card catalog, and it is all in a flickr set called visiting oregon state library.
Please don’t mistake this post a bit of schadenfreude, but I was very interested to read an article titled “a spam filter for questionpoint” the other day. In it, Caleb Tucker-Raymond, the Statewide Digital Reference Coordinator for the L-net project, describes the issue of spam coming through QuestionPoint. He also does a great job describing the measures he considered implementing, and the one he actually has implemented to (mostly) stop the arrival of virtual reference spam. Regarding IM security, Caleb hits the nail on the head:
I haven’t used Meebo or other web IM clients much, so I’m not sure if embedding and HTML image or movie or piece of malicious code would be a problem, but something tells me the IM people have it figured out already.
What interested me most about this post, and others about patrons changing font colors within QP by (perhaps) writing some HTML and leaving tags open, is how vendor driven VR products are seen as safe and instant messaging is seen as insecure.
There are a number of reasons why librarians started believing this, but one reason I want to bring up is the not so subtle ageism I see present in many libraries. Because of their age and associated lack of power, it is easy for libraries to manage their behavior. Even though both groups might be participating in the same activities, librarians can much more easily act on biases they have about young people than they can act on the the biases they have about other people. There’s no difference in one patron emailing friends, and another IMing friends. Both are legitimate library activities, and should maybe even be encouraged. “Libraries? Oh yeah, that place where I connect with my friends.” That has a nice ring to it.
It is only possible for librarians to take issue with web activities like gaming, IM, blogging, and MySpace because these things are (incorrectly) seen as the territory of kids. If these things were introduced to the library world not as things that “those crazy Millennials are doing” but rather as new information trends, I doubt librarians would have been able to take such objection. Just because younger people were among the early adopters of these technologies does not give libraries the right to treat them as illegitimate.
