Librarians Say Surveillance Bills Lack Adequate Oversight

By Ellen Nakashima

Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, November 2, 2007; Page A06

A little-remarked feature of pending legislation on domestic surveillance has provoked alarm among university and public librarians who say it could allow federal intelligence-gathering on library patrons without sufficient court oversight.

Draft House and Senate bills would allow the government to compel any "communications service provider" to provide access to e-mails and other electronic information within the United States as part of federal surveillance of non-U.S. citizens outside the country.

The Justice Department has previously said that "providers" may include libraries, causing three major university and library groups to worry that the government's ability to monitor people targeted for surveillance without a warrant would chill students' and faculty members' online research activities.

"It is fundamental that when a user enters the library, physically or electronically," said Jim Neal, the head librarian at Columbia University, "their use of the collections, print or electronic, their communications on library servers and computers, is not going to be subjected to surveillance unless the courts have authorized it."

Under the legislation, the government could monitor a non-U.S. citizen overseas participating in an online research project through a U.S. university library, and gain access to the communications of all the project participants with that surveillance target, said Al Gidari, a lawyer with the Perkins Coie firm who represents the Association of Research Libraries and the American Library Association.

The bills, which would replace a temporary law amending the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, would not require the government to demonstrate "probable cause" that the foreign person targeted is a terrorist or a spy or to let the FISA court, which grants surveillance warrants, know that the tap will be on a library. Under the Senate bill, a general surveillance program may be authorized yearly by the attorney general and the director of national intelligence. The House's version would require the FISA court to authorize surveillance directed at people overseas.

The librarians said their concern about such monitoring is rooted in recent history.

In the summer of 2005, FBI agents handed an administrative subpoena called a national security letter (NSL) to a Connecticut librarian, and demanded subscriber, billing and other information on patrons who used a specific computer at a branch library. NSLs can be approved by certain FBI agents without court approval. The agents ordered the librarian to keep the demand secret. But he refused to produce the records, and his employer filed suit, challenging the gag order. A federal judge in September 2005 declared the gag order unconstitutional.

Librarians cried out over the issue and in March 2006 won language in the reauthorized USA Patriot Act that specified that libraries acting as book-lenders not be subject to NSLs. But FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III said, in written remarks to the Senate Judiciary Committee in May 2006, that "a library is only subject to an NSL if it provides electronic communication services."

Today, many universities -- and by extension their libraries -- can be considered Internet service providers, because they run private Internet networks allowing students and faculty to send e-mail, conduct online research and engage in online chats without touching the public system, experts said.

Many universities also have branches overseas, where users can log onto the school network and gain access to the library's server on U.S. soil. Moreover, university research -- especially in the scientific arena -- is frequently conducted online and in groups, often internationally, by accessing shared databases and advanced private Internet networks, librarians said.

"For me, the issue is if somebody is going to follow the research thread of a faculty or student, that may be something that needs to happen to protect all of us, but it needs to be done under judicial review and with a warrant," said Larry Alford, dean of libraries at Philadelphia's Temple University, which also has campuses in Rome and Tokyo. "The transactions that used to go on inside of a classroom and inside of a library building now can go on electronically and virtually."

For Neal, who has been a librarian for 34 years, the issue is not academic. He recalled his time working at Penn State University in the 1980s, at the height of the Cold War, when the FBI demanded information about the reading habits of international students. The staff refused, but the experience jolted Neal, who said he felt that library users' privacy rights had been "violated."

Greg Nojeim, senior counsel at the Center for Democracy and Technology, said: "The librarians have fingered an issue that is particularly problematic in the Senate legislation. When a group of Americans communicate with one targeted non-American abroad, everyone's privacy is at risk. We are not saying the government should have to seek a warrant for every overseas foreigner, but court oversight is essential."

The Association of Research Libraries, representing 123 institutions, the American Library Association, with more than 65,000 members, and the Association of American Universities, representing 60 U.S. institutions, each say they seek to amend the draft bills to make clear that the term "communications provider" does not include libraries. Although a report by the House Judiciary Committee states that libraries are not meant to be subject to the provision, it does not have the force of law, according to Prudence S. Adler, associate executive director of the research library group.

House intelligence committee Chairman Silvestre Reyes (D-Tex.) said the House bill, produced by Democrats, would protect Americans' constitutional rights. He noted that the measure would allow the FISA court to "review the targeting procedures to ensure that Americans aren't targeted."

Sen. Christopher S. Bond (R-Mo.), the intelligence committee vice chairman, who helped craft the bipartisan Senate bill, said librarians need not worry. The government, he said, would seek to monitor only "suspected terrorists." If a surveillance target communicates with a U.S. citizen or a resident who is not a target, the latter's communications would be "minimized" or blacked out, he said, and the bill would require a court to approve the minimization procedures.

"You know what happens if that [library exception] gets into the bill?" Bond said. "You would have your libraries filled with al-Qaeda operatives."

Justice Department spokesman Dean Boyd declined to specify which institutions might qualify as "electronic communications service providers," calling the question hypothetical. But he said the administration opposes exceptions for libraries or others, because they "could lead to an unworkable patchwork of legal authorities" and impede effective intelligence gathering.

At a public library in Santa Cruz, Calif., signs posted in 2003 inform patrons that their borrowing is subject to federal surveillance.

Actress Jessica Biel Options Film Rights To Book With Librarian Heroine

Biel says she was smitten with Megan Abbott's book Die a Little, and it is likely she will play the blond femme fatale with the dark past, rather than the other protagonist, a seemingly normal librarian. Hollywood is unwilling to pay for a period piece set and costumes, so the adaptation will bring the Los Angeles local into the modern era, rather than 1954, as it was originally.

*

By Josh Getlin, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
November 1, 2007
The book

"Die a Little" by Meg Abbott

The buyer

Jessical Biel

The deal

Actress Jessica Biel options the film rights to Edgar-nominated writer Megan Abbott's "Die a Little," a Los Angeles noir novel set in the 1950s with an intriguing character twist.

The players

Biel (recently in "I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry") and her producing partner, Michelle Purple, sign an option for a film set up at United Artists that also includes screenwriters Geoffrey and Marcia Blake and producer Richard Gladstein. Abbott was represented by Paul Cirone from the Friedrich Literary Agency and Shari Smiley at Creative Artists Agency. The novel, pulp cover and all, was published by Simon & Schuster.

The back story

Imagine a noir novel set in Los Angeles, 1954, a bleak landscape of drugs, prostitution and murder, where a private investigator is trying to unlock a terrible secret. Nothing you haven't seen, right? Except the two main characters are women, and the story is told in women's voices. "Die a Little" is one potboiler in which dames won't take a back seat. And the movie that's taking shape, based on the book, will be faithful to the original.

When Biel first read Abbott's 2005 thriller about a quiet, outwardly normal librarian and a blond femme fatale with an unsettling past, she was smitten. And the pitch she made to bring a major studio on board was direct: Think "L.A. Confidential" with two women. United Artists signed on, in a deal that was put together over several years by CAA's Smiley, among others.

"I was thrilled that Jessica wanted to do this movie," said Abbott, a New York-based noir novelist and a scholar who has published a book on the subject. "And it was great to think that she wants to play the darker role of the blond instead of the more wholesome character of the librarian. . . . It could be a major departure for her."

So move over, tough guys. Although many women have written L.A. noir, not many female-dominated movies come to mind. "Die a Little" is a genre-bending project, and Biel was passionate about the book. She paid for the option herself -- not always the case when celebrities seek film-worthy material.

The story will be updated to present-day Los Angeles because there had been studio resistance to the original period setting, which could drive costs up considerably. Beyond that, "Die a Little" could look similar to the novel.

"There wasn't a major role in this movie for a male star, which made it difficult to pitch at first," said a source close to the negotiations. "But people saw the strength of the original material. It's going to be a great vehicle for two women."

josh.getlin@latimes.com

California library's internet filtering strategy

posted by michelle c

Popular blog Boing Boing points to one library's interesting method for dealing with library filtering, utilizing large signs designating "filtered" and "unfiltered" internet access. Says the submitter of the photo, "The 'unfiltered' side faces the reference desk so the librarians can monitor usage but they say it has reduced abuse and given adults uncensored access to the internet." Pic and entry here. An interesting comment debate follows, discussing whether the signage constitutes a privacy invasion.

Haunted Libraries Around the World: The Complete List

George Eberhart - October 31st, 2007

In the fall, a journalist’s fancy lightly turns to thoughts of ghosts. Newspapers and magazines that haughtily refrain from printing news of the paranormal for 11 months of the year eagerly jump on the Halloween coach in October to regale their audiences with dubious tales of the preternatural. Bleak mansions and somber castles usually spring to mind when we think of haunted places, but ghostly phenomena—whatever the cause—can manifest in well-lit, modern offices as well as crumbling Carnegies. Of course, it helps if you inadvertently build your library on top of a graveyard.

Haunted libraries fall into two types. First, there is the “building with a reputation,” where a convenient murder, curse, or other tragedy has occurred. Library staff can then blame the odd noise, the occasional book falling off the shelf, or glitches in the air conditioning on the resident “scapeghost.” No one reports anything too spooky, and the children’s librarians have a good time with it at story hour.

Second, there are libraries where credible, responsible people observe enigmatic human shapes, hear disembodied voices, and witness other classic parapsychological events. Glib explanations about how the building must be settling ring about as hollow as those mysterious footsteps late at night on the upper floorboards. The library staff learns to live with the phenomena, usually by accepting the paranormal as a normal working condition and the wraiths as superhuman resources.

Like other public buildings that have seen long years of human activity, some libraries are allegedly haunted by the ghosts of former staff, patrons, or other residents. Most often the manifestations involve odd noises, cold spots, or objects moved; other times a visual apparition is reported. In many cases, phenomena can be attributed to the sights, the sounds, and the aura of a historic building. However, libraries offer such dynamic mental and sensual stimulation that if haunts are truly evidence for postmortem survival, I can’t imagine anywhere else I’d rather spend my earthly afterlife than in a library. (Beware, Ohio State!)

The following list represents a fairly comprehensive list of current and former library haunts. But if I’ve missed anything, or my list needs correction and even updating, please send along your comments and suggestions. The paranormal demands precision!

Haunted Libraries in the U.S.: Alabama - D.C.

Haunted Libraries in the U.S.: Florida - Maryland

Haunted Libraries in the U.S.: Massachusetts - Missouri

Haunted Libraries in the U.S.: Nebraska - Oregon

Haunted Libraries in the U.S.: Pennsylvania - Texas

Haunted Libraries in the U.S.: Utah - Wyoming (and Canada)

Haunted Libraries Around the World: Europe, Asia, Australia, Mexico

Chilean President Michelle Bachelet Gives Poor Families Books

posted by birdie

As reported in The Economist, the President of Chile, a medical doctor and breath of fresh air after the cruel rule of Gen. Augusto Pinochet, has instituted a project to give a box of nine books to over 400,000 impoverished families. Her choices, among others, are Kafka's "Metamorphosis" and Salinger's "Catcher in the Rye".

In today's The Lede (blog) from the New York Times...If You Had to Pick Nine Books...you are welcome to view other reader's opinions, and offer your own choices if you so desire. What would you choose?

Eight laws of library technology

by John Miedema

Posted on October 23, 2007 by John

Greetings. I have worked in the information technology industry for over a decade, mostly as a web developer for IBM. One day I was in my local library, looking at the library OPAC, thinking, ‘Why isn’t this more like Amazon?’ That thought took me to library school. It turns out librarians were thinking the same thing, and they are busy reinventing the OPAC. To my surprise, what I learned at library school was that I was less interested in library technology than librarianship. I have recently launched a new blog, slowreading.net, where I intend to focus more on reading research and practices in libraries and in culture. But I have a number of thoughts on information technology that I have not unpacked. I wanted to do small justice to them by summing them up in a single post. I hope they are useful to somebody in the library field.

1. It all comes down to data and rules. Anyone beginning their journey into information technology must feel overwhelmed. The industry is so diverse, with so many vendors and products and jargon. No one can learn it all. So just dive in and learn something; in time you will see that it all comes down to two things: data and rules. Remember in the eighties when you learned WordPerfect 5.1? Then they made you switch to Word. Turns out the switch wasn’t that hard; the products were fairly similar. In short order, you found yourself learn Excel, then intuitively picking up on other software programs. Next thing you knew, you were building web pages. There is a snowball effect, and it keeps going. Maybe you’re at the point of designing an Access database, or picking up some JavaScript. Before long, it all blends. You hear talk about .Net, Web 2.0, web services, SOA, and the semantic web — cakewalk. In the end, there is not much new under the sun. It all comes down to data being sloshed around by the application of programmatic rules. Content and syntax. I hope that helps describe the big picture, and gives you courage to try anything in the field.

2. Organized information is handier than disorganized information. Just like closets. It sounds obvious, almost a definition of cataloging. Now let me offer this slant — any degree of increased order is helpful. There are many methods of increasing order: back-of-the-book indexes, full-text indexes, controlled vocabularies, taxonomies, etc. The thing all of these tools have in common is that they reduce the state of disorder or chaos in information to some degree. This is especially helpful as the quantity of information being managed increases. The task of a librarian in the information age isn’t necessarily to bring high-end classification systems to the web. Things like social tagging are catching on because they bring just a measure of order to large bodies of content. Do you have any innovative ideas that simply bring a little more order to information? You may have a major invention on your hands.

3. The rate at which data is being recorded is accelerating faster than our ability to manage it. Call it information entropy or info-glut. It seems that the ability to record information has necessitated it. How did organizations ever get by without all the data they now record, one has to wonder. The information technology industry keeps inventing new ways to cope with the situation — content management, business intelligence, tagging, and so on — but there is another practical option: collect less information. Will we be less informed? Not if we apply an old-fashioned solution, the scientific method. Scientists collect a finite number of observations from the natural world, apply scientific rigor (repeatability, etc.), and make valid conclusions more often than not. They don’t try to record everything. I’m just waiting for the day that some vendor clues into this, and packages it up as the next best thing. Maybe library science should pick up on this first!

4. Librarians should not build their own software systems. Librarians should experiment with every new technology out there. Librarians should become very technically literate … in order to know what they want, and what they are getting when they go to a vendor to purchase a system. System development is deep water. If a new technology makes it easy to get started, it will be all the harder to finish. You can’t build a system out of Web 2.0 widgets. Forget technology; go conceptual. Think very hard about what patrons want; most don’t know. There is an old joke among developers that systems would work great if it weren’t for the users. Users complain more about font-size than function. In truth, design is a two-step between users and experts. Once you designed it, hand it over to the vendors and their code-jockeys for development. I’ll make one significant exception; open source development has the potential to harness all levels of development skills into a worthy product; it just takes longer.

5. These days there is only one way to acquire a system: buy a package, and two, custom build it. No one does custom builds anymore, right? It’s too costly; buy a package. It’s the 80-20 rule: get 80% of what you want, and configure it for your organization. That’s the sales pitch. More often you get 50-50 or worse. Just because it’s shrink-wrapped doesn’t mean it’s a package. Think configuration. Ask your vendor how much configuration is required. Is it custom programming in disguise? That’s where the dollars drain out. Coding is not just keystrokes. Don’t treat developers like mechanics and they won’t treat you like business executives. The technologies are young compared to the automotive industry and there are few truly standard solutions; everyone is learning on the job. They are not building cars, they are building the assembly line.

6. RSS and XML are cooler than you think. RSS is a simple Web 2.0 technology that completely changes our relationship with the web. Instead of having to go to the web, the web comes to you! If you learn nothing else about Web 2.0, learn RSS. It’s a great step toward what’s coming next. If you want to learn the next most important thing, learn XML, god’s gift to the web. XML is a character based data format that allows disparate systems to talk to each other. It is the heart of Web 2.0, which is righteous on so many levels. It is easy to get started; at no cost anyone can micropublish through a blog. These technologies are just the beginning. Keep your eye on these buzzwords: web services, service-oriented architecture, and the semantic web. Librarians are already talking about semantic libraries. There’s lots coming down the pipe.

7. Print is the next evolution in information technology. If technology evolved in the order of its importance, then print would be the next big thing. There’s no question that digital technology is better for finding information. Scan those books, bring it on. But finding information is only half the picture. What is preferable for reading information? People talk about the continuum of data to knowledge. Data is something out there, on the web perhaps; knowledge is something in your head. We go through of process of taking information that’s out there, and internalizing it. That’s where print is so important. When it comes down to serious reading, especially of challenging material, there is no equal for print and books. There are many more examples where print has persisted where personalization matters. The business world still prefers print for signatures. Print has something that the greatest quality e-Book cannot have, fixity, the quality of unchangingness that we need to evaluate ideas. In the final analysis, we require something in our hand to make it real. It’s just the way we’re made.

8. Library technology is less interesting than librarianship. It is important to remember this. It is becoming a more distant memory now, but remember that not so long ago it was believed by many that digital technology would replace libraries. Librarians were told they could become knowledge workers in the private sector. I’m glad that seems quaint now. In the final analysis, information technology is just infrastructure. Want to code; go into computer science. Think back to why you went to library school. Librarianship is much more than technology. I’m sure you can speak to that.

Filed under: librarianship, libraries, library2.0, print, software, technology

Librarians Can Be Very Nice People

posted by birdie

OK, we've reported on the ghost in the library, now here's a dear little story about a library angel in Kansas City.

Exorcist Wanted...In the Library

posted by birdie

Uh oh, ghost in the library. In the library bathroom to be precise. Here's the story from Zee News, Kent, UK.

Have A Lend of Us

posted by birdie

Could this be your library? One librarian is "trampy", the others are "a bit dim", "helpful and gay" and "sweet and dyslexic". Maybe...

...but it's really an inside peek at the cast and crew of the new Australian TV comedy, "The Librarians" from The Sydney Morning Herald.

Pastor Orders Harry Potter Books Removed From Catholic School

posted by birdie

I'm not sure where the Rev. Ron Barker of St. Joseph's School in Wakefield, MA has been for the last ten years (in his study?), but apparently he became aware--last month--of the character Harry Potter, and the seven books in which he was the title character. The following report is from Fox News, so read it at your own discretion:

"A Catholic pastor at a Massachusetts parochial school has made all the Harry Potter books there disappear, saying they are spiritually dangerous for children and could encourage them to engage in witchcraft. The Rev. Ron Barker of St. Joseph's School in Wakefield, Mass., said he stripped the library there of the fantasy series by British author J.K. Rowling in the last month after discovering the novels were among the 10,000 volumes on the shelves.

"This is a parochial school and I have the moral authority to do this," he said in an interview with FOXNews.com. "For some people, reading those books is a vehicle to become involved in the occult. ... My basic premise is for the spiritual protection of the children."

Anatomically Correct Art Censored in Bookstore Window

posted by birdie

Someone, we're not exactly sure whom, didn't want their child walking by and seeing the collaborative window exhibit "Playing Doctor" at the York University Bookstore. The exhibit was an attempt to facilitate awareness about the importance of being checked for testicular and breast cancer.

Here's the story from Excalibur, the campus paper of York University in Toronto.

Library of Congress Chewed Out by Congress

posted by birdie

How much must this hurt...to be compared to Wal-Mart in terms of inventory tracking.

But yes, according to this piece from the Washington Post, "corporations such as United Parcel Service and Wal-Mart know how to keep track of their packages and merchandise" {better than the LoC}, a weary but sympathetic congressional panel, headed by Rep. Vernon Ehlers (R-Mich.) told officials of the Library of Congress yesterday.

Not wishing to be compared to a mega-store, Librarian of Congress James Billington responded, appropriately, "We are a working library, not a storehouse. It requires a different approach".

Update: 10/26 12:35 GMT by B : A reader's observations on the L0C situation entitled "Black Hole at the Library of Congress" from a Michael Lieberman's blog at the Seattle Post Intelligencer.

Library porn filters would block patrons' legitimate inquiries

posted by Blake

The San Jose Mercury News Says Filtering was a bad idea a decade ago, and still is. Responding to a minor nuisance at the downtown library by dampening the rights of inquiry and speech of all patrons at every city library is an unacceptable trade-off.

Libraries an integral part of the bigger picture

posted by Blake

The Truro Daily News - Truro,Nova Scotia,Canada - says It's impossible to imagine a modern society without easily accessed, well-stocked libraries. But a little like not missing your water until the well runs dry, if libraries do falter due to the current attrition, we will wake up one day and cry over what’s lost.

New OCLC report on social networking

posted by michelley

OCLC just released a report called Sharing, Privacy and Trust in Our Networked World, which addresses social networking and what role libraries may play in this area. Based on their other excellent reports, I'm sure it will present fascinating research.

Books for the Ages, if Not for the Best-Seller List

posted by Blake

Have you ever wondered about the NY Times Best Seller List? Books for the Ages, if Not for the Best-Seller List : The List compiled in strict secrecy to prevent cheating by publishers and authors, is not a completely accurate barometer of what the reading public is buying, and it has generated controversy from time to time. The novelist James Patterson has more work on the list than anyone else... How is it put together? How accurate is it?

Christian group pushing to filter porn from San Jose libraries

posted by Blake

The Mercury News: A Christian group led in part by a former San Jose city councilman is pushing for anti-pornography filters on computers at the city's public libraries. "We want to provide free access to information. Parents are certainly welcome to guide children's use, but it's certainly not the library's role to do that," branch manager Pam Crider said.

Rare book found in charity shop

posted by Blake

Rare book found in charity shop A rare first edition of Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest has been handed in to a charity shop. The book, which dates back to 1898, was discovered at the branch of Oxfam in Nantwich, South Cheshire - appropriately inside a handbag.

The Virtual Librarian, A Novel

posted by Blake

birdie writes "The Virtual Librarian, a forthcoming novel from Theodore Rockwell, award-winning author of "The Rickover Effect" and "Creating the New World," and co-author of three other important non-fiction works. He includes as co-author his deceased son, who discussed with him many of the ideas that led to this story.

In "The Virtual Librarian," information technologist Keith Robertson keeps reminding himself that Lib is not a real person; she's a virtual librarian software, nothing more. Like the telephone voice that tells you whether your flight's on time. But Lib's software is evolutionary, designed to keep improving itself as it learns. So she is outgrowing her creators and developing a mind of her own."

Sex, Drugs and Bombs: Confessions Of A Librarian

posted by Blake

Here's a new contender for my favorite headline ever: "Sex, Drugs and Bombs: Confessions Of A Librarian": Places where children are kept calm in storytelling corner, dads can escape the chaos of home to do the Sunday crossword and students can find the silence they need to get on with their studies. Certainly not places where drug dealers hide their stashes and flashers lurk in waiting for their unsuspecting victims. But that's exactly the kind of thing Don Borchert has experienced in his 10 years as a librarian in California.

New Show Down Under...The Librarians

posted by birdie

There's a "New Australian black comedy on the tele...The Librarians...review in The Age.

"There's something intrinsically comic about a library. It's a place of order and quiet, but anyone can come in, and they frequently do. The line between control and chaos is crossed every day. So the new ABC comedy series The Librarians is the subject of considerable speculation within the book-lending profession. The librarian who gave the series' writer, producer and star Robyn Butler a tour of the State Library expressed the fears of many when she took the comedian aside and asked: "You're not going to be mean to librarians, are you? You're not going to wear cardigans and say shush?"

E-books multiply, but who's reading them?

Sony and Amazon are betting that digital novels will replace ink and paper. Some readers aren't so sure.

By Clayton Collins | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor

Caitlin Lyons labors in the towering stacks as bibliophiles trickle into Boston's Brattle Book Shop. Many are repeat customers, here to browse an eclectic collection – hundreds of thousands of loosely categorized tomes that spill from these two floors onto outdoor shelves in an empty lot.

It's an avalanche of paper, concedes Ms. Lyons, a recent English major with an ecosensitive streak. She acknowledges that this vast inventory, digitized, could shrink dramatically into an easily managed series of reads on a PC, PDA, or some dedicated device's screen. That, she says, would represent a loss. "Way too many things are becoming technological," she says, cradling a fragile-looking hardback copy of Benjamin Disraeli's "Sybil." "A bookshelf and a study? You can't do that on a disc."

Digital evolution has long since swept the audio and video realms, leaving holdout purists clinging to tubes, vinyl, and film. Holding back the broad digitization of books – besides the special sensory experience they deliver in their traditional form – has been a spotty digital inventory and the lack of a dominant device for displaying them.

But as habits change and content inventory nears critical mass (Google, to name one prospective repository, is still wrangling with copyright issues), digital books might finally gain a foothold, observers say – not as a replacement format, but as an alternative delivery system not unlike the audiobook. Both the publishing industry and the reading public appear to be shaking the notion that for the beloved book, digital equals death.

"Around 2000, I think [publishers] thought there was going to be a brave new world and they were going to have a whole new thing, and I think that's part of what went wrong," says Sara Nelson, editor in chief of Publishers Weekly. What's clearer now, she says, is "there will be plenty of niches and plenty of space for books in digital form, not so much as a direct competitor, [but] as an added format."

In fact, digital loomed very large in the book-publishing world back at the beginning of this decade. No less than Bill Gates was referring to paper as a "reading 'technology' " nearing obsolescence. Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Media Lab was dabbling in "electronic ink." Booths at BookExpo America were crammed with devices from firms of all sizes. Partnerships bubbled.

"There was an enormous outpouring of messianism," says Richard Curtis, president of his eponymous literary agency and founder and president of E-Reads, a publisher of both print and electronic books. "In the next five years there was a backlash as the people involved realized that it was far more complicated than they thought – technically, in terms of digital-rights management, and culturally." Even big firms such as Warner, with its ipublish, were left with little to show for their investments.

Today, more quietly and with adjusted expectations, the push for digital books has been renewed. Sony is tweaking its 10-month-old Portable Reader tablet. Giant book e-tailer Amazon is plotting its own move into digital sales, with a prototype product in testing.

Year-over-year growth at fictionwise.com, a leading digital-books retailer, moved from a fairly flat 20 percent in 2005 to a projected 28 percent this year, according to Steve Pendergrast, a spokesman. His firm markets its own reader: the eBookwise 1150.

"Sony's marketing grows the entire e-book market and gets people thinking about buying a device," Mr. Pendergrast says. "They shop around, and some percentage of them opt for ours instead of theirs."

Nearly half of his firm's e-book sales are now in romance titles, Pendergrast says, a category that was in low single digits as recently as 2004. Other areas likely to be well served, Ms. Nelson and others say: books with perishable information that are candidates for one-time use – travel books, for example. The advantages are clear.

"There's portability, flexibility," says Mr. Curtis, who allows that he still likes an old-fashioned book before bed. "Can't read the 10-point type [of an e-book]? Bump it up to 12 points. Load 40 books into a device and carry it to Frankfurt or wherever." Still missing, says Curtis, is that "explosive spark" device that will appeal to a fast-fingered generation.

That means a device ripe for iPod ubiquitousness, industry-watchers say – perhaps an efficient convergence device served by a content aggregator like audiobook giant Audible.com.

It might involve Apple. Last month, HarperCollins announced a pilot project in which samples of more than a dozen fiction titles could be accessed by users of the iPhone. The publisher said the move would gauge demand for a cellphone format. There are other pockets of promise. E Ink, in Cambridge, Mass., for example, has made recent strides in flexible plastic display screens.

Curtis's small, independent firm has persevered since 1998, he says, kept in the game through sales of print books. "Now the [e-book] industry seems to be established on enough of a basis for us to go on," he says. "We're moving forward aggressively."

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Internet Archive is now officially a library

posted by Blake

A Very Defiant Duckling Named Ender points out we missed News From a Few Months Back that In May, California officially recognized the Internet Archive, established in 1996, as a library. The designation makes the online archive eligible to apply for several federa

Radio Station Decides Not To Air Allen Ginsberg Poem 'Howl'

posted by leo

Banned books don't exist just in libraries -- in fact, they don't even have to be books.

The New York Times has a story today about how WBAI, a radio station in New York, decided not to air 'Howl', the well-known poem by Allen Ginsberg.

This is the 50th anniversary of the court decision that found the poem not obscene due to its "redeeming social importance".

Unfortunately the radio station felt they might get slapped with punitive fines by the FCC if they aired the piece, so they decided to stream it over the Web instead.

The poem has been broadcast several times since the court decision. But one lawyer familiar with First Amendment issues observes that as a consequence of the FCC's so-called "zero-tolerance" policy, "it's a completely different era".

UPDATE: Here's the segment WBAI didn't broadcast, "Howl Against Censorship".

Vancouver Libraries on Strike

We have been without a contract for 273 days
We have been on strike for 70 days

Please add your name to our online petition
encouraging the City of Vancouver
to engage meaningfully in negotiations

Direct public feedback
is the best motivator of civic politicians.

hy is the Vancouver Public Library closed?

Cupe Local 391, the local that represents library workers at VPL, has been trying to negotiate a fair collective agreement with our employer since December 18, 2006.

Unfortunately, we have been met with nothing but stonewalling and delay. Because we've seen no authentic negotiation on the part of our employer, library workers are left with no choice but to take job action.

hat are we bargaining for? We have four key issues:

• Pay equity
• Improvements for part-time and auxiliary workers
• Improved language for job security
• Improvements for health benefits

hy Pay Equity?

Being paid fairly is a human right. The library is a predominantly female workplace and, as a result, library workers have been underpaid for decades. It is only ethical to pay library workers fairly in a way that compensates them for the required education and skills necessary to do the complex job of facilitating library service.

hy improvements for part-time and auxiliary workers?

Almost half of CUPE 391 members are either part-time or auxiliary workers. Of these 380 workers, only 50 members receive any kind of pro-rated health and vacation benefits. The rest of these employees receive only a small percentage in lieu of benefits that comes nowhere near fair compensation.

hy do we need Job Security?

Contracting out is a big threat to our workforce and the public services we provide. Contracting out is a trend that offers no real savings while negatively affecting our ability to offer a quality service. We can not afford to lose talented people who care about the communities in which they work.

hy Improvements for Health benefits?

Changes in the delivery of health services necessitate updates to our health insurance plan. We have not proposed anything in our health benefits package that is not in-line with other public service employees.

hat can you do to get your Library services back?

Please write, e-mail and phone your concerns to:

VPL Board Chair Joan Andersen, City Librarian Paul Whitney
and the Vancouver Public Library Board
c/o Vancouver Public Library
350 West Georgia Street
Vancouver, BC V6B 6B1
Phone: 604-331-4003
Fax: 604-331-4080
E-mail: board@vpl.ca

Mayor Sam Sullivan and City Council
Third Floor, City Hall
453 West 12th Avenue
Vancouver, BC V5Y 1V4

E-mail the Mayor and Council:
mayorandcouncil@vancouver.ca

CA State budget bad news for public libraries

The California 2007-08 state budget is bad news for public libraries. Two major library programs suffered significant cuts, apparently in an effort to accomplish a budget with zero deficit. In Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's words: "I am deleting the discretionary $1 million legislative augmentation to the Public Library Foundation. ... In addition, I am deleting $7 million in order to further build a prudent reserve in light of the various uncertainties in revenues and spending that we face this year."

"Library on the lake" opens to public

A library built on water opened to the public on Tuesday in eastern China's metropolis of Shanghai, giving people the pleasure of reading with great scenery.

The library is built on the Xiayang Lake in western Qingpu district of Shanghai, covering an area of 8,000 square meters, according to the local-based Xinmin Evening News.

In the six reading rooms of Qingpu Library people can choose from 330,000 books and 800 kinds of newspapers and magazines in collection. Among the six reading rooms, there is one designed especially for children, and one for literature fans.

The reading room for children is decorated as a pleasure ground. Equipped with computers, children can read digital books with multi-media effects, probably with the help from their parents.

The reading room for literature fans boasts of antiquity. With wide space and comfortable sofas, it can also be the site for literature salons.

Every reading lamp in the library uses energy saving bulb, a friendly gesture to the beautiful surrounding.

(Source: CRIENGLISH.com)

Flashback 2002

Brewster Kahle of the Internet Archive has a dream. No, that's too narrow. He has a lot of dreams as well as the energy and money to realize them. I knew him long before he had lots of zeros in his bank account, and he has always been enthusiastic about his projects at Thinking Machines, at Apple when he developed what became WAIS, the Wide Area Information System - the very popular database in the early days of the public Internet. More recently the San Francisco non-profit, The Internet Archive, was established to collect and making available all of the past Internet information. In a step to distribute this information around the world Kahle made a large gift to the Library of Alexandria which now has a very strong information technology department (see http://www.archive.org/about/bibalex_p_r.php. The public search engine for the Archive is the Wayback Machine. At no charge anyone can use the Wayback Machine to search for Web pages unavailable elsewhere. The most recent collection is coverage of the September 11, 2001, events in New York and Washington. At press time archive.org had more than 100 terabytes (100,000,000 megabytes) of files.

Another project is the building of a digital library of books that are in the public domain (http://webdev.archive.org/texts/texts.php. A number of libraries and individuals have embarked on similar projects such as Project Gutenberg (at http://promo.net/pg/), Liber Liber in Italy (http://www.liberliber.it/home/index.asp), and the Million Book Project (http://webdev.archive.org/texts/millionbooks.php). Kahle is working with these and others. Last week, Kahle wrote me asking for the names of librarians who would be interested in talking about the importance of libraries and how digital technologies can help. Kahle was preparing for a cross-country trip to publicize the digital library, and The Archive was hosting a party on September 27.

Michael Ward, an e-book publisher and head of Hidden Knowledge (hidden-knowledge.com) accompanied me and took the photographs included in this article. We had been in contact since my early experiments with optical character recognition in the early 90's. Ward's Web site includes a number of original e-books for sale as well as some free material such as the Memoirs of General William Sherman, an homage to the traveler Burton Holmes, and a collection of old magazine covers. During the ride from San Jose to San Francisco, I learned that there are many text digitizing projects going on, some well supported and others that are labors of love, especially by science fiction readers. Some of the barriers are technical, but improvements in scanning technology, low cost storage, and better connectivity make the solutions apparent. The growing problem is copyright, and one battle will be fought in early October at the U.S. Supreme Court when the justices hear the arguments in Eldred v. Ashcroft (http://eldred.cc/) which challenges the act that extends U.S. copyright protection another 20 years (so that Disney won't lose control of Mickey Mouse!).

There are those who do not care about copyright laws and have Web sites filled with a mix of out-of-copyright material and scanned versions of more recent texts. textz.com is trying to do for ascii versions of books and essays what Napster did for music. Others such as GNUtenberg.net, the Open Meta-Archive, and the book sharing on the Usenet group alt.binaries.e-books either ignore or challenge the current laws in the United States and other countries. There is, of course, a lot of lower profile activity that is not publicized. I had met one enthusiast at a recent conference who claimed he has 25,000 books in ascii, and they could be delivered on a $100 80 GB hard drive. He gave away CD-ROMs of his hundred favorite texts. His cost: ten cents.

Kahle's project is completely within the law, but as Dan Gillmor of the San Jose Mercury News writes (http://www.siliconvalley.com/mld/siliconvalley/4175607.htm), the industry that controls much of the music, movies, and text cares little about fair use and is convincing Congress - with generous doses of campaign donations - that future digital technologies, especially those for consumers, must be crippled to protect their interests. They want restrictive laws which would stop the flow of material into the public domain for another twenty years.

The Party

The Internet Archive is housed in an old house in the Presidio, a former Army base in San Francisco. The old building is nothing like the typical high tech venture in this area: tilt-up concrete construction or a multi-floor showplace set in an industrial park. For one thing, archive.org survived the Internet bubble. The office is filled with wireless networks, racks of servers, high speed data lines, plasma screens, and massive printers. Out back of the Archive was parked a Ford Aerostar van, covered with bright lettering, "Bookmobile ... Print Your Own Book ... 1,000,000 Books inside (soon) ... archive.org" and on the roof was perched a satellite dish.

The bookmobile
(photo by Michael Ward of Hidden Knowledge).

I wandered down to the back of the van where Kahle stood under a small structure. In the shade was a table that held a binder, some books,and a guillotine paper cutter to trim the pages. He explained to those gathered round (including a CBS cameraman) how the printing worked. The books that reside in his archive or others can be downloaded in a number of formats, and some, like The Wizard of Oz, are saved as a set of color page images which are compressed. The bookmobile prints about twenty pages a minute (two on one side of a sheet of paper) and the complete work is assembled by hand, and placed in a cover and bound using a device that heats the glue applied to the spine of the pages. A guillotine paper cutter is used to trim the book. Staff of the Archive were printing other examples inside the office and giving them away to the guests. I grabbed a copy of Conrad's Heart of Darkness, while others were looking at books by Lewis Carroll, Edgar Allen Poe and Mark Twain. Each of them had the look and feel of a good trade paperback in a plain cover.

Kahle was planning to leave from a public school in East Palo Alto, California, head through Sacramento and eastward across Highway 80. He planned to stop at the bookmobile convention in Columbus, Ohio, which usually only welcomes vehicles made by the show sponsors. However, the used Ford van, small as it is, certainly is no threat to the current model for moving books and videos to people far from a branch library.

We talked about other countries which use boats (Venezuela) and camels (Kenya), and carts (Zimbabwe) to bring materials to readers. In my home state, librarians used to ride horses into the remote hollows and valleys in the rural parts of pre-war Kentucky.

Brewster Kahle (left) and Steve Cisler (right) discussing book mobility
(photo by Michael Ward of Hidden Knowledge).

I asked about the connectivity. Kahle said the Hughes Direcway system runs at about 64 kpbs upstream and up to one megabit downstream. Motosat is a company that modifies this consumer product so that it works with a mobile connection. Park the van in a level area and make sure that the southern sky is visible because the antenna must see the satellite. The Motosat system uses GPS to aim the dish and establish a good connection Another company, Tachyon, Inc. is selling a mobile network connection. The Burning Man event has been using one since 1999. This sort of connection is of great interest in other countries and in parts of the U.S. where land lines have not reached. The bookmobile VSAT connection is connected to an 802.11b (Wi-Fi) network which surrounds the van, so anyone in the neighborhood could bring a laptop and connect to the server and choose her own books or copy some that had already been requested.

Network gear in back of van
(photo by Michael Ward of Hidden Knowledge).

What I found inspiring was the way all the technology was assembled off-the-shelf and used with a large collection to deliver a very tangible output that could be used by any reader at very low cost. It was not just a printout; it was a book. Even without a satellite (or wireless) connection, the collection of books could reside in a large cache on a few hard drives and the books accessed and printed locally. Of course the selection would be less than what was offered by archive.org or its partners.

Brewster Kahle assembling a book
(photo by Michael Ward of Hidden Knowledge).

A newspaper reporter questioned the practicality of the Internet bookmobile. Wouldn't it be better to print materially more cheaply at a central location and then distribute them normally through book stores, online sales, or libraries? There are large print-on-demand systems such as Xerox Docutech that large organizations can afford. When I worked at Apple we were able to print and bind the proceedings of a conference in the evening and distribute 300 copies the next morning. However, these are enormously expensive. The bookmobile reminded me of an itinerant vegetable cart which is a now a rarity in the United States. Because Kahle is especially interested in providing materials for young people, perhaps it could be likened to an truck that roams a neighborhood selling frozen bars of ice cream, except the books are freely distributed. The Internet Bookmobile is one way of showing people a simplified version of how a book is produced. Of course it avoids the process that begins with an author trying to find a publisher, and for the chosen few, the editorial process that follows.

A stack of finished books
(photo by Michael Ward of Hidden Knowledge).

Kahle wants to attract attention to the effort to build a collection of books, and by ending up in Washington, D.C. during the Eldred v. Ashcroft hearing at the Supreme Court, he can supply a very visual spectacle for the media who have a hard time showing any news when the battle is over intellectual property. Kahle plans to park in front of the court building, set up his press and bindery and give away books to those in the vicinity. I expect he will be hassled by Capitol Hill police, if he can even drive a van near the building.

Trimming a book with the guillotine
(photo by Michael Ward of Hidden Knowledge).

What happens after that? Kahle hopes to find financial support to keep the bookmobile on the road year round. He estimates it will cost $100,000 including the salary for the driver-printer. At the party several people, Including this reporter, expressed interest in taking the vehicle on a tour for a couple of weeks. Because much of my work is in other countries I thought about the practicality of such a mobile system in a place like Honduras or Mozambique. The barriers to a successful tour in the United States are far less than in many other countries, but even a touring unit would not necessarily need a mobile satellite to connect to the Internet. It could connect up a selected stops such as telecenters or schools with an existing connection. As I mentioned earlier, the collection could be cached on a few large hard drives. Assuming there were material of interest in Spanish or Portuguese or the predominant language of the region, the demonstration of the printing and binding would be very engaging. The books chosen might form the basis for a community collection or, as in the present trip, just given to individuals who come see the bookmobile. Kahle has begun sending short messages from some of the stops between California and Washington, D.C. (http://webdev.archive.org/texts/bookmobile-open_house.php). He reports the young boys like the paper cutter best of all! You can follow the progress of the trip, make contributions to the effort, and see some of the other bookmobiles in use.

About the Author

Steve Cisler is a consultant whose background is in public and special libraries. He is currently a GLOCOM fellow; the Center for Global Communications is a self-funding, non-profit research institute affiliated with the International University of Japan. He has been a teacher in the Peace Corps, a wine maker and search and rescue coordinator in the Coast Guard. Now he focuses on public access projects and community computing projects in the United States and developing countries. He has written for Online, Database, American Libraries, Library Journal, and Wired. Steve has two sons and lives with his wife in San José, California.
E-mail: cisler@pobox.com

Online shopping can benefit Fayetteville Public Library

Supporting the Fayetteville Public Library is as easy as shopping online.

MyLibraryBookstore is a new service that allows patrons to shop for books, movies and music online, with a portion of the sale going to the library.

“ It adds another convenience to customers using our Web site and catalog, ” said Louise Schaper, library executive director.

Schaper said that all proceeds from the sales will be spent on increasing the library’s collection. The service was recently made available by the library’s primary supplier, which is also a major supplier to Amazon. com, she said.

The library had a previous service through Amazon, Schaper said, but when this came about it seemed like a better fit.

“ We were able to customize it in a way we were comfortable with, ” she said.

The service is through Baker & Taylor, which is the library’s primary supplier of books and audio and visual material. The company was founded in 1828 as a bindery and subscription book publisher, according to its Web site, www. btol. com.

The company discontinued publishing in 1912 to focus on distribution. It now claims to be the “ world’s largest distributor of books, DVD, music and videogame products to libraries, retailers and other resellers, ” according to its Web site.

Schaper said the service is compatible with the software used by the library, allowing the service to be integrated with the library’s catalog. It will allow people, when they search for a book and find it checked out, to buy it if they don’t want to wait, she said.

The service can be accessed through the library’s Web site, www. faylib. org. A link is among the alternating banners on the home page, and a link to the service can be found under the pull-down menu, Support FPL. The service operates similar to other online shopping sites, and residents don’t have to log in through their library account.

Entering the site through the library’s Web page will ensure that the Fayetteville Public Library receives proceeds from sales.

Creating the 21st Century Library

By Aaron Sarver

August 31, 2007

When you enter the Prelinger Library in San Francisco, the first thing you notice is "rock star" librarian Nancy Pearl--in action figure form. It's the first hint that you've stepped inside an unconventional library. Megan and Rick Prelinger's vision of engaged learning is at

odds with the weighty atmosphere that often pervades spaces containing 40,000 items--ranging from books to maps to films--intended for research purposes. Rick first achieved fame in the archivist world when his collection of 60,000 16mm educational films, known as the Prelinger Archive, was purchased by the Library of Congress in 2002.

Three years later, after the dot com bust had dragged down commercial rents, the couple leased a 1,700-square-foot warehouse space in San Francisco's SoMa (South of Market) neighborhood and moved their massive book collection out of storage. (This is what happens when two archivists gets married.) Four long, 15-foot-high rows of bookshelves loom over guests, but the extraordinarily high ceilings make the book towers less imposing. Boxes of "ephemera" sit neatly stacked up against the far left row. And the back of the library has an unruly pile of boxes of books waiting to be shelved.

The Prelinger Library eschews the Dewey Decimal and Library of Congress systems, and is organized instead by what Megan calls "a map of my brain." Books are grouped by topic, in a related fashion. Western U.S. history merges into agriculture, which merges into urban planning. Since space is limited, there is a decent amount of churn. Under-used items are phased out and new ones brought in. During my visit, a few boxes of the recently defunct magazine Punk Planet (see page 38) had just arrived. With funding from the Internet Archive, the Prelinger Library is digitally scanning the books in its collection that are not under copyright protection for use on archive.org.

In These Times recently sat down to talk with Megan Shaw Prelinger.

What makes someone start her own library?

One of the multiple barriers put in place by major research libraries is that they don't enable ordinary people to make use of extraordinary materials. So the idea of making a library was fed by my experience that college and university libraries' closed stacks inhibit browsing and the process of random discovery. I always felt like I had my best ideas or developed my best projects when I was wandering and looking for certain things, but then finding things I didn't expect.

How did this "process of random discovery" inform how you structured your library?

Even at public libraries, the subjects I was interested in were scattered. They were either not present at all or organized in a way that made no intuitive sense to me. Neither Dewey Decimal nor Library of Congress as an organization method made any intuitive sense to me. It's like organizing your record collection or book collection at home. I've always used organization as a way to create juxtapositions and cluster little sets of coherency in my own book collection in a way that pleases me.

Is it fair to say that your organization of materials is an implicit critique of the way people are taught to learn or to research? That you want to explore ideas in the way that someone like Walter Benjamin did, rather than through a rigid system imposed by very structured institutions?

I think it's an explicit critique. We tell people that you're going to find things "intershelved." You're going to find government documents next to nonfiction and fiction. Materials are clustered by subject and we want people to have the shelf be an experience unto itself.

If it doesn't occur to you or it isn't explained to you that printed ephemera, historic magazines, photograph collections, maps, fiction can all be equally meaningful to your area of inquiry, you might not know to look for those things. So we try to create a browsing experience that can't be had anywhere else. People come in and ask, "There's no computer?" They have been trained to formulate a query rather than just engaging the shelves unmediated.

How do you think the digitization of books should effect how libraries manage their print collections?

In the library and document preservation worlds, there exists a concern that the growth of the digital environment will result in the end of print, and that books and newspapers need to be rescued from the digital future. I don't believe that. Books as artifacts will always have value apart from their digital counterparts.

Yes, the online environment obviously offers mass dispersal into the world and that's not possible in a print library environment. But part of our library project is about collapsing the polarization between print and digital, and looking toward a third way where a library can be a hybrid analog-digital space. Books are both retained and valued, and where a digital collection exists, maybe it allows more freedom with what the analog collection can do, because you can always do a keyword search of the digital collection. Maybe the benefits of one liberate the other.

How much consideration does the Prelinger Library give to creating a public space where scholars and regular patrons can meet each other?

A lot of living and contemporary authors donate materials to the library. People will pick up a book and say, "I didn't know about this book," and we'll tell them the author is a professor at Berkeley and that he has said you could go talk to him. When you're browsing at a terminal, you're not going to bump elbows with someone who's interested in the same things.

Are there any specific things you're looking to add to the collection?

We look to preserve the historiography of underreported historical narratives--primarily North American because that's our history. Usually when things like that become available, we want them.

With 1,700-square-feet of space we can't position ourselves as rescuing all print. But with something like the Bureau of Indian Affairs records [which the Prelinger Library recently received from another library that was about to discard them], that was very clear. Talk about underreported historical narratives--you can hardly get more underserved than Native American cultural history. There are Bureau documents from the 1870s when white ethnographers lived among Native Americans and wrote, "We think most of the Indian raids on the neighboring white settlement camps are being perpetrated by white settlers dressing up as Indians and robbing their neighbors." What happened? That idea--that observation--has been buried, dismissed and ignored for 130 years. When you read things like that, it legitimates the act of rescuing these documents and makes it even more urgent to do so.

Copyright has come into play in digitizing works. You were part of the lawsuit Kahle-Prelinger v. Gonzalez that was about orphaned works. Can you explain what the term orphaned works means?

In the United States, everything published prior to 1923 is in the public domain and everything published since 1963 is automatically under copyright. So there's a grey area between '23 and '63 where only about 15 percent of all copyrights were renewed. So we're able to digitize 85 percent of stuff in that 40-year period. Large changes in the law in 1998 extended copyright, so even if the author elects to let their work enter the public domain, the government automatically renews that copyright.

Now copyright is very difficult to opt-out of. It's life of the author plus 70 years. If the rights-holder no longer exists and the institutional author, say a textbook company, is dissolved, then the copyright laws protect no one. In a lot of cases, works being digitized bring authors new audiences that they didn't have before. So our argument is that existing copyright renewal laws do a disservice. We want the opportunity to digitally disseminate works that have been abandoned by their authors.

Are there any specific works that you think need to be digitized so they can be available for research?

Textbooks and songbooks. Tour guide books that explain how to go on excursions and investigations. If those were digitized, we could layer a map from 1965 onto a map from 1945 and trace landscape changes. You can do that for earlier years, but history becomes locked up in 1963.

So if an author is deceased and his or her books are out of print, it is still illegal to digitize them, even though there are a dwindling number of physical copies of the work?

Right. That's tragic. It doesn't serve the authors. The legislation was devised to serve corporate interests. Yes, there are authors who are selling millions of books who want their copyrights to be held in their family in perpetuity. They should have that right. All we want is to be able to digitize works if we've done due diligence to locate an author or a rights-holder and if that rights-holder no longer exists or is supportive of digitizing the work.

Like other librarians, do you see yourself as a defender of civil liberties?

Yes and no. As an unincorporated library, we were never subject to the Patriot Act. In a broad sense, you can view the Prelinger Library as a democratizing project. Pushing history out of dusty corners and making it relevant and usable to people doing work today.

To me the idea of a library as an arcane space and privileged space, a space separate from relevance to everyday life, is wrapped up in the general historical trend of anti-intellectualism. Libraries should be social spaces and idea playgrounds--places where people are free to get excited about ideas.

---

Aaron Sarver joined In These Times’ staff as associate publisher in 2001. A steering committee member of the Independent Press Association-Chicago, Aaron works in print and audio and for various media outlets.

Librarians Respond To AP Poll Findings That Americans Don't Read Enough Books

posted by birdie on Saturday September 01

from the read-a-book dept.

One out of every four adult Americans did not read a book last year, according to a poll conducted by the Associated Press and Ipsos.

Pennsylvania librarians respond: "I was disgusted by that" said Jeanne Williamson, library director at the Milton Public Library. The article really upset me."

Peggy Stockdale of New Columbia said "I think they're missing out on a great joy. You're never bored if you read. You can go places where you otherwise can't, and you learn."

Melanie Weber, head of adult services at the Public Library for Union County in Lewisburg, said not only is reading for enjoyment or in-depth informational purposes but it’s also a great model for young people. Adults who read have kids who read. Story from Standard-Journal,.

Librarian works to save Iraq’s books, archives

LOCAL SUPPORT Gail Walker, district librarian for Carrollton Exempted Schools, is working to raise awareness of the dangerous conditions for librarians in Iraq. Walker has been corresponding with Saad Eskander, director of Iraq’s National Library and Archives, which have been nearly destroyed in the war.

BY CHARITA M. GOSHAY
REPOSITORY STAFF WRITER

Gail Walker, district librarian for Carrollton Exempted Schools, is working to raise awareness of the dangerous conditions for librarians in Iraq. Walker has been corresponding with Saad Eskander, director of Iraq’s National Library and Archives, which have been nearly destroyed in the war.

Gail Walker likens the destruction of Iraq’s National Library and Archives to the obliteration of the Library of Congress, or the Smithsonian Institution.

Walker, district librarian for Carrollton Exempted Village Schools for 25 years, is on a mission to bring attention to the plight of a distant colleague, Saad Eskander, director of the Iraq National Library and Archives.

“I wanted to send out a ‘message in a bottle’ of sorts,” she said.

Prior to the war, archeologists and historians expressed concern over the safekeeping of Iraq’s archives. Walker said 60 percent of the nation’s library materials and 25 percent of its archives have been stolen.

Walker said she fears that Eskander, a Kurd who once fought against Saddam Hussein, could be killed for his efforts. Eskander fled to Great Britain when the Kurds were defeated, but returned when Saddam was deposed.

Walker said Eskander is trying to “fight the insurgents with culture,” but that he’s caught between the insurgents and the Iraqi National Army.

ONLINE JOURNAL

Until July, Eskander maintained an online journal detailing his attempts to restore the facility, which has been repeatedly looted, ransacked and shelled since 2003.

Walker said her interest and concern were spurred by Alia Muhammad Baker, a librarian in Basra, Iraq, who was featured in the New York Times in July 2003, and is the subject of a real-life children’s book, “The Librarian of Basra” by Jeanette Winter. Just prior to the war, Baker removed the books from Basra’s library and stored them for safekeeping.

“I felt I did the worst thing possible, in that I didn’t do anything,” Walker said. She eventually wrote to Baker and received a postcard in return, but the two haven’t been in contact since 2005. In 2006, Walker heard through a “librarians’ grapevine” about Askander’s online journal. In March, the two began an e-mail correspondence.

“It’s absolutely incredible,” she said. “It soon became apparent that the situation is much, much worse. There’s not one page that doesn’t leave your heart broken. We don’t always think of these people as people with lives and families and children. We hear about 50 getting killed; they’re numbers to us.”

Walker said libraries are important because they are repositories of information and the one place where people can find equality.

“Democracy has to begin with culture,” she said. “The Iraq military is trying to maintain order, so culture falls at the bottom, but for him (Eskander), it’s at the heart. If Iraq is going to become a nation again, culture has to be at the bottom of it.”

What you can do

Walker, who opposed the war from the outset, urges Americans to contact their elected representatives.

“So much has been taken from these people already, through Saddam, the fighting factions and war,” she said. “We have a moral obligation to help them restore it.”

To read Eskander’s journal, visit the British Library’s Web site at: www.bl.uk

Walker may be contacted at:

gail.walker@mac.com

Library workers refuse to be quiet in equal-pay fight

Five weeks into strike, Vancouver employees mix helpfulness, resolve on city's picket lines

Aug 25, 2007 04:30 AM

Petti Fong
Western Canada Bureau Chief

Vancouver–You can take the librarians out of the library, but you can't stop them from knowing the answers to your questions.

On the picket lines for the first time in their 77-year history, Vancouver library workers have turned their knowledge into a one-stop information booth for tourists and residents.

"Just keep going four blocks down this street. The Chapters is on your left," picket captain Peter DeGroot advised one slightly lost pedestrian this week.

"The bus stop is on that side."

As the five-week-long strike drags through the dog days of August, the city's library workers are taking a stand and answering questions while walking the picket line.

With wi-fi and cellphones, library workers have been giving out directions to tourists and answering queries about books, public washrooms and bus schedules. For anyone needing a fix of reading materials, library workers have also set up their own book bin.

Alex Youngberg, president of CUPE local 391, said library workers weren't sure what to do on the picket lines at first.

"The resolve is even stronger than it was in the beginning because there is a realization that we just finally had enough," she said. "It irritates us to no end that we have to beg for pay equity."

Library workers, who like other striking civic workers have been out since July 26, have received an offer of 17.5 per cent in wage increases over five years.

After two weeks of no talking, the city offered contracts Thursday to the union representing the 2,500 striking inside workers.

"Everybody wants this strike to end as soon as possible," said city spokesperson Tom Timm. He said the city wants the strike over by Labour Day, Sept. 3.

The union put a statement out on its website yesterday, saying the bargaining team had gone through the two different offers and contacted the city to explore reopening talks.

For the library workers, the contentious issue remains pay equity.

Simon Fraser University political science professor Marjorie Griffin Cohen said a starting salary for a library worker in Vancouver is $27,000, while a labourer working for the city starts at $43,000.

"The union in this case has a very good argument that because the province does not have pay-equity legislation, it's up to the union to negotiate it," she said. "What the library workers are arguing is they're not paid well and they're claiming this entry-level wage is below the poverty line."

The difference between Toronto and Vancouver, said Laura Safarian, a librarian at Vancouver's main downtown branch, is that Ontario has pay-equity legislation, while British Columbia does not.

The library workers want a point system in place that rewards them for their education and skills. Many entry-level workers coming into the municipal library system have master's degrees, but are paid less than entry-level labourers hired by the city who need only a high school diploma.

In Toronto, entry-level library workers earn $7 an hour more than they do in Vancouver, a fact management does not dispute. Police and firefighters also earn more money in Toronto than in Vancouver.

"Why do we have to be punished for being educated?" Safarian said. "Society values strength and the ability to shovel more than they value literacy skills and information technology skills."

The city's chief librarian, Paul Whitney, said education is only one factor in determining pay rates.

The difficulty in creating a job evaluation system that compares different positions to worth is that it comes down to a subjective process, Whitney said.

In Regina, where library workers were on strike for two months and pay equity was one of the issues raised, Allan Kozachuk with the Regina Public Library said there was an agreement to review the issue.

Four years later, Kozachuk, who works in human resources, said the library and its workers are now at the point of finalizing the plan. "The next step is to meet collectively and start looking at implementing the new plan and hopefully resolving the pay-equity issue," he said.

Into a new world of librarianship

Sharpen these skills for Librarian 2.0

One of the principles I would add to the Library 2.0 meme is that “the Library is human” because it makes the library a social and emotionally engaging center for learning and experience. Librarian 2.0, then, is the “strategy guide” for helping users find information, gather knowledge and create content. The most important traits of Librarian 2.0 include:

Librarians 2.0 plans for their users This librarian bases all planning and proposals for services, materials and outreach on user needs and wants. User-centered libraries breakdown barriers and allow users access wherever they are: home, work, commuting, school, or at the library. This involves users from the get go in planning and launching services based on their needs. This librarian asks what new technologies or new materials users need. This librarian proposes building projects and involves users in designing those places. This librarian does not create policies and procedures that impede users’ access to the library. This librarian tells users how resources and funds will be expended. Decisions and plans are discussed in open forums and comments are answered. This makes the library transparent.

Librarian 2.0 embraces Web 2.0 tools This librarian recognizes how services might be enhanced by the Read/Write web and how new services might be born in a climate of collaboration. This librarian uses Instant Messaging to meet users in their space online, builds Weblogs and wikis as resources to further the mission of the library, and mashes up content via API (Application Program Interface) to build useful Web sites. A Google map mash up of local libraries created by Chicago librarians is one such instance of building tools via new resources. Other librarians creating MySpace profiles and participating in other thriving communities build connections online where their users live.

Librarian 2.0 controls technolust This librarian does not buy technology for the sake of technology. “Techno-worship” does not exist here. Without a firm foundation in the mission and goals of the institution, new technologies are not implemented for the sake of coolness and status. Technology is put to the test: Does it meet the users need in a new or improved way? Does it create a useful service for putting users together with the information and experience they seek? These are some of the questions this librarian asks when planning for technology. This librarian creates and nurtures a living, breathing technology plan.

Librarian 2.0 makes good, yet fast decisions This librarian recognizes how quickly the world and library users change with advancing technology. Project timelines that stretch on for months simply do not work in Library 2.0 thinking. Perpetual beta works well for the library’s Web presence. This librarian redesigns for ease of use, user involvement and easily added/re-configured pieces. This librarian brings evidence to the table for planning sessions and decision making, such as recent studies from Pew, articles from professional and scholarly journals and a synthesis of on topic postings from the biblioblogosphere.

Librarian 2.0 is a trendspotter This librarian seeks out information and news that may impact future services. This librarian has read the OCLC Pattern Recognition and User Perception reports and uses them in planning. This librarian uses the Cluetrain Manifesto and realizes that networked markets are library users as well and that honest, human conversations need to take place within their institution, virtually and in physical space. This librarian reads outside the profession and watches for the impact of technology on users and new thinking on business, because it is, in fact, related.

Librarian 2.0 gets content This librarian understands that the future of libraries will be guided by how users access, consume and create content. Content is a conversation as well and librarians should participate. Users will create their own mash ups, remixes and original expressions and should be able to do so at the library or via the library’s resources. This librarian will help users become their own programming director for all of the content available to them.

Librarian 2.0 also listens to staff and users when planning, tells the stories of successes and failures, learns from both, celebrates those successes, allows staff time to play and learn, and never stops dreaming about the best library services.

A library catalog built using the MyLibrary software

posted by Blake on Tuesday August 21

Eric Lease Morgan has created a simple and traditional library catalog of about 300,000 items using the MyLibrary software. From the about page:

This is an index of just less than 300,000 MARC records -- a traditional library catalog. MARC records were downloaded from the Library of Congress. MARC data was cross-walked to MyLibrary (Dublin Core) fields and imported. The content of the MyLibrary database was indexed with Kinosearch and made accessible via an SRU interface. Search results sport cover art from Amazon.com. If reviews exist, then they can be read. Users can to view the full MARC records in tagged, MARCXML, and MODS formats. Users can create accounts for themselves and have items (virtually) delivered to them.

The implementation is not necessarily intended to be a production service but rather exists to demonstrate what can be done with MyLibrary -- an open source digital library framework & toolbox.