The Threat of Web 2.0

Rory Litwin at Library Juice reports on a speech by Jurgen Habermas on the perils of Web 2.0. Relevant quotes:

The price we pay for the growth in egalitarianism offered by the Internet is the decentralised access to unedited stories. In this medium, contributions by intellectuals lose their power to create a focus.

And in his report on the speech, Andrew Keen notes:

So the great achievement of the Web 2.0 is the undermining of the idea of a specialist, an expert, an intellectual.

So, is this repressive disintermediation? Or just anarchy? How much wikiality is there in such concerns? Not everything about Web 2.0 applies to Library 2.0, which encourages involvement but still has some central role for the library as institution. But there are valid cautionary notes.

Project Play: Remember the Milk & Jott

These tools are cool, cute, well done and flexible. I may never use them again. I already have this mostly covered with my palm Treo, a phone which shares my calendar contacts, data files and to do list with web-accessible desktop Outlook and others at the library. Do I need more lists and reminders?

My phone already lets me blog or send messages. Still, it's kind of cool to blog via speech to text phone call. This entry was sent through Jott. listen

Powered by Jott

[Afterword: Jott is phone based reminders and speech conversion to text for messaging. Remember the Milk is a web-based to do list, which can be used collaboratively. The above posting required drastic simplification and editing to fit into Jott's 30 seconds per message maximum.

Both these services are easy to use. Both are in Beta, which makes one wonder if they will graduate to requiring some fees down the road. One thing I really liked about Remember the Milk was its slick integration with Google calendar. It would also be good for collaborative project to do lists with a disparate group of folks. For my current purposes, they're marginal, but worth knowing about.]

On not sucking

I was happy to see in this month's issue of Wired, with a cover story of "Why Things Suck", that public libraries made their short list of "things that don't suck."

Thanks to Jeff Scott of Gather No Dust, I found out even more. In his blog posting, Jeff talks about why we don't suck. He also links to a Wired online copy of the "don't suck" list. This includes interactive ratings and according to people that have voted, we're doing pretty well.

Turn and face the strain...

Our good neighbors at the Neenah Public Library got a nice article in yesterday's paper about changes in usage patterns as seen in annual circulation numbers. My immediate reaction was how universal some of the trends seemed: if you change the exact numbers and a few proper names, the article would have been true of many libraries, and certainly ours.

The last sentence grabbed me: "...library staff has been able to keep pace with the growth in circulation though the help of volunteers and self-checkout machines..." -- yep, that's us, too, spot on.

But it occurred that we should look at specific numbers to see where we were alike and different -- and thank about why. Neenah's growth in circulation was 52,422 -- the largest increase in their five countypublic library system. Our growth at APL was 79,173, but we're a larger library, so it might be more useful to compare percentage changes.

Circulation comparison, % changes 2006-7:



Interesting stuff... more of our growth is coming in books, CDs, books on CD and magazines. Some of the differences may have to do with how the two libraries have implemented format changes in their collections. I know that we've been trying to grow our books on CD collection, and the numbers reflect that. We also finished bar-coding all our magazines, and while that's not a big number for us, it's probably more accurate now than previously.

But just like in Neenah, people like our video collection for the wide-ranging selections not found in video stores, and we're also pushing books and literacy.

"I am curious -- library"

A video of business author Seth Godin, found on John Blyberg's blog -- under the posting "Let's be curious with our users."

We certainly rely on users being curious with us.

“With so much info on phone, why huge library?”

Found on Steven Cohen's Library Stuff, this guest editorial in the Jan. 22 Cincinnati Enquirer asks this question -- which we'd better be able to answer. The writer notes that his phone is:

a gateway to local and global news, updated in real time. It is connected to the greatest single information repository in the history of mankind, and can retrieve data from this network on demand - from anywhere, at any time

and in comparison notes that a new $18 million dollar library is "a monstrosity." He characterizes the library as wasteful of space for marginal uses, while real needs for local tax dollars go unmet. He cites articles (found by googling with his phone) which say library use is declining. But library users are lounging in spacious comfort, surfing the net, checking out last year's TV shows on DVD and playing Guitar Hero.

Project Play: Google Docs

Google is dangerously seductive. It's just too darn useful. It could be the next Microsoft: They mean to rule the world! Or at least control all information. But we can trust them -- their motto is "Don't be evil!" Their staff plays a lot of frisbee.

Of course, this blog is published with Blogger, from Google. I get my home email via Gmail, from Google. I use iGoogle as one of my regular home pages, with nicely customized newsfeeds and aps. Lest we forget -- as if we could -- Google is the search engine of choice. Google translator absolutely rocks! Google calendar is currently the product of choice on our library website. Oh yeah, and they own YouTube -- you gotta love these guys! Google books and the Google Library Project? A little controversy there -- let's not get started... and we won't talk about all the people who are deluded into believing that Google has made libraries obsolete.

Okay, then there's Google docs, the subject of this week's Project Play lesson. I love Google docs. My regular use is sharing files between home and work, but sometimes they're shared with other folks I'm working with. I've published some to the web and linked them from this blog. Barb Kelly, our Assistant Director, devised a way for people using catalog terminals in the library to take notes and save them in Google docs.

For my Project Play lesson, I logged into a shared Google docs account and messed around with a few documents. I read the Google docs blog and was truly impressed with some of the recent changes, particularly to presentations. This is really sophisticated stuff in creating external applications that provide most of the function of the basic "office" productivity, then host it remotely, allow customized publishing and sharing, making it easy to use with bells and whistles.

What's not to love? I just hate to put all my eggs into any one basket, so it's Flickr, not Picasa for me, and Bloglines, not Google Reader. Google Finance is pretty cool for tracking investments, though.

For more on Google, see:

• Google Watch
• IsGoogleEvil?com - obsolete site, but I love the name
• just google "google evil" or "google controversy" -- there's lots!
  

Here's a presentation I whipped up from part of Joy's Google Docs post on the Project Play Blog. Reformatting it and putting it here took me about 15 minutes.

Video ratings

A recent question on WISPUBLIB mailing list, and my response, reprinted here for those who do not read WISPUBLIB (and for my own archival purposes). The question:

Hello All,

Does anybody have a specific policy in regards to minor access and R rate DVDs?

This should be on somebody's FAQ...

Appleton Public Library does not have a policy, but we have discussed with our board, and I have a bunch of thoughts:

• Parents are responsible for their children
• MPAA ratings are a marketing tool for the U.S. motion picture industry.
• Libraries differ from movie theatres (and video stores) in many essential ways, including how we select and distribute titles and the economics of the distribution transactions.
• MPAA ratings do not include TV shows, older films, a great many foreign films, and many direct video releases. They are unreliable and somewhat arbitrary.
• Libraries are ill-advised to make policies based on these ratings, as this does not necessarily protect children from exposure to violence or sexuality in media, but creates a false sense of security while sacrificing access.
• Making public library policy based on ratings constitutes prior censorship based on decisions that have nothing to do with a given film's suitability for library use or the values of any particular family.
• You can effectively give parents the opportunity to restrict their children's access to materials, or types of materials, for those families who choose to do so, without implementing this arbitrary censorship on the entire community.
• Where ratings exist, one should make this information available in the catalog and from helpful staff, in order to help families who want this information in making viewing decisions.
• "You can decide for your kids, but let me make the decisions about my kids."
• Libraries can best support the decisions of families and intellectual freedom for the community by avoiding making policy using or based on ratings
• I wouldn't say this is the only right way to do things; these things often come down to local politics -- your mileage may vary, so you pick your battles & you do what works for your community.

i.m. uncertain

Maybe it's an age thing. Maybe it's a style thing. I don't see where Instant Messaging holds a lot of interest for me in my own work. For my own personal workflow, it seems distinctly inferior to email and telephone. I was able to install the Meebo widget here and use it without too much trouble, thanks to a bit of help from colleagues at APL and OWLS. But the why of it isn't apparent to me.

I can see where it would have some good applicability for library service, such as on the library website. Service desks can be in touch with staff workrooms, colleagues at different libraries can collaborate and share info. People could ask reference questions real time. Except that's why we do AskAway -- at some cost. We could use IM during times when we're open and rely on AskAway when we're not around, if that would be clear enough to patrons.

A further complication is that our City policies generally ban the use of IM services, although we were able to convince the folks at City Hall that there were legitimate work-related reasons (such as AskAway) for IM use at our library. Part of our Electronic Communications Policy reads:

Employees are prohibited from knowingly visiting inappropriate Internet sites, unauthorized chat rooms or using instant messaging services through the City systems. ... Designated staff at the Library may use instant messaging services for work related purposes on Library systems at the discretion of the Library Director. These services may only be used with log files enabled and will be subject to regular review by the Library Director or designee.

Thus all employee use of Meebo, etc. has to be logged and I am required to review those logfiles. It's a regressive policy but it was the best compromise we could achieve at the time. This puts a chill on instant messaging. Although the policy is regressive, there's a basis. Federal Rules of Civil Procedure define electronic records as discoverable. Just like email, everything one does with IM is a public record -- and should be available not only to your supervisor but the local newspaper.

You wouldn't hang on the phone at work with friends for non-work reasons. Neither should we be IMing members of our "buddy list" for non-work reasons. Yet "radical trust" is not enough in areas of potential liability, thus management is required (however reluctantly) to take on a watch-dog role.

Symantec's CIO Digest notes:

Given the tumultuous, impulsive state of adoption, it's not surprising that many organizations lack consistent messaging policies encompassing all electronic communications, along with the systems to enforce them. In light of increasingly stringent regulatory and legal requirements, however, organizations would be well served to review their policies and assess their ability to discover, capture, review, and archive IM traffic.

I was skeptical about our overly cautious approach, but googling Instant messaging liability" produces 243,000 hits. Further reading:

• Websense "Instant Messaging: an Instant Threat"
• National Law Journal "New Liability Frontier: Instant Messaging"

Eating Books ?!?

Browsing news sources, a Pakistan Daily Times article titled "Eating Books" caught my eye. If this is a new way to learn, it -- sounds like something out of the Thursday Next stories. If it's a way to smuggle books out of libraries, it seems... self-defeating.

The article is either figuratively or wrongly or capriciously titled, as no actual book-eating is involved. But it is an interesting review of book theft problems across centuries and cultures. It seems Pakistani library problems are in some respect no different from Wisconsin problems. It's a small world.

I trust I won't have to eat my words...