07.12.09
Posted in 2009 ALA Annual Conference at 11:02 pm by Gordon Flagg
The same day that National Security Archive Director Tom Blanton keynoted the ALA President’s Program, a front-page article in the New York Times revealed that former Vice President Dick Cheney ordered the Central Intelligence Agency to withhold information from Congress about a secret counterterrorism program. Blanton noted that as President Gerald Ford’s chief of staff, Cheney had convinced him to veto amendments strengthening the Freedom of Information Act. Congress overrode Ford’s veto, allowing Blanton to show his audience 35 years later declassified government documents obtained by the NSA through FOIA requests.
An ALA member since 1986, Blanton said “I’ve learned at the feet of some ALA activists for intellectual freedom and open government.” One of the NSA’s first FOIA requests in 1988, was for documents relating to the Library Awareness Program, a 1960s effort in which the FBI asked librarians to look out for users with foreign-sounding names and accents. Since then the NSA has filed 36,000 FOIA requests that have “liberated,” as Blanton put it, 8 to 10 million pages.
After the 9/11 attacks, the Bush White House had “a testosterone attack,” Blanton noted. Among the measures implemented in the name of national security was a wiretapping program that was later found by the inspector general to be ineffective because of the secrecy with which it was conducted. “Essentially, security mania broke out in our government in these last eight years,” Blanton said.
Blanton documented the rising rate of security classifications by the government, which is now twice that of the height of the cold war—23 million last year. He argued that the government performs a massive amount of overclassification, driving home his point by presenting side-by-side comparisons of documents that had been declassified under Clinton and subsequently reclassified under Bush; the reclassified documents removed extensive material that had not been redacted under the original declassification.
Although President Obama had “made transparency and openness the key to his Senate career, Blanton said he has continued to cover up the warrantless wiretapping program, blocked the release of hundreds of torture photos showing U.S. troops abusing prisoners, fought against the release of the White House visitors list, and even argued against the release of an interview Cheney gave regarding the leak of the identity of CIA operative Valerie Plame Wilson because of fears that it might end up on The Daily Show.
Comparing librarians’ values to those prevailing in Washington, Blanton remarked, “Every person in this room has an ethical posture that’s 180 degrees away from this.” He concluded, “openness is our protection, not secrecy.”
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Posted in 2009 ALA Annual Conference at 4:52 pm by Greg Landgraf
Oak Park Public Library Warrior Librarians
Dressed in Viking armor and braids and performing to “Ride of the Valkyries,” the Oak Park (Ill.) Public Library Warrior Librarians took first place in the fifth annual Library Book Cart Drill Team Championship, winning a gold book cart from sponsor Demco before a standing-room-only crowd.
For the first time, two teams tied for first place in the judge’s scoring. Oak Park was selected over the Cart Wheels from Des Plaines (Ill.) Public Library in an audience vote. The Cart Wheels won a silver book cart for their Grease-themed program, while the Steel City Kings from the University of Pittsburgh took third and a bronze book cart, performing to Elvis Presley’s “A Little Less Conversation.”
Sticker distributed by the Delaware Diamonds
The results were in spite of a bit of pre-show trash-talking from the Delaware Diamonds, who distributed stickers and pins to the crowd before the competition.
Mo Willems and Jon Scieszka (wearing a giant “Ambassador” sash, in recognition of his position as National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature) provided color commentary for the event.
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Posted in 2009 ALA Annual Conference at 1:53 pm by Gordon Flagg
The knotty issue of net neutrality—the principle that network providers should not discriminate in the sites or applications they provide access to—and its implications for libraries was deftly explicated by a panel of experts assembled Sunday morning by the Library Information and Technology Association.
Carrie Lowe, Gregory Jackson, and Clifford Lynch
Clifford Lynch, director of the Coalition for Networked Information, opened by framing the issue in a historical context, suggesting that “While net neutrality is a relatively new phrase”—arising within the past 10 years—”at some level it’s a very old idea.” In the mid-1990s, when the Internet was beginning to be used by a wider audience, numerous competing services offered different types of access and widely varying pricing structure, which Lynch called “an enormous competitive market with low barriers to entry.”
Problems arose when modem technology reached its limits and broadband became a necessity. At that point, Lynch observed, consumers’ options for access came down to two choices: your telephone carrier or your cable provider. Recently, these network providers have attempted to limit access to certain sites (often by providing only slowed-down access), for reasons that range from the commercial to the political.
Lynch noted that the most prominent battleground for net neutrality is broadband access to homes, but issues regarding mobile networks are emerging and will undoubtedly become more important.
Carrie Lowe of ALA’s Office for Information Technology Policy offered a working definition of net neutrality from ALA’s perspective: “a principle that consumers should be free to access any Internet content or services.”
In 2006 ALA issued a position paper on net neutrality from a library perspective (pdf file). Lowe cited two areas in which net neutrality particularly matters to libraries: At its core, net neutrality is an intellectual freedom issue; and libraries are creating a role for themselves as information providers, which makes this a bread-and-better issue for them.
From a federal standpoint, most observers agree that net neutrality was the operative principle of the Internet until 2005, when the Supreme Court ruled that ISPs should be considered to provide information services rather than communication services. The Federal Communications Commission subsequently issued a deregulation order incorporating the decision that included four precepts reflecting net neutrality principles; however, Lowe said, the comments were vague and contained no enforcement measures.
Lowe noted that net neutrality has been gaining prominence lately: President Obama talked about it on the campaign trail, and the broadband funding in the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act stimulus package included net neutrality language, although it was relatively weak. “It’s really heating up as an issue, and we have every reason to think that the FCC is going to take it up as an issue” once the new commissioners are in place, she concluded.
Gregory Jackson, vice president and chief information officer at the University of Chicago, told four stories that illustrated how net neutrality issues play out in an organizational context. After Obama—a former faculty member of the university’s law school—launched his presidential campaign, the school had to consider whether websites on its network, raging from student fan pages to ones containing his academic papers, could be construed as advocacy, endangering the institution’s nonprofit status. (Jackson noted in passing that Obama developed his favorable view of net neutrality while he was teaching alongside fellow law school faculty member Lawrence Lessig, a prominent proponent of free speech on the Internet.)
Second story: Consider a world-class library that is eager to share its online resources with a worldwide audience, but much of its licensed material is restricted to use by the university community; so the library is legally forced to block access to its holdings, violating net neutrality.
Third: Video is becoming increasingly used as an instructional method, forcing a university to “tune the network” to devote more bandwidth to that medium, resulting in a lower priority for delivery of other media—which would be considered a violation to net neutrality if done by an ISP.
Fourth: The movie and music industries feel they are losing control of the ability to sell their wares as consumers use peer-to-peer technology to share content. The content owners feel colleges have provided students with broadband access that encourages this behavior. For schools, the easiest solution would be to restrict peer-to-peer files; but that would be discrimination based on the nature of the content.
Ultimately, said Jackson, this all raises the issue of what a network is for. The way that intellectual property gets accessed has not kept pace with the way that networks are actually used, he observed. Ultimately, Jackson concluded, “This is not about right or wrong; it’s about managing risk.”
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Posted in 2009 ALA Annual Conference at 11:49 am by Greg Landgraf
Wanda Urbanska signs copies of Less Is More.
“The disease of overconsumption is on its death bed,” proclaimed Simple Living host Wanda Urbanska during her Auditorium Speaker Series speech, sponsored by American Libraries. As evidence, she cited three primary indicators, which she nicknamed “Heat, Feed, and Speed.” “Heat” refers to decreasing energy requirements for the heating and cooling of homes, which have been getting smaller since 2007 after a 60-year growth trend. “Feed” speaks to food choices, as gardens and farmer’s markets grow in popularity. “All of a sudden we’re waking up wondering why we’re so heavy,” Urbanska noted. “Speed” covers transportation choices, where people are driving less and buying smaller cars.
Libraries are inherently green, Urbanska argued, because of their role in helping to reduce consumption. Nevertheless, Urbanska urged the crowd to make green choices in their libraries and their lives. “Reclaim your role as eco-role models and exemplars in your community,” she said. “Change is happening rapidly. Let libraries continue to be at the center of it.”
She offered a host of examples:
- Timer systems for heating, cooling, and lighting systems.
- Eliminating phantom loads by unplugging electronics when not in use.
- Discouraging printing to reduce paper use.
- Recycling of paper—including paper from discarded books.
- “Freecycling” of magazines and books by having swaps at the library. “In today’s economy, that’s a big deal to folks, to be able to take home a book and mark it up and not have to return it,” she noted.
- Buying locally made products whenever possible.
- Reducing the use of disposable materials. Urbanska used her travel mug as an example, claiming that “In 20 years of carrying a travel mug everywhere I go, I’ve saved 7,000 cups from landfills.”
- Using green cleaning products.
- Bike or walk to work, errands, or meetings.
- Host green programming, such as a workshop on making useful materials from plastic bags or a vegetarian cooking class.
- Purchasing products made from recycled materials.
This last point proved to be one of the most commonly shared challenges as audience members asked how to purchase recycled paper when they’re locked into a bidding process that requires them to buy the cheapest materials without regard to whether they’re recycled or not. Urbanska suggested treating the process as a campaign rather than a single instance and seeking partners, both among colleagues at the institution and through the use of petitions and letters to the media.
Suggestions that emerged from the brief audience discussion included seeing if other savings could be applied to the green initiatives and creating demonstration press releases for proposed changes, which would let the decision-makers see how the change could be announced—and how it would make them look like heroes.
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Posted in 2009 ALA Annual Conference at 8:55 am by Sean Fitzpatrick
Three weeks into a pilot campaign aimed at moving OCLC’s 2008 study From Awareness to Funding from theory to practice, OCLC hosted a session July 11 to talk about where the study has taken them since its publication one year ago and to discuss their new campaign: Geek the Library.
The purpose of Geek the Library is to show what Awareness calls “Probable Supporters,” or regular voters who are likely to vote in favor of library funding, how the library can engage them in their interests and create a transformational experience. The call to action? Get you geek on. Geek the library. Show your support.
Worm Geek
“Geeking” something is simply showing nerd-level passion. It’s cool to geek. The idea of the campaign is that whatever people geek, the library can engage them in that passion.
OCLC’s 2008 study showed that voters who perceive the library as a “transformational” force and not just an “informational” source are most likely to vote in support.
Of course, amid a global economic crisis where city budgets are being cut nationwide, voter support is more important now than ever. “As we all know, the world changed after we did this [2008] research,” said OCLC Vice President for the Americas and Global Vice President of Marketing Cathy De Rosa. What researchers at Leo Burnett found in a follow-up to the Awareness study was that people feel the future is uncertain and that the important behavioral shift has shown that people have moved from a “trade-up” to a “trade-off” mindset. This finding, while bad news for most of Leo Burnett’s high-profile clients, is good news for libraries. Leo Burnett’s follow-up study also showed a renewed focus among Americans on self-reliance, “almost to an early-American level” said De Rosa.
De Rosa suggested the findings of this year’s followup study only enhance those of last year’s. As people “trade off” luxuries for necessities, libraries see an increase in usage.
But moving the study from theory to practice took some action. “You can’t just take the words ‘information to transformation’ and apply them to libraries without some sort of campaign,” said OCLC Director of Branding and Marketing Services Jenny Johnson. The campaign aims to activate probable supporters’ “latent love” for libraries.
Geek the Library, a field campaign in southern Georgia and central Iowa covering 80 libraries and 1.1 million people, has four goals: to increase awareness for library funding, to change perceptions and attitudes of probable supporters and elected officials, to measure the potential to help lead to a reverse in the downward trend in library funding in the U.S., and to provide materials and learning to the public library community at no charge.
OCLC plans to report on the findings of this field study in March 2010.
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Posted in 2009 ALA Annual Conference at 7:32 am by Gordon Flagg
To anyone attending an ALA conference, viewing the many attendees toting laptops or sporting smartphones and the exhibit hall dominated by high-tech vendors, it’s inescapable how pervasive technology has become in our society; in developing countries, it’s obviously another story. “Technology and the Developing World,” a Saturday-morning program presented by the Library and Information Technology Association, illustrated various approaches to rectifying that situation
Randy Ramusack, U.N. technology coordinator for Microsoft, described the firm’s Partners in Learning initiative, launched in 2003 to help teachers learn how to use technology. Since then the program has reached over 100 million teachers and students in 110 countries, and Ramusack said they hope to boost that to 250 million by 2010.
Microsoft also supports Research4Life, a public-private partnership that gives scientists in developing countries free or low-cost access to information in more than 7,000 journals.
Ramusack also touted other programs in which Microsoft is involved, including the World Database on Protected Areas, an important tool for conservation activities, and a project with the U.N. High Commission on Refugees to use technology to promote education in refugee settlements.
The One Laptop Per Child project is a nonprofit organization that has put over 1 million laptops into the hands of children in developing countries. OLPC developed the XO computer, a low-cost ($188), low-power (3 watts) unit that has been deployed in 20 countries, half of them in Latin America. SJ Klein, OLPC manager of content, said the design goals were to develop a computer that was cheap, robust, easily repairable, and designed for kids, and that would run on free or open source software.
The $188 XO
Klein said the XO, which has built-in wireless but no hard drive, provides a means for children to chat, play, read, and publish their ideas. He noted that such empowerment is “both awesome and sometimes scary for teachers.” The children—who are often the only literate members of their families—take the XOs home from school, where they become part of their lives.
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