Jenny Levine: Libraries

A round up of interesting links from other librarian sites:

The USA PATRIOT Act and Patron Privacy on Library Internet Terminals

"The upshot is that there will be a great many more surveillance orders, everywhere in the country, and in turn there will be more requests for library records, including Internet use records. Think of law enforcement as needing to enter two doors to apprehend a suspect." [at LLRX, via LIS News]

LibraryLaw.com - copyright law, trustees, FOTL, FOIA, privacy, referenda, and more [via Librarian.net]

The Death of Digital Rights Management?

“ 'It’s very difficult to sell [digital-rights] technology to companies that are no longer trying to sell content,' observes Schreiber. In a way, it’s a classic chicken-and-egg question: is the digital rights management industry hampered by a failing market, or are e-books floundering for want of better digital-rights technology?" [at Technology Review, via Tomalak's Realm]

How about both are hindered by usability problems and a focus that is decidedly not on the consumer?

"Analysts say the content protection companies left standing, including Alchemedia and SealedMedia, have technologies that may break the usability barrier, finally enabling the serious online sales providers envision. “There are some extremely bright people working in this space who will be able to figure out what the consumer is willing to put up with,” says Letts. Alchemedia’s “Mirage” system, for example, does away with the requirement for special viewer software by making sure the decrypted form of a protected file appears only on-screen, never in random-access memory, where a computer looks for any data it’s trying to print or copy. That way, publishers can put content out in a format compatible with a regular Web browser, and “the fear about the save and copy buttons is neutralized. We don’t have to block those doors because the data in [memory] is still encrypted,” says Schreiber."

"SealedMedia’s system, on the other hand, does require a special two-megabyte browser plug-in, but it stores decryption keys on a central Internet-accessible server, meaning that if you have the right password, you can access content from whatever machine you happen to be using. SealedMedia’s viewer can also handle audio and video content. 'SealedMedia is providing us for the first time with a robust, convenient way to deliver multimedia e-books,' says ipicturebooks’ Preiss."

Here again, I hope they're thinking of more than just B2C sales (business-to-consumer) and that these technologies will work with items circulated by libraries. See why we need to be in on the debate and the development cycle?

That's What I Want

"No single service has a catalog of music from all of the major record labels. Until there is DRM standardization and a sea change in industry attitudes, users will have to patronize more than one service to get an unabridged selection of artists. That means consumers are asked to pay for a service that might carry only half of their favorite artists, or to pay several monthly bills just to have access to the musicians they like. Not surprisingly, many users are unwilling." [at New Architect, via Tomalak's Realm]

This article is an excellent primer explaining why the online music services are failing, covering everything from Digital Rights Management (DRM) to usability issues.

"According to Pew, in the last year, of the users who were asked to pay for something that used to be free online, 50 percent found free online alternatives. Thirty six percent stopped getting the service online, and only 12 percent paid for it. Subscription service providers need more. They must offer a unique value proposition to keep their audiences from walking out."

What amazes me is how many people take advantage of free online services but then forget about libraries. Granted we're not loaning out digital music yet, but I don't think we do a good enough job of marketing our computers, our video & DVD collections, our audiobooks, our CDs, and everything else you can get for free at your local library. Not to mention the free expertise.

Of course, that's nothing new and we say that every year, but now we have to figure out that digital service and delivery part, otherwise known as "shifting." Similar to the concerns raised in this article, we need to work closely with our vendors to make sure our services based on their products don't have that usability barrier that so many of our online catalogs currently have.

Whew! Today I finally finished my LibraryU module! It's only been on my to-do list for four freaking months. Actually, I feel bad that I haven't finished it before now because it's a guide to Researching the Events of September 11, 2001, and Terrorism. My original intent was to provide a webliography starting back in October so that public libraries in general could link to it rather than having to re-create the wheel. Unfortunately, various projects at work precluded this from happening. But it's up now, so if your library isn't already providing this type of information, please feel free to link to it. I'll be fleshing out some of the pages a bit more and adding annotations to all of the links, although it will take some time. Here's more about LibraryU, the project.

Your Phone as Your Wallet, Part 2

"At this time, welcome PayBox, a German company that is establishing itself slowly but surely. To use the system, you register with your bank account and PayBox then acts as a link between your mobile phone and your bank account. If I would like to pay for a cab then I give the driver my mobile phone number, or alias, and he enters it into his system. I then get a phone call and a nice voice tells me that this cab driver is requesting an amount of X EUR. I can then say yes and enter my password and the money is securely deducted from my bank account. For me, the entire system is free. The system is gaining acceptance on the web, at least in Germany, but for paying in stores it is moving along at a slower pace, partly because a POS (point-of-sale) terminal is needed there...."

"Paying for a coke with your VISA card is not really efficient but if you pay with your phone bill then it might work a lot easier. You can already get a coke out of a vending machine with your mobile phone in Finland, and I am sure this will be something that we will be accustomed too fairly soon. An example of this can be what Europolitan Vodafone and TietoEnator are launching a new payment method in Sweden. I also recently learned that you can pay for drinks and subway tokens with your mobile phone in Santiago (Chile)." [InfoSync]

Suh-weet! This is definitely the entry point for micropayments to become widespread. So when can I pay my library overdues using my cell phone?

Audible Books on MP3

"This almost has to be a e-Book killer for the masses. Don't get me wrong, e-content will still have it's place. I just see the mainstream grabbing hold of *this* digital techology much quicker and in greater numbers than e-books as imagined to date." [LibeTech Weblog]

Eric comments on my Audible post from yesterday, and he seems as enthusiastic about them as I am. I agree with him that MP3 audiobooks are a killer app and that they will be adopted by the mainstream faster than eBook devices will. I've always believed that most Americans will experience new technologies in their cars first, and that this will ease widespread adoption into other areas.

OnStar is a perfect example of this. It's GPS sold as a safety feature, and it introduces the concept of location-based services in a non-threatening, non-techie way. I think we'll see the same thing with satellite radio and MP3s. You can already buy both types of players for your car, but they haven't taken off yet because they don't come pre-installed the way OnStar does. Once they do, however, there will be no going back, and once someone has had the thrill and ease-of-use of listening to MP3 audiobooks in the car, they'll realize they can do this anywhere and the technologies will become ubiquitous and pervasive.

Which is one reason why I really want to see Audible succeed. They're the major player in the game right now, which means we don't have to muck about with a dozen different standards and formats. They also understand the user's desire to own what they purchase, and they're trying to work closely with libraries.

So Eric, "me too!"

Microsoft, WebEx Ink a Digital Deal

"Attempting to boost momentum behind its Tablet PC initiative, Microsoft on Monday showcased its 2.5-pound pen-based device and announced that WebEx would support its digital ink capabilities. Online conferencing vendor WebEx said at the Demo 2002 conference in Phoenix that it will build Web conferencing services for the Tablet PC, taking advantage of the portable form factor to boost enterprise communications in meetings, according to K.V. Rao, director of platform marketing at WebEx in San Jose, California.... In addition, Groove Networks says it is building a secure collaboration offering based on the Tablet PC that will allow users to work together on projects in real time, sharing comments in digital ink." [at PC World]

I hadn't thought of this. I've been focusing a lot on how PDAs can make reference librarians more mobile, but I hadn't considered that the Tablet PC could do this but with more screen real estate. Things that make you go hmmm.......

Homer Library Plea Deserves Support
"Of the several tax referendum issues to be decided by Homer Glen and Homer Township voters in March, we find one (not necessarily to the exclusion of the others; we'll comment later) especially worthy of community support."

Yyyyyeeeeeesssssss! Local paper endorses my home Library's referendum issue!

Major score! Library_geek points us to the NOBLE Swap Shop, a collection of resources for libraries running on an Innovative Interfaces system, which SWAN just happens to do. Talk about saving us a ton o' time! I was going to write up the code next week for SWAN libraries to add a search box to their Web pages, and here it is on the NOBLE page. Perl scripts for booklists, snark search boxes, search shortcuts, and more make this the mother lode for III libraries. Oh, Diane.... I'm a coming to knock on your door tomorrow!

Today I got an email from Matt at Audible. It went out to some kind of a list, but it included two documents, an overview of the company and its services in general, and an overview of its services for libraries. When Matt spoke at our Tech Summit in September, only the Kalamazoo and Highland Community College libraries were actively circulating Audible titles. NOLA was just getting started, but now there are four more libraries on board the program. Here's their list, which is labeled as "partial":

King County, Washington
NOLA (Northern Ohio system)
Kalamazoo, MI
Broome County, NY
Carroll County, MD
Highland County, IL Community Coll.
Rochester, NY (Henrietta Branch)

In my previous post about Audible, I was thinking of the Kalamazoo Public Library, not King County. KPL has a page devoted to their MP3 audiobook program, and it includes first and second quarter reports (both in PDF format). Their program has also been wildly successful.

Also of interest in Audible's general overview document is continued progress towards something called "AudibleWireless," which provides "customized spoken audio content based on the customer's individual selections, delivered to a wireless device or accessed with an ordinary handset."

So the next time you see an ad for a cell phone or PDA that plays MP3s and you ask yourself why on earth anyone would want that, now you know. It's another type of "heavenly jukebox" digital content coming to you wherever you are via your wireless device. I wonder if Audible can partner with satellite radio companies in order to stream content of your choosing to your car or home stereo. Hey, Matt....

Joel speaks the truth in an essay about The Iceberg Secret, Revealed. Although the first half isn't as applicable to libraries, the second half is music to my ears, and I'm going to pass it around at SLS. Choice quotes:

"If you show a nonprogrammer a screen which has a user interface that is 90% worse, they will think that the program is 90% worse."

"If you show a nonprogrammer a screen which has a user interface which is 100% beautiful, they will think the program is almost done.... And then when you spend the next year working 'under the covers,' so to speak, nobody will really see what you're doing and they'll think it's nothing." This is a big problem for me in the type of work I do at the System level.

"Don't, for a minute, think that you can get away with asking anybody to imagine how cool this would be. Don't think that they're looking at the functionality. They're not. They want to see pretty pixels." I'm still trying to learn this one, because I always think I can convince based on the potential outcome.

Miss Cleo Charged with "Deception", Water Accused of Being "Wet" [Plastic]

Besides the big-old-duh headline, I like the point of this post that Miss Cleo is a character and people who call her know that. Last year, when I first started seeing her commercials, I had an idea to do a parody ad for libraries based on a Miss-Cleo-like character. I mean, what could be better than a parody of a parody to spread libraries as a meme to the Net Generation.

So this was my idea. I wanted to have "Miss Cleo" sitting at a reference desk. Pan down. Telephone rings. Miss Cleo answers. Patron starts to ask reference question, but "Miss Cleo" already knows the answer. (Kind of like the librarian in Dilbert.) Then, when she needs the patron's information, she "reads the cards," the cards being library cards. The tag line would be "Call your librarian. We already know the answers," along with an Answers @ Your Library campaign.

I was going to flesh this out further, but nobody except me seems to think this would be funny. That's nothing new in my life, though.

Honda Commercial - The automotive equivalent to a really hot librararian "Good-looking, yet intelligent. Fun, yet sophisticated. All in a very eye-catching 200-horsepower package." [via Library Stuff]

Personalized Results: Exploring The Future Of Google

"Google is now in the position to take their search engine to another level that can make them soar even higher than their competitors. A lot of speculation has arisen in regards to what lies ahead in Google's future. A few of the speculations are how and when Google will display personalized results."

"The basis of this paper is to examine a few of the methods that Google might employ in their system of providing personalized results. The reason why these methods are examined in great detail is because last year Google acquired a company, Outride,Inc., who researched heavily into personalizing data."

Some fascinating ideas, including the idea of personalized recommendations displayed while a user is surfing. How about the ability to choose between recommendations from everyone or authoritative recommendations from librarians? Or how about librarian recommendations integrated into our online catalogs?

Washington Plans Unprecedented Camera Network "Washington police are building what will be the nation's biggest network of surveillance cameras to monitor shopping areas, streets, monuments and other public places in the U.S. capital, a move that worries civil liberties groups, The Wall Street Journal said Wednesday. The system would eventually include hundreds of cameras, linking existing devices in Metro mass transit stations, public schools and traffic intersections to new digital cameras mounted to watch over neighborhoods and shopping districts, the Journal said." [at The Washington Post]

This is pretty scary. How long do you suppose it will be before they want to put the cameras in library branches? And then subpoena circulation records?

Information Specialists at the Intersection of IA and Usability [via ia/]
This is an interesting article in its own right, but I just had to share this section:

"In a speech last year, GraceAnne DeCandido described the lure of librarianship by saying:

For most of us, what brought us to librarianship was the power of the word, the power of stories. Whether we called it reading, or scholarship, or research or study, what brought us to libriarianship was the power inherent in bringing together people and ideas.

She went on to say:

If librarianship is the connecting of people to ideas, it doesn’t matter where the ideas reside. That means, if the ideas are on video, or on audiotape, or on CD- ROM, we adapted our collection policies to handle these materials. Format is no longer the controversial issue it once was. Or is it?"

Mobile Messaging Spec Released "An initiative by industry leaders to standardize mobile instant messaging and presence services came to fruition Wednesday with the release of the Wireless Village 1.0 specification.... The goal of the specification is to promote interoperability between mobile and fixed-network instant messaging systems so that, for instance, PC users can exchange messages with mobile phone users.... The specification also is forward-looking and will embrace Multimedia Messaging Services (MMS) when it becomes available, according to the group. MMS will add various multimedia elements, such as music and video, to messaging." [allNetDevices Wireless News]

Great! Now I will be able to send people pictures of Rosie, the cutest puppy in the whole wide world, on their phones! And Bruce will be able to send me pictures of Beans no matter where I am. :-)

Back in the real world, this means you might be able to answer more complex reference questions over IM.

Entertainment Industry's Copyright Right Puts Consumers in Cross Hairs "The studios and TV networks are also whining about the feature that lets users fast-forward through commercials or skip them entirely. The entertainment companies are understandably worried about this trend, but so what? My employer would like you to read the paper all the way through and at least glance at every advertisement, but the fact that you don't have to is one of the reader-friendly pieces of the transaction." [Dan Gillmor's eJournal]

Hear, hear! More from Dan about the latest lawsuits against Tivo and SonicBlue (the folks that make ReplayTVs). It's a great summation of how ludicrous these lawsuits are, so it's a good printout for the uninitiated. Here's why it will matter to them (and you and me):

"Why should you care if you can't make a copy of a CD to play in your car? Because the industry's attack is much wider. Your rights are intertwined with scholarship, with the public commons of knowledge that the owners of information want to close off. The damage will be far-reaching if they succeed."

Besides the fair use, First Amendment, and criminal prosecution issues surrounding all of this, there is one other thing libraries can take away from this whole debacle, and that is the lesson of not placing barriers in the way of what your users want. Work with them, not against them. It will only alienate your users, and they won't come back.

Quova upgrade pins down AOL users. "The Redwood City, Calif.-based company is releasing GeoPoint 4.0, software that identifies the geographic location of Web site visitors down to the country, state and city level. The technology maps IP (Internet protocol) addresses--which are used to route signals over the Web to an individual's computer--with new depth, according to the company. 'Clearly, in terms of digital content distribution, the technology becomes very important to assigning and getting the right kinds of information to the proper and authenticated users. For example, music distribution,' Mike McGuire, research director at GartnerG2." [at News.com]

Interesting. I don't think they'll ever fully get the mapping down, but I wonder if this type of technology can be integrated into library vendors' software for automatic authentication to our databases and online catalogs.

I talk about this in my Information Shifting presentation, but here's why you need to pay attention to digital audio titles, which right now means MP3s. You may have seen libraries that are integrating bib records for eBooks into their online catalogs (usually for netLibrary). Maybe you're even one of those libraries. All a patron has to do is search the catalog, view a record, and click on the link to the online version, all without leaving their PC.

So take that scenario one step further. Let's say I'm a patron that wants to borrow "Pomp and Circumstance" for a party for my new graduate. What if I can go to your catalog, search for it, click the link, and download it for a two-week loan period, all without leaving my PC. Now I don't have to come in to pick up a whole CD (that you hopefully have); I can just download the one song that I wanted.

Of course, that's if your library has access to digital files such as eBooks and MP3 audiobooks in order to circulate them. Don't ever forget that the bigcos don't want you to have that access.

And BTW, the King County Library System is also offering their patrons access to Books24x7 ebooks online. They are the baton twirlers at the head of the shifted parade.

Eric's been holding out on me. I thought his Libtech blog was on the Radio servers, but he's actually elsewhere and I've been missing his posts. Today he posted a link to an Eastside Journal opinion about the King County Library System's MP3 audiobook program. I'm a big proponent of both MP3 audiobooks and the company they are partnering with, Audible.com.

In fact, our SLS Tech Summit last September featured Audible, with presentations by both a rep from the company (thanks for coming that day, Matt!) and Eric Welch from Highland Community College Library (Eric is also circulating Audible titles on MP3 players). I'm still hoping to jump start a group discount for SLS libraries, but the KCLS program is a great model, as well as proof that this works.

As the Up for Library Innovation editorial notes, "Thumbs up for the King County Library System, which is continuing its record of being on the cutting edge of information services. The latest is acquiring 200 MP3 players that allow patrons to listen to audio books. The 3-ounce devices are much smaller than ordinary cassette tape or compact disc players. They can hold the equivalent of 20 cassettes and the material is merely downloaded onto the device. If you want to use one -- you can check one out for 28 days -- be prepared to stand in line behind 753 people who already have their names on the waiting list. The good news? The library will double the number of MP3 players by year's end."

If you want to see the presentations from last fall, find them on the SLS InfoTech site.

If you want to find out more about the wildly successful KCLS program, visit their eAudio site. They used to have their quarterly reports available online, but I can't find them now. I'll look it up tomorrow at work and see if I can track them down.

If you want to know if your library should pursue this, then just take my word for it and do it. You don't have to be a big library system to offer a new, quality service to your patrons. Trust me - they'll thank you for it.

Sorry, Time's Up! "The latest fad among jobless techies in San Francisco? Taxpayer-funded Internet access at public libraries.... As local unemployment has surged to 5.7%, once-quiet bookworm oases now swarm with surly surfers.... Librarians say the congestion has even sparked Web rage. In December, one user screamed for 10 minutes at a librarian who kicked him off a terminal. "He threatened to sue," says Eleese Longino, 26, a patron who saw the incident." [Tip of the hat to Shirl and WEB4LIB]

Well, leaving aside the 19th century stereotype of libraries as "once-quiet bookworm oases," where has the media been? I had people yelling at me in 1996, swearing, and just plain being ornery, all for more time at the Internet PC. And that was on a dial-up modem! What exactly here is news? That there's a few more of these people now so we can officially name it?

A Matter of Trust: "Blogging should be mandatory for every CEO. Screw insider trading disclosure, open up the walls that shrould Fortune's top 500 in secrecy. For never again will I trust the words of an analyst, accountant or spokeperson. if it doesn't come from the horses mouth, it just doesn't cut the mustard." [CurryDotCom]

For those of you non-librarians out there - and actually for you librarians, too - here's the thing. You do trust libraries, even if you haven't used one in a while. Librarians have a built-in trust with the public because of the great service we provide (I'm talking customer service here), the great service we provide (I'm talking housing, organizing, and disseminating information here), and the great service we provide (I'm talking the consistency day in and day out - we're still here, what about all of the .coms that were going to replace us?).

If you go to the Librarians' Index to the Internet, you inherently know you can trust what they present to you. Actually, don't go there, and just think about what the title tells you. You can't count on companies, politicians, or the media anymore, but you can still count on us. Just try and find someone who has never once used a library as a child, a student, a parent, a person. Go on. I dare you.

So if you haven't used a library in a while, come on back. You'll be surprised what we have to offer (still). And librarians, let's build on that trust that's been sitting in the back seat and continue asserting ourselves in our domain - information. We need to get our message out to the masses that we're still here - better than every, thank you very much - and you can still trust us.