I’m a connector

I’ve just arrived in D.C., after a sleepless red-eye flight from Seattle. I’m always a little silly when I have no sleep, so I apologize in advance for any undue lightness of tone. The guy next to me on the first leg of my flight, when I told him I was going to Washington, D.C., remarked that it’s somewhere that every American is supposed to visit once. “So, cross it off your list,” he said.

I added my name to the list of people blogging ALA Annual. Not sure what obligations I have now, but I’ll try to write lots of long boring posts summarizing every single thing I attend. Then all you loyal readers can feel like you’re right here with me.

Actually, I’m going to try to finish up a post I started yesterday that has nothing to do with ALA. Yesterday, I discovered a new memo released by the Pew Internet and American Life Project entitled “Don’t Blame Me: It’s the Phone’s Fault!” which examines the results of a previous study that found that about half of Americans have “distant relationships” to technologies like the Internet, cell phones, iPods, etc. The Pew reports refer to these as “information and communication technologies,” or ICTs for short.

ALA and Bookmobiles

I’m gearing up for a trip to DC for the ALA Annual Conference. It will be my first time in DC and my first time doing the ALA thing. Even though they were here in Seattle six months ago, I didn’t go to any of the events. Makes more sense to travel to the other side of the country, I guess.

I will be manning a booth, along with two other SPL Mobile Services staff, at the Diversity and Outreach Fair. In preparation for this I put together a Flickr page with photos of some of our bookmobiles and services, including technical stuff like lifts, carts, etc. That’s me at the adjustable-height circulation desk. Gripping stuff, I know.

Trusting the experts

Many bloggers in the past few days have been writing about Michael Gorman’s two recent pieces on the Encyclopedia Britannica blog (Web 2.0: The Sleep of Reason, Part I and Part II). In these two rather incoherent posts, Gorman, who is perhaps best known as the blog-hating former president of the American Library Association, associates Web 2.0 with “an increase in credulity and an associated flight from expertise,” which he blames for such calamities as citizen journalism, Biblical literalism, and Wikipedia.

A haemorrhage of personal privacy

This weekend, a report was released by Privacy International, a London-based watchdog group, which criticized Google for creating “the most onerous privacy environment on the Internet.” The report has received quite a bit of flak for being biased, poorly researched, and incendiary, and Danny Sullivan at Search Engine Land has an excellent breakdown of the report’s problems.

While Privacy International has probably overstated the case against Google in particular (or at least hasn’t done its research well enough to make a good argument), the overall message of the report is still worth noting. In fact, while the report does point to Google as the worst offender, not one of the 23 Internet companies it reviewed received a top ranking, and the companies that received the highest ranking among those reviewed (“Generally privacy-aware but in need of improvement”) still have some significant problems with the ways in which they handle user data. Privacy International suggests that this is evidence of what it calls “a haemorrhage of personal privacy” on the Internet.

A wobbly stool

The first year of library school has come and gone. So now I have three months to spend actually thinking and learning about libraries. Unfortunately, during my time spent in school so far, the topic of libraries hasn’t come up all that often.

I did learn a lot this year–it’s just that I didn’t learn much of it in my classes. The knowledge I’ve gained from professional experience, outside reading, and involvement in extracurricular activities has been far more interesting and relevant than most of what I’ve had to spend time on in class.

There have been a few highlights from the first year, my classes with Deborah Jacobs (director of the Seattle Public Library) and Nancy Pearl (is there anyone who doesn’t know who Nancy Pearl is?) being chief among them. One thing that’s stuck with me from Nancy’s class is her characterization of librarianship as a “three-legged stool”: the information/technology leg, the reader’s advisory leg, and the programming leg. If this is true, then 95% of my classes so far have been focused on one leg. That’s a pretty wobbly stool.

On serendipity

I’m hunkered down for the final push to the end of the school year, so I haven’t had much time to write. But I wanted to share an interesting quote I came across while doing research for my final paper for my Classification Theory class. It’s from Elaine Svenonius’ Intellectual Foundation of Information Organization, which is a treatment of the history and theory of bibliographic organization and classification.

Dewey Decimation

Well, even though this was the topic of the day two days ago, I think it’s still worth writing about. When the new Perry branch of the Maricopa County Public Library, in Gilbert, AZ, opens next month, its collection will not be classified using the Dewey Decimal System. It won’t use the Library of Congress Classification System, either, or the Bliss Bibiliographic Classification, or the Universal Decimal Classification, or any of the other myriad traditional library classifications. Instead, books will be arranged into about 50 broad sections and smaller subsections, and will then be arranged alphabetically by author’s last name, much as books are arranged in many bookstores.

Some librarians, on mailing lists and blogs, have expressed some reservations over this venture, citing concerns that it will make things more difficult to find and shelve, and that there is simply no need, since Dewey organizes materials more or less by subject anyway. Others have praised it as a great, user-centered innovation.

There are two reasons I’m excited about the Maricopa Library’s experiment:

More on those angry librarians in Sacramento

When I first wrote about the librarians in Sacramento who are circulating a petition protesting, among other things, the library’s collection development policy, I said that I thought the blog posts I had seen on the topic were fairly one-sided and unreflective, and I suggested that this was an example of what Steven J. Bell has called the “speech chill [of] the library blogosphere.” I still think that this was more or less true. But as I have been watching the issue more closely over the past few days, I have seen some really thoughtful discourse taking place on library blogs. And as my blogging feet are still quite tender, this has been an interesting lesson for me in the way discussion takes shape in the blog world.