In the Library with the Lead Pipe welcomes Audrey Barbakoff, a librarian at the Milwaukee Public Library, and Ahniwa Ferrari, Virtual Experience Manager at the Pierce County Library System in Washington, for a point-counterpoint piece on filtering in libraries. The opinions expressed here are those of the authors, and are not endorsed by their employers.  We thank them for their time and energy in writing this piece!

Untitled by paul goyette, on Flickr / CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

Audrey Barbakoff

Banned books week sucked last year.

I felt pretty hypocritical about last year’s Banned Books Week. Don’t get me wrong; I love Banned Books Week. I adore it. Without the reminder provided by events like this, it’s too easy to get drawn into the day-to-day concerns of library work and forget about the essential issues of intellectual freedom, battling censorship, and embracing the sharing of ideas even when they are unpopular or unpleasant. It’s because I find it so critically important, so essential to who we are as librarians, that I’m upset.

Because libraries are complicit in one of the most extensive censorship campaigns in history.

Even right under the nose of Banned Books Week, we are censors. Every single day, we prevent people from accessing content that makes us uncomfortable – online. We take the single greatest advance in the open dissemination of ideas since the printing press and slap filters on it. I just don’t understand how librarians can allow and encourage patrons to read books full of graphic sex and violence while simultaneously denying them the opportunity to access the same content online. Think of a popular urban fiction author, like Keith Lee Johnson. We’ll buy a kajillion copies of Little Black Girl Lost, we’ll display them in a place of prominence, we’ll replace them when they’re stolen, we’ll recommend them to patrons, including minors, who like Wahida Clark. But would our own computer filters let you see that exact same text on the screen? No way.

So why do we let this happen? I think it’s because public librarians fail to talk about filtering in an ethically important way. Even articles that address the controversy around filtering and intellectual freedom fall into the trap of dickering about smaller issues, such as how restrictive filters should be, how well they work, or which product is best¹. It’s easy to do, and part of me wonders if we haven’t intentionally let the ethical issues slip into the shadows out of a little bit of shame over our print/digital double standard. Perhaps we just find it easy to write off digital content because we’re format-ists. Perhaps it’s because CIPA or COPA or whatever vowel they’re using these days has leveraged our funding to quash our resistance. Perhaps we’ve just had filters for so long we’ve accepted them as necessary, or at least “grudgingly come to terms.”²

Whatever the reason, we have to take our heads out of the e-sand if we’re going to offer our patrons the service and access that is their right. There are certainly serious concerns about the efficacy and cost of filtering which need to be addressed. However, these smaller decisions on how to filter must come out of a broader understanding of why we filter at all – and of what the higher-level effects and implications of that choice may be. Basically, we need to have a frank, moral conversation to remind us what exactly we’re doing. Only once we have a clear understanding of what it means to filter can we legitimately ask ourselves how we’re going to deal with them in the real world.

In case you haven’t picked up on my rather overbearing personal opinion on this topic, I’ll lay it out – mandatory filters are censorship, big time. I’m too passionate about this to feel comfortable making a logical argument without letting you know about my bias up front. This doesn’t mean, however, that I don’t understand why many libraries can’t go without filters. Some libraries need the funding; others have communities that demand them; some have bandwidth limitations; and some librarians believe filters protect children – and even adults³ – just as surely as I believe they don’t. So I’ll do my best to set my fervor aside and, rather than trying to justify the total eradication of all filters, I will challenge you to take a good, long look at the moral ramifications of filtering before making any decisions about how to do it at your library.  I will argue that mandatory filters (and by extension, filters that silently default to “on” and/or are difficult to turn off) are morally impermissible; however, there are ethically significant ways to avoid forcible filtering without violating the needs of your library and its patrons.

First, a little background.

For all of you who are not public librarians, or who are public librarians but are way too busy struggling to keep your library running with not enough budget, staff, or technology to waste time nitpicking over a bunch of obscure legal documents, here’s the quick and dirty background.

The current federal legislation affecting filtering in public libraries is the Children’s Internet Protection Act, or CIPA. Implemented in early 2001, CIPA does not actually require all public and school libraries to install filters. However, only libraries with mandatory filters are eligible for certain federal discounts on communications technology, including Internet access.⁴ Since few libraries can simply turn their collective noses up at funding, especially in the high-demand, high-expense area of technology, many smaller libraries have only the illusion of choice.

The ALA filed a lawsuit to overturn CIPA in 2002, alleging that it violated users’ first amendment rights. A series of similar laws meant to control the dissemination of pornography online had already been repeatedly declared unconstitutional on these grounds.⁵ The Eastern District of Pennsylvania unanimously agreed with the ALA, but the U.S. Supreme Court did not. On June 23, 2003, the court ruled 6-3 that CIPA was constitutional.⁶

CIPA was meant to apply only to children,⁷ but recently state legislation allowing constitutionally protected speech to be denied to adults has been gaining hold. In Bradburn v. North Central Regional Library, the Washington Supreme Court allowed the library to refuse to disable a filter for an adult patron.⁸ (That’s pretty scary to me. I became a librarian to be a guide to an overwhelming world of information, not a stony-faced gatekeeper, judge and jury of what is acceptable.) The state argued that filtering is not censorship but a form of collection development; just as a library can choose not to buy a book, it can choose not to offer access to a website.

However, that argument doesn’t get to the heart of the issue. It’s a spurious debate that gets us bickering over semantics rather than closely examining the impact of the action we are taking when we force filters on our patrons. After all, we’re doing the same thing no matter what we call it. A rose by any other name, and all that jazz. On that note, and with a sense of the increasing pressure on libraries to use filters to deny people of all ages access to constitutionally protected content, let’s drop the semantics and the politicking and take a look at just what exactly it means to our communities when we mandate filters.

Let’s get Logical: What are we really debating?

Filtering is generally cast as the uneasy equilibrium between Freedom and Protection. We want to give our patrons maximum freedom while still protecting children. It sounds logical, right? However, it’s quite frankly ridiculous. Consider what it really means, in practical terms, to “protect” somebody from information. It means systematic denial of access. It means that people from group X are barred from accessing information on topic Y. We would never, ever consider systematically denying printed material – even “dangerous” material – to entire groups of people. Would you designate whole categories of books on certain subjects unequivocally off-limits to Muslims? To a particular political group? To women? Of course not, and there’s no reason to start just because we’re dealing with e-content.

Now, you might argue that children are not like these other groups. After all, when it comes to children and even teens, most people will recognize that not everything is appropriate for every child of every age. That does not – I repeat, does not – make it ethically permissible for the library or the librarian to categorically deny all children access to any single subject, even a taboo one. Just as with books, the librarian’s job is to offer access and guidance; the decision of what to actually utilize belongs solely to the individual child and his or her family. That choice must always be individual, never imposed by systematic discrimination based on age or any other external characteristic.

This isn’t a radical position. In fact, it’s completely consistent with how we manage children’s intellectual freedom for printed materials. Many libraries have formalized in their policies that it is the prerogative of the child and his or her guardians to make the individual choices appropriate for that particular child.  Although a librarian might try to guide a child away from a resource that doesn’t seem developmentally appropriate, it’s still the choice of the child and his or her family whether or not to heed that advice.  In the absence of parental instructions, we won’t prevent children and teens from checking out pretty much any book in the library, regardless of where it’s shelved or what it’s about.  We recognize that this value is at the very core of our work, and I cannot believe that we would intentionally sacrifice this primary ethical mandate just because the information is on a screen.

If not Freedom v Protection, what is the debate really about? It’s Intellectual Freedom as opposed to Not Offending Anybody. Offending people is a hassle. Offended people stomp up to the desk and holler at some hapless librarian or clerk in the hearing range of every other patron in the room. They point brazenly at the poor sap who had the misfortune to be minding his own business (offensively!) in other people’s line of sight. They hang around for ten minutes filling out complaint forms and demanding to speak to whoever’s in charge. They leave a trail of paperwork and hastily-scheduled departmental meetings in their wake. Letting patrons look at whatever information they choose results in loudly offended other people.

Infringing on people’s intellectual freedom, on the other hand, is easy. It’s silent. Most things that get filtered are at least potentially embarrassing, so people will slink away rather than ask for the filter to be disabled. Think the rape victim who can’t access the rape and incest hotline number (true story) will ask the librarian to come turn off the filter? Will she file a formal complaint? Probably not, and neither will a hundred other people looking for information on sexuality, health, gun rights, domestic violence …. No, taking away someone’s most basic right at the library is simple and quiet.

Making tradeoffs.

Ok, we’ve traded the rights of just a few people in a few select circumstances for a whole lot of peace and quiet. I have to ask, although I don’t want to: is that really such a bad thing? We have limited resources, especially now, and they could be used much more effectively than having librarians deal with angry people’s paperwork all day. And it is an important aspect of intellectual freedom that all patrons feel comfortable and safe in the library; if they are so offended they feel they can’t walk in the doors, their access is surely hampered.  In all seriousness and objectivity, I have to ask myself: Is it so bad to
trade a little freedom for a lot of calm?

Yes. Yes, it is. Because intellectual freedom is a moral imperative for libraries; avoiding offense is decidedly not. In fact, our moral code often intentionally offends. Demonstrating to people that there is a worldview other than their own – and that it’s just as valid – is frequently offensive. And it’s darn important. Most libraries acknowledge the importance of representing all viewpoints, regardless of personal preference, by having a balanced collection development policy; we collect materials on all sides of controversial issues and all along the political spectrum, even if our communities have a strong proclivity one way or the other. We’ve got something to offend everybody. In fact, we recognize that some things are valuable precisely because they offend people. (Banned books week comes to mind again.) Of course, it’s extremely important that we don’t offend selectively – that we aren’t actually biasing our collection toward or against any particular group or viewpoint. No, libraries are and should be equal opportunity offenders.

So offending people now and then is OK, and probably proof that we’re doing our job right. But it’s still a hassle. Let’s look at the other affected party – the person who doesn’t get information we consider “legitimate” because of over-blocking. Let’s even assume the filter works pretty well (although many studies would disagree⁹), and that “most young patrons probably don’t care as much [about filtering] as we intellectual freedom advocates do; they are not there to access forbidden websites…mostly… they want to play games”¹⁰. In short, let’s even assume the relative rarity of a “legitimate” site being blocked. If just one person is denied the access promised to him the by Library Bill of Rights, but a hundred complaints are obviated, is it worth the tradeoff?

No. Librarians serve the community by serving individuals. By giving each and every patron my full attention and care, regardless of his or her background or views, I am also doing my best to help the community as a whole. I am creating a safe space where any and all members of the community can come to access any kind of information. I am creating community gatekeepers¹¹ who will go out into their social circles and teach others.

Although I don’t often hear library service discussed in exactly this way – serving the whole by serving the individual – I do think that the library profession generally agrees that this is effective. Look at the way we structure our everyday service. The meat and potatoes of our work is helping patrons at the reference desk one at a time or in small groups, essentially as individuals. We don’t make them wait while we weigh the merits of their individual needs against what might be best for the community – we just do our best to help. Furthermore, we embrace a Library Bill of Rights, and human rights by definition are meant to apply to each and every individual.

All of this means that when we allow a single individual to lose access, we are causing much, much greater harm than we realize. We negatively influence the entire community. Not only have we made that person uncomfortable in the library, we have also adversely affected anybody he or she  tells about the experience. We have contributed to creating a restrictive, oppressive space for the whole neighborhood. If we serve the community best by serving the individual best, we’re just plain lowering the quality of our service. Worst of all, we are violating somebody’s right. Yikes. The library is frequently upheld as a shining symbol of democracy, a “cornerstone of the American Dream,”¹² and we are seriously compromising our symbolic purpose if we can’t even uphold the most basic rights we promise to all people. And that means all people – even kids, even teens, even people who smell bad and carry their stuff around in garbage bags, even people who want to look at something controversial. Perhaps especially them, since the barriers they face to access are so high.

Is damaging the community, creating an unsafe space, and violating the public trust in our purpose worth a little (or even a lot) less hassle? No. No, it definitely is not.

Community values don’t exist.

I’ve demonstrated that it’s immoral to impose filters on our communities. But some might argue that this leaves one possible loophole: a community with strong traditional values might decide as a whole to embrace filters for itself. Could it be ethically permissible for the community to choose mandatory filters, for children or even for adults?  Dean Marney, director of the North Central Regional Library (the library which blocks online constitutionally-protected speech from adults; see “First, A Little Background” for a refresher), thinks so. He argues that “we must be responsible to the communities we serve.”¹³ “Community values” often seem to be the rallying cry for censorship, especially for children, and especially online.

However, what we call “community values” are really only “majority values,” or sometimes even “loudest minority values.” Making sweeping generalizations based on “community” values assumes that your community is perfectly homogenous. It’s not. No matter what the most vocal members of your community assert, no matter how small, how insular, or how traditional your area may be, it is full of sub-groups, dissenting opinions, and individual diversity. There will always be people who want to view the legal content you have blocked, even if they remain silent about it.  If a library believes in serving individuals, if it purports to value human rights, it cannot morally allow the preferences of the majority to trample on the rights of the minorities.

That’s not to say we can’t take into consideration the majority opinion, and craft policies that will best serve its members. In fact, I believe strongly that libraries should be responsive to their patrons’ needs, and that’s why I don’t offer a one-size-fits-all filtering solution. Within certain ethical boundaries, there are many ways to tailor your policies and services to your majority community. However, there is a moral line that must be drawn when majority-serving policies begin to infringe on the rights of other individuals. As we’ve long believed for print materials, which we collect even when they offend the political or social sensibilities of the majority, the tastes of 99% of your population do not override the rights of those remaining few.

Whether analog or digital, libraries have a moral obligation to represent the minority opinion as fairly as the majority one; we have a responsibility to serve the individual who disagrees as fervently as the one who conforms. If we make intellectual freedom a privilege for those who hold the predominant local viewpoints and values, we don’t really uphold intellectual freedom at all. As the great revolutionary and social philosopher Rosa Luxemburg wrote, “Freedom is always and exclusively freedom for the one who thinks differently.”¹⁴

Oops, there’s real life again.

Hopefully I’ve convinced you that mandatory filtering in libraries is incompatible with our core values. Now what are we supposed to do about parents who want their kids on filtered computers? How are we supposed to deal with a community that by and large clamors loudly in favor of filtering? How will we afford to provide sufficient computer and Internet service when CIPA will cut our already-meager funding if we don’t filter?

In real life, some form of filtering is probably necessary in most cases. While I don’t personally agree with policies that restrict legal content, even pornography, I understand that in most communities patrons expect and want such restrictions. A filter may be a more practical solution than having librarians spend their entire day running around playing computer police.¹⁵ The option for a parent to enable a filter for his own child may make him feel that his child is safer on library computers. And most of us can’t afford to spit in the eye of federal funding. So how can we balance a practical need for some form of filtering with our moral responsibility to provide access?

In Filters and the Public Library: A Legal and Policy Analysis¹⁶, Mary Minow details the many options for mandatory, optional, or lack of filtering and their implications for patrons’ rights. Since I really can’t do a better or more succinct job, I’ll direct you to her for the nitty gritty details involved in selecting the right option for your library. Her overarching conclusions are similar to mine: mandatory filtering is morally impermissible, but there are a variety of acceptable ways to make filters optional or remove them altogether. (She calls possibilities in which individuals can choose for themselves to enable a filter or work at a filtered machine “pro-choice”, which I love.) I’d like to use my little soapbox here to offer what she does not – some suggestions to help you respect the more conservative values of your community while implementing one of these less stringent filtering policies.

There are some practical ways to make all patrons feel safe in the library, even with optional or no filters. These can be as simple as “turning computer screens away from foot traffic and installing privacy screens”¹⁷ so that no patron of any age will accidentally stumble upon what another is viewing. Children’s computers can feature prominent links to preselected sites “such as the ALA’s Great Web Sites for Kids … and search engines specially designed for children.”¹⁸ More important, however, is creating a use policy consistent with the library’s mission and its treatment of print materials. However liberal or restrictive your computer use policy (and the ethics of that is well beyond the scope of this piece), “viewing of inappropriate images [is] a behavioral issue… the best approach is to address the matter with the end user, rather than trying to make the material inaccessible.”¹⁹ Clear rules and consistent, enforceable punishments for breaking those rules are already our primary tools for governing acceptable behavior in the library’s meatspace. Done right, they should be just as effective (read: not perfect, but pretty good) in governing computer use.

However, these small, practical measures are clearly not sufficient on their own. The best way to make public computers more useful and safe for all patrons, including but not limited to children, is education. As the National Research Council so eloquently states in Youth, Pornography, and the Internet, “Swimming pools can be dangerous for children. To protect them, one can install locks, put up fences, and deploy pool alarms. All these measures are helpful, but by far the most important thing that one can do for one’s children is to teach them to swim.”²⁰ By relying on an automated system to block content, we are missing a critical and valuable opportunity to teach children (and adults) to “swim” in an online world. When we deprive them of this opportunity to learn, we do them a disservice both in the library and when they are outside the reach of our computerized safety net.

I recognize that trading an electronic band-aid for deep education is not easy. Education is expensive and difficult to implement. As far as I know, there are no studies that document how effective various forms of education may be in improving appropriate behavior and safety on public computers, which means we have no roadmap. And all pro-education, anti-mandatory-filter options mean no e-Rate funding. And yes, that stinks. I tried to think of an option that would be morally acceptable and let you keep the money. I really did. But, as happens so often, it’s your money or your soul. A good bargain is just not a morally weighty counterbalance to a violation of children’s rights and the core values of our profession. Sorry. If your library absolutely cannot maintain public Internet access at all without the discount … weeeelll, ok. While it’s difficult to embrace solutions with a high price tag, especially in a time of severe and widespread budget cuts, it is possible to take steps in the right direction. On the bright side, if we can free ourselves of dependence on strings-attached government funding, we can be a more objective and free institution in the long run.

Eliminating filters is possible, and some intrepid libraries are paving the way for the rest of us each day. The Sonoma County Library is an especially good example of a system that overcame the concerns of its community and even the objection of its own grand jury to implement a no-filter strategy that benefits all users. Their fantastic response to the jury is one of the best pragmatic defenses of the power of a filter-free library out there.²¹ The San Jose Public Library took an equally staunch, if somewhat less inspiringly documented, stance.²²

Of course, what works for them may not work for you. The best real-life solution for your library will be individual. Your community’s majority values, its size, the physical constraints of your space, the condition of your budget, and many other factors will influence what the elimination of mandatory filters would look like in your library. I hope the few suggestions and examples I’ve offered have at least convinced you that this is both worthwhile and possible in your community. We all deal daily with practical concerns that make honoring the big-picture issue difficult and that require compromise. What matters is that we address these realities through an ethical lens; that rather than blithely accepting the status quo, we recognize that our decisions have serious moral implications for library service.

And in Conclusion (i.e., you probably could have just skipped to this part)

The debate about filters is not really about two ethical issues, freedom and safety. It’s about the ethical issue of freedom pitted against the more practical issue of offending patrons. Mandatory filters create a double-standard for intellectual freedom by denying users digital materials we would happily give them in print; they unfairly bias against open access for children and those looking up sensitive or controversial information; and they reduce the quality and value of the service we provide to all. In the real world, sometimes we have to bend a bit on principles in favor of practicality; but we must always recognize that this is what we are doing, and consider the damage we may cause.

Ahniwa Ferrari

Audrey provides some excellent arguments against filtering, but if you ask me she’s a little gaga²³.

Also, she’s wrong.

Okay, so not wrong in the sense that she isn’t right. But she is wrong in the sense that there’s no simple solution for filtering and, more importantly, we can’t say that filtering is bad. We can’t say it’s good, either, because filtering isn’t bad or good on a broad scale, but it’s something that needs to be looked at in every individual case to determine if it is, or is not, the appropriate tool for the job.

And the job is a tough one.

My job is tough, too. I’m supposed to provide the PRO-filter argument in this little pro/con piece. I was asked to fill this role because I was vocally supportive of the decision to uphold filtering in the controversial superior court case here in Washington involving the North Central Regional Library. The problem is, though, I’m not pro-filter, and in that particular case, my argument was much less pro-filter and very much more pro-library.

You see, library filtering is a lot like abortion.

Okay, not really, but a similar approach to the two issues is useful. For instance, nobody is actually pro-abortion. Those people picketing outside the clinics are against abortion, and their opponents don’t fall on the opposite end of the spectrum – they hang out in the middle. Similarly, those who choose to picket outside the library (usually on the interwebs) are not pro-filtering, they’re against it, and again their opposition isn’t on the other side of the spectrum, but in the middle.

We’re not pro-abortion, and we’re not pro-filtering. We’re pro-choice.

Why are we pro-choice? Because libraries operate in vastly different communities and each one, dealing with its own particular set of circumstances, must make the choice that it feels is appropriate. That there are two libraries in California who decided to take a stand against filtering and, by extension (if you take their and Audrey’s word for it), censorship, is great. I’m glad that worked out for them, and I’m sure they did it because they felt it was in the best service to their communities. But every community is different, and what is right for one is not right for all.

Let’s take the North Central Regional Library case as an example.

Demographically, there are 28 libraries in the NCRL system; 14 of them serve as the de facto school libraries for their school districts. 16 of them only have one computer in the building. Most of them are very small libraries (the largest about 2000 sq ft), in very small communities. These libraries are essential to these small communities where people can’t afford broadband and where kids need a quiet place to study.

I’ll repeat part of that, since it seems fairly important. Half of the libraries in NCRL are also the de facto school library for their school district. Yeah, they’re public libraries, but they aren’t public libraries like they have in Sonoma County or in San José. In terms of being a de facto school library, in being completely understaffed, in having only one single computer for public use – how can we judge filtering in a library like this unless we’ve been there? Shouldn’t we trust that the librarian in charge of a particular library has the best knowledge of what is the right course of action for that library? I’m willing to do so when it comes to libraries making anti-filtering choices in California. I’m even willing to applaud them. But I think that the North Central Regional Library system deserves applause, too, because it’s taking a very unpopular stance to do what it thinks is appropriate in terms of serving its community.

Jan Walsh, Washington State Librarian at the time (now retired), stated her support of the decision²⁴in terms I couldn’t agree with more. She said:

I am pleased that our state Supreme Court  has handed down a strong, sensible ruling that gives our public libraries flexibility to reflect their community values as they adopt Internet policies and use of filters on certain content.

I know that the library community is divided over this issue and certainly as a veteran librarian I understand the points of view about unfettered access versus policies that protect our school children and others from pornography and other objectionable and potentially harmful material.  I believe this 6-3 Supreme Court ruling, and the federal ruling that we expect will follow, provides public libraries with permission to adopt a reasonable filter system if that fits the needs of their community. We support libraries listening to their patrons. If that value is to have no filter, then that’s fine.

This is not a free speech issue, in my mind. It is about what your community needs. It is about the use of our taxpayers’ limited resources and our libraries’ limited resources.

Dean Marney, Director of the North Central Regional Library, also provided a response²⁵ that I feel is worth repeating here in full:

NCRL is pleased with the Supreme Court’s decision validating our approach to Internet filtering. We embrace the Internet as a resource and encourage its use by all patrons. NCRL will continue to provide broad access to a wealth of rich and diverse online content consistent with our Collection Development policy and our mission to promote reading and lifelong learning.

More generally, we are heartened by the Court’s acknowledgement of the multi-faceted role many public libraries must perform today. In fulfilling its role, NCRL must balance many important interests, some borne of tradition and some arising as a consequence of an increasingly complex world. First and foremost, NCRL is a traditional, full service library serving Chelan, Douglas, Grant, Ferry, and Okanogan Counties. We must consider the diverse needs of all our patrons, adults and children alike, in shaping our print and online collections. We strive to offer resources of depth, breadth, and quality yet we must do so within ever-tightening budget constraints. We also provide vital support to public schools throughout the region, including services that in some instances children might go without were it not for NCRL. We also have important workplace and safety responsibilities to our staff and our patrons. We are gratified to know that the highest Court in our State understands the context in which NCRL operates and the discretion we must exercise to perform our essential functions.

It’s about choice. Libraries make choices every day about how to best serve their communities. The libraries who do this best are the ones who don’t take a standard approach, but think about their communities, in particular, and their particular needs, and creates a policy that responds to those needs. Sonoma County did this, and San José did this, and North Central did this too. All three libraries acted courageously and made tough decisions, but what is more courageous: acting in a way that draws accolade from your peers, or making the tough, unpopular decision because you feel it best serves your library’s community.

Filtering and Censorship and Collection Development

The Supreme Court decision was that filtering the internet is actually an application of collection development. This seems to me like a strange approach, one no doubt conceived by lawyers as well as (if not more so than) librarians, but let’s run with it.

Libraries have collection development policies that they use to determine which materials get added to their collections. These policies act as a filter, basically, through which our purchase of materials is made: Item one, book on the holocaust written in a fair manner showing both sides – Purchased; Item two, book on the holocaust written by a known anti-Semitic group which makes no attempt to be fair and distorts historical fact – Rejected. While libraries will do their best to represent both sides fairly in any controversial topic, they must use their discretion to determine what “fair” means and reject items that don’t meet that standard.

These decisions happen all the time, though they’re mostly invisible to the public, for whom items magically appear on the shelves. The fact is, librarians do their best at all times to provide the best information to their patrons while removing the information that they feel is of no value or harmful to the community. This is filtering, absolutely, but is it censorship? Is the argument really that different when we talk about filtering practices on the internet as opposed to the filtering practices we incorporate into our purchase of physical materials?

You may argue that buying books is opt-in while internet filtering is opt-out. In other words, in book purchasing we select items to buy, while with internet filtering we select items to keep out. There’s also a cost issue; we pay for each book we purchase, but we don’t pay for each website, they all come included as part of the great wide interwebs. These arguments have some merit, but they’re really just distractions when you remember the underlying purpose of collection development: to provide good content and filter out bad content. Whether you opt in, out, or sideways, the idea is to not only provide the best books, but also the better websites, so that people can find quality information and avoid being fooled by sophistry and scam.

Human Filtering Vs. Computer Filtering

More and more the filtering of physical materials is not a completely human process. Our lovely vendors offer to do a lot of the filtering for us²⁶, and it becomes very hard to tell what falls through the cracks. All the same, we’ll assume that there is much more human intervention in the selection of physical materials than there is in the filtering software that libraries use to select what internet sites are viewable. And we’ll even assume, as the Librarian in Black insists²⁷, that all filtering software available to libraries is pretty much ineffective, both by block “good” websites and not blocking “bad” websites.

At this point I should make a confession. I have a ten-year old at home, and I filter his web access. I’m not ashamed of this decision, being that it was born of a situation where he had searched for and found porn and had, at the end of the day, been so overwhelmed and ashamed at what he had seen that he literally burst into racking sobs when he told us about it a couple days later. It had obviously been eating away at him, and this in a house where we had never been anything less than honest and open in talking about sex and where everyone saw each other naked from time to time without it being a big deal. We talked to him about it, of course, to help him make sense of what he saw, to get over his shame, and to set his mind at ease. Then we decided to create an environment where he wouldn’t have to worry about it anymore.

The filter we use at home is a very simple Firefox add-on called ProCon Latte²⁸, and it just plain works. It has without exception blocked all objectionable sites, and while it has also blocked a handful of legitimate sites it was short work to make those sites accessible by adding them to a white list. Maybe the web searching patterns of a ten-year old are not indicative of those of the general public, but my experience with filtering has been positive and I find it hard to believe that my completely free add-on filter is so much better than every other commercial paid filter that libraries can utilize.

Filters In A Perfect World

Obviously, filters aren’t perfect, and most libraries’ filtering policies are probably not perfect either. In a perfect world, every library would have a filter that aligned perfectly with the needs of its community – for some that might mean only blocking the very worst of sites, for others it may mean blocking more. And in every case, should a user find their access blocked to a website that they feel should be accessible, there should be a way for them to access that site without the need for direct appeal to a librarian and without having to wait for the site to be reviewed by some committee. Access should be immediate, and review should come afterwards to determine ongoing accessibility, without impacting that user at that time, and without causing them embarrassment in having to ask to have the filters turned off.

Lacking a perfect world, we’ll continue to do the best we can. For some libraries that may mean removing filters entirely. For others, that may mean forging ahead with whatever filters they have because they don’t see a better alternative. Libraries serve their communities first, and one must assume that they’re doing so as effectively as they can. Whatever high-minded ideals are involved, and the ideals are important, we must allow libraries to choose how to interpret them. It is a balancing act, to be sure, between issues of free speech and appropriate service to a specific community. It’s a choice that we as spectators should not presume to make, but one that each library must grapple and come to terms with. Our job, as outsiders who claim to advocate for libraries, is to support those decisions, whatever they may be, within the communities in which they are made.

References for Audrey Barbaroff’s Post

ALA Office for Literacy & Outreach Services. (2010). The American Dream Starts @ Your Library. http://www.olos.ala.org/americandream/

American Library Association. (2010). CPPA, COPA, CIPA: Which Is Which? http://www.ala.org/ala/aboutala/offices/oif/ifissues/issuesrelatedlinks/cppacopacipa.cfm

American Library Association. (2003). Libraries, the Internet and Filtering. http://www.ala.org/Template.cfm?Section=litoolkit&Template=/ContentManagement/ContentDisplay.cfm&ContentID=164201

American Library Association. (1996.) Library Bill of Rights. http://www.ala.org/ala/issuesadvocacy/intfreedom/librarybill/index.cfm

Federal Communications Commission. (2009). Children’s Internet Protection Act. http://www.fcc.gov/cgb/consumerfacts/cipa.html

Goldberg, Beverly. (2009). On the Line for the First Amendment. American Libraries. http://americanlibrariesmagazine.org/features/05272009/line-first-amendment

Goldberg, Beverly. (2010) Ruling: Washington Libraries Can Deny Adults Unfiltered Internet. American Libraries. http://americanlibrariesmagazine.org/news/05102010/ruling-washington-libraries-can-deny-adults-unfiltered-internet

Houghton-Jan, Sarah. (2008). Internet Filtering Software Tests: Barracuda, CyberPatrol, FilterGate, & WebSense. Report to the San Jose Public Library. http://www.sjlibrary.org/about/sjpl/commission/agen0208_report.pdf

Houghton-Jan, Sarah. (May 07, 2010). Why internet filters don’t work and why libraries who filter are wrong. Librarian in Black. http://librarianinblack.net/librarianinblack/2010/05/filtering.html

Janes, Joe. (October 6, 2009). Censorship Gets Smart. The Internet Librarian. http://americanlibrariesmagazine.org/columns/internet-librarian/censorship-gets-smart

Luxemburg, R. (1961). The Russian Revolution, and Leninism or Marxism?. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

Marney, Dean. (November 1, 2010). The Internet Is Not All or Nothing. Library Journal. http://www.libraryjournal.com/lj/communityopinion/887222-274/lj_backtalk_the_internet_is.html.csp

Metoyer-Duran, C. (January 01, 1993). Information Gatekeepers. Annual Review of Information Science and Technology (arist), 28, 111-50.

Nichols, S. (January 22, 2009). COPA Child-Porn Law Killed. PC World. http://www.pcworld.com/article/158131/copa_childporn_law_killed.html

Oder, N. (2007.) Proposed state filter law would go beyond CIPA. Library Journal. http://www.libraryjournal.com/lj/community/legislation/851065-270/story.csp

Oder, N. (2009.) After 18 Months, San Jose Council Says No to Internet Filters. Library Journal. http://www.libraryjournal.com/lj/community/legislation/854791-270/after_18_months_san_jose.html.csp

Oder, N. (2010). ACLU still concerned about whether individual libraries overblock. http://www.libraryjournal.com/lj/community/intellectualfreedom/869102-269/rhode_island_pls_fix_filtering.html.csp

Plumer, D. (2001). Literature Review and Analysis: Internet Filters and Intellectual Freedom. University of Texas at Austin Graduate School of Library and Information Science. http://www.gslis.utexas.edu/~i380kdcp/SP04/Plumer-research.pdf

Sobel, D. (2003). Internet Filters and Public Libraries. First Amendment Center: Washington D.C. http://www.firstamendmentcenter.org/PDF/Internetfilters.pdf

Sonoma County Library Commission. (2010). Sonoma County Library Commission Response to the 2009-2010 Grand Jury Report. http://www.sonomalibrary.org/agenda/Grand%20Jury%20Response/Grand%20Jury%20Response%202010_final.pdf

Walter, V.A. (September 23, 2009). The Children We Serve. American Libraries. http://americanlibrariesmagazine.org/features/09232009/children-we-serve

References for Ahniwa Ferrari’s Post

“Librarians Do Gaga.” Youtube: Athenasbanquet. May 27, 2010. <http://bit.ly/gyYXd1>.

Oder, Norman. “Updated: Washington Supreme Court, 6-3, Backs Library System’s Full Filtering Policy.” Library Journal. May 6, 2010. <http://bit.ly/ef9GdJ>.

Marney, Dean. “Washington State Supreme Court Opinion.” North Central Regional Library. May 06, 2010. <http://bit.ly/i3QKxs>.

Houghton-Jan, Sarah. “Why Internet Filters Don’t Work and Why Libraries Who Filter Are Wrong.” Librarian in Black. May 07, 2010. <http://bit.ly/h4oDcN>.

“ProCon Latte.” Add-ons for Firefox: corvineum. July 17, 2009. <http://bit.ly/i0KFxC>.

___

Many thanks to Linda Johns, Ellie Collier and Eric Frierson for reading earlier drafts of this post and for all of their helpful comments and suggestions.

1. For an example, see Carr, 2010. Despite the title’s implication, nearly half the article focuses on how well particular filtering technologies work. Even Judith Krug, past director of ALA’s Office of Intellectual Freedom, spent much of the interview re-posted in Goldberg, 2009 framing her discussion with the problems of a particular technology, SurfWatch, rather than the issue of filtering as a whole. Library Journal is particularly guilty of focusing heavily on logistics with little to no real discussion of the underlying ethical issues. The San Jose Council’s decision to remove filters was reported as one almost purely of cost (Oder, 2009). Some articles (Oder, 2007) highlight librarians’ resistance to filtering mandates or concerns, but fail to open discussion on why such struggle is warranted. Others (Oder, 2010) talk specifically about over or underblocked content, but never mention, much less debate, the impact on intellectual freedom as a whole. A search of LJ’s site yields many similar examples
2. Janes, 2009
3. Goldberg, 2010
4. FCC, 2009
5. For more information on the legality of CIPA and its predecessors, see ALA, 2010; Sobel, 2003; and Plumer, 2001
6. ALA, 2010
7. ibid
8. Goldberg, 2010
9. ALA, 2003; Houghton-Jan, 2010; Houghton-Jan, 2008
10. Walter, 2009
11. Metoyer, 1993
12. ALA Office for Literacy & Outreach Services, 2010
13. Marney, 2010
14. Luxemborg, 1961
15. Or it may not be. See Houghton-Jan, 2010.
16. Minow, 1997
17. Minow, 1997
18. ALA, 2003
19. Sonoma County Library Commission, 2010
20. ALA, 2003
21. ibid
22. Oder, 2009; Houghton-Jan, 2008.
23. “Librarians Do Gaga”, 2010. Audrey has an acting role in the video.
24. Her statement can be found in Oder, 2010.
25. Marney, 2010.
26. The most common way this happens is through the use of approval plans.
27. Houghton-Jan, 2010
28. “ProCon Latte”, 2009

By ian boyd on Flickr

Introduction

Let’s start off with a little background and context, just in case you haven’t been glued to the news to catch every nuance of the WikiLeaks story. The Guardian has a helpful timeline of the saga to get you (at least partially) up to speed, and if you don’t like theirs, there are plenty of others. Overall, the various issues and plotlines in the WikiLeaks story make it so complex that it’s highly challenging to summarize. The simplified version would go something like this:

Once upon a time, a young hacker (Julian Assange) decided that the world would be a better place if there were no secrets and all information were shared. He founded an international organization of tech-savvy activists (WikiLeaks) to create a protected, anonymous platform where individuals could safely share secret information and expose corruption. The organization was successful and began to expose all kinds of formerly secret information to the world. Unfortunately, the world was not entirely happy about it. The governments who had created the secret documents got angry and began to point fingers. The United States accused and arrested a young man (Bradley Manning) who they thought had betrayed them, while American politicians began to speak out against the organization. The U.S. government wanted to arrest the organization’s leader (again, Assange), but couldn’t figure out exactly what he had done wrong.

Suddenly, bad things began to happen to the organization. Companies that provided internet hosting, financial services, and other support for the organization began to close its accounts. Other tech-savvy activists with strong opinions about freedom of information (Anonymous) began to attack the websites of the companies that had closed the organization’s accounts. Next the Swedish police announced that they wanted to arrest the organization’s leader for taking advantage of two women. The women accused the leader of doing bad things to them, changed their minds, and then changed their minds back again. The U.S. got in line to prosecute him because he had made them look bad. Finally, the organization’s leader was arrested in London and a wacky liberal dude (Michael Moore) paid his bail so he could stay with a British friend and await trial (for what, we’re still not entirely sure). Most recently, the organization’s leader announced that he’ll be writing a book to cover his legal costs. Stay tuned for next year.

That brings us up to the present day. It is far from over, but a few Lead Pipers wanted to join the fray and weigh in on the situation from the librarian point of view. So here goes…

Kim on Information Activism & Scale

Considered as a historical document, the WikiLeaks “About” page reads something like the American Declaration of Independence. It describes as underlying principles of the organization a belief in “the defence of freedom of speech and media publishing, the improvement of our common historical record and the support of the rights of all people to create new history.” It quotes Thomas Jefferson in the assertion that “the price of freedom is eternal vigilance.” It refers directly to the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights and specifically to Article 19, which states, “Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.” And, like those rebels who produced the Declaration of Independence, the organization behind the document is now facing the consequences. Within the past month WikiLeaks accounts have been closed or suspended by an increasing list of companies including Amazon, MasterCard, Visa, PayPal, Bank of America, and Apple. EveryDNS.net pulled their primary domain, wikileaks.org, offline (though not to worry, they have seemingly endless mirrors of the site). Not to mention the sexual assault allegations filed against WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange in Sweden. Right or wrong, it’s an astounding modern tale of David v. Goliath on an international scale.

What’s a librarian to think? We, of course, have our own declaration, the Library Bill of Rights, which asserts that libraries “should challenge censorship in the fulfillment of their responsibility to provide information and enlightenment.” It’s interesting, though not surprising, that one of the computer wallpaper options offered on the WikiLeaks “Support” page uses the same phrasing as a well-known library blog, “Information wants to be free.” Meanwhile, in the recent YouTube release of the Swedish television documentary WikiRebels, the term “information activist” was used several times to describe Assange. Evidenced in part by yet another rhetorically related library blog, I expect that many librarians would consider themselves information activists, if asked. In a post on The Young Librarians Series blog, Leah White defined an information activist as “a vigorous advocate of knowledge gained through study, communication, research or instruction.” Assange says that the people behind WikiLeaks, “believe a richer intellectual and historical record that is fuller and more accurate is in itself intrinsically good, and gives people the tools to make intelligent decisions.” While librarians don’t handle classified government documents on a daily basis, there’s a clear connection between the philosophy of WikiLeaks and that of our libraries. Information creates a knowledgeable citizenry, and a knowledgeable citizenry makes better choices.

Yet all libraries are clearly not on the same page when it comes to WikiLeaks: the Library of Congress, mother ship of all U.S. libraries, blocked access to the controversial website from its computers, though they apparently reinstated it later. Even the most opinionated information advocate — in fact, Assange himself (based on the change in WikiLeaks policy to edit later documents) — acknowledges that if the release of classified documents may cause harm to individuals named in those documents, there may be limits to how much information is good information. There is a line where information may shift from empowering to dangerous, and WikiLeaks has been walking that line. Still, the crux of the issue is whether an organization should have the right to publicly release leaked documents, which boils down to freedom of the press. When is it okay to censor a media organization? There’s no easy answer to that question, particularly when you consider an organization that exists outside the laws of any particular nation.

Complicating the issue, the most fascinating aspect of the WikiLeaks controversy is the fact that it’s a completely new phenomenon. Documents have been leaked in the past, both in the U.S. and in other nations, but they’ve been leaked to newspapers and other media on a smaller scale. The scale was smaller in large part because it took time to photocopy documents and send them to journalists, and once the documents had been leaked newspapers could only publish a certain amount at a time. The internet changed that playing field. What we’re seeing with WikiLeaks could never have happened before, and neither United States nor international law was prepared to deal with it. In an interview with Daniel Ellsberg, Assange’s predecessor commented:

This is the first really large-scale, unauthorized disclosure leak since the Pentagon papers. There has been nothing like it in the 40 years in between…. I couldn’t have released on this scale 40 years ago. In fact, I couldn’t have done what I did do without Xerox at that time. Ten years earlier I couldn’t have put out the Pentagon Papers.

WikiLeaks has gained so much attention not just because they are publishing classified documents, but because technology has made it possible for them to publish mind-boggling quantities of classified information without going through any traditional media outlets. Assange has coordinated with various international newspapers, but those papers have played the game on WikiLeaks’ terms. Furthermore, WikiLeaks is publishing this information without being subject to the laws of any individual nation, as their organization is distributed around the world. Most fascinating of all, behind Assange and WikiLeaks is a virtual guerilla army of the techno-savvy who have repeatedly–and with some success–attacked the companies who have taken a stance against WikiLeaks. We’re looking at a scenario in which the Web is like the nineteenth-century American West, and Assange is the new sheriff in town.

Eric on Transparency

If WikiLeaks has taught me anything, it’s the value of creating a culture of transparency. To be transparent is to have the ability to make decisions with clear objectives and reasoning and to be prepared with justification for one’s actions.

That’s the real value in transparency: you’re held accountable for your actions, and knowing that, you think critically before acting. You don’t want to make a mistake that will be seen by all, so you make sure your choices are sound. You make fewer poor decisions because you know what you do is in the open. Best of all, in a transparent society, you are ready to answer the “Why?” questions that will be asked after you’ve make a decision. Even if you make a mistake, you will have your reasoning to explain your actions.

On the Library of Congress’s blog, Matt Raymond shares the LOC’s statement on the decision to block WikiLeaks:

The Library decided to block Wikileaks because applicable law obligates federal agencies to protect classified information. Unauthorized disclosures of classified documents do not alter the documents’ classified status or automatically result in declassification of the documents.

This is the equivalent of saying, “Them’s the rules.” It’s an easy out for government agencies. If the White House says so, then that’s the way it’s going to be. There’s no apparent critical thinking. There’s no reasoning. There’s simply following the rules.

I’m the father of a toddler. It’s much easier for me to say “Stop drawing on the wall with permanent marker” and put my kid into a timeout for defying that order than it is to get my kid to understand why drawing on the walls is a bad thing. After all, the kid will stop once put in a timeout. There’s no need to explain to him why his actions were bad–he just knows that there’s a punishment associated with that behavior and that’s enough to get him to stop. His toddler brain isn’t ready for critical thinking; it just responds to a negative stimulus.

At some point, he’s going to develop the capability to think for himself and solve complex problems. His vocabulary will shift from predominantly “NO” to predominantly “WHY?” My parenting strategy had better be ready for this. If I lay down rules like “Don’t dunk the kitty in the bathwater,” I had better be prepared with good reasons for why it’s a bad idea.

That’s much harder to do. It’s ridiculously easy to get my kid to follow rules now. As he grows, he’ll become more defiant if he can’t make sense of the rules of the house. This means I’ve got to be more transparent on why the rules exist; if I can’t come up with a good reason, I have to be willing to admit that they might not need to exist at all.

That’s the situation the Library of Congress was put in. It is enforcing a rule that has no apparent reasoning, and the American public is not a bunch of toddlers. The LOC needs to articulate the reasons for their actions. Perhaps they need to demand that the White House provide reasoning for its rules before following them. Simply citing a message from the White House is not reasoning.

Like the librarians who defied the PATRIOT Act by deleting circulation records and fighting the law in court, it’s time for the Library of Congress and any others who are told to ‘protect’ classified information to demand reasoning. It’s time for our government to be able to articulate why WikiLeak’d documents need protection in a way they helps us understand the decisions that are being made.

That said, I can’t claim that WikiLeaks should or should not be blocked. I haven’t read the vast majority of them, nor do I have the diplomatic or military expertise to know what would be a breach of security that would put real lives at risk. I do expect that the American public should demand reasons for civilian deaths in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. “Because they are embarrassing” is not a reasonable explanation for their protection. We need to know because the actions taken by our military and government are on the American public’s behalf.

Transparency is hard. It requires time to think deeper about decisions, to be prepared with an articulated reasoning for one’s actions, and to communicate reasons to the appropriate audiences. It also means that when you make a mistake, you learn from it.

Leigh Anne Throws the Books at You

And now for something completely different: the role of print artifacts in a digital scandal.

In a case of dueling memoirs that simply cries out for Aaron Sorkin’s input on the inevitable feature film, both Julian Assange and his WikiLeaks co-founder, Daniel Domscheit-Berg (a.k.a. Daniel Schmitt) have acquired publishing contracts for their version of what one could call WikiLeaks Genesis.  Yes, you read that correctly:  two people who leveraged social technologies to turn world politics upside down are now seeking both commercial gain and cultural legitimacy in the form of traditional print books and conventional publishing channels. This is what happens, apparently, when you upset Amazon, MasterCard, Visa, and PayPal: you’re forced to spread your message via an outdated medium that is (I hear) dying.

I shouldn’t joke; it’s not funny. And yet, in some ways it is. It’s just not “ha-ha” funny. Perhaps it’s more akin to that uncomfortable laughter that settles over a party when someone expresses controversial opinions in mixed company. Once more the question arises, a question some librarians thought long-settled: what is the appropriate role and value of a physical book in a 21st-century library environment?

Random House/Knopf/Crown certainly sees value, to the tune of $1.5 million for Assange, who vows to pour it all back into WikiLeaks. In the temporary absence of pre-pubs and review copies, librarians are left solely with their ethics and policies as the basis for decision-making about books that are certain to fly off library shelves, if purchased. But is popular demand enough, in this situation? Does the permanence of a physical text imply inevitable inclusion in a physical library?

Put on your collection development hats, librarians, and ask yourself some questions.  Will you purchase Schmitt and Assange’s books for your collections?  At least one pundit claims Assange’s writing shouldn’t be published at all. How would you respond? Does your library own Assange’s prior work, Underground? If not, will you purchase it now? Other texts of cultural relevance have sprung up in both digital and print formats; will you purchase these?

To take it a step further, what is the relationship (if any) between your library’s collection development policy and its intellectual freedom policy? What portions of the ALA Code of Ethics are relevant to this discussion?  How many replacement copies will your library purchase if the works are stolen?  How would you respond to a library user’s complaint about the purchase? How long will these works be relevant to your collection?  At what point, if any, should deselection occur? How will you make all these decisions?

I ask questions rather than dictate conditions because I prefer to judge a book by its covers, as well as what lies between them. In fact I cheerfully volunteer to review both memoirs so that the library community may have the published professional review we so frequently fall back on as necessary for our collection decisions (Google me, Random House: I’m born digital!). While I personally fall firmly in the camp of those who believe information wants to be free, our own admiration of–or disdain for–the politics of WikiLeaks is not enough of an objective standard by which to make these choices.  One of our roles as librarians is to collect and preserve the cultural artifacts spawned in the wake of current events, be they memoirs, newspaper articles, blog posts or podcasts…provided we take the time and effort to craft a professional rationale, and ensure that the works meet its requirements.

Having discharged our responsibility to our patrons, what is our responsibility to ourselves as library workers?  The most wonderful thing about the decision to publish print memoirs of the WikiLeaks affair is that it forces librarians on both sides of the “print vs. digital” skirmishes to review their positions. Rather than continuously predict the death of print, why can’t technophiles concede that there are weaknesses in the digital publishing model that the traditional publishing model can supplement? Late adopters, for their part, now have the opportunity to learn, in a format they prefer, how digital activists like Assange and Schmitt are shaping the future, and why the tools they use have such critical implications for information storage and retrieval. There is a happy medium to be found here, and I’m confident that library workers can use the WikiLeaks scenario as a framework for questioning our assumptions, understanding our philosophical differences, and crafting a professional discourse in which opposing viewpoints coexist peacefully, rather than at opposite ends of the ideological spectrum.

In a delightful episode of serendipity, I’ve been reading Tracy Hickman’s novel, Song of the Dragon, between bouts of researching and writing this post. One of Hickman’s tribes is a race of elves called the Iblisi, whose function is to preserve the true history of the Rhonas empire, regardless of what fictions the various court factions cook up to gain favor with the Emperor. The Iblisi work secretly and silently, and few citizens of the Empire understand their work. However, without them, the Empire would crumble into utter confusion. So it is with librarians in the age of the 24/7 news cycle: we are here to manage the constant flow of data, and provide manageable frameworks for storage and retrieval. Sometimes that’s a book. Sometimes it’s a blog post. And sometimes, it’s a photo of questionable taste but cultural relevance. As long as the professional discourse about formats is rooted in logic, ethics and standards, I will be satisfied.

Battle on, WikiLeaks.  Battle on, librarians.  And may the odds EVER be in your favor.

Note: For those interested who will be in San Diego next week, you may want to join in on the ALA Midwinter discussion.

In the Library with the Lead Pipe welcomes guest author Adrian Whatley. Adrian Whatley is the e-Resources Librarian at Austin Community College. She views her job as connecting students to the information they need in the easiest, most time-efficient manner possible.

Poster Advertising the Student Library and Technology Use Study

Part One: Setting the Stage

Austin Community College Library Services (ACCLS), like many academic library systems, is coming to terms with an increasingly tech savvy student population that will ultimately transform the nature of the work we do, the services we provide, and the content we offer. Instead of relying on assumptions and overheated trendcasting, we wanted to hear from the students themselves: the devices they own, which social networks they frequent, and what types of tech-oriented services they would like to see from us. Our goal was to ascertain the facts that would lead to the oft-lauded data-driven decisions that all libraries seek. To that end, we conducted a college wide student library and technology use environmental scan.

The idea for doing the survey germinated in the Summer of 2009, while collaborating on a webpage that would feature a collection of links to online searching, citing, and organizing tools. After musing about what students might find most useful, we had a “Why don’t we just ask them?” moment. Ellie had recently interviewed Char Booth about her research report, Informing Innovation: Tracking Student Interest in Emerging Library Technologies at Ohio University (A Research Report), which she felt was an especially good example of hard data about student technology use. Moreover, Adrian had attended Booth’s presentation at the 14th Annual ACRL convention in Seattle, and had been very impressed by the insightful, and in some cases, counter-prevailing wisdom of the results. We batted around the idea about replicating the survey at our own institution. Would the social network usage of ACC students mirror OU’s?¹ How would community college students differ in their rate of technology adoption? And most importantly, would they friend us on Facebook?²

Part Two: Getting to Yes

Every institution has its own structure for approving projects. ACCLS functions primarily through a team structure, but was also engaged in creating a project proposal form that would allow individuals to propose projects for themselves, or for a specific team to tackle. We were very excited to take on this project ourselves, so we brainstormed approaches and settled on filling out the application for an ACC Innovation Grant as a way to organize ourselves before presenting our proposal to library management. The application process for the grant necessitated the completion of a scope and purpose statement, planning report, budget request, and project timeline. The documentation process proved invaluable to us as we pitched the project and conceptualized its deployment at ACC.  Because we had done the initial legwork of nailing down timelines and formulating grand strategies, it was easier to focus on important details, such as honing the phrasing of the survey instrument itself.

While we didn’t receive the Innovation Grant, we received strong support for the project from our library dean, who facilitated our goal of offering a cash prize rather than an electronic gadget (a move that created additional administrative hoops). She also provided extra adjunct librarian hours to afford us time off the reference desk to focus on the project.

Part Three: Nuts and Bolts

Austin Community College consists of eight campuses throughout central Texas serving roughly 44,000 students with nearly three quarters of our students attending part time. Each campus has its own library, and in 2008, all eight libraries combined had a door count of 1,124,027 and 1,014,250 hits on our homepage.³ The fact that our virtual and actual visits are nearly equivalent highlighted to us the need for a serious and measured evaluation of technology use among our student population in order to further develop digital services. We spent the Summer and Fall of 2009 determining our scope and purpose, defining the research questions, and developing the survey instrument with feedback from our colleagues. We also evaluated several types of survey software, and decided that SurveyMonkey provided the best delivery and analysis options.

Our goal was to survey the entire ACC student body. The survey itself consisted of 7 demographic questions, 21 multiple-choice questions about library and technology use, and 3 open-ended items that queried general student experiences with ACC Libraries. While drafting the instrument, we quickly found that we wished to ask many more questions than our respondents likely had the patience to answer, so some focusing of direction was necessary.

We put a lot of effort into making the survey as short as possible and ended up tabling many questions that we would have liked to ask (though we did save them for future use). Our primary criteria was, “How would we use the results from this question?” With that as a guideline we decided  to cut common survey questions like race and gender, which may have been interesting, but wasn’t going to impact whether or not we create a mobile website or offer text messaging reference. We kept demographic questions about campuses and majors so that we could gauge how representative our sample was and provide bibliographers with custom profiles. With our editors’ red pens in hand we also cut questions about information literacy, search strategies, favorite resources, and library website usage, deciding that that cell phone usage and general comfort with technology would be our main foci. We probably should have cut even more, both to increase the response rate and to reduce the amount of work needed to process and interpret the results.

Bookmarks

Promotion and distribution of the instrument took place in February. The survey was open to all ACC students and available from March 22 until April 16. We collected a total of 1,097 responses (87.8% completion rate). Promotional efforts included: a link on the library homepage, a splash on the ACC homepage, posts to the ACC faculty listserv, a presence on the library’s blackboard tab, bookmarks, posters, table tents, links on the desktops of the computers in the computer lab, links on the Student Life website and Facebook pages, and an article in the student newspaper, The Accent.  Our colleagues also greatly assisted in the marketing of the survey by directing students to it at the conclusion of library instruction sessions and reference interviews.

Part Four: Death to all open ended questions!

Ellie was able to pull together the main responses almost immediately thanks to the simplicity of reporting in Survey Monkey. Coding the responses to the open ended questions was, however, another story entirely. We decided to put our graduate school research methods course to use. We reviewed the responses independently to come up with categories, met to finalize agreed upon categories, coded the questions independently, and met again to agree upon codes. In hindsight, this was overkill. We could, theoretically, tell you our intercoder reliability now, but for our purposes, it really doesn’t matter and it added an enormous amount of time and energy to the whole process. We were able to create and demo a slideshow of graphs of the results to the multiple choice questions at multiple library meetings in May. It took us until November to complete the coding and data crunching for the open ended questions. We feel it would have been preferable to have more of the results available sooner to capitalize on the initial excitement. We would recommend cutting several steps, perhaps just reading the questions separately to brainstorm categories and attach initial codes and then meeting to come to consensus.

The open ended responses did provide an interesting look into many of our and our students’ assumptions. For example, a number of the responses to our question about texting services made it clear that students did not know they could renew books online. We had a different question that asked students what services they were and weren’t familiar with and 32% responded that they didn’t know they could renew books online. However, the open ended responses made much more of an impact on us. So, to be clear, we’re not saying don’t use open ended questions, just don’t worry about being quite as thorough as we were.

Part Five: Results!

For full summary of results, or to follow along with graphic representations of the data while you’re reading, open the slideshow.

Before detailing responses, we would like to caution that this is a convenience sample rather than a probability sample. Nearly half (47%) of respondents learned of the survey through the library website, so results are skewed towards students who use the library website. [slide 2] However, we were pleased to see a large response number (total started survey: 1,250, total completed survey: 1,097) and a wide variety of majors represented, with the highest being Nursing (151, 12.4%) and General Education Transfer Credits (98, 8.1%). [slide 4]

Overall, we had generally positive feedback, in particular, that the library is valued as physical quiet space to work/study. Students reported physically coming to the library (63% 2-3 times/week or more) more than using the library website (45% 2-3 times/week or more). [slide 12] This mirrored the Informing Innovation results which also showed a greater use of the library building than the library website (p. 67)

We saw from Booth’s report that the study had a side effect of increasing student awareness of library services. With that in mind, one of our questions was a bucket list of every service we could think of. Of the items with low awareness, the biggest takeaway in our eyes is letting students know about their library account and how to access it online. [slide 14]

Students showed general confidence in their searching and technology abilities, but not in web design or fixing computer problems. While they tended to feel that their research skills were at least adequate, there was a sharp decline in their confidence from using the Internet for personal use to using it for school to researching with library resources. [slide 17] These results were nearly identical to those from Informing Innovation (p. 63).

About half (47%) of our respondents owned smartphones. On the assumption that we have a disproportionately tech-savvy sample, we can hypothesize that some smaller percentage of the whole student body have smartphones. Slightly fewer (44%) owned VHS players and only 53 students (5%) owned e-book readers. [slide 20] It is interesting to compare these results to the 2010 ECAR Study of Undergraduate Students and Information Technology, which found a 3.1% ownership of e-book readers and 62% ownership of smartphones among its respondents (p. 42).

We made an error in formatting the computer and laptop ownership question⁴, but generally we found that most respondents did own a computer. Seventy students (6%) reported having no internet connection at home, and another 21 (2%) used dial-up. The same number of students reported having wireless and broadband (about 60%). A quick glance at the data showed that many students selected wireless without selecting where their wireless was coming from, so the broadband/cable/DSL adoption is likely closer to 90%. [slide 22] Ellie was particularly interested in this section of the survey. She has had several students refuse e-books as potential sources saying they didn’t have computers and/or internet at home. If we combine our students with dial-up and those without internet at home, that means nearly a tenth of our students don’t have the tools to use our online resources. If we are correct in the assumption that this sample was a particularly tech savvy subset, the number could be larger.

We  asked students how likely they were to embrace new technologies. The responses trend slightly above average, enforcing our assumption that our sample is slightly skewed towards the tech savvy. [slide 25] The ECAR results (p. 39) were similar however, so it could also simply show a trend of people preferring to consider themselves average or above.

Another portion of our survey listed a wide selection of social networking and other online activities and asked respondents how often they participated in each. Texting and Facebook were the only two answers with high “every day” response rates. Watching videos on Youtube and reading wiki articles were the highest “2-3 times a week” responses. Most other options had high scores in the “never” category. [slide 26]

Most (96%) respondents own cell phones. [slide 29] Offered a selection of cell phone activities, text messaging scored highest in the “every day” category, with “never” being the most common response for most other choices (including post to Twitter, read or contribute to blogs, download music, watch videos, read e-books). [slide 30] In terms of interacting with the library, students would most like to use text messaging to receive renewal or overdue notices and to renew materials. [slide 32]

More than half (66%) of respondents’ cell phones can access the internet [slide 33] and there was generally high interest in using the library website on their phones, with the most positive responses for finding hours, locations and phone numbers, checking their account/renewing books, and searching for books. [slide 34]

Facebook was the top social networking site both in terms of reported use (45% use it all the time) and in willingness to friend the library (25%). All other choices (including Twitter, MySpace, Second Life, delicious, and more) scored highest in either “never use it” or “never heard of it.” [slide 37] Facebook was also the overwhelmingly preferred social network of respondents to the  ECAR, while MySpace was a distant second (p.11). Of the 484 students who wrote in the open ended section answering, “Would you like the ACC Libraries to have accounts on any of these sites? Why or why not? What type of information would you want the library to share?” the top categories of replies were:

• Yes, Facebook (97)
• Content – Events (49)
• Negative feedback about social networking sites in general (32)
• Content – Contact Information (31)
• Negative feedback about the library being in a social space – these are personal/private spaces and/or non-academic (25)

Nearly half of respondents chose Firefox as their preferred web browser, though we believe this question may have been inadvertently skewed by offering “Google Chrome” as a choice rather than just saying “Chrome.” We believe the high choice of Chrome (21%) can at least partially be attributed to students selecting the search engine Google rather than the browser. This belief is based on additional write in answers choosing Yahoo! as their preferred browser. [slide 39] (To the best of our knowledge, Yahoo! does not currently offer a browser, though they may have in the past, so we cannot entirely rule it out.) More than half (59%) of respondents customized their browsers [slide 40], and 56% indicated interest in a library related-plugin. [slide 41] (Luckily, ACC already offered the LibX toolbar).

We ended with three open ended questions:

What do you like MOST about the ACC libraries? (988 replies)
Top responses:

1. Staff (268)
2. Ease of use (213)
3. Quiet (164)
4. Computers (146)
5. Collection (133)
6. Facilities (82)
7. Atmosphere (64)
8. Hours (49)
9. Resources (48)
10. Printing (42)

What would you CHANGE about the ACC libraries? (930 replies)
Top responses:

1. Nothing (260)
2. Provide more computers (117)
3. Provide more space (83)
4. Stay open longer hours (82)
5. Provide more books (76)
6. Specific/one of a kind complaints (46)
7. Enforce quiet (39)
8. Provide more study rooms (27)
9. Provide more seating (24)
10. Printing (23) / Outlets (22)

The last question asked whether they had any other comments. The top two responses far outweighed any others and they were, “no” and generally positive feedback.

Part Six: Missteps and Mental Models

We had hoped to create bibliographer reports like Char Booth did, breaking down responses by subject area, however only a handful of categories had enough responses to make this worthwhile. We have also offered to run any requested analyses, but have had very few requests.

We already mentioned our formatting mistake on the computer ownership question and the issue with offering browser choices. We also had a few questions that asked, “If the library offered X…” and received write in replies along the lines of, “I didn’t know you did that,” telling us either the student didn’t read the question clearly enough, or we didn’t word it clearly enough.

Other responses revealed more about our students’ mental models. Some responses showed student assumptions on how the library and technology interrelate. Others revealed assumed relations between physical areas or services that are run by different departments. Here are a few examples of ACC students’ misconceptions that we encountered while reading open ended responses:

• All traditional library materials (books, articles, videos, etc.) are available electronically.
• Lack of distinction between a phone application and the internet/web.
• Lack of distinction between a browser and the web.
• Lack of distinction between copier and printer.
• Lack of distinction between computer labs and library.
• Lack of distinction between other ACC service providers and library.
• Assumption that if the library offered text a librarian we would be giving out librarians’ personal cell phone numbers.

Some of these are just interesting without being particularly problematic. Ellie noticed an increasing number of students standing in front of the copier looking for their print jobs, but was much more understanding of the confusion after seeing her doctor’s office’s all-in-one giant copier/scanner/fax/printer. Some signage may be helpful, but the issue doesn’t have much impact on student success or on how students view the library.

Complaints about computer labs and wireless service however, do effect how students view the library. They are also, both fortunately and unfortunately, handled by a different department. The confusion is particularly understandable since in many buildings the computer lab is physically inside the library. We hope to address a number of these issues in a public response to the survey. We will also be sharing a final report with the college and highlighting items of interest for specific departments.

Finally, there are those more esoteric issues that are much harder to tackle. We can create a tutorial or link to an explanation of electronic publishing or a definition of a browser, but how do we get students to watch it and how do we know if they understood? And how much does it really matter? If they can get online, check their email, register for classes and get the research they need to finish their paper, is it hurting them if they “clicked the blue e” without knowing what a browser is or how it’s different from an app? As technology lines blur, how important is it to fully understand all the distinctions? We’d love to hear your take.

Part Seven: Still to come

We are writing this article and our final report to the college at the same time. Some of our preliminary recommendations include:

• Publicize the library account features and how to access your account online. – e.g. place a library account bookmark in each checked out book for a week.
• Create a “Did you know?” page on our library website. Review open ended answers to “What would you change” and list items that were requested that we already provide. Also provide brief answers to items that are out of our control – e.g. computer labs are run by a different department, library does not control the wireless.
• Run a “You asked, we answered” promotion – e.g. promoting Library Anywhere and the LibX toolbar as a response to survey results.
• Create a simple short explanation of textbooks. Cover that the library doesn’t purchase textbooks & why. Explain that student services makes the decisions on how many and which textbooks to purchase. Tips on how to improve your chances on getting a textbook (clean record, completed form, etc.)
• Address mental models – provide an explanation of how books end up online (that not every book is available as an e-book).
• Investigate checking due dates and providing renewals through text messaging.

Some of our results fit the standard pronouncements about student social media and technology use (everyone is on Facebook, text messaging is the current hot thing), but  some of our library-oriented results in particular surprised us (the students particularly value the library as place and want the librarians to enforce the rules – especially keeping the facilities quiet).  We hope that sharing our experience has encouraged you to adapt Booth’s template for your own institution.

Hangtags on the posters

Thanks to Char Booth for her inspiration, hard work, and feedback on this article, and to Emily Ford and Eric Frierson for their feedback.

Additional Resources

• Full survey instrument
• ECAR Study
• Informing Innovation
• The Physical and the Virtual: The Relationship between Library as Place and Electronic Collections

1. Ellie in particular was interested to see if danah boyd’s findings about class and social network preference would be visible in our results. We certainly did not see the animosity towards MySpace that Booth saw in her results, but we did still see Facebook as the primary player in social networking sites for our students.
2. Not so much.
3. Data from the ACC Student Factbook
4. We asked how long they had owned their laptop and desktop computers. We misconfigured the question such that they could not select the same answer for both.

Derik Badman

Developer, Springshare

Who are you, and what do you do?

I’m Derik Badman. For a paying job I work as a web developer for Springshare, Inc (creator of LibGuides and LibAnswers). Most of my time is spent working on LibAnswers: adding features and occasionally fixing bugs. I also spend time working on a new product (as yet unannounced), and answering support questions from our customers.

In non-paying capacity, I make (drawrite) comics, often of an experimental nature, which get posted at my website, Madinkbeard.

What hardware are you using?

My main computer is a 22.5″ iMac with a 3.06 GHz processor and 8GB RAM, running OS 10.6.4. I use this most of the day, most every day for my programming, drawing, and other things like watching tv/movies. I also have an 12.5″ ASUS Eee PC laptop running Windows 7. I mainly use this for testing Windows issues (Internet Explorer) or for when I need to do some typing related work away from my desk.

My laptop use has cut down a lot since I got my Motorola Droid running Android, which I use far too much for email, texting, Twitter, RSS reading, managing my todo list, taking photos, and note taking.

I use a Wacom Intuos 3 tablet for making my comics, and I’ve got a Western Digital external hard drive for backups. For scanning (mostly) and printing (rarely), I’ve been really happy with the HP PSC 1510 All-in-One, which was cheap years ago and has held up really well.

And what software?

The software I really live in right now:

• Chrome for my regular internet browsing.
• Firefox for viewing and testing my development work (primarily because the Firebug Add-on is so useful for dealing with CSS and Javascript).
• TextMate for my actual coding.
• TweetDeck for Twitter and Facebook monitoring.
• Adium for instant messaging.
• Evernote (on my Mac and on my Droid) for notetaking and listmaking.
• Mac Mail for my work email.
• Adobe Creative Suite 5 (primarily Photoshop and InDesign) for making my comics and for various image-related work tasks (icons, logos, etc.)

If you count web applications:

• Remember the Milk for my todo list.
• Gmail for personal email.
• Google Reader for RSS feeds.
• Google Calendar for my schedule.
• Delicious for bookmarking.
• WordPress for blogging and posting my comics

A lot of these applications I use on all three of my devices, and often that multi-platform use is why I’ve chosen products.

What would be your dream setup?

Probably the only thing I could ask for is one of the Wacom Cintiqs, which is a very large tablet with a built-in screen. Otherwise, for now, I’m really happy with my setup, which admittedly is mostly all new in the past few months.

Paula Brehm-Heeger

Library Services Manager, Public Library of Cincinnati and Hamilton County

Who are you, and what do you do?

I’m Paula Brehm-Heeger and I am the Central Region Library Services Manager for the Public Library of Cincinnati and Hamilton County. I manage the direct public service departments at our large Main Library located in Downtown Cincinnati and also six of our 40 Branch locations. All six of the locations I oversee are located in urban areas. I’ve been working in libraries for more than two decades with a lot of that time dedicated to serving teenagers. I was the President of the American Library Service’s Young Adult Library Services Association in 2007-2008. My first book, Serving Urban Teens was published in 2008 by Libraries Unlimited.

What hardware are you using?

At work I use a standard desktop setup with a Pentium 4 processor.

At home I mainly use a Dell XPS laptop and sometimes sneak a few minutes on my husband’s laptop—also a Dell but an older model (Inspiron 6000). I use my husband’s laptop when I need to run numbers because he purchased a number pad to make calculating easier. I’m too lazy to actually buy one but always think it’s a great example of a simple hardware add-on that can make a huge difference in efficiency.

For my portable devices, I have a Blackberry Storm and my first generation 60GB iPod Classic. I’ll probably have to update the iPod soon but I really do like my Classic’s display so I haven’t been compelled to try anything new yet.

At home we recently updated our TV—finally abandoned our tube-TV in favor of a new Samsung flat screen! I also have three weather alert radios that I use in some capacity every day, including one that features a sensor to tell me the temperature on my front porch because I hate to be surprised about the weather.

And what software?

At work and on my home setup I use a Windows OS. I use Internet Explorer at work and Firefox at home.

I used standard Office products for writing my book—Microsoft 2003, and I worked with a freelance graphic designer to produce a few of the charts. The biggest challenge in writing the book was keeping things organized in my email and folders! I requested reproduction rights for a number of items and also did my own indexing.

The primary tools we have used in analyzing data are Microsoft Excel and SPSS (Statistical Package for the Social Sciences). Greg Edwards (the Library Services Director at my Library) and I set up a logical data entry form in Excel which he then utilized for entering the data in SPSS. Our data analysis, like any good evaluation of data, depends heavily on constructing a logical way to compare the data. Excel and SPSS are just tools—figuring out what it is that you’re hoping to find out is the most important step. GIGO (Garbage In, Garbage Out)—even the best spreadsheet and data-mining software won’t help if you haven’t taken the time to logically think through what it is you’re comparing and how the data points relate to each other.

On my Blackberry my favorite apps are Google Maps, Weatherbug, Pandora, Facebook, and QuickPull. Pandora has replaced satellite radio for me in the car. I just plug the Blackberry into the auxiliary jack and select my station. QuickPull was an important find for me. A lot of times I concentrate on apps that make me happy and ignore things that keep my devices healthy and functional, so setting up a nightly schedule for rebooting was a big step. At my Library we now employ a Blackberry Enterprise server solution so I can review all my work-related email on my handheld, too. I wasn’t a big Facebook user until I started using the app on my Blackberry. Now it’s so simple and easy to check whenever/wherever that I check it a lot more, update my status, and send pictures regularly.

iTunes is software I use all the time. I’m addicted to downloading TV shows—especially those shows no one else I know is willing to watch with me. I watch them whenever I get a chance. This is especially great whenever I have to go anywhere on an airplane.

The other software that has changed my life is my Digital Video Recorder—does that count as software? I think it does. I love it and don’t know how I ever managed my TV life without it.

What would be your dream setup?

The Quantum computer described in The Traveler trilogy by John Twelve Hawks. How awesome would it be to have technology designed by beings from another realm? Though I’m guessing the tech support might be complicated. I also need to invest in my first ebook reader but haven’t committed to any on the market yet. The iPad seems impressive but is much more than an ebook reader, so maybe the Nook is the best option for my particular need. I’m planning to make a decision sometime before the Holiday season. Whatever I select, my ideal set up would allow for easy, simply downloading of ebooks and viewing them on a device that is lightweight with reader-friendly eink. I think even the highest-end ebook readers aren’t quite there on reproducing the eye-friendly feel of ink on paper. But it’s close.

Ellie Collier

Reference Librarian, Austin Community College

Who are you, and what do you do?

I’m a librarian at Austin Community College. My title is Reference Librarian/Assistant Professor (we have faculty status, I don’t teach any credit courses), but I also do instruction and collection development, am the subject liaison to a number of departments (psychology, radio-tv-film, and visual communications), and serve on library and college-wide committees. I’m also an editor and writer at In the Library with the Lead Pipe. I’ve recently started calling myself a technophile Luddite because while I geek out over tech in my personal life, much of my day is spent helping users who don’t own personal computers and are not comfortable with technology. I try really hard to be an advocate for those users when discussing new technologies and interfaces for the library.

Away from work I’m an active board and card gamer, and a less active video gamer, crafter, and cook.

What hardware are you using?

At work I mostly use what they give me. Right now that’s a Dell Optiplex 780 (2.93 GHz processor, 4 GB RAM, 150 GB Hard drive—of which 119 GB is free right now) and a fairly nice sized flat panel monitor. I have the standard mouse, keyboard, and speakers for peripherals, along with personal earbuds that I brought in to spare my office mate from whatever I’m listening to. We’re also given a thumb drive which I pretty much only use to transfer pictures to a laptop that has an SD card reader so I can put them on the SD card for our large display TV, or to take documents to a computer that has access to a color printer. Each campus has a digital camera, but I don’t use them that much. I did request and receive a Logitech webcam and a Blue Snowball microphone which I use for creating tutorials. I used to have a printer that I shared with my office mate, but it’s been out for repairs for months, so I share the main one with the whole office, and I use the student printers as well.

At home I have a 2005 Dell that was good for gaming when I bought it, but has been reinitialized and barely sees use anymore. A cat knocked the speakers onto the CPU and shorted it out. I managed to get most of the drivers reinstalled, but the sound card doesn’t work anymore and I’ve been too lazy to bother trying to fix it.

My main computer is my little netbook, an Asus Eee PC 1000HE. And more and more, my Motorola Droid. I have an external CD/DVD burner that I almost never use and an external hard drive (one of those cute Passport ones) that I thankfully used to backup my desktop before the cat attacked it. I also have one of those low end all-in-one scanner/printers.

I own a hand-me-down medium sized TV that I use to watch David Attenborough documentaries and play my GameCube (I’m currently loving Baten Kaitos). I have accidental cable because they couldn’t figure out how to shut it off when they set up my internet (through a smaller local company), but I don’t have that hooked up. I use a wireless router for my netbook and I have the cheapest possible internet, so between the dinkier computer and the slow internet I pretty much never watch any internet videos at my apartment. I save those up to watch at my partner’s place on his big screen TV that he has hooked up to his computer or watch them on my Droid.

And what software?

I am incredibly lucky to have full admin rights over my work computer. We’re running Windows 7. They’re actually pretty good about getting us software if we ask for it, but I’m more an instant gratification person, so I tend to just download something free at my moment of need. I use GIMP and sometimes just Paint for my photo manipulation. I have NVU for the rare times I need to do more with HTML than I want to mess with in Notepad. Foxit for editing PDFs. FireShot and Jing for screen captures. Snaplinks (now Multi Links) is my favorite Firefox add-on ever (you click and drag over a bunch of links on a page and it opens all of them in new tabs). Chrome and Firefox for browsing. Delicious for bookmarking items for the staff development committee. I use WordPress for my work blogs and we have an internal wiki run by eTouch SamePage. We also use LibGuides, LivePerson (for chat) and iii/Millennium. But honestly, most of my day-to-day tasks are accomplished in my browser (GDocs, showing students library resources, my email—which I run through Gmail) or in Excel.

The dying desktop has OpenOffice because I couldn’t be bothered to dig out my MS Office installation disc the last time I needed to open a document. The Eee PC has whichever version of Windows and Office it came with. I use Picasa for pictures, Pandora for music, iTunes for podcasts, Firefox for browsing, GChat for talking to my brother, Gmail for email, GBookmarks for bookmarking, GDocs for most of my word processing, GReader for blogs. Sensing a theme?

On my Droid I have Google Sky which is super awesome and I pull it out all the time even though it can be a little sad with all the light pollution in big cities, but it’s always good for figuring out whether that really bright thing is a star or a planet (tip: it’s usually a planet). I used to always carry a paper day planner, but I think I’ve begrudgingly made the switch to filling those roles with GCal and GTasks. I use GTasks for my grocery list, too. Oh, and GVoice for transcribing my voicemail. It’s hilariously terrible, but often close enough to get the idea.

What would be your dream setup?

I’m really pretty pleased with my current situation. I wouldn’t turn down a killer gaming computer, but I wouldn’t use it enough to justify owning it either. What I’d really love is a dedicated, built-in kitchen computer for cooking—with one of those plastic, gel covers over the keyboard so I can wash it off afterwards. Or maybe just a touch screen. And that’s probably totally attainable with current technology and will probably be within what I’m actually willing to pay for something like that within a few years.

Clayton Copeland

LIS Doctoral Candidate, University of South Carolina

Who are you, and what do you do?

Hi, Everyone! I’m Clayton Copeland, and I am currently a doctoral candidate and teaching fellow with the School of Library and Information Science at the University of South Carolina. Go Gamecocks! I’m a true “Carolina Girl,” and in more ways than one! In addition to being a student with the University and earning a Master’s degree in library and information science here, I was born and raised in the Palmetto State.

Libraries are the places of my earliest and happiest memories. The library was such a peaceful, tranquil place to me, a place where happy days were made happier and challenging days easier. No matter the burdens of my heart, somehow opening the library door, finding just the right book, and cuddling in a soft comfy chair made everything seem OK again. All of my worries seemed to be carried away by the gentle rustling of turning pages. My book journeys allowed me to discover both far and distant places and places within myself. Books gave me the gifts of learning and self acceptance. I loved the library so much that I became a “mini-me librarian” in second grade, when my school librarian made all my dreams came true and asked me to be her “assistant.” I’ve worked in libraries in one capacity or another since, and I have loved every minute of it. To me, there is no greater privilege than putting a book in a child’s hand or helping any library user find the information he or she is seeking.

Of late, my day-to-day work involves my dissertation study, Equity of Access to Information: A Comparative Exploration of Library Accessibility and Information Access from Differently-Able Patrons’ Perspectives. The study explores the lived experiences of library patrons whom society labels as “disabled,” and seeks to understand the extent to which our libraries are meeting their information needs and are providing them with equal access to information.

What hardware are you using?

A Dell Latitude D 620, with 2.16 GHz and 2 GB Ram. The computer travels well and is also flexible in its capabilities and functions. After long days of work, I connect to a 20 inch LCD monitor and standard size keyboard for better visibility and greater ease with typing. In a recent pursuit to find a small, lightweight computer for easier transport and travel to and from professional conferences, I purchased a Samsung netbook. I use a walker for ambulatory purposes, so space for carrying books and everything that must travel with me on the road and day-to-day is at a real premium. The small size and lower weight of the netbook offer a reliable and portable alternative to the more substantial laptop.

And what software?

Windows XP is the university-supported operating system at the moment. My professional day would not be complete without numerous interactions with the Microsoft Office Suite, which I use for writing and preparing course lectures for the courses I am teaching. I also rely heavily on Adobe Acrobat for creating PDF files as well as Dragon Naturally Speaking Version 10, a voice recognition program I use for recording notes, writing papers, and transcribing interviews with dissertation study participants. Of course, Google Calendar and Gmail are absolute musts when it comes to staying organized and in touch with colleagues, family, and friends.

What would be your dream setup?

Opportunities to interact with technologies personally as well as opportunities to learn from students, colleagues, and the people I am getting to know via my dissertation research increasingly make me aware of an ever-growing need for affordable, reliable, responsive, and Universally Accessible technologies. Technology has incredible potential. My greatest hope and “dream” is for technologies to help their users overcome barriers—whether physical, economic, social, or otherwise—that traditionally could prevent or inhibit access to information. Although so many facets of accessibility and technology have been (and are being) addressed, I am becoming more and more aware of our need to improve their accessibility; without it, the tools we intended to be facilitators of inclusion become another cause of exclusion.

Birkin James Diana

Programmer, Brown University Library

Who are you, and what do you do?

I’m Birkin James Diana. I’m a programmer for the Brown University Library. My work there focuses on enhancing our digital-repository, developing APIs and services based on lightweight SOA principles, enabling disparate systems to work together, and developing cool desktop and mobile-friendly services for users.

What hardware are you using?

I am one with an early 2010 13″ MacBookPro laptop. An Apple laptop has been my primary machine since the black and white 1991 PowerBook 170. They work for me. My previous laptop had a beautiful 15″ screen but I regularly missed the portability of a beloved 12″ PowerBook G4 I had around 2004. When this beautiful 13″ model became available, I took the leap, and have been thoroughly happy with it. Over the past few months I’ve experimented with an external display at work. A bluetooth Kensington Slimblade mouse drives the laptop. I also use an iPhone 3GS extensively, and have an iPad I bought largely as an experiment to monitor the UI creativity explosion I knew it would foster, and to understand first-hand what space it can occupy between a pod/phone and laptop. At home our numerous Macs are connected by and backed up to an Apple Time Capsule base-station.

And what software?

TextMate is my favored programming tool for Python and Django, my favored language and framework (the Django documentation oozes a refreshing depth of thoughtfulness). Initially trained in Java, around 2005 I came to love Eclipse and its plugins, and periodically fire it up and look at the latest version of Pydev (for Python development), but I always come back to TextMate. It’s not as full-featured as some other editors, but its clean interface and lightweight speedy feel are a pleasure.

I tend these days to have Chrome open to University email, calendar, and wiki tabs, Firefox open with the Web Developer Plugin and Firebug for examining webpages, and Safari for other browsing. I also always have open BBEdit, Apple Mail (which integrates fairly well with the University’s switch from Outlook to Gmail), Transmit for FTP, Apple’s Terminal, Versions for subversion work, and Clockwork, an old 2006 shareware app I use as a timer for focused work-bursts. Daily, I use the iPhone app ToDo which, with some angst, has replaced the wonderful LifeBalance as my preferred organizer. Lastly, in the context of API and complex web-communication analysis, Wireshark is an impressive, powerful tool I regularly dust off.

What would be your dream setup?

To a large extent I have it, in terms of hardware and software. That’s a nice thing about programming: it doesn’t require a huge tool investment, even for those drawn to high-quality well-designed tools. My move toward the dream setup has to do more with ‘practice’ and ‘environment’. Regarding practice, I periodically play with that balance between using known, comfortable tools and systems, and experimenting with possibly better ones (example: trying distributed version control). So an ideal setup would inherently be a bit fluid. Regarding environment, a dream setup would somehow allow for others to know when I need to be left alone to concentrate, and when I am / will be approachable for the good collaboration that our team values. No easy solution to that. But that’s why a single-screen portable laptop setup remains so appealing. I can just pick up and go find a quiet place to concentrate and work for a while if unable to do so in my normal workspace. (Of course, this does bring up the hardware desire for much, much faster wireless-speeds.) This is a great question; I see a group brainstorming meeting in my team’s future!

Emily Drabinski

Instruction Librarian, Long Island University, Brooklyn

Who are you, and what do you do?

I’m Emily Drabinski, an instruction librarian at Long Island University, Brooklyn (go Blackbirds!). I come from a failed first try at being a writer and editor, two things I do lots of as a librarian. I edit a book series for Rory Litwin’s Library Juice Press about gender and sexuality in librarianship, work on a journal called Radical Teacher, and saw my first edited book, Critical Library Instruction: Theories and Methods (with Maria T. Accardi and Alana Kumbier) come out last spring. I still daydream about running away to a tiny house on top of a mountain overlooking an ocean and writing the most beautiful book ever written ever in the whole wide world. Maybe if I get tenure.

What hardware are you using?

I walked to a friend’s house the other day with nothing but my pockets, and realized I was carrying almost $800 in gadgets. And I think of myself as a paper-and-pencil kind of person! I use a 13-inch white MacBook at home, an Dell OptiPlex desktop that takes up my entire desk top in the office, a Motorola Cliq phone that I wish had the latest Android update, a second-generation Kindle, and an 8GB fifth-generation iPod Nano. (Those last three are my New Yorker commute trifecta. They’re my car.) Love my gadgets, but I still buy two thirds of my books in print, use my Kindle primarily to pay for the newspaper again, and track my reading using an old card catalog drawer. I love living in the future, but the past is relentless. So far, there seems to be room in the present for both.

And what software?

I live in Google and Google lives in me, even though I know they’re tracking me and selling me and locking me in. Mail, Talk, Voice, Calendar, Reader, Docs (love Google forms!), Scholar, Groups, Books, I’m a fan of it all. Dropbox has been a godsend for manuscript-length files. I backup on a La Cie drive, but everything goes into Dropbox, too. And I love the social web, Twitter and Facebook, and WordPress for blogging, mostly about my lunch.

What would be your dream setup?

I’d love a featherweight laptop with a battery I could recharge in the sun, something I could take from home to work to play and back without even thinking about the weight. My mobile device works great for most things I do, but I still want a computer I can sit down and type on with a nice big screen. And I know this is unpopular, but if Google could insert a Firefox browser with all my tabs open just behind my eyeballs, I’d be fine with that too.

Ryan Eby

Sysadmin and Developer, Ann Arbor District Library

Who are you, and what do you do?

I’m a sysadmin and developer at Ann Arbor District Library. I take care of the network administration, system administration, and helping the development team when able with the website and other software development projects. My day-to-day responsibilities and projects vary considerably and it’s difficult to generalize with everything we do.

You can find some of the software we’ve released on the Ann Arbor District Library page at GitHub.

What hardware are you using?

I use pretty much all Apple hardware. I have a Mac Mini running OS X Server as the occasional desktop, though I tend to be mobile, and use a MacBook Pro 17″ 2.5 GHz intel Duo with 4 GB RAM for most of my work. An iPhone 3GS and iPad complete my mobile setup. With fixing things constantly as part of my job, I want something that just works for my personal setup and I’ve had good luck with this arrangements. OS X gives me enough Unix underpinnings to let me do everything I need.

For general hardware we tend to be an HP shop with numerous DL360‘s with mix of dual and quad core Xeons for various tasks and various ranges of HP switches.

The public computers are all HP thin clients, and staff thin clients are being migrated to the same hardware. You can read more about the hardware on Ann Arbor District Library developer blog; a post about our software is forthcoming.

Connection is fiber to all of our branches except one, which has a T1 due to location.

I have no real hardware at home as I do mostly work related things. The exception is airport expresses, which are scattered around the house for Airtunes.

And what software?

OSX Snow Leopard with some common apps installed:

• Things: task and project management, Dropbox synced
• 1Password: password management, Dropbox synced
• Dropbox: best thing out there
• Chrome for most browsing with Firefox installed for when I need Firebug
• Coda for coding, and TextMate for when I need more power
• Pixelmator for general image manipulation
• Git/GitHub for version control
• Ruby and Capistrano (parallel SSH commands) for various sysadmin tasks

The iPhone/iPad have SSH and RDP clients along with Instapaper, Stanza, Things, 1Password, Dropbox, and a couple of Dropbox-powered notes apps.

We’re mostly an open-source shop. Our public computers are thin clients that run a simple Debian installation. They connect to Windows terminal servers, giving patrons a Windows environment while retaining the back-end manageability of Linux. The thin clients were rather cheap, and we already had a Citrix-based server farm. Since we’re running it as a web-based application, we could drop the Citrix licensing, so costs are low. Running it as a Linux/Web-app combination has also allowed the public computers to become a rapid development platform where changes can be rolled out quickly, both to the OS and for other management needs. We plan to open source the software once our current round of testing is finished.

Most of the other servers run Gentoo with software installations based on the tasks we need to accomplish. Most of our development is done in Drupal, so servers tend to run Apache, MySQL, and PHP. We also have Nginx, CouchDB, Redis, and Ruby running for a few applications.

The Windows terminal servers are virtual.

What would be your dream setup?

I’m pretty happy with the current setup: having pretty much all Linux clients allows administration and debugging to be fairly straightforward. Dropping Windows would be nice, but is probably far in the future given the ongoing demand for Microsoft Office.

Ahniwa Ferrari

Library Development Project Manager, Washington State Library

Who are you, and what do you do?

I’m a nerd (and incidentally a librarian) who tries his best to find ways to push reference services forward, on a grand scale, for libraries in Washington State. I’m a project manager in Library Development at the Washington State Library, and I spend most of my time coordinating our statewide reference cooperative, Ask-WA. With over 65 library systems participating in this project, this means that I do a lot of scheduling and quality control work, provide a lot of reference and technology training, arrange continuing education opportunities for librarians throughout the state, and generally try and get the word out to the public that reference librarians are awesome.

I also coordinate our statewide database trials, assist with our statewide downloadable audiobooks project, review grant proposals for other projects, act as editor-in-chief for the official agency blog, and am the chief architect and curator of our Hard Times Resource Guide.

What hardware are you using?

I use what the State gives me, which works fine for my purposes.

It’s an HP desktop machine, runs Windows XP Pro, and packs a dual-core 3 GHz processor and 3.5 GB RAM. My favorite thing about it is the added NVIDIA Quadro NVS 290 video card, which supports my dual HP L1950 LCD monitors (in a side-by-side configuration). They could take away everything else, but I’d go nuts of I had to work on a single monitor again.

Peripheral to the desktop I have a Logitech Webcam Pro 9000 that I use for web- and video-conferencing, along with a Plantronics .Audio 400 DSP headset. I have an i-rocks IR-4610 USB 2.0 4-Ports hub that I purchased personally and brought from home (I have much more use for it at work), into which I regularly plug:

• My iPod Touch (2nd generation, 8GB), which I use to keep track of apps for libraries, and which was quite helpful in designing my own app, Ask-WA, which recently launched for both iPhone and Android platforms.
• My MotoZine ZN5 mobile phone, which I don’t actually like to use as a phone, but which I use quite frequently as a camera when I’m out visiting libraries.
• My SanDisk Sansa Fuze MP3 player (8GB), which I decided to purchase for myself after a great deal of research in light of our downloadable audiobooks project, and which I mainly use to listen to said downloadable audiobooks in my car during my commute.
• My SanDisk Cruzer Titanium flash drive (4GB), which wouldn’t be noteworthy except that a. it’s made out of titanium, which is automatically rad, and b. it’s a rugged beast that has lasted on my keychain for over three years now and has survived regular use.

When I’m on the road I have a netbook that I use for work, which is an HP Mini 2140 (the 1366×768 resolution version), and which sports an Intel Atom 1.60 GHz processor and 2 GB of RAM, and which also runs Windows XP Pro. I have the larger, 6-cell battery, which lets me (if I shut off Wi-Fi) run for about 7 hours at a conference without having to plug-in. It also has a built-in VGA webcam which I use occasionally to record presentations at conferences.

At home I run a three-year-old desktop that I assembled inside a quiet Antec P180B case with hand-picked components. It’s a little worse-for-wear for my having dropped it off the bed, but it still does what I need it to do.

And what software?

Ask-WA runs on OCLC’s QuestionPoint software, so I get to use that a lot, and after 2+ years, I’m happy to say that I almost have it figured out.

I’ve crowd-sourced some of the scheduling aspects of Ask-WA so that now libraries can manipulate their own schedules using Google Calendar, which saves me a lot of time. I like a lot of other Google applications as well, and regularly use Google Reader, Google Voice, and Gmail, for their respective functions.

I’m a Firefox user and devotee, and have a number of add-ons now that I couldn’t imagine living without. Among others, I regularly use Pixlr Grabber to swipe screenshots for presentation slides, and I use Shareaholic about a dozen times a day to push library-related news items (and other items of interest) to my Tumblr account, which in turn pushes out to my Facebook and Twitter feeds.

At work I use a lot of Microsoft Office products: Outlook, Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, all 2007. Nothing too exciting there.

I use Camtasia Studio 6 for creating screencasts and training videos, which I switched to after using Jing for a time and finding it too limited.

I like free software, including 7-Zip for zipping and unzipping files, CutePDF so that I can print anything into a PDF file, TagScanner for mucking with MP3 filenames and tags (useful for audiobooks), and Pidgin for the occasional informal work-related chat.

I use Elluminate for web-conferencing and webinars, including my own monthly webinar series for reference librarians, Ref22. Elluminate does more than the software we use to have (Wimba), but I haven’t decided if I really approve of it or not, yet.

What would be your dream setup?

In terms of a desktop system, I actually think I could use two more monitors. I think that four monitors total in a 2×2 setup would be pretty awesome. Aside from screen real estate, so long as the computer is fairly responsive and I don’t spend too much time waiting, I’m pretty easy. That said, I’d still like to bump up to Windows 7, and I wish that Outlook worked better than it does.

What I would really love is a mobile-sized device that dual-boots as an iPhone and Android device (maybe even throw Windows 7 Mobile in there), with at least 64GB of space, with at least a forward-facing camera that takes good quality photos and video, with an integrated microphone and speaker, and that could connect via Wi-Fi and all mobile data networks. This magical device would also have a battery capable of eight hours of continuous use, and would allow folder-level file management on a PC connected through a simple USB cord.

I really want the magical mobile device that works as a camera (photo and video), MP3-player, cell phone, mobile gaming, and all-purpose work device, and I want it to be open and I don’t want to pay exorbitant monthly fees to be able to use it. And I’d really rather it wasn’t an Apple device. Is that too much to ask?

Alison Hicks

Romance Language Librarian, University of Colorado, Boulder

Who are you, and what do you do?

I’m a modern language librarian who researches technology and foreign language librarianship. While language learning is more and more driven by technology, language librarians aren’t exactly known for their flashy tech expertise. My aim is to help spread technology skills and enthusiasm throughout language librarianship and departments in order to push the language/literature/information/technology frontier. To this end, I’m active in SALALM, the Seminar for the Acquisition of Latin American Library Materials (¡Vamos SALALM!) where I write a Web 2.0 column for the newsletter/blog, set up a mentor social network, and head SALALM’s first e-strategy committee.

My work with my departments and SALALM is mostly informed by the more general reference and instruction technology stuff, such as usability testing, widgets, QR codes, and mobile learning. I’ve kind of muscled my way in on it but I love exploring how new technologies can (or cannot) be adapted for research or teaching purposes.

I’m currently the Romance Language Librarian at the University of Colorado at Boulder, where I serve as the bibliographer for French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, and Comparative Literature.

What hardware are you using?

This section is going to be embarrassingly short; pretty much my only gadget is my 13″ Mac Book, which replaced my beloved G4 Powerbook earlier this year. Yep, that’s right: no cell phone, no TV, no Wii, no nothing… What can I say?! My Scottish genes just can’t bring themselves to shell out that much for a smartphone, although I have to say that when I replaced my Mac earlier this year I did receive a free iPod Touch and I’m getting pretty addicted to the small screen. My uncle also once gave me a first generation Sony e-reader which I used fairly regularly, but not enough to replace it when it died. Though I do use my computer to excess, so I guess that makes up for the lack of other hardware.

And what software?

I moved to the US in 2005 to do my MSIS with the impression that Americans learned to code in the cradle. I soon realized I was wrong, but this didn’t stop me from taking all the technology courses I could find. And this probably helped me get my first job at LANIC, a Latin American website where we used Terminal. I still use Terminal today, largely for my husband’s retro webpage, but it’s more likely that I’ll be using TextEdit, Text Wrangler, and Fetch at home, and Dreamweaver at work.

Mostly I work in a pretty standard Firefox enabled cloud though. I used Bloglines for five years for RSS and since the sad news of its demise, I’m looking for a replacement. Yahoo Pipes for fancier RSS, Google Alerts for, well, web alerts, Jing for screencasting, WordPress for blogs, Flickr for photos, and Delicious for personal and subject guide bookmarks.

For collection development activities, I use a lot of targeted RSS fed through Yahoo Pipes. Instruction is when Jing and Sporcle (a quizzing software) come to the fore. I also helped implement Libraryh3lp for IM and text messaging reference, and Jing for IM videos. My latest reference project involves QR codes, and I use Microsoft’s Tag program for this.

Most of my collaboration with colleagues happens through Google Docs. I’m a new convert to Google Docs: I resisted the Google siren call for years because I was worried about privacy issues, but Zoho downtime finally made me change over and now I can’t go back. I use Ning for the social network that I built for SALALM, and Twitter for other professional development activities. I withstood Twitter for ages too, but I found that having to consolidate and condense my thoughts really helped my learning process.

Nothing very unusual on my Touch (Stanza for ebooks, MetrO for public transport, Pandora for music, The Guardian for news), except Convert Everything, a conversion app. It’s taken me five years to manage to translate feet and inches and I’m pretty sure that I’m never going to understand fluid ounces.

What would be your dream setup?

That we move beyond dismissing Web 2.0 as just a technology. Web 2.0 isn’t a thing, a tool or a trend; by its very uncontrolled, decentralized, and conversation-enabling nature it has engendered enormous sociological and pedagogical change. By continuing to look at Web 2.0 as just a trendy tool, we fail to understand its true potential and we fail to support the changing information paradigms. I love what I do but I think there’s a lot more room for truly enlightened discussion and reinvention in the research world.

My second greatest dream is that there is universal Wi-Fi. Enough of the spotty, slow connections, the extortionate costs, and that frustrated, useless feeling when you’re out and can’t look something up. Yay Finland for making broadband a legal right; I hope other countries are equally inspired.

Thirdly, and slightly less grandly, that every page that I want to follow has an RSS or a Twitter feed. If a page doesn’t have a feed then I’m pretty much never going back—it’s very frustrating. Subscribing to individual RSS feeds may be a little old school now, but while Techmeme and other aggregators filter a lot of the noise, Jaron Lanier has inspired me to try and avoid being “trapped in someone else’s recent careless thoughts.” So RSS, and increasingly Twitter, is still my number one choice for a web desert island. All that news! That I want to read! Just waiting for me!

And lastly, I’d love a Guardian newspaper quick crossword app. I can’t do US crosswords (too many baseball players as clues), but a non cryptic quick crossword app would make my day.

Anna Johnson

Library Instruction Coordinator, Mt Hood Community College

Who are you, and what do you do?

I’m Anna Johnson and I coordinate the library instruction program at Mt Hood Community College. I schedule librarian-led research skills instruction in about 200 different classes every year, in a wide variety of subject areas (even Math!). I teach about half of these library instruction classes, and I also teach several one-credit courses, like “College Success” for new students and “Teaching at the Community College” for fellow (and future) educators. My job is completely different every day and I absolutely love it.

What hardware are you using?

At work I use a college-issued Dell setup with Windows 7 (64-bit) and a 17-inch monitor. I had a second monitor until a few weeks ago when I realized I care more about wooden desktop real estate than digital desktop real estate. Our library’s tech guy bet me a Dr Pepper that I’d ask for that other monitor back by December, but I’m happy to have it gone. So far.

Thanks to a decade-old wrist injury, I use a Natural Ergonomic Keyboard and a Natural Wireless Laser Mouse (both from Microsoft). I love this weirdo ergo equipment but it renders my computer pretty useless to anyone else who tries to use it, especially since all the letters on the left side of the keyboard’s split have somehow wiped off.

The other hardware on my work desk is an iHome, for the rare days when I’m in my office long enough to listen to my iPod, which is a 5th generation (video) model, 4 years old and still going strong. I have an ancient cell phone, so old it still flips closed, on purpose—if I had a smart phone I’d be an even bigger slave to email than I already am.

At home I have an Acer Aspire One netbook. I love it for three big reasons: it actually fits on airplane seat-back trays, it’s perfect for TV watching on Hulu and Netflix, and it doesn’t get in my way when I hook it up to a projector for presentations.

And what software?

If circa 1990s graphic designer me was reading this, she’d be so disappointed to know that I spend 90% of my computing time using Microsoft Office programs, but most of my work these days can’t happen without Word, Excel, and (especially) Outlook. I quite like the Xobni add-on for searching in Outlook, and it tells me fun facts like that I send way too many emails.

Nearly all of my work involves collaboration, so I give folks lots of ways to chat with me. Between Outlook, Gmail, Meebo, and Windows Live Messenger, I’m constantly getting four different pop-up notifications in my system tray.

This year I’ve been trying to better integrate library resources into the college’s online classes in Blackboard, so the Adobe CS5 suite is the newest addition to my software toolbox, especially Photoshop, Dreamweaver, and Captivate. Alongside these I use lots of “helper” applications, like Audacity, and I’m a big fan of Levelator for cleaning up uneven audio files. I can’t live without Adobe Acrobat, and never post documents online without first converting them to PDFs.

iTunes is almost always running whenever I’m at the computer. At work I stream WERS, a great radio station out of Emerson College in Boston, and at home I dive into my 560 gigs of music on my Buffalo TeraStation external hard drive.

What would be your dream setup?

I’m still chained at the hip to my flash drive so I’m trying to decide if I should get on the cloud computing bandwagon or if I just want a powerful laptop that I can take between home and work. I have high hopes for a one-computer future for myself. I’ll be a happy early adopter guinea pig if and when my college starts supporting laptops instead for desktops for our faculty office computers.

Lynda Kellam

Data Services and Government Information Librarian, University of North Carolina at Greensboro

Who are you, and what do you do?

I’m Lynda, the Data Services and Government Information Librarian at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. I do numbers and track down the government stuff. I also help train our reference interns who are LIS graduate students.

What hardware are you using?

At home I have a 2.4 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo iMac with a 20-inch screen. I am also a bit of a gadget collector, so I have an Acer netbook, an 6 six-year old Dell Inspiron laptop (mostly for running Civilization III), a 64GB Wi-Fi iPad, a 30GB 5th generation iPod, a 1GB pink iPod shuffle, a 16GB 4th generation Touch, and an HTC Hero phone with the Android platform. I really need to sell some of these! The main things I use now are the iMac, iPad, Touch, and the phone.

My work computer is a 2.16 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo Dell Latitude laptop hooked up to another big as an elephant screen. I also have some hand-me-down equipment to use for scanning and other projects. The laptop has been a great tool; I wouldn’t be able to do my job well without it because I need the mobility. On a given week I’m rarely in my office for long.

And what software?

Day and night I use mostly Firefox. It is the first program I start up when I get up in the morning and when I get to work, especially now that we have switched over to Google Apps for Education. I tried using Google Chrome on my iMac but it didn’t have my passwords so I lazily switched back. Firefox’s homepage goes to my work and personal gmail accounts, the library homepage, our library chat (Libraryh3lp), and my personal chat (Meebo). After logging into those I usually check the Echofon Firefox add-on Twitter feed.

During my typical workday I’m switching between Google Documents, for things I’m sharing, Microsoft Word, for big writing projects, and Evernote, for pretty much everything else. I’m currently finishing up a book project so I have spent most of my time in Microsoft Word this month. I regularly use SPSS, a statistical software, for data work. I have SAS training, but have few requests for it. And for some reason, I end up using Adobe Photoshop quite a bit. I know it better than any other editing program so I just default to it, I guess. We aren’t allowed administrative rights to our computers, which means I don’t get to experiment much with software on the Inspiron. I have to save the experimentation for the Acer or my iMac.

On my iMac I use primarily Evernote, Pages, Skitch, TweetDeck and Cultured Code’s Things. I would love to have Skitch at work because you can do photo editing in a fraction of the time it takes me in Photoshop. It is a super program! I am an Evernote junkie, too. Everything I need is in there and I can access it on my gaggle of gadgets. I’ve gone Pro because I use it for so many work projects. I’m a recent convert to Things. I’ve used Remember the Milk for a couple of years, but it can be so complex that I always get confused and abandon it. I now basically use RTM for my grocery list. Things, on the other hand, has a simple interface that is easy to use, and I have access to it on the iPad or iTouch.

What would be your dream setup?

I think for work I am finally reaching that point. We switched to Google Apps, LibGuides and Libraryh3lp this year, which means that I can answer student questions, update my library course guides and help out on chat from anywhere. As a reference and instruction librarian I shouldn’t be tied down to an office space; I should be able to roam and still have access to my work.

The only thing I would change is that I would love to have a Mac Pro for a second work computer for the Mac-specific software like Skitch and Things and because I prefer the OS. I bring my iPad to work regularly, which is a good substitute. I have remote office hours in a dormitory, and I’ve used it several times there. The library website and databases display pretty well. I do wish it ran Flash because then it would be the perfect little remote reference machine.

I’m pretty happy with my current home set-up. Out of all of the gadgets I’ve bought my iMac was one of the wisest. It does everything I need.

Bohyun Kim

Digital Access Librarian, Florida International University Medical Library

Who are you, and what do you do?

My name is Bohyun Kim (Twitter: @bohyunkim) and I design web sites, create databases, manage electronic resources, and plan and manage all aspects of technology (hardware, software, and services) at my library. I also write grant proposals and work as the project manager for technology-related grant projects. I am the Digital Access Librarian and one of the library’s four founding librarians of Florida International University (FIU) Medical Library in Miami, FL., which opened in the fall of 2009.

What hardware are you using?

At work, I have a Dell PC with Intel Core 2 Duo (2.4 GHz), 3.35 GB RAM, and a 20″ monitor and a Mac Mini with Intel Core 2 Duo (2 GHz), 2 GB RAM, and a 19″ monitor. I use a Gefen DVI switcher to connect the PC and the Mac Mini with one keyboard and other USB devices.

At home, I have a 19″ iMac with Intel Core Duo (2 GHz) with 2 GB RAM and a 17″ MacBook Pro with Intel Core 2 Duo (2.33 GHz) with 2 GB RAM. I also have a Samsung N120 netbook (Intel Atom 1.6 GHz and 1 GB RAM) and I own an iPhone 4, which I use every day, and an iPad that I use mostly for PDF reading. I use an Evoluent Vertical mouse at both work and home.

And what software?

I mostly work in Adobe Dreamweaver and Photoshop. The text editors I use for scripting are Notepad++ (Windows) and TextWrangler (Mac), both of which are free. My favorite SFTP programs are WinSCP (Windows) and Cyberduck (Mac). I have been quite tempted to purchase TextMate and Transmit for a while. So I may purchase those sooner or later. I rely on XAMPP and MAMP for testing server-side scripts on my local machine. Firebug and Colorzilla are the two Firefox extensions that I most frequently use. I also occasionally use Live HTTP Headers (Firefox extension) to troubleshoot access issues with e-resources. I heavily use Firefox for web design and development work, but for general web browsing I prefer Chrome for its speed. I heavily use iPhone simulator for mobile web app development. For creating instructional materials, I use Jing, FireShot (Firefox extension for Windows), Screenjelly, Camtasia, Audacity, and GarageBand for screen capture, screencasting, and video and audio editing. I use Dropbox on all my computers including my mobile devices.

The apps that I most frequently use aside from Mail, Calendar, and iPod are Dropbox, Good Reader, and iAnnotate on my iPad and Twitter, PS (Photoshop) Express, Podcaster, Facebook, Audiobooks, TWC (The Weather Channel), and Stanza, and Dropbox on my iPhone 4. I love playing with note apps although I am a terrible note taker. Among many note apps, I love Push+Pop for its extremely simple interface. I also have several games on my iPhone, and my recent favorite is SuperQuadra and Frict. I have been trying to revive my long-lost doodling ability after listening to the inspiring talk about Doodle Revolution by Sunni Brown at the Big Web Show and TED. But so far, I haven’t gotten much beyond purchasing the Brushes app and drawing a few palm trees and dogs!

What would be your dream setup?

As far as available hardware goes, I would like a MacBook Air with a 27″ Cinema Display and a Mac Mini on the side with the fastest processor and the largest RAM possible.

For things that do not exist yet, I want a foldable and rollable paper-thin touch-screen computer that can be charged wirelessly with the projection keyboard feature.

Emily Lloyd

Associate Librarian, Eden Prairie Library

Who are you, and what do you do?

I’m Emily Lloyd, an Associate Librarian with a large public library system, a mom to a teen and a tween, and the author of Shelf Check, a librar* comic and/or blog. Some of my interests right now include the idea of spontaneous library programming and librarians as Lifehackers for their communities, as well as the possibility of libraries offering library-published original or curated free ebooks to members. Why limit our ebook offerings to our Overdrive collections when e-publishing is so easy and free? We could partner with local historical societies for an e-volume of local lore, or publish a collection of our staff’s favorite public domain stories, or an anthology of poems or humorous essays by staff or teens from our teen advisory groups, etc.

What hardware are you using?

I have a Dell Inspiron 1525 laptop. I’ve had it about two years, and it’s my first new, not hand-me-down laptop, a gift from my Mom. It’s fine, but could be faster.

Since mid-August, I’ve had a Wi-Fi-only Barnes & Noble Nook. I use it for library books, the occasional purchase (I was able to download Mockingjay at 11:00 p.m. when it was released at midnight EST! [I'm in Central]), and (most heavily) with Instapaper for reading longer articles and blog posts. Outside of the slow start-up time, I think it’s great, and really like the way it feels in my hands.

I don’t have a smart phone yet, but I bought a 3rd-gen iPod Touch last Spring so I wouldn’t feel completely out of the loop when it comes to trying out apps (backfire note: I still feel out of the loop, since many of the apps I’m most interested in require a camera that the Touch doesn’t have). I used the Touch as an ereader before I got the Nook, and continue to use it for free books from FeedBooks via Stanza.

And what software?

Google Docs. iTunes. Skype. There isn’t much I don’t do online or in-browser. Blogger, Google Reader, Delicious. Twitter. I make Shelf Check at Toondoo, a free strip-building site I’m very grateful for, supplementing their clip-art style graphics with things I slap together at Picnik (also free). I use Picnik a lot for library book display signage as well. For browsing, I use Chrome and make frequent use of Talon, Aviary’s brilliant screen capture extension, which lets you edit your capture in-browser.
At work, we recently upgraded to Office 2007, and added Audacity and GIMP to all public computers. I’m excited to spend more time with them.

What would be your dream setup?

Unfettered access to a great tech zoo. I don’t feel I need to own things so much as I feel that not being able to play and spend time with them is becoming a liability. I’m thinking of trying to start up a kind of tech gear co-op, either neighborhood or workplace-based, where you can take my Nook home for a week (I don’t think a weekend’s enough) and try checking out a library book, and I can take your MacBook and camera home and try out iMovie. Or even something as simple as a “Bring Your Gear to Work Day” or staff meeting, where we lay all our stuff out and teach each other the basics about it.

Clifford Lynch

Director of the Coalition for Networked Information

Who are you and what do you do?

I’m Clifford Lynch. I’m the Director of the Coalition for Networked Information; I’m also an adjunct professor at the University of California, Berkeley School of Information. In terms of computing-supported work, this means that I deal with vast amounts of email, spend a lot of time looking at various kinds of things on the net, experimenting with various software and services, and editing or commenting on documents. I struggle to get original writing done, and to mange the research materials that underpin this. And I’m on the road almost all the time, so portability and reliability are very important.

What hardware are you using?

I’ve had Apple powerbooks for years and years; I’m currently on a 13 inch aluminum MacBook Pro that’s about a year old, with a solid state drive replacing the hard drive and the memory maxed out to 8 GB. These machines are finally at the point where you can put enough memory on them so they aren’t memory constrained (at least for what I do), which is really nice. I don’t use an external monitor; I have an assortment of external drives in various places as one level of backup. And handy access to a good duplexing laser printer (I’ve been using HPs for the last seven or eight years) is important.

I don’t use a lot of gadgets at present: for example, I have a boring quad-band unlocked cell phone that basically makes phone calls and roams internationally pretty gracefully. Though in due course I suspect I’ll end up on an iPhone or something like that.

And what software?

Of course the usual stuff: OS X, Safari and Firefox, Microsoft Office. I should say that the current trends towards very highly integrated software systems scares me to death and I try to avoid it (update your browser, and your mail and calendar suddenly break!). For email I’m still on classic, now four years unsupported, Eudora, and live in fear that it will suddenly stop working when Apple updates the operating system. The good news is there are some promising successors coming along, albeit slowly. I use Meeting Maker for calendaring, and an absolutely fabulous, indispensable program called CircusPonies Notebook for note taking, list making, and organizing.

There’s lots of other software I’m experimenting with on an ongoing basis, including various word processors and text editors, and systems like Mathematica, Netlogo, and TeX that I’d like to really master someday. And I still haven’t found a solution I’m fully happy with for bibliography management and organizing the masses of papers, reports and other documents that I have on my local drive that have been downloaded from the net.

What would be your dream setup?

In terms of hardware, I feel like I’m in pretty good shape, finally; I don’t feel like my laptop is severely underpowered for the basic work that I’m trying to get done. I do find some of the Apple product line trade-offs between capability and portability frustrating—the laptops with the bigger screens are consistently much more capable, and I keep wishing they’d couple the computational and storage capabilities less tightly to the screen size for those of us who prize a small footprint. I miss the non-glare screens that Apple used to use, and battery life can always be improved—particularly now that you can’t just pack an extra battery.

Network speed, ubiquity, and cost are real issues for me. I wish I could count on fast reliable wireless, backed up by fast backbone network connectivity (think about hotels, where the wireless is OK but everybody then bottlenecks onto a single T1 line out of the hotel)—everywhere and affordable. This is a particular nightmare when traveling abroad, but it’s bad even in the US. This is a major barrier to making more integral use of cloud services of various kinds (even basic things like backup; I do use this, but only as part of a broader strategy).

In terms of software, I think there’s still tons of room for progress towards a dream configuration. And let me close with a plug for content. Availability of journal articles in digital form is pretty good, and this is a huge boon when doing research. I can’t wait for the day when I can get the vast majority of the books that I have in hardcopy digitally so that I can put selected books on my hard drive, search them and annotate them when I’m working on writing something.

Sarah Murphy

School Librarian and Desk Set co-founder

Who are you, and what do you do?

I am Sarah Murphy, and I’m a school librarian at an Independent K-12 Boys’ School in Manhattan. In 2006, Maria Falgoust and I co-founded The Desk Set, a fund raising, party throwing organization of librarians and bibliophiles. I live in Brooklyn.

What hardware are you using?

At home, I use my laptop—a MacBook—and when I choose “About this Mac,” I discover that it’s a MacBook 4.1 with an Intel Core 2 Duo speeding along at 2.4 GHz.

I have an 8GB iPod Touch to carry around music and photos, and check the Web when I’m lucky enough to hit a Wi-Fi spot. For playing music, I’m considerably more fond of my circa 1955 Magnavox console turntable.

I adore my decade-old Canon CanoScan which lets me make flyers (or my own wedding invitations) using paper and other physical media (like Scrabble tiles!) and still distribute them like a proper 21st-century gal who wants to avoid extra waste and cost.

And to supplement all of this, I’ve got a ten-dollar phone that doesn’t even take pictures.

So, if I need to capture the moment, I might borrow my husband’s Canon Rebel XS or I’ll use my super rad Diana+ from Lomography (a gift from some of my Desk Set pals).

At work, I’m primarily hooked to a 21.5-inch 3.06 GHz iMac, and I often teach lessons using a SMART SB660i3 SMART Board ® 600i interactive whiteboard system and UF55 projector. I’m circulating 24 Dell 2100 Netbooks, 4 MacBooks, and 2 iPads.

And what software?

Most of what I do happens online, and my browser of choice is Firefox. At work, when I’m not teaching, I’m usually staring at either our online library catalog (Destiny Library Manager from Follett) or my email (.edu mail powered by Gmail). At both home and work I’ve more or less ditched MS Office in favor of Google Docs. And I can’t get through the day without my Google Calendar.

The Netbooks run Ubuntu, and I encourage the students to use Google Docs rather than Open Office. When they return the netbooks, I’d rather not have to worry about what files they leave behind: when all their work is in their email, it disappears when they log off.

The Desk Set has a blog powered by WordPress, and the blogs at school also happen to be from WordPress.

And I’m pretty wild about iMovie for library instructional videos starring fourth graders, or for video invitations for Desk Set events. When screenplays are required, I’m happy to use Celtx, mostly because it’s free, but also because screenplays for fourth graders don’t really require Final Draft.

What would be your dream setup?

I am fairly satisfied with what I’ve got, but I admit that I’m sort of loving the iPads at school and would love one of my own. But I wouldn’t use it for its (very nice) Kindle app or its (also OK) iBooks app, because my ideal setup for reading is still the book. Honestly, I’d love to ditch everything digital all together. My eyes have been more strained lately and I often feel like I spend most of my time writing and reading emails about what I’m going to do, and very rarely ever do anything. So my ideal ideal setup would be a house full of printed books, the aforementioned Magnavox, and a bottle of wine.

Kenley Neufeld

Library Director, Santa Barbara City College

Who are you, and what do you do?

My name is Kenley and I like to explore new ideas, play, listen to music, sit in meditation, and do my best to help others. If I can listen, to myself and to others, then I’m on the right track. If I can “be present” and bring “awareness” to all my actions then what I do is what I am doing. That said, I recently came across a Seth Godin discussion on what we should be doing in our organizations. I like what he wrote. My job should be seeing new opportunities, making decisions that work, and understanding the connection between my audience, brand, and ventures. I try to apply this in my work life where I serve as the Library Director of a large community college library in Santa Barbara. It’s a great place to arrive every day. It has a motivated, passionate, and supportive staff. What a difference that makes!

What hardware are you using?

Main device (appendage?) is my iPhone 4. Wow, what a device!

When using a full size computer, at home and in the office, I have a 15″ MacBook Pro (2.8 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo and 4 GB) running Snow Leopard (and Windows 7 via Parallels 5 as needed) with an attached 24″ Apple Cinema display. Blue Snowball microphone and G Drive for backups.

My iPad comes in handy when going to meetings or the coffee shop.

And what software?

On the iPhone, I love using Gowalla, Foursquare, and Facebook. Safari and Calendar are the close follow-ups. Hipstamatic camera app for taking fun pictures. 1Password for tracking my virtual wallet and passwords.

The MBP keeps Chrome and Firefox open all the time. I use the Dev version of Chrome and am also testing Firefox 4. Some sites that I use don’t work well in Chrome (my preferred browser) and by having Firefox open and available I can easily switch over to the other browser. Also, I have two different Google accounts that I use and prefer to keep them open in different browsers.

TweetDeck appears when I can support the time. In the background is Adium, Skype, Dropbox, and Jing. 1Password for fast logging in to websites.

My iPad needs to have other functionality so I use iAnnotate PDF, Instapaper, GoodReader, IM+, and Tweetings. 1Password is a must, again.

Overall, I spend quite a bit of time with web apps. I’ve lived in Gmail for most of the last six years. All my calendars are in Google, but I have them connected with my iPhone and iPad using the Google/Exchange option. Pay for MOG for my music listening needs. WordPress is the bomb.

What would be your dream setup?

I’ve worked pretty hard at setting up systems that meet my needs. The laptop needs to stay small enough to travel, but large enough to work at the desktop. It’d be nice to have a second Cinema Display on the desktop.

Still waiting for the ideal audio storage and playback system in the cloud. Nothing quite has the mix right… cost, speed, ease of use, integration with existing tools, etc.

An Android to play with and explore

Carlos Ovalle

Computer Systems Developer, University of Texas, Austin

Who are you, and what do you do?

I’m Carlos Ovalle. I’m an IT person, doctoral student, and occasional lecturer at the University of Texas at Austin’s iSchool. I offer various types of tech support and run the IT Lab. I teach an undergraduate class called Information in Cyberspace. I study technology and law (especially copyright) and try to figure out how these things affect the practices of cultural institutions like libraries, archives, and museums, and maybe have suggestions for various groups about those subjects. I’m an American Library Association Copyright Scholar, and I try to help answer librarians’ questions about copyright at the website I helped build at librarycopyright.net. I’m on the board of EFF-Austin. I’m working on my qualifying paper and some other projects involving some local archives and museums. Also, I play games when I have time. Sadly, that isn’t too often recently, but my wife and I are on the library guild in WoW.

What hardware are you using?

My work desktop is an older system, but I really like it: a Dell Precision PWS380, Pentium D 3.20 Ghz, 4 GB of RAM, 500 GB hard drive using RAID 5 (basically, 3 hard drives striping, so that if one fails it can be replaced—that has saved me on multiple occasions). I also occasionally use a Dell Mini 10v or a MacBook Pro.

Home personal computers: Dell XPS 6301. Intel Core2 Quad, 3 Ghz, 8 GB Ram running 64-bit Windows 7 Ultimate, NVidia GeForce GTX 285 video card, 750 GB hard drive. That’s supposed to be my gaming/high processing computer, but in all honesty it gets used the least of any of my systems. I mainly use this one when I want to hole up in a room and do a ton of academic work.

The computer I use the most often is my laptop, a Dell Vostro 1720 with an Intel Core2 Duo, 2.66 Ghz, 8 GB 64-bit Windows Vista, NVidia GeForce 9600M GS video card and 500 GB hard drive. I use it for absolutely everything.

The latter are the newest systems; they’re a bit of overkill for what I ordinarily do with them, but I expect them to last 4-6 years without much problem. The rest of the systems I mentioned are probably 5-6 years old, but still very usable.

My newest project is going to be getting Ubuntu running on a six-year-old Precision.

And what software?

Lots. I try to be at least familiar with everything we have in the lab. I regularly use Windows OSs because I support them, and I run XP, Vista, and 7 on my various systems. Although a coworker does most of the Mac stuff, I do try to keep familiar with OS X for the times I support it.

This second, I’m using SSH Secure Shell Client to connect to a Red Hat Server and using alpine to check my email. I’ve got about 40 or so Firefox tabs in five windows. I’ve got Skype and Pidgin running for IM, and Winamp Pro for music. I’ve got Excel and Word open for a research paper I’m collaborating on.

What would be your dream setup?

Dream—two main systems. For a desktop, up the RAM, processor, and graphics card on my XPS system, and since I’m dreaming, also have it be a lot quieter. Plus a giant monitor, naturally.

The biggest problem I regularly face is with my laptop cooling. I’ve had to purchase a cooling pad, and it still overheats regularly. So a fairly high-end laptop that doesn’t suffer from cooling problems is like a dream right now.

Dan Scott

Systems Librarian, Laurentian University

Who are you, and what do you do?

Hi, I’m Dan Scott, a decrepit 38-year-old systems librarian at Laurentian University. I spend an inordinate amount of time trying to help the Evergreen free software library system project on most fronts: features, bug fixes, community, and ease of use. I also maintain the File_MARC PHP library for reading and writing MARC records.

What hardware are you using?

Most of my time is spent on a Lenovo ThinkPad T400 with a dual-core 64-bit processor, 3 GB of RAM, and a 500 GB 7200 RPM hard drive (I buy a 3rd party hard drive and swap it in myself rather than paying the crazy premium that the manufacturer would demand). I never use an external monitor, and I disable the trackpad in the BIOS—I love the nipple—but I do plug in a stock external Lenovo mouse and keyboard when I’m at the office. I’ve used ThinkPads for ten years; I blame my previous career with IBM for getting me hooked.

Coffee|Code runs on a Linode virtual private server with 512 MB of RAM and 16 GB of storage.

My HTC Nexus One phone is my truly mobile computer; having email, a full Web browsing experience, and GPS navigation continuously available changes things. I own my phone outright, so I was able to switch to a local SIM when I spent two weeks in Amsterdam and got unlimited data for €2.50/day. In the last two weeks I relied on the phone’s ability to act as a Wi-Fi hotspot while working at a cottage without an Internet connection, and then again for a few more days when I returned home and found my DSL connection was dead. The 3G speed on the phone is as fast as my DSL connection—hard to believe that I used to use a 300 baud modem to connect to the world. I also use the phone to read books to my daughter at night; we just finished Alice in Wonderland and are moving on to Through The Looking Glass.

The Nexus One has also taken over most of my on-the-go media consumption needs, but when I’m traveling light or conserving batteries I’m very happy with my 8 GB Sansa Clip+ with an additional 8 GB microSD card. It has a tiny form factor, long battery life, and supports Ogg Vorbis and FLAC, which is how I’ve stored most of my music collection.

I ride a 2008 Norco Nitro (hardtail, hydraulic discs) and occasionally take advantage of the great trails in Sudbury, but usually it suffers the indignity of being used for commuting.

And what software?

I’m currently running Fedora 13 on the laptop. Linux has been my primary desktop for over a dozen years. I’ve been a Gnome user for the last few years; before that I was a KDE user (during the halcyon KDE 3 days), and before that I ran WindowMaker.

The software behind the Coffee|Code blog is Serendipity. I run “Screen” on every server so that random network problems don’t really interfere with my work.

I use mutt for email, and I use LibreOffice to create presentations or when people send me Microsoft Word or Excel documents.

I use KeePassX for password management on my laptop and synchronize the password database with my phone running KeePassDroid.

I run VirtualBox OSE (Open Source Edition) as distributed in the Fedora packages so that I can build and test virtual images of Evergreen on other distributions such as Debian and Ubuntu, and occasionally to test software on a Windows XP (ugh) virtual image.

I mostly program in Perl,JavaScript, and PHP using the Vim text editor and Subversion repositories. I write tutorials and documentation in AsciiDoc and store those in Bazaar repositories.

For Web browsing and Web development, I’m pretty much evenly split between Firefox + Firebug + NoScript and Chromium. Neither browser helps with the hell that is debugging Internet Explorer, though.

For communication, my primary tool is the XChat IRC client for staying in touch with #code4lib and #evergreen on Freenode. I also run Empathy so that people who aren’t library geeks can contact me via various instant messaging protocols. I fairly obsessively use the standard Web interface to communicate on the Identi.ca microblog service, and very rarely I check in on Twitter.

For a podcatcher, gPodder is the bomb.

What would be your dream setup?

I downsized from a 15″ laptop to a 14″ laptop, but was surprised that it was a 14″ widescreen—which ended up having approximately the same footprint as my old laptop. My first ThinkPad was a 13″ ultra-portable; I would happily go back to that form factor if I didn’t have to sacrifice the processor, RAM, hard drive capacity, or battery life. It looks like the ThinkPad x201 line is what I would be dreaming about currently. Throw in a decent port replicator and a dual-monitor setup; I’m sure I could get used to it.

I would ideally be using that setup to work on free software written in Python, stored in a distributed version control system, bolstered by a rich set of unit sets and solid documentation.

Cindi Trainor

Head of Library Technology, Eastern Kentucky University

Who are you, and what do you do?

I’m Cindi, and I’m a librarian. I’m also a mom, wife, student, photographer, crocheter, runner, reader, and writer. I work at Eastern Kentucky University currently, where I’m the head of the
library technology division. The word “Division” is a little heavy to describe my Fantastic Five, who keep all the technology in the libraries (from SFX to the public PCs and everything in between) a-humming along as best we can. Which is to say that we set it up, and when it breaks, we fix it. Like many librarians responsible for technology, I’m an accidental technologist. My current favorite distraction—aside from crocheting and running—is watching Dr. Who.

What hardware are you using?

My work computer is a 13″ MacBook, which I love and take everywhere with me. At home, I have a 24″ iMac. I shoot primarily with a Canon 5D and the f2.8 24-70 mm, f2.8 70-200 mm and f1.8 85mm lenses. I use the 24-70 mm lens for most shooting, but the best portraits come with the 85mm lens, which yields sharp images with vibrant color and butter-soft bokeh (the out-of-focus background that makes the subject POP!). Fantastic! I have experimented with off-camera lighting using the ultra-portable kit recommended by the Strobist blog including the Canon 580EX, Canon ST-E2 flash trigger, and Westcott collapsible umbrella—but mostly rely on natural light for shooting.

And what software?

• Connecting: TweetDeck, Chrome, Adium
• Writing: WordPress, Scrivener, Google Documents
• Shooting: Flickr, Photoshop, LightRoom, Picnik, iPhoto
• Chilling: Last.fm, Grooveshark, and Pandora
• Roaming: lamely enough, I still have a dumb phone. Someday, my distracted driving will be web-based and GPS-guided. I kid!

What would be your dream setup?

I would love to have a Canon 5D Mark II, but by the time I buy a new camera I bet there will be something even better available. My next camera-related purchase will probably be another L-glass lens. Now that I have a camera that can shoot acceptably in ISOs above 100 (the Rebel I had really couldn’t), I don’t have to rely so heavily on lenses with huge apertures. When I eventually get better training on studio lighting, I’d like to own a cloth backdrop and a few studio
lights.

If I ever decide to move on from librarianship, my absolute dream job would be to be the Presidential photographer, provided that by the time I get around to it, the President is still someone I like. More realistically, I’d probably be content shooting and writing for a publication of some kind.

Dee Venuto

Media Services Coordinator, Rancocas Valley Regional High School

Who are you, and what do you do?

For almost 20 years I’ve been a teacher librarian. For the past three years, I’ve served a wonderfully diverse and large population as the media center coordinator at Rancocas Valley Regional High School in Mount Holly, New Jersey. Most of my technology choices are based on creating relevant experiences for my students and networking with individuals interested in the library world.

Recently, a challenge led by the county chapter of Glenn Beck’s Project 9/12 group resulted in the banning of our school’s copy of Amy Sonnie’s Revolutionary Voices, an anthology of writings by LGBTQ individuals. This threw my career into a new direction: I now find myself an advocate for intellectual freedom and spending more time working on our nation’s growing digital/educational divide. Whether presenting at ALA or working as a member of the state library cooperative board of New Jersey, I hope to offer insight that helps all types of libraries collaborate for the benefit of our profession and patrons.

What hardware are you using?

I regularly use a HP 8510w notebook with Windows XP. Although quite heavy, it easily travels to and from work with me and offers me security when presenting in other locations. The lab in my library uses Vista and offers me another experience.

At home, I’m addicted to the wireless laptop, much to the chagrin of my family, but am integrating the iPad too. In addition, anticipating the purchase of Macs at our school I’ve started to play with a MacBook Pro.

And what software?

Facebook, Twitter, Gmail, Microsoft Outlook, Google Docs, primitive website design using our school’s provider, Delicious, NoodleTools (checked out Zotero, but my students and I aren’t ready for that), SmartNotebook, Prezi, Windows Movie Maker, PowerPoint, professional listservs, Firefox, Safari, research databases, Yahoo IM, and iTunes. As always there are plans to learn new things really soon such as TweetDeck and iLife, with possibly Ning on the horizon.

What would be your dream setup?

Besides being shown a source that outlined exactly which technologies would best serve my students’ needs, I would love to have a second 30-station iMac lab in our library—complete with dual platform capabilities—so I could teach students how to create content using iLife or Movie Maker with information from their own devices (phones, MP3 players) or the library’s. I also dream of an educational system that allows this to happen by catching up to its 21st century learners and integrating a curriculum which gives them skills in the ethical use of technology. Personally, I entertain the idea of an iPhone or Droid, but really don’t think I should be plugged in anymore than I am.

Brett Bonfield

Library Director, Collingswood (NJ) Public Library

Who are you, and what do you do?

I’m the director of the Collingswood (NJ) Public Library and a part-time PhD candidate at the Rutgers library school in New Brunswick, NJ. I’m also a co-founder and editor at In the Library with the Lead Pipe, treasurer for the New Jersey Library Association, and I work on a couple of presidential task forces for the American Library Association. Outside of work, I’m a wedding officiant, a barefoot runner, and a certified yoga teacher.

What hardware are you using?

My primary home computer is a new Apple iMac (21.5-inch, 3.2 GHz, 4 GB), which we bought in August to replace a Dell PowerEdge 600SC (Pentium 4 2.4GHz, 2GB, Sceptre X7 monitor) we’ve had since 2002. The iMac is my first Apple computer and so far I’m very impressed. I got it, in part, because I’m so taken with my 8 MB iPod Touch, which I use all the time.

My laptop is a first generation Pangolin Value from System76, an independent computer vendor out of Colorado that sells Ubuntu machines and provides very good customer support as well. We bought it in 2006 and it’s still going strong, though if I had the purchase to do over again I would have gotten a much lighter machine.

At work, I use a white label PC (Pentium 4 2.8 Ghz and 2 GB) sold to the Library by an independent, local computer vendor a year or so before I got here. Dealing with its finicky motherboard sold me forever on Kingston memory, as much for its customer service as for its products.

My camera is a Samsung SL270, though I’m a terrible photographer and, as I discovered when using its HD video mode, an even worse videographer. I also have a long-discontinued and practically invulnerable Nokia cell phone on a prepaid T-Mobile plan (the next best thing to my dream of not having a cell phone at all).

And what software?

I like and rely on Dropbox, Firefox, Google Docs, Gmail, Pinboard, LastPass, LibreOffice, Photoshop, VLC, and the three-headed notes team of SimpleNote (for Touch and synchronizing), Notational Velocity (Mac desktop client), and ResophNotes (Windows desktop and portable client).

On Windows, I’m a fan of 7-Zip, Foobar2000, Notepad++, PuTTY, WinSCP, and Microsoft Excel and Word (2003 and earlier), and Security Essentials.

On OS X, I’m a fan of Cyberduck, iTunes, and Skim, and I really like Safari, Stanza, iCombinator, and Hacker News Mobile on my Touch.

I’m trying to learn Vim yet again, this time by choosing MacVim over TextEdit as often as possible. If Vim finally takes, I’ll owe a big debt to Yehuda Katz.

I like Chrome (especially its developer tools) and Safari, but almost never use them now that I’m in school and rely on Zotero, which is only available for Firefox. Fortunately, almost everything I like about the other browsers is now available for Firefox as well (and sometimes exclusively), including Private Browsing Mode, Smart Keywords, Sync, AdBlock, BetterPrivacy, HTTPS-Everywhere, Instaright, Link Widgets, OptimizeGoogle, Readability, and Scrollbar Anywhere. I also use and appreciate Firebug, Flashblock, and NoScript, though I’d like to find a way to be less aware that I’m using them.

For Maintaining the Library’s Vista-based public workstations I depend on Ninite to keep the software up to date and SteadyState to maintain security and set session time outs. I’d like to upgrade from Vista to Windows 7, but Windows 7 doesn’t support SteadyState and I won’t upgrade without it.

The Collingswood Public Library’s website (including its catalog) run on the WordPress-based Scriblio, and WordPress is the platform for In the Library with the Lead Pipe as well. I use WordPress.com and FeedBurner to maintain the email list and send out the newsletter for my wife’s yoga studio, and Mad Mimi for the Collingswood Public Library’s list.

I host rss2email on my own server and send all my feeds to Gmail. I’m also playing around with TweetByMail, so I can interact with Twitter via Gmail. The fewer interfaces I have to deal with, the better.

What would be your dream setup?

Most interface/platform improvements don’t mean much to me. CPU speeds have long surpassed my cognitive limitations, and interfaces have been good enough for so long that it’s hard to remember a time when I wanted them to be more responsive. If anything, I tend to consciously slow down how fast I speak and type so that I don’t say or write something I haven’t thought all the way through. Meanwhile, I’m assimilating new information ever more slowly.

What would really impress me would be ways to seamlessly provide privacy and security in networked environments. For instance, I would really like to have access to a wireless mesh network, like the one being developed by the One Laptop Per Child project. I also dream of libraries wholeheartedly adopting Tor (or, perhaps, VPN or SSH tunneling), which would require two complementary initiatives: making Tor faster by installing relays on library servers, and spreading the word on what it does and how to use it—which may have the salutary effect of educating people about the relevance of libraries’ longstanding commitment to privacy.

Afterword

Five years ago, before I had started researching library schools I might want to attend, I didn’t know much about librarianship. I think I would have been surprised by the phrase “Library and Information Science.” What did one have to do with the other?

Like many technologists, I may have had some vague notion that librarians had something to contribute to discussions about information and metadata and standards and access, but my concept of what librarians did and what they knew probably had more to do with stereotypes and anecdote than on an understanding of reality. Which is a shame. Although in the last few years I think we’ve done a really good job of making clearer connections between libraries and technology, I don’t think anyone is surprised when librarians are omitted from discussions about and between prominent technologists, such as the one facilitated by the Setup. (Note: by “librarians” I mean anyone who works in, with, or for libraries. Hat tip to Eli Neiburger for saying what I’d been thinking, only less clearly, for some time before he said those words out loud.)

I love the Setup. It’s a great publication, it’s beautifully designed, the questions are perfect, and the interview roll includes many of the techies I most admire, along with many others who I hadn’t heard of by name before they appeared but whose answers were fun and instructive. Although I’m not surprised that no librarians have been included in the Setup, I thought it would be useful to see if librarians would be as interesting to interview as people who work in professions that are more generally perceived as IT. That’s for you to decide, but I think the answer is yes. I started this project with high expectations, and every one of the librarians I interviewed exceeded them.

Thanks to all participants for their answers and great photos, and thanks to Daniel Bogan for starting and running the Setup, for giving it a Creative Commons license, and for agreeing to serve as a reader for this piece. Thanks also to Chris Boetticher for his photo-editing wizardry, to my Lead Pipe colleague, Eric Frierson, for reading and commenting on this post in draft form, and to Derik Badman, Laurel Bliss, Ellie Collier, Hilary Davis, Allie Flannery, Emily Ford, AJ Johnson, Cindy Phillips, Jean Rainwater, and Marcellus Turner for suggesting people for me to interview. Finally, thanks to Derik Badman for last-minute troubleshooting—either WordPress or our host choked on this post and I had to go directly into MySQL to take it live, a task made much easier by my new friend, Sequel Pro.

In the Library with the Lead Pipe welcomes guest poster Micah Vandegrift. Micah is a graduate student in Library and Information Studies at Florida State University. He currently lives in Brooklyn, NY, and is interning at the Brooklyn Public Library. Micah’s education has focused on 20th century American culture, digital media and the humanities and he hopes to work in an art library, museum or academic library in the near future (he’s also on the market, so contact him directly if interested!). He loves hanging out on the internet and can be found tweeting, blogging and chattering about web tech trends, libraries and music pretty regularly. Contact Micah at micahvandegrift@gmail.com or Google Voice # 347-687-2096. Lead Pipe is pleased to provide a venue for the HackLibSchool project, and we hope you’ll join in!

UPDATE February 2011: The Hack Library School initiative now has a blog!

Photo by Micah Vandegrift

The “What.”

If you haven’t heard of Hacking The Academy, I’d strongly suggest you look into it. During the week of May 21-28^th a group of academics, librarians and higher ed techies crowdsourced submissions for a born-digital book. They compiled a variety of articles and blog posts focused around the theme of shared professional development resources, questions and innovations, with the goal of taking these important adaptations from across the field and centralizing the conversations in a digital space outside the institution, thus ‘hacking’ the academy. What I admire most about the Hacking The Academy project (#Hackacad on Twitter) is the fact that this group took it upon themselves to engage professional development in higher education and, utilizing social media and other technologies, craft it to their specifications. Call it DIY, curation, hacking or what have you, the point is because of the ever-increasing sociality of the real-time web people are able to interact with one another on a whole new level. When this ability is applied to the professional sphere, the possibilities are bountiful. This post is equal part inquisition and proposition that it is time for the emerging library professionals (we students) to take an active role in what we learn, need to learn, didn’t learn, and wish we had learned in library school by curating our own hack.

From what I know of librarianship thus far, as a student in Florida State University’s Masters in Library and Information Studies program, this field is highly adaptive to new technologies, and there are more than a few cases where libraries really stand out for their technological implementations, e.g. The Hub, Darien Library. Yet, as I have been scanning the social web these past months, I have come across more than a few posts from my peers wondering if they missed something in school, or offering their own posts on “what I wished I’d learned…” regarding the practicalities of librarian life. Is this indicative of blight in the system? Maybe. Is it perhaps a product Gen-Y’s increasing openness to use blogs for constructive criticism? Possibly. Is it worth a glance to see if library school is not lining up so well with the profession (a constant conversation in the field) in the eyes of recent, current students? Absolutely.

The “Why.”

Aside from having to actually find a job, the thought of being unprepared for the field is incredibly scary. Entering the profession with a degree and discovering that there are some skills or core knowledge that you missed is not the way to begin a career. I think this point gets at the heart of one of library school’s broad themes, and one that may be confusing to students; is this a professional or theoretical degree? When I chose to pursue the MLIS I did so under the assumption that I was going to gain some “practical skills” to enhance my previous M.A. in American Studies. I had no idea that social science and information theory was going to be so much of the program. The concepts I’ve learned and the skills I’ve obtained will no doubt be useful, but I didn’t feel prepared at all for the coursework, and am now starting to wonder how all of this will transfer to my day-to-day life in the field. I am interning right now in the Web Applications department at the Brooklyn Public Library, and despite being 75% of the way through my degree, I do not feel entirely confident talking about or working with the tools necessary to do the job. This is not to say that there are not plenty of students who begin the degree totally prepared and transition right into successful careers and do very well. But I can say with some confidence that these issues arise for more students than one might care to admit. Opening up conversations on this kind through a library school hack could better prepare future students, and also provide tips, advice and encouragement to those struggling through.

Then, there is an issue of identity that remains a complication. Are we “librarians”, “information professionals”, “knowledge managers”? Both Kim Leeder and Char Booth have written on this topic recently, which inspired a lot of my thoughts for this post. If working librarians are having such identity crises, what of us still in school!? Thankfully, one of my courses did introduce the idea that a spectrum of careers exist wherein the MLIS will be useful, but I am still unsure how to market myself on a job market. I will hold a Master of Library and Information Studies, and would love a useful title or phrase to promote my skill set, which will be broader than many people’s understanding of “librarian.” I tend to lean toward “Information Professional” although that still leaves so many questions and is nebulous at best. If the profession is set on the precipice of some great, inevitable change in definition, how is my course on Foundations of Information Professions going to be relevant next year when I am job searching?

Additionally, with the information landscape changing so rapidly, I find that textbooks, course syllabi and conference topics that are supposed to be authoritative are lacking valuable content related to current issues in the field and are behind the curve on engaging new ideas. For instance, I am intrigued by the concept of transliteracy, the ability to read, write and interact across a range of platforms, a relevant and pressing topic in the field. I discovered transliteracy through following librarians on Twitter, and have yet to see it addressed in a textbook. The speed at which professional life is evolving right now due to immersive social-technological layers is, in my opinion, far more effective in preparing me for work as an information professional than a textbook that is barely two years old, of no fault to authors and researchers. It is in this kind of a space that a dynamic, participatory text edited and updated in near real-time could function.

To take this argument a step further, I would also argue the case that the professional organization(s) that we all participate in are no match for the relationships that are possible and the value that can be created through curating one’s own network via Twitter, LinkedIn or Facebook. To say it plainly, I am beginning to think that the staid traditions and topics of librarianship that are addressed in Library School are outdated. If so, what can be done to keep this amazing profession on the cutting edge?

Finally, as a student inundated with articles, papers and conflicting theories to weed through, not to mention any hobbies or other interests I’d like to keep up with, I find it difficult and overwhelming to dig into a professional journal, or get more in touch with recently published research, which traditionally formed the cutting edge in a field. I understand that research is important, and I agree wholeheartedly that it may appease some of my desires for an accurate sense of relevancy for my degree, but as a Gen-Y reader and a former researcher myself, often my interest is just not piqued in academic publications. I like to say that two of the most important advancements of the recent social web are the comment box and the “share” button, both of which do not exist in the majority of academic publishing (kudos to PLoS One and Shakespeare Quarterly

for some pioneering work there.) The paper to conference to journal model does not feel immediate or dynamic enough for my plugged-in sensibilities, although I recognize the value of the peer review process. I’d like to think that projects like Hacking The Academy are moving us toward content curation as a form of peer review and digital presentation as equal to analog publication. Models like this excite me about my participation in a field open to evolving technological workspaces.

The How.

On Oct. 24^th, 2008 Char Booth guest posted a “Library Student Bill of Rights” on the popular Tame the Web blog. As a guiding document, I think this is a great example of a model for change. She stated, “In full recognition that it is far easier to tear down than to build up, I leave it up to the faculty and administrators of the library school world to do something about it.” However, I disagree with her on this point. Two years have passed and the “Rights to Challenge, Innovate, Redefine” and more touted in this document are not, to my knowledge, being actively pursued or employed. I think Ms. Booth had the right idea, but placed responsibility on the wrong group. Armed now with tools to organize and collaborate, it is the current and recent students and professionals who must “do something about it.” So, in alignment with my belief in the social web, crowdsourcing and user-curation, I propose that the body of library school students should become the change they wish to see enacted.

Thus the #HackAcad connection; why isn’t there a collaborative, online text like that for Library School? There are enough people writing prolifically about their experiences in school, and through transitions to the field, that it would be easy to gather posts on a variety of topics. In fact, as I was researching this post, I came across a post by Bobbi Newman titled “So You Want to be a Librarian? A Guide For Those Considering an MLS, Current Students & Job Seekers” that sets up a great starting framework for a #HackLibSchool experiment.

There is no shortage of content already floating around the web that would fit into a web-text like this. What I propose is that we (the students, the bloggers, the Web 2.0ers) get active, curate this content, and centralize it. We are all familiar with the variety of tools that are available to make this happen, and the process for growing, contributing to and curating content will be open and adaptable to new ideas. Great with coding? Feel free to build a framework for the site. Enjoy social media? Spread the word. This is a chance to get creative, showcase your skills, and participate in something that will resonate in our field.

Practically:

• HackLibSchool will begin as a Google Doc, open to all as of today, and eventually move to its own webspace.
• Content should have a focus on library school, providing tips, insights, challenges, definitions or any other type of “hack” that a current or future student might benefit from.
• Nominations and submissions will be welcomed for the remainder of the month of October.
• Articles will be organized by relevant topics.
• All organization and editing of the document will be entirely crowdsourced, requiring participation, engagement and some level of commitment from involved parties.
• HackLibSchool can and should be a meme that exists across many networks. It can and should be a Wiki, a Delicious tag, a Twitter hashtag, a .com, a .org, a Flickr group, an unconference, etc.

Other than that, HackLibSchool has no other set parameters. I’d like this to truly be a group-owned project, and I only see my involvement as a progenitor. Eventually, a team may need to be formed to keep the project focused and forward moving. Living up to the dynamic, adaptive nature of the webtext, perhaps a quarterly review will be necessary. I shy away from nominating an Editor, but that may be a future iteration of the project. I’m open to suggestions as to how to continue this project as a seminal document for our profession.

I’d like to clear about my intentions behind this idea. This is not meant to subvert the education that library school provides, but to supplement it. Not sure of the differences between an MLIS and an MLS? Well, here are three perspectives from bloggers who wrote on that exact topic. Can’t remember the top five articles that every library student should have read? Here are two reviews and a Delicious tag to follow. Wondering what is happening right now in librarianship that can help you be better prepared for the field? Here are the most comprehensive Twitter lists, and two emerging scholars who blog regularly. I imagine this serving as a dynamic, adaptive document highlighting what one can expect from grad school, as well as some tips and ideas about the profession as a whole. (Key words: dynamic and adaptive, living on the web and allowed to change and morph as the field does over time.)

For those who skipped to the end for the summary – This is an invitation to participate in the redefinitions of library school, and the thus the field of librarianship, using the web as a collaborative space outside of any specific university or organization. This is an ambitious project, I know, but I have the sense that peers and colleagues are ready for this. Imagine standards and foundations of the profession that we will create, decided upon by us, outside of the institutional framework. Ideas like the democratization of the semantic web, crowdsourcing, and folksonomies allow this to exist and we should be taking advantage of it. What will the information professions be next year if we define it for ourselves today? If we had a voice in the development of curriculum, what would that degree entail? This is my challenge to you; participate or come up with a better idea. How would you hack library school?

Thank you to Trevor Dawes, Ellie Collier, Emily Ford, and Kim Leeder for reading an early draft. Your comments were very insightful and made me remember the value of collaboration in academia.

Three years, twenty committees, twelve hundred instruction sessions, forty thousand monograph purchases, and half a million reference questions later, I’m at the point in this librarian job where I have enough experience to know how to get things done, and also enough to wonder, “What exactly am I doing?” The more you know, the more you know you don’t know, as they say.

I exaggerate the numbers, but the above four things do seem to encompass the majority of what I do from day to day. Of course there’s a wide variety of additional tasks that fill up my time in the office, from updating my library’s Facebook page to presenting at conferences. All these things combine into the work portion of my life. Is it a good job? Undoubtedly. Is it fulfilling? Usually. Fun? Sometimes. But I can’t help but wonder what it’s all for.

The danger of the summer lull, particularly for academic librarians — but perhaps for others, too — is that after the frenetic pace of the regular semesters, we suddenly have time to reflect. I call it a “danger” because it’s much easier to speed through life and work without asking too many questions. Questions can get you into trouble if you don’t like the answers. But then a little trouble isn’t always a bad thing.

My spring semester ended about a month ago. Immediately after finals I went on a lovely long vacation, and now I’m back at work, waking up early thanks to jet lag, and taking a little time to think and ask questions. After all, this year was my midpoint in moving towards tenure at my institution, a circumstance that required me to submit formal documents to my colleagues so that they could offer constructive feedback about my progress in this position. It seems fitting, now that I have been evaluated by others on my librarianness, that I do a little review of my own and decide what being a librarian means to me.

The Librarian Identity, or Lack Thereof

One of my favorite things about being a librarian, and an academic reference and instruction librarian in particular, is the variety: the variety of tasks and duties I’m responsible for, the variety of people I interact with, the variety of information and topics I deal with on a daily basis. The average day in the life of an academic librarian is notoriously difficult to pin down, since the list of potential tasks accomplished in a single day is seemingly endless. I enjoy knowing that every day I do something a little bit different and yet it all somehow fits under my job description.

On the other hand, it makes me wonder if my job description should be quite so broad. Not that mine is different from those of identical jobs in other places; it’s not. I greatly enjoy the many types of tasks that cross my desk on a daily basis, but I see a red flag, too, in the sheer yawning chasm of work before me. In the back of my mind is the nagging concern that my work might be oversized, unfocused, and possibly on the edge of unmanageable. Yet if I wanted to narrow it down to a few critical tasks, I’m not sure I could; too much else would be neglected or would get in the way. So I find myself asking, what’s at the core of it all? What is the real work of librarianship?

This last question brings to mind a poem by Gary Snyder, “I Went Into the Maverick Bar,” in which the main character of the poem adapts his appearance to fit in with the customers of a country bar in New Mexico. The real work of this poem, the work of coming to terms with place and identity, is far larger than any job, but if we shrink it down and tweak it slightly (with apologies to Mr. Snyder), the nature of the poem is still applicable.

Yes, I’m calling librarianship my “maverick bar.” Not literally of course, since our workplaces in no way resemble the bourbon-and-beer scene in the poem, but I have the sense sometimes that librarians are a little bit like those folks in the bar – a little displaced, not quite sure who they are or what they should be doing. Every culture has a life of its own beyond the individuals, and our library culture, too, is not quite native to where we now live. Libraries were built for a print-based culture of collecting and preserving, but that culture has shifted dramatically around us while we continue to dance, a little awkwardly, to the band.

Our search for identity is clear to me as the source of many younger librarians’ efforts over the past several decades to combat the “librarian stereotype.” Any culture that is so intent on making a sharp break from the recent past makes me suspicious.  I’m unable to accept that the inherent nature of librarianship has changed dramatically, even if it sports a nose ring and carries a smartphone. Then there are the varied, insistent, even desperate initiatives to redefine our buildings in ways that will continue to appeal to library users, campus administrations, trustees, and boards of directors. I’ll be first in line to admire these new buildings and renovations, with their polished work spaces and bright, airy environments, but these new buildings may simultaneously advance us even further on the path to identity crisis. They include less and less of any particular thing that one would identify as characteristic of a library. After all, what purpose does a bookless, wholly electronic library serve that distinguishes it from an overblown student center? In this article from the Mercury News, note the paragraph:

Libraries are the very heart of the research university, the center for scholarship. But the accumulation of information online is shifting their sense of identity.

Shifting their sense of identity to what, exactly? The article doesn’t say.

These days we’re better at knowing what we’re not (bun-wearing shushers) than putting our finger on what exactly we are and what we’re here for. Perhaps it’s this insecurity that causes librarians to try to do so many things all at once. We leap into social networks, digital repositories, and online services; we reconceive our collections; we become publishers as well as collectors; we reach out to our communities, campuses, and potential donors, stretching ourselves thin; we digitize; we redefine our jobs, and redefine them again; we rebuild, restructure, rearrange; we stand alert, ready for anything. And even when we are self-conscious enough to acknowledge our situation, we still don’t have any answers. In a blog post more than a year ago Bobbi Newman pointed to this problem, but rather than offering solutions she ends with the (admittedly potent) line, “We’ve got to change, and I mean really change.”

The urgency and the need for change is clear to all of us; what no one can seem to put their finger on is how to change. And that leads to more identity crisis and more desperate grabbing at the technologies, tools, and strategies that might work in the short-term. We’re running on the information hamster wheel; we simply can’t do everything. And rather than try to do it all, it might be better if we do, well, nothing for a while. You don’t tell someone hyperventilating in panic to run some sprints, do you? No, you give them a paper bag or some distraction, speak calmly, and encourage them to sit down, relax, and put their fear aside. Similarly, what libraries may need to do is stop, take a breather, release our fears of irrelevance and ask our patrons, campuses, administrations, donors — and yes, ourselves — what is our real work and what does it look like in 2010 and beyond?

If indeed libraries have become irrelevant in the age of the almighty Google — and I don’t think we have — wouldn’t you rather know than keep panting along on the hamster wheel, accomplishing nothing?

In Search of the Real Work

What librarians do have is a set of core values that serves as the backbone of our identity and draws together even those working in nontraditional positions. Increasing access to all types of information and all perspectives while protecting intellectual freedom and privacy; these are the values that unite us. I think every library student gets (or should get) a little rush upon first discovering the ALA Library Bill of Rights and realizing the larger issues that play a role in this field. If we boil it down, the major value expressed in this document is intellectual freedom, the full and equal access to all types of information for everyone. In my mind, this is one of the most critical roles a librarian can play. (Though I have heard some debate on this; for more, stay tuned for Ellie Collier’s post later this month).

The values that guide librarians don’t address the core tasks that cement these values to our daily lives in the field. While I would like to believe that my primary responsibilities reflect these values, I don’t knowingly achieve any goals related to intellectual freedom in my daily tasks. There is some gap between what I stand for as a librarian and what I do in practice, as all idealism shrivels a bit in the face of reality. I must please my boss, my tenure reviewers, my students, my campus administration. At a minimum, I hope my theory and practice don’t contradict each other.

I wonder, too, if there are common tasks across all librarians’ various job types, professional organizations, and institutions. I can’t think of any other career that has so many different manifestations of what work in that field might look like. I’m not sure whether to call it flexibility or lack of focus. Just think about the various titles that librarians work under: Emerging Technologies Librarian, Copyright Librarian, First-Year Services Librarian, Digital Initiatives Librarian, as well as all the ones that are more traditional and familiar. Not to mention librarians working in other information-related organizations that aren’t libraries.

A considered look backwards at the librarian’s primary roles throughout history is interesting in the effort to make meaning out of this. In “Tracing the Archetypal Academic Librarian,”  Stephen E. Bales compares academic librarian job duties during two periods of early history with those of today. After reviewing the activities that took place in libraries during the time of Assurbanipal (roughly 600s BCE) and Alexandria (200s BCE), Bales concludes that most of the primary roles of librarians have not changed over the course of several millennia: librarians from all periods of time have been involved in these tasks: identifying, selecting, acquiring, organizing, retrieving, conserving, and conducting some sort of scholarship. Bales is not the only one to note that librarianship, historically, has taken place largely behind the scenes, and this was still the case in the late eighteen hundreds.

No longer. Bales’ insights might be helpful if not for the fact that I do very few of these things as part of my daily work as an academic librarian in 2010. Not many librarians I know do much of this at all. In fact, the two things I spend a large proportion of my time on – outreach and teaching – didn’t even make the cut in Bales’ listing of major roles. Certainly in former millennia librarians had no interest in sharing their collections; documents were reserved for elite and wealthy scholars. Nor does Bales mention professional service outside of scholarship, which is a tremendous time commitment for many academic librarians. In my opinion, Bales’ historical assessment of librarian duties doesn’t really cut to the “real work” of the field today.

To gain a more modern perspective on the priorities of a librarian position, we can review evaluation documents from institutions that break out task areas into particular percentages. For instance, I happened upon a handbook from Florida International University Libraries (pdf) that prioritizes the work of an information services librarian in this manner:

35% Reference/Research Assistance

25% Information Literacy

15% Collection Development

5% Liaison

15% Non-Scheduled Activities (service, conferences, professional development)

5% Other Duties as Assigned by Department Head

While I don’t advocate trying to break down one’s work schedule according to this sort of math (think of all the grey areas), it does make it clear that answering questions and teaching are by far the top two responsibilities at this institution. That sounds about right to me. Of course, if we look closely at each of those categories we can see that they each encompass a wide range of more specific tasks. “Information Literacy,” for example, might include teaching (one-time workshops, for-credit courses, and perhaps additional sessions), assessment of current instruction, planning for future instruction, creating promotional and informational materials, etc. Although it’s just one priority area, I’m sure it could fill a full-time librarian’s work schedule all on its own.

It’s clear to most of us working in academic librarian positions – and probably all librarian positions – that the full array of responsibilities and duties our jobs encompass are simply not achievable in a regular work week. In case we thought it was just our imaginations, the University of California at Berkeley conducted a workload survey of their librarians and received 31 responses that indicated overwhelmingly that getting the work done is more than full-time commitment. It’s no surprise that Berkeley librarians largely felt obliged to work some evenings and weekends to keep up; even those in smaller institutions do the same. This makes it even more important to identify what our real work is, and to prioritize tasks in a way that empowers us to accomplish it.

Conclusions, Such as They Are

There’s not much discussion in the literature of librarianship, so far as I can tell, to answer my rather philosophical question about what our “real work” is. I have located books and articles about job duties and priorities, some of which I mentioned above, but little that attempts to dig to the core of our professional beings. Historically, I could argue that the real work revolved around collecting and preserving documents in the interests of greater knowledge. Today, although that is one piece of the work most librarians do, it has certainly been deemphasized.

The more I consider this question, too, the more I doubt that it could possibly have a rational, scientific answer. I relive that grad-school rush upon reading the Library Bill of Rights, which is about as real as anything I could point to in this field. I think about the deep, true gratification I enjoy when I manage to connect an interested, intellectual person with new information that contributes to their perspective on a topic. I think about my colleagues in academic libraries, and about my colleagues in public, school, and special libraries. Isn’t it true, in the end, that our real work is more about values than tasks?

And that greatest value of all, even beyond any document compiled by any professional association: Knowledge, with a capital “K.” I see no work in librarianship more real than the collection, protection, and dissemination of Knowledge, and the empowerment of others in means to acquire it. Although libraries historically were more about hoarding Knowledge than sharing it, our work has not otherwise changed much over the millennia. The internet, while making information more widely available, has simultaneously obscured true Knowledge and increased the importance of our real work.

This revelation doesn’t directly help me manage my workload and organize tasks, but it does help to keep me theoretically and emotionally grounded in my job. My real work is Knowledge. If I hold that goal in mind, the details of how I accomplish it on daily basis begin to fall into place. Some of my duties, like teaching, support Knowledge directly. Other tasks, like tracking reference questions, are not tied to that higher goal but are necessary for the reality of my workplace. If I want to continue in my job, I can’t just stop doing those less crucial tasks, but I can prioritize my efforts and save the best of my energy for the real work of librarianship.

+++++++

Readers: I don’t speak for every librarian, just myself. What are your thoughts about the “real work” of librarianship? Your comments below are welcome.

+++++++

Author’s Note, Or, A Confession and Suggestion for Further Reading: I’m embarrassed to say that I was unfamiliar with (or had forgotten) “The Darien Statements on the Library and Librarians” until after writing this post, but now that I have I strongly encourage anyone who is thinking about the real work of librarianship to read them. The document is an excellent, timeless vision of our field, and I nod to the wisdom of those who conceived it.

+++++++

My thanks to the entire cast of ItLwtLP as well as Eric Frierson and Rachel Slough for their invaluable feedback on drafts of this post. I have never before had so many helpful and insightful responses to any single piece of writing, and I hope the results reflect it.

Waiting for a ride home? by QualityFrog / CC-BY-NC

Have you ever noticed how many special events there are in library-land? National Library Week, Read across America Day, Teen Read Week, National Poetry Month, National Children’s Book Week—it becomes difficult to keep track! As much fun as it would be, it’s pretty much impossible to celebrate or even acknowledge each and every one of these. When used discriminately, however, they make a great marketing tool for the library to use in promoting programs and materials and can even aid in fulfilling the goals of vision statements and library missions.

One of the newest national initiatives, Teen Tech Week has been celebrated by ALA’s Young Adult Library Services Association (YALSA) since 2007. This year, Teen Tech Week is March 7–13. According to the YALSA website, “The purpose of the initiative is to ensure that teens are competent and ethical users of technologies, especially those that are offered through libraries such as DVDs, databases, audiobooks, and videogames. Teen Tech Week encourages teens to use libraries’ nonprint resources for education and recreation, and to recognize that librarians are qualified, trusted professionals in the field of information technology.”¹

I like In the Library with the Lead Pipe, and I was really pleased when they asked to write an article, especially once we decided that Teen Tech Week would be my topic. One of the things that makes In the Library valuable for me is its goal, “to explore new ideas and start conversations; to document our concerns and argue for solutions.” Teen Tech week is a great fit with the first part of that goal, but not a great fit for the second. Honestly, I wouldn’t know how to criticize Teen Tech Week, constructively or otherwise—there’s just not a lot to criticize. (It’s not that I think ALA/YALSA is perfect or anything, but that’s a different article.) Teen Tech Week is just so open-ended and flexible, you don’t pay anything to participate, YALSA’s artwork and promotional materials are excellent—and with a free program I think there’s not a lot of expectation, so whatever you get from YALSA and provide for your teens seems good. I haven’t encountered any problems with it, and other than an aversion to technology in my personal life (I love my job, don’t get me wrong about that—I’m just a little more old-fashioned at heart than your usual early-thirties teen librarian), have no problems with technology-based programming, so I really have no criticisms.

What’s great about Teen Tech Week is that it gives us a built-in reason to push ourselves to get creative in our technology programming, to plan gaming events and listening parties, to investigate texting and social networking, and to push our non-print library materials. Many teens use the internet and other technologies almost to the exclusion of books as their source of entertainment and information, which can make me reluctant to immerse myself in the world of chats and playlists and fanvids. I spend my personal time gardening and baking bread, and would prefer to spend more of my work time planning traditional book groups and teen advisory board (TAB) events, but the fact is that many teens prefer texting to talking, RSS to reading a book, and gaming to gardening. The methods and merchandise sold to them—very effectively, I might add—is what they’re using, what their friends are using, and, therefore, what we should be using to engage them.

Getting Teens Into the Library

Ultimately, we want teens to visit the library. Besides being, as we are so often reminded, the next crop of voters, teens are energetic, dynamic, and contagious—when teens latch on to something, they tell their friends. Who tell their friends. Who… you get the picture. These are the kind of patrons we want to attract, right? Right. What is this generation known for more than anything else? They are one of the first generations to grow up completely immersed in technology—the internet has always been available to them. To get these kids to make the library ‘TheirSpace,’ we have to make them aware of all the wonders housed within, not only the books.

Although teens are familiar with the internet and internet-based gadgets (usually before we are) and feel comfortable using them, they don’t always use them to their best advantage. The Pew Internet and American Life Project reports that 71% of teens use the internet as their primary source for school projects,² but many of those same students need guidance in using the internet effectively. By promoting Teen Tech Week, you’re helping to let teens know that the librarians at your facility are information experts—dynamic, interested, up-to-date adults that they can turn to for help with their information needs, and not just encyclopedia pushers.

Something else to keep in mind when working with teen patrons—you won’t necessarily meet them face to face. Their comfort with e-communication means they are more likely to want to text you or ask a question on Facebook chat than to drop by for a visit. A brand new study from Pew mentions that 73% of ‘wired teens’ now use social networking sites, and 75% of teens surveyed own a cell phone.³ To really connect with teen patrons, we need to reach out to them where they are, using the channels they’re most likely to use, rather than wait for them to come to us.

Granted, some of us may not feel entirely comfortable using these technologies, but celebrating Teen Tech Week in your library is a great excuse to make yourself more comfortable! Every year, YALSA generates a new theme for Teen Tech Week that is general enough to work in a wide variety of ways to get the message across. This year’s theme is “Create, Share, Learn @ Your Library.”

Getting Started

If you want to celebrate Teen Tech Week at your library, a great place to start is the Teen Tech Week website. Here, you can register for Teen Tech Week (registration closes mid-February, so if you’ve missed the deadline for this year, keep it in mind for next year), and also find and share program ideas, resources, and promotional tools. Registration is free, and occasionally sponsors will send you incentives. Posters and bookmarks are available from the ALA store.

One of the best features of the Teen Tech Week initiative is it’s flexibility. For instance, many school districts take a spring break in the first few weeks of March. YALSA encourages you to “feel free to celebrate Teen Tech Week at the best time for your library.”⁴ Each year there is a different theme, but YALSA doesn’t get bent out of shape if you prefer not to use it. There’s an umbrella theme, “Get Connected @ Your Library,” that you can use every year, and the promotional products (like bookmarks) don’t always have the dates for Teen Tech Week listed, so you can use them other years.

If you want to start on a small scale, there are plenty of ways to do it. Displays of technology-oriented materials such as Playaways or books on CD, how-to books like Flash Animation for Teens or The Ultimate Guide to Video Game Writing and Design, or how-to-download-ebook demonstrations are great ways to push stuff you already have in-house, and Teen Tech Week helps create the focus to make these items more visible and relevant. The Teen Tech Week website has some great resource lists to get you started.⁵

Passive programs are a great fit for Teen Tech Week, especially if you’re just starting out, or if your library staff is pressed for time to program. For instance, you could give prizes to teens in the library if you see them using a handheld device— “Caught you texting!” Holding a week-long scavenger hunt to highlight resources that use or promote the use of popular or emerging technological tools is another low-maintenance idea. You could do a “Name that Acronym” quiz —KWIM? Prizes can be cheap, like candy, ear buds, thumb drives, or stickers and decals to decorate an iPod case—the ALA store even has this last prize for sale.

You don’t have to use working technology to have an awesome program during Teen Tech Week. Ask your IT department (or ask around at local companies) for spare computer and machine parts and make jewelry or funky sculptures. If you have a little money (or know some boys who have outgrown their toys), get some R/C car parts, Erector sets, Legos and the like and have a Robot-Building Contest. Even if you can’t get working motors, the robot sculptures will be a blast to create and look really cool in the Teen area.

Going Virtual

If you are able to connect with your teens over the internet, and more and more library systems are recognizing the necessity of maintaining an online presence, your possibilities are practically endless. Internet scavenger hunts are easy, cheap, and fun for teens to complete on their own time. Online quizzes can be created on websites like Quizilla or SurveyMonkey—they can be just silly, for-fun, multiple choice quizzes (Who do you text most often?) or be used to gather real information about which web sites your teens prefer, their favorite type of music, which formats are used most frequently, etc. If you’re in a real time crunch, it could be something as simple as, “Post a greeting (or comment on a book review, etc.) on the library Facebook page this week, and get a prize! Pick your prize up at the teen desk the next time you visit.” Not only are you celebrating Teen Tech Week, but it’s also a great way to let the teens know about your library’s social networking sites. On the Akron-Summit County Public Library blog/website for teens, we often add quizzes and other interactive posts. They can complement and promote in-house programming as well as stand on their own.

Book discussion groups can be moved to the virtual realm, onto sites like BookBundlz or Shelfari. Sites like these can really come in handy when travel is difficult, for teens who are too busy or can’t drive themselves to the library to make a meeting, or for teens who have moved away, but still want to connect with their friends ‘back home.’ The Denver Library uses part of their website for a virtual Book Club—when you sign up, they’ll send you emails of a five-minute section of a book chapter every day for a week. If your interest is piqued, you can come to the library and check out the book to read the rest.⁶

Getting Media Into the Mix

If you have teen patrons who are more into writing than discussion, you could use the comments function of your library blog to start a Round Robin story that the teens write themselves. Post a paragraph or two of an original story, and let the teens continue it in their comments. You’ll need to post a couple of guidelines and monitor submissions, but this can be a lot of fun. This is only one way teens can use the internet to showcase their creativity. Websites like Scratch allow teens to animate tributes to their favorite books, the library, or even create a basic video game. You could form a gallery on the site to collect all submissions from your local teens, and ask them to vote for their favorite projects.

Book trailers and short films are increasingly popular and a great fit for a library-based program. Many teens can shoot short videos with their phones and cameras, but if your library has basic video equipment, you can get far more creative and involve more teens. Our library recently purchased a digital video camera at Target for $50, and one branch is going to use it, along with our galley copies, to do some unscripted reviews to add to the teen website. That’s inexpensive enough that many librarians would feel fine with their TAB using it to create video shorts, film a short-scripted play, or do mock-interviews. Most cameras have USB cords that allow you to connect them directly to your computer, and there is free video-editing software available online.

If $50 is more than your library can afford, YALSA sometimes holds a mini-grant program specifically for Teen Tech Week. In 2008 and 2009, they awarded forty $450 grants to school and public libraries to fund special programs and services. Here are a few examples from the list of last year’s winners (the rest are available on the YALSA Teen Tech Week website—see footnote):

• Baraboo Public Library in Baraboo, Wisconsin will be using [the] mini grant to improve teen space in the library. A large, dark brick wall will soon be covered with a bright high-tech mural designed by a local teen artist. Teens will learn how to wire LED lights, construct LED clocks, and make a scrolling marquee as [they] combine paint, electronic gadgets, and bling bling to create a unique and eye-catching focal point for [the] teen area.
• The Dorris Van Doren Regional Branch (El Paso Public Library System in Texas) hosts Artech Fun: This program combines art and technology through the use of Wacom’s Bamboo Fun Tablet. Funds will be used to purchase two digital drawing tablets and a small collection of digital art books to help teens take their art to the next level. Guest speakers will be invited to show teens how to use a digital drawing tablet and talk about their careers. Teens will then be able to reserve time slots to work on two projects. The first project is to create promotional art for the summer reading club and perhaps create an animated short. The second project is to create or upload their own artwork to be showcased in an art show that they plan at the library.
• Bartow County Library System in Cartersville, Georgia’s Teen Advisory Board will use Flip Mino video cameras to create instructional videos for patrons. The teens will answer basic cell phone questions, explain how to use the online library catalog including how to renew items and place holds, and show how to set up an email account. These are just a few of the topics the instructional videos will cover. The teens will film and edit the videos before posting them to the library website, MySpace pages, and making DVDs that patrons can check out and take home.⁷

There are so many different directions you can go! It doesn’t have to be just ‘fun stuff.’ You can make Teen Tech Week a meaningful and educational experience, and even give teens a chance to ‘give back.’ Hold an old-cell phone drive in the teen area, and using your TAB or regulars to help spread the word, and donate the phones you collect to a women’s shelter or similar charity.

Talk to your children’s library staff and see if there is a way the teens can create a special audio or video project reading or telling stories that younger kids could enjoy. Recorded stories on CD for the little kids to take into a story tent or quiet corner to listen to on their own or with a friend could be fun for the teens as well as the kids. Teens could record reader’s theater renditions of favorite children’s tales, or even film a full-on original play, with costumes and backdrops, to run on a loop on a TV in the corner of the Children’s Library.

Teen Tech Week would be a wonderful time to kick off a Teen Tech Volunteer group who uses their tech-savvy (with a little guidance and training) to assist adults with basic computer usage, such as navigating the library website, using a search engine, or learning word processing software. Often it’s hard to find the time to leave the circulation desk to help patrons lacking these basic technology-use skills, especially at peak hours. Friendly, willing teens could be just the solution, and it can be win-win if they need volunteer hours for scouts, 4-H, or school.

Involving Your Peers

Speaking of school; be sure to let your local teachers and school library know about Teen Tech Week, and how you plan to celebrate. They may want to help you promote your events or even get involved themselves. Although teachers see teens even more often than we public librarians do, sometimes they need a push to relate to them through technological means, just like we do. The teen librarian/branch manager at our Richfield Branch, Jen Stencel, was recently talking to a teacher about our Summer Reading Program, and witnessed firsthand a mini-epiphany.

I was just at a 6-8 grade curriculum meeting this past Friday and afterwards I was approached and spoke with the Special Ed teacher who was absolutely excited that we [the library] count blogs and such for ‘reading’ during our summer reading. She was excited to realize that reading blogs, posts, walls, emails, texts, IM’s, etc., is just as much a reading skill—not a traditional skill, but one just as vital, if not more so in today’s world—as reading a book. This would surely excite her students, most of whom are tech-savvy, or at least tech-comfy. We then went on to talking—with exclamation marks flying—and she realized we let the kids count other technologies like Playaways and Kindles/Nooks for reading as well. She was going to introduce her kids to the Richfield Branch Shelfari site. I’m not sure if she was going to do the book club part of it, but she liked the idea of teens ‘socializing’ over books and the ‘fun’ way it would get them to write reviews and share comments.⁸

Conclusion

The exciting thing about Teen Tech Week is that it gives us an opportunity to explore and learn to use all of the websites, gadgets, and formats that our library is purchasing, our teens are bringing into the building, and we are reading about in professional journals and magazines. It is a chance to let the teens know that libraries and librarians are not all about books. We are interested in learning about and sharing all types of information resources, and prove entertaining and cutting edge programming and services that occasionally dip into the philanthropic or even (gasp!) educational arenas. When you choose to participate in Teen Tech Week, it’s not only the teens who “Create, Share and Learn @ your Library.” The staff will as well.

My thanks to Carrie Burrier, Lisa Manocchio, Sarah Rosenberger, and to Brett Bonfield for their insight and suggestions for this post.

1. Young Adult Library Services Association (2007). Teen Tech Week Mission. American Library Association.
2. Pew Research Center&mdsh;Internet and American Life Project.
3. Pew Research Center—Internet and American Life Project (2010). Social Media and Young Adults—A Report.
4. American Library Association (2010). Teen Tech Week Frequently Asked Questions.
5. Young Adult Library Services Association (2010). Tech Week Event Planning and Booklists. American Library Association.
6. Denver Library Online Book Clubs.
7. Teen Tech Week 2009 Mini-Grant Winners
8. Stencel, Jennifer. 2010. Retrieved from an email dated 2/15/2010 and edited with her approval.

In the Library with the Lead Pipe is pleased to welcome another guest author, Jean Costello! Jean is a technical project manager for a prominent STM publisher. She is a passionate supporter of public libraries and blogs regularly as The Radical Patron.

2009 may be an inflection point for public libraries. This year, the deepest recession in U.S. history accelerated their financial trajectory. Following nearly a decade of level or eroding budgets,¹ libraries across America were threatened with closure due to lack of funds. Some have closed and most are operating with dramatically reduced budgets. The recession has also increased usage, with citizens flocking to their local libraries to access computers for job search, participate in recreational activities and borrow popular books and DVDs. As the economy improves, the public may remember the value delivered by their public libraries and restore funding. Even if this happens, I believe funding will be insufficient to maintain the viability of our public libraries in the absence of new service offerings, service delivery methods and funding mechanisms.

The philosophical and material underpinnings of our public library system are solid, however its organizational structure of wholly independent entities funded primarily by local taxes, developed in the mid-nineteenth century,² is ill-equipped to compete with 21st century companies that provide more focused service offerings. Google, Amazon, and others will remain clear winners in terms of information findability and convenience for the general public. In the community realm, social media companies have disrupted our assumptions, understanding and behavior and their influence will grow without the availability of viable alternatives. And long term success in the entertainment or social service sectors seems tenuous given the array of commercial and government entities competing to support these needs.

So is there light at the end of this tunnel?

Circumstances are starting to favor change. The economic crisis has prompted many Americans to re-evaluate and modify their consumption habits.³ Perhaps for the first time, some may find value in sharing rather than owning resources. The Wall Street bailouts of 2008/2009, and this year’s debate over healthcare reform, have foregrounded a national dialogue about the role of private companies and government agencies in American life. For public libraries, a multi-year funding crisis, news of academic institutions replacing their libraries with other facilities⁴ and a growing interest in mixed-use libraries⁵ may make the pain of doing nothing greater than the pain of doing something. This is a prerequisite for most organizational change. More importantly, the maturation of key digital technologies enables libraries to deliver new and existing services more efficiently on a large scale.

The right change

America desperately needs an institution dedicated solely to the public good, that serves all its citizens equitably, promotes genuine community and fosters a healthy, integrated sense of recreation and self-improvement. Our libraries have done this magnificently for over a hundred years, through good times and bad, in the largest cities and the most rural communities. It’s one of the reasons library service offerings have remained constant for decades and funding secure for even longer.

I believe we do not need to remake our public libraries; we simply need to shore them up. As we envision change, it seems important to preserve the local autonomy and authenticity that have collectively made these institutions a national treasure. The right change would bolster libraries’ ability to leverage digital technology while increasing use of their physical facilities and surrounding amenities. It would also be advantageous to attract more users with high-end needs, for they would likely spur new service development and be able to deliver more financial and political support than traditional constituencies.

In my view, the public broadcasting model is a good way to meet these goals. Imagine a single, non-profit entity positioned to attract major funding and provide technology solutions far better than any municipal organization or system can do on its own. Imagine freeing countless public librarians and volunteers from rudimentary tasks to give them more time to collaborate on activities that inform, inspire, and entertain. Imagine libraries providing trusted information and facilitating meaningful dialogues across America. Imagine extending the work of passionate, outstanding librarians beyond their local libraries. A National Public Library (NPL) Corporation to augment the existing public library system would make this possible.

(Note: As a patron, I can speak to the public-facing aspects of this idea. I’d be interested in comments from library professionals about how the NPL might offer benefits for optimizing library operations, professional development, etc.)

NPL purpose and funding

Like its counterparts in radio and television, the NPL would syndicate high-quality programming to independent libraries across the country. Programming in this context would include content as well as digital technology for operations or direct patron services. The NPL would also provide consultation and coordination for fundraising activities.

Like the public broadcasters, NPL would derive funding from multiple sources including the federal government, charitable donations from corporate sponsors and fees from member libraries. Public libraries are nodes in a national system and it is appropriate that our federal tax dollars support it. Corporate and foundation funding, with appropriate governance to counter undue influence from large donors, is a valid funding source. Through their fees, member libraries would gain access to rich content and services and also secure a stakeholder position in the NPL.

Programming; digital technology

Through my work as a library volunteer and advocate, I observe the significant amount of time library staff and volunteers devote to functions that can be optimized through technology. While technological awareness is generally high, people appear thoroughly overwhelmed by the plethora of digital tools and techniques available to them. As a result, even basic tasks such as maintaining lists of supporters who serve on boards and committees, make financial contributions and volunteer can be challenging. Devising communication strategies amidst multiple, dynamic mediums including email, websites, blogs, and Facebook can also be daunting. Many of the library meetings I’ve attended have been as much about contact administration as about new programs or initiatives.

In terms of patron services, I use a few libraries in Massachusetts that seem to be on-par with their peers nationwide. Despite my esteem and strong support for them, my honest rating for convenience and ease-of-doing business would be about a B- or C. As someone who is employed full-time and needs access outside traditional business hours, is comfortable using internet services, and has other options for accessing information and entertainment, I find my public libraries are not keeping pace with service levels from other providers.

Within the libraries, information and service are readily available at the front desk. Outside the library, it is more difficult to come by, or impossible, due to limited hours of operation. Some libraries require that I phone or visit to seek staff assistance for straightforward transactions like renewing materials and reserving meeting rooms and museum passes. Each seems to use a different method of posting events on their websites and few let me search for programs or register online. It’s easy to overlook or miss out on some good library programming as a result. None has an integrated electronic newsletter to keep me updated on library news, programs, and new material acquisitions. Information about volunteering and making financial donations is also fragmented; giving to my library is not as convenient as it is with other organizations.

Here are a few online applications the NPL could rapidly make available to deliver better online services and save staff time as well:

• A calendar to enable the public to search for events, add events to their personal calendars, and receive email alerts about programs they have registered for or that meet their interests.
• A reservation system for meeting rooms, museum passes, etc.
• A volunteer management system to make it easy for people to browse and search for opportunities and sign up to work.
• A secure payment system so people could make one-time or recurring monetary donations to their library.
• A contact management system for libraries and friends groups to identify and contact members, donors, etc.
• An email marketing tool to craft rich, targeted electronic communications to libraries’ multiple constituencies.
• A survey tool to enable libraries to query users directly about satisfaction with existing services and interest in new services.
• Mobile applications for these services.

The benefits of a single entity that develops robust, integrated solutions for these common functions and makes them available to every library are significant. In addition to administrative efficiencies, a standard application suite would save time for library staff who must now evaluate the myriad options for delivering these services, figure out how to implement and support them, process purchase orders and maintain licenses for commercial applications, manage multiple admin accounts, and write training documentation. It is an enormous amount of work, particular for smaller libraries without dedicated technical staff.

Properly designed and implemented, patrons could receive more information from their libraries and securely process transactions online. One advantage of a uniform application suite is that users would likely promote the services in casual conversation or show others how to use them, as they do now when speaking of Netflix or other popular online services. My experience is that this does not happen today because services differ so widely from one municipal system to another.

Patron privacy protection is another advantage. Today, many libraries use free or low-cost commercial services on their websites because they do not have the resources to develop or host their own solutions. These services open patrons to unwanted advertising or require that they trade their digital privacy in order to use them. It would be a great public service if libraries uniformly deployed open, non-commercial products that deliver outstanding service and protect patron privacy.

It would also benefit the public and libraries if these solutions could be shared by other municipal agencies. The public would receive more convenient, consolidated access to their local governments and have their library to thank for it. Libraries might find agencies that currently compete with them for local funding becoming allies if they were using modules of the library’s information system to manage some of their administrative functions.

As a technology professional, I know solutions for the functionality listed above have matured to the point where integration and deployment by professional software developers would be reasonably straightforward. The NPL could make wise use of existing open source software and cloud computing to reduce cost and lead time for delivering web applications to its members. I am also confident that robust solutions for online access to patron accounts and library catalogs could be developed better through the efforts of an organization staffed and focused on the challenge than the tapestry of public and private organizations currently working to develop solutions.

Programming; content

Given the competition from commercial information and entertainment companies, I think a successful strategy for public libraries is to augment existing services with those that commercial firms cannot or will not deliver. NPL can provide enormous value in this area by syndicating the talent and contributions of public librarians throughout the country. A few ideas:

1. Online subject communities. The NPL could deploy an online community module to facilitate engagement around subject specialties. These communities would feature curated content (something like CurrentCites for the public) and moderated group discussions by an individual librarian or small team of librarians. For a given subject, curators could surface and contextualize the most high-quality, trusted material on a particular subject to people who joined the community. They could initiate and moderate interesting forum discussions by asking perceptive questions and referring participants to other user comments or relevant content. Part of the moderation would involve modeling organized thinking, clear and concise writing, and decorum—qualities that are sorely lacking in social media today. (Recent coverage and commentary on John Wilbank’s keynote at the Society of Scholarly Publishers conference is a fine example of the potential for quality online discussion.) The list of subjects is vast, as librarians know, and who better to help the public explore them?
2. Collaboration with public broadcasters. PBS and NPR collaborate to provide outstanding content. The Forum Network, which works with public stations and community partners to provide “a diverse range of perspectives on both local and global issues to audiences around the world” is one example. Adding the NPL to this collaboration would strengthen each organization.
3. Hidden Gems book and film reviews. It is increasingly difficult for good creative works to see the light of day. Consolidation in the publishing, television ,and film industries have diminished product quality; executives no longer feel confident or empowered to take chances on promising but unproven works. Instead, they promote formulaic and derivative works they believe will feed the bottom line.⁶ Additionally, the loss of independent booksellers and movie houses means that good works receive less exposure. Impartial reviewers with access to publisher catalogs, a mission to find “hidden gems,” and a large national audience might help stem the tide of mediocrity. Many library websites have links to recommended reading lists and reviews from publishers, personalities and ordinary book lovers. Publishing NPL content instead would have these advantages:
   • It would reinforce the library “brand” rather than providing free advertising for others.
   • It would reduce broken links and links to lists that haven’t been maintained. This may seem like a small thing, but in this day and age these really damage an organization’s credibility.
   • It would reinforce the library’s role of guiding users to trusted sources. The public trusts librarians and a well-organized reading list created by librarians would garner attention and respect. (Nancy Pearl hasn’t done too badly, after all). Most people understand that blurbs on book jackets and movie trailers are marketing pieces rather than genuine endorsements. Some may also realize that people manipulate the online ratings systems as a way to market their products.⁷ Librarians do not face pressure to push product and can offer thoughtful, unbiased opinions about good works of fiction and non-fiction. The reviews would be more valuable if reader comments and questions were moderated and engaged.
4. An online survival series. For this feature, librarians could research, curate, edit, and present information on up to five important topics, with one topic covered each day of the week. Here again, engagement with reader comments, questions, and content suggestions would enhance this series. Suggested topics include:
   • Information Overload—Digital technology has opened the info floodgates and everyone I know is overwhelmed by the flow. This column would be dedicated to strategies and tools for finding the information you want and filtering out the rest.
   • Commercial Search Services and Online Social Networks—Google, Facebook, and other services offer enormous benefits and can serve the public good, although we continually need reminders of their primary motivations to seek and maximize profit.⁸ Librarians are well-qualified to provide much-needed public education about the nuances and implications of information organization, storage, and retrieval.
   • Trusted Sources—In 2007, the New York Times reported on “self-interested Wikipedia edits” by corporations and government agencies.⁹ This Spring, Elsevier was exposed for publishing six fake medical journals.¹⁰ In late August, the Washington Post‘s ombudsman highlighted the paper’s penchant for covering the politics rather than the substance of healthcare reform.¹¹ A recent survey reports that 63% of Americans believe news stories are often inaccurate.¹² We’ve got a rough-and-tumble infosphere on our hands and the public needs help finding and vetting information sources. Librarians can help.
   • Digital Privacy—people are generally not aware of the vast amount of data collected and stored about them. Industry and our elected officials prefer to keep this topic opaque. Libraries can serve the public good by enhancing the ALA Privacy Revolution and regularly presenting information about it.
5. Public library spotlight. Public libraries have a rich collective history and most have equally compelling individual histories. Many are architecturally beautiful, interesting, and significant. All are reflections of their community. Given this richness and the sheer number of them, I’m surprised public libraries have not been the subject of more artistic and non-fiction works. Showcasing these fabulous institutions would be a great gift to present and future generations.

Fundraising consultation and coordination

Professionals at NPR and PBS have devised a range of techniques for garnering financial support from people who use their services. Public libraries would benefit from the expertise of professional fundraisers rather than relying on the part-time efforts of inexperienced librarians, staff, and volunteers. The public broadcasters have crafted campaigns that seamlessly promote the central organization and independent local affiliates. The same could be done for public libraries.

The NPL fundraising staff could craft messages that explain the need for funding over and above tax revenue. They could help public libraries articulate value beyond their existing user base. Fundraising consultants could also help establish best practices for involving and promoting local businesses in fundraising campaigns.

The NPL could also help transform corporate and foundation funding of public libraries. Having a central library organization to receive contributions would be good for donors and libraries. It would be a visible and efficient way for donors to demonstrate support for valued services to a significant number of people. It would also liberate librarians from chasing targeted small-dollar grants so they could focus on adding more direct value for the public. Small grants spread across multiple municipalities, that carry significant administration costs for donor and library, could be replaced with large grants to the NPL. The loss of the small grants would likely be offset by the fundraising consultation and coordination libraries would receive as part of their NPL membership fees. Large donations would support programming to provide more sustainable benefit to a greater number of libraries. The increased impact and efficiency would benefit all parties.

New local services

The services listed above will make local library websites more valuable to their communities. Better utilities for calendaring, reservations, volunteer management, etc. will drive some increase in visitation, however new programs and services will be required to maintain the high usage libraries are currently experiencing. The hope is that efficiencies achieved by implementing NPL developed systems and fundraising support would free time for other initiatives that benefit their local communities.

Library staff and volunteers are best suited to develop programs for their communities; however NPL content and services might provide program ideas or help drive participation. A tie-in with content from public broadcasters, for example, might drive visitation. Libraries could host regular “Hidden Gems” movie nights to provide access to films that don’t typically benefit from a wide release. Or they might host local subject-based clubs to personally discuss or collaboratively research topics from the online communities. Computer classes could be structured around the “Information Overload” series. Or the library might become the locus for civic action around public issues like digital privacy that libraries have brought to public attention.

Another area where libraries can add unique and outstanding value is by publishing quality information about local issues. This service was provided during a period in the early 20th century described by library historian Lowell Martin as the “Innovative Years.” He writes that “libraries would pull together the facts about an issue—an upcoming election, a public figure, a catastrophe—and reproduce the material for the convenience of curious citizens”.¹³ Interestingly, Martin credits new technology (the telephone) and the pressure of limited budgets with making library service more reactive. Nearly a hundred years later, these factors may have re-established the need for proactive library services. As with the online features, rich user engagement is a critical success factor. My town election/library/school dream provides further ideas for elements of this form of engagement.

In conclusion

Public broadcasting is but one example of how organizations provide information services to leverage efficiencies and strengthen the viability of local enterprises. Many private and public sector firms have adopted it. Visit most realtor websites, for example, and you’ll find content, databases, and utilities provided by a central organization. College alumni and other membership organizations use companies like Harris Connect for tools to “create bonds that increase participation, membership and support.”

An inflection point is a mathematical term to denote a point where a curve reverses direction. I believe a confluence of social, economic, political, and technological developments lays a foundation for a change in outlook for public libraries. A narrative of obsolescence can become one of rejuvenation and reaffirmation of their mission to provide a record of knowledge, support self-education, and provide wholesome recreation.¹⁴ A National Public Library Corporation could promote the ideal of equal access to information by helping ensure that the smallest and poorest communities have access to many of the same resources as the largest and most affluent. It can help make the Library 2.0 vision a reality. It could also add dimension to the concept of a “third place” by strengthening librarians’ role in the Commons through influence in the development of “a set of [information] resources or resource systems, the communities that use them, and the social practices and property regimes for managing the resources.”¹⁵

In their existing form, I believe public libraries supported by a National Public Library Corporation are uniquely positioned to help Americans live richer personal and public lives. Their mission is noble and broad. Their staffs are dedicated and highly educated. They are geographically interspersed, with a strong culture of resource sharing and collaboration already in place. During their early “Innovative Years,” public libraries were trusted institutions of culture and knowledge at a time when information was scarce. An overabundance of information may usher in a second wave of innovation. Let us hope the library community can take advantage of the opportunity.

Acknowledgements

Thanks to Brett Bonfield for his support and guidance on this article. Thanks also to Kent Anderson for thought-provoking reflections in the Scholarly Kitchen blog as well as for sharing his thoughts on public libraries with me.

References

¹ OCLC. (2008). From Awareness to Funding: A study of library support in America. and Agosto, D.E. (2008). Alternative funding for public libraries: Trends, sources, and the heated arguments that surround it. In E. Abels & D.A. Nitecky (Eds.), Influence of Funding on Advances in Librarianship. Bingley, UK: Emerald Publishing Group.

² Bostwick, A.E. (1910). The American Public Library. NY: D. Appleton & Co. 1910.

³Dewan, S. (2009, March 10).
One U.S. recession casualty: Conspicuous consumption. The New York Times.

⁴ Abel, D. (2009, September 4). Welcome to the library. Say goodbye to the books. Boston Globe. and Kelly, J. (2009, July 28). Franklin High library undergoes transformation. Milford Daily News.

⁵ Carlson, S. (2009, September 14). Is It a Library? A Student Center? The Athenaeum Opens at Goucher College. Chronicle of Higher Education and Oder, N. (2009, August 4). Milwaukee Begins to “Rethink Libraries for the 21st Century”; Mixed-use facilities are part of the blueprint; community meetings are ongoing. Library Journal.

⁶ Fisher, M. (2009, July 9). Give Struggling Authors a Chance. The Atlantic. and (2009, January 3). Blockbuster or Bust: Why struggling publishers will keep placing outrageous bids on new books. Wall Street Journal.

⁷ Davis, P. (2009, August 5). Gaming the Rating System. The Scholarly Kitchen.

⁸ Waller, V. (2009, September 7). The relationship between public libraries and Google: Too much information. First Monday 14(9).

⁹ Hafner, K. (2007, August 19). Seeing Corporate Fingerprints in Wikipedia Edits. The New York Times.

¹⁰ Grant, B. (2009, May 7). Elsevier published 6 fake journals. The Scientist.

¹¹ Alexander, A. (2009, August 30). A Missing Ingredient in Health-Care Coverage. The Washington Post.

¹² Pew Research Center for the People & the Press. (2009, September 13). Press Accuracy Rating Hits Two Decade Low.

¹³ Martin, L. (1998). Enrichment: A History of the Public Library in the United States in the Twentieth Century. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press: p 51.

¹⁴ Ibid, p13.

¹⁵ Helfrich, S. and Haas, J. (2009) The Commons: A New Narrative for Our Times. In Helfrich, S. (Ed.) Who Owns the World? The Rediscovery of the Commons. Berlin: oekom Verlag.

what to do with the waterfront by mulmatsherm / CC-BY

I am not much of a book reader.  I have a home computer.  It has a working internet connection.  Any interest I have in genealogy or local history could probably be exceeded serendipitously by talking to family or neighbors and by wandering around the city.  As a family, we do not watch many movies.  I cannot seem to pay attention to audiobooks.  Our taxes are complicated enough that I use software to figure them out.

What I am saying is that I am not the target market of public libraries.  Despite that, I am completely intrigued by them.

I worked for many years as a technologist in academic libraries.  They were all large research institutions with big collections, budgets and staff.  I was also not the target market for them either (at least not after I graduated), but I understood the principal demographics of their constituencies and their expectation of the library.  I witnessed the shift in the academic library from book depository to IT shop (whether or not all academic librarians agree on this assessment).  When the university library stopped being “the place where the books are” it began to lose some of its identity and many began trying to create “social spaces” within the library (presentation rooms, coffee shops, information commons, etc.).  The primary purpose of these endeavors, however, seemed to be mainly to help market the library as the information hub of the institution.  Since the information is available mainly via technology, and the technology makes the information fungible, it became necessary to reinforce the library’s importance to the community.

If this seems complicated, well, that is because it is.  The future of the academic library is in little jeopardy, really, because its role and utility within the larger organization is pretty well defined and not easily replicated by some other group or service.

This is not to say (by any stretch of the imagination) that academic libraries are satisfactorily meeting the needs of their “customers”.  Not by a long shot.  However, if the academic library is increasingly becoming a technology organization then many of the academic library’s problems are technological problems, theoretically with technological solutions.  The majority of these problems are at the intersection of “the way we have always done things” and “where do we go from here”.  That is, these are technology problems that are enveloped in a sticky skein of sociopolitical issues.  If the interminable committee meetings were ever to wear down that outer skin, it might just be possible to make some real progress.  The library technologist’s hope springs eternal.

The public library, on the other hand, appears to be roughly the inverse.  It is a primarily social service that has clumsily tacked technology designed for academic libraries to the top.  Any argument for the merits of library applications pretty much breaks down when applied to the public library.  The audience is different and their needs are different.  While, without a doubt, enabling research is within the scope of the public library, in reality the vast majority of transactions there are far more modest.  The public that the library serves, largely underwhelmed by our complicated bibliographic search tools, instead uses Amazon.com, a technology company that has quite cleverly tapped into social activities (lists, “people who bought x also bought y,” etc.) to pitch their products.  Most importantly, the packaging is slick and effortless.

It is a shame—especially considering how interesting, fun, and rewarding the projects would be —how little public libraries seem to be able to execute their technology.  Not that technology is ignored, indeed my local library employs a vast array of applications to try to aid its users.  But this comes across as a hodge-podge: many different interfaces, none of them terribly satisfying and not in sync with each other.  This is not exclusive to my library, of course, nor is it uncommon in an academic library setting.  It would also be fairly easily remedied by some technical expertise, cooperation, and a little bit of vision.

Whereas the academic library is likely not in jeopardy, the public library is subject to far more fickle decision makers.  If the primary benefactors of the service, middle class tax payers, see no benefits resulting from the library’s existence, it may find itself subject to political pressure.  This is a population that, on the whole, is pretty wowed by style and convenience which tend not to be libraries’ strong suit.

Know Your Audience

My wife, Selena, is a steadfast supporter of the public library.  She had an awakening about five years ago after shelling out tons of money to Amazon for books she read only once.

“Oh my God, they’ve got all these books.  For free!”

At this point, we had been married for about four years and I had been working in a library for about ten.  It is not like I hadn’t brought up the possibility of the public library before, but I had no defense for her complaints about the catalog’s interface (SirsiDynix’s iBistro).  It took her requiring her high school students to get a library card to see the merits of the library and ever since she has been a devoted advocate.

That does not mean that she still doesn’t have her complaints.  They are legitimate gripes and, thankfully, almost completely technical.  Her issues are:

1. There is no simple way for her to find the intersection of discovering new things that might be interesting to her and what the library has.
2. The library interfaces are crude, unforgiving and provide little that is useful for the casual reader.
3. Two-plus month waits for the most popular and current titles in the collection is counterproductive and fosters the notion that libraries are irrelevant or out of touch.

The third point is not exactly technical, I realize, but it has an effect on the library as a whole.  This will not stop me from offering a technical suggestion that might help.

Tell Me What I Want

There are several opportunities in the library for serendipitous discovery:  the children’s book room, the returned book cart, the new books shelf, maybe a staff picks list.   It has not, historically, been the forte of the library catalog.  One of Amazon’s many strengths lies in its recommendations and groupings.  Simply by being me and doing what I do, Amazon finds and presents me with things I might be interested in based on how other people with profiles like me shop.  While the recommendations are generally hit and miss, it made me aware of many things (especially music) that I would have had no way of discovering before.

There are various reasons that the library is reluctant to start creating profile based services for its borrowers:  USA PATRIOT act style privacy concerns, population sizes that are too small to produce meaningful recommendations, etc.  U.S. libraries should pay close attention to the UK’s MOSAIC project, however, a JISC-funded initiative to harvest and mine circulation data with the intention of providing recommendations based on borrower usage.  Assuming concerns surrounding the differences in privacy rights can be met, this could really begin to pave the way forward for such services.

In the meantime, there are tangible ways to provide less targeted, although still meaningful, recommendations:  best seller, award, and book club lists.  Best sellers’ lists are, of course, a very rough metric of what is currently popular across America and, in the case of some lists, targeted at particular demographics  (the New York Times, Essence Magazine, Evangelical Christian Publisher Association, Powell’s Bookstore, Independent Mystery Booksellers Association, etc.).  While best sellers lists give no context of the actual content (outside, possibly of fiction or non-fiction) and certainly are no barometer to the quality of the work, they do at least provide a list of books that are currently popular, which might be all the discovery some users need, especially the specialty lists.

When I checked my local public library for access to their collection based on best sellers lists, I was rather surprised to find that they did not have any.  This seemed so simple and such an easy win for them, that I thought I would mock something up so they could use it.  The New York Times has opened their best sellers lists and book and movie reviews through their API service making it very simple to create a set of interfaces based on their best sellers to the library catalog.  Unfortunately, this proved to be harder than I originally had hoped because the library catalog has no machine readable interface.  There is no easy way to provide mashups to my library.  This is not terribly surprising; the same was true for Atlanta-Fulton County Public Library’s catalog.  This is a terrible shame.  If the library is unable to provide the resources to create interesting and vibrant technological services, they really should do everything in their power to facilitate these services being created by members of their community.  This is exactly how Ann Arbor District Library cultivated its “Super Patron”, Ed Vielmetti.  Ironically, the AADL already had a strong technological base and probably needed to depend less on their constituents than other libraries.  I suppose this stands to reason, though, what with the rich getting richer and whatnot.

Quasi-tangential Rant

The issue of completely closed systems resonates with me especially hard.  For the last two years, I have been working on a project to build a specification to provide access to library data, via the Atom Publishing Protocol, called Jangle.  I was my employer’s representative to work on the Digital Library Federation’s Integrated Library System and Discovery Interface API.  This year, my work has primarily been split between trying to herd Jangle along and trying to find opportunities to expose library data and services as Linked Data.  I also wrote a book chapter on possible ways to make your library data more accessible for mashing up.  Sadly, all of this is an exercise in futility if libraries have no machine readable accessible means to provide their data.  This lack of openness is a major setback to libraries and the potential services they can offer their users.

The Worst of the Best Sellers

While I was trying to figure out a new plan of attack for implementing something like this, I did find that best sellers lists are not uncommon in public libraries; a cursory scan found them at Atlanta-Fulton Public Library, Knox County (TN) Public Library and the Nashville Public Library among several others.  The AFPL and Knox County PL both had them integrated directly into their OPACs.  Both use SirsiDynix powered OPACs:  the AFPL uses iBistro and Knox County uses Rooms.  Nashville Public Library uses BookSite.com, a third-party service that compiles lists and tries to emulate the look and feel of the original library website.

They all suck.

The problem with BookSite.com is that it, apparently, has no way to check the host library to see if the selection is even in the collection, much less if it is available or when it will be.  This requires the user to click on the link, initiate a catalog session, see if the item exists, check the availability, click the back button, find the next item of interest, click on the link, enter the catalog, etc.  While this may not seem terrible, every time they follow a link for an item that does not exist or is not available diminishes their confidence that they will ever find something available.  Let us not forget, also, that our OPACs tend to be horribly slow at initiating or reallocating sessions.  All of this just adds to a frustrating user experience.  This is another example of where a lack of APIs hamstrings third-party developers:  despite the intentions of the library to provide a better experience by purchasing subscriptions to products like BookSite, the end result is still awkward.

One would then think that incorporating these lists directly into the OPAC would be an improvement. Unfortunately, this is not really the case.  While item availability is shown (assuming the item is even held), the display is just an ugly, OPAC title list view.  Understandably, practically any title that appears on a best sellers list is more than likely going to be checked out (and will probably have a wait).  From a user’s perspective, though, this offers very little as a “discovery interface.”

“Gee, thanks for showing me a list of books that I cannot get access to for at least a month.”

Quite a few of the the entries were fairly misleading as well.  They provided hope for the user that the title might actually be available, but required going to the full title screen (similar to BookSite.com), only to see that all of the copies are, in fact, unavailable; they just have some status set that the OPAC cannot recognize as “available” or “unavailable.”

What is unacceptable here is that the poor user is presented with a list of 15 dead ends.  If the library is unable to provide any of these particular titles, what can it offer the borrower that might be related or relevant?  Each of these books represents a possible avenue of interest into the collection.  They also define a particular point of interest in the collective national consciousness that can be utilized to present other works held by the library that may not be new, but could be just as much of interest to the user.  The “traditional” library avenues of providing similarity tend to be fairly weak substitutes when it comes to this.  Dewey Decimal Classification (common to the majority of public libraries), which provides the “shelf browse,” is completely ineffective in the case of fiction works for anything other than finding other titles by the same author or another writer with the same last name.  Browsing on subject headings is also a rather blunt tool.  “”, “Female friendship Fiction.”, “African American women Fiction.”.  None of these, individually, captures the essence of why a particular book is on a particular best sellers list.  The MARC 65x field is unable to capture timbre.  And this is huge area where the public library is failing the public.

An Obvious Market Opportunity

There are products and projects that begin to address this disparity between what the casual user wants and expects and how the library catalog has evolved (or not) for the web.  BiblioCommons’ business model is to provide this social context layer over the collection by facilitating and aggregating circulation data, reviews, lists, and other means to allow library users to directly influence the relationships between works.  SOPAC could be considered an open source alternative to BiblioCommons; it is a suite of components featuring a public interface built atop the popular FLOSS content management system Drupal.  One of the pieces, Insurge, is intended to provide a means to share this social data between the various implementations:  reviews, ratings, and recommendations.  The design of Insurge theoretically allows it to work independently of SOPAC, the Drupal module, although, in practice, this has yet to happen.  Both of these are complete OPAC replacements, relegating the integrated library management system to its rightful place as an inventory control system.

At the other end of the spectrum is LibraryThing for Libraries, which takes the incredibly pragmatic approach of integrating into the existing vendor-supplied OPAC interface.  Like the other two, it leverages the much broader LibraryThing community to help enhance the local collection.  Of the three currently available options, it, by far, provides the richest and most comprehensive social enrichment because the community already exists.  The others have to build this community and the content from scratch.  One has to wonder, really, how Syndetics has sold a single subscription since LTfL was released:  LibraryThing gives everything a Syndetics subscription could, plus gives the user relevant alternatives from their own library’s collection.

That being said, LTfL also shares the same limitation as Syndetics (or any other “shoehorned in the OPAC” enrichment package):  the OPAC is still there.  This content, these tags, the ratings:  none of these are available to the searcher until she has already found something.  Queries do not include this community supplied content, there is no spellcheck, results cannot be sorted by rating.  If public libraries are to stay relevant, these interfaces have to be dropped.  The future of the ILMS itself is a different matter entirely, though its usefulness as an inventory control system is out of scope here.  This is just about the OPAC.

It’s the relationships, stupid

I strongly believe that the future of the public library collection interface has to be tied into some kind of content management system.  I am unable to find any hard statistics to back this up, but I do not think it is much of a stretch of the imagination to say that a vast amount of library circulation is casual, popular reading.  Just walk into any branch and browse the collection; the overwhelming majority is not research material.  While certainly there are lots of archival, local history, reference, and research items at any public library, can any one of them, honestly, say that these types of activity make up the majority of what cardholders want, need, or expect to do there?  Why, then, are the interfaces optimized to perform these tasks, arguably, at the expense of the majority?  Of course, sophisticated information retrieval still needs to be supported—the line between “hobby” and “research” can be blurry—but perhaps it does not need to be the primary function of the public interface.  The social nature of the library as place and collection need to be merged.

The concept of CMS as OPAC is not new or original (or exclusively useful to public libraries):  as previously mentioned, SOPAC is a Drupal module, as is the Mellon Foundation-funded eXtensibleCatalog (XC) project.  Scriblio is a plugin for the WordPress blogging platform.  Several years ago, I was working on a project to build a catalog using the Daisy CMS as a back end.  Even SirsiDynix’s Rooms was an attempt to merge the content and collection, albeit with the aesthetic of a traditional web OPAC, the speed of federated search engine and the general user experience of a root canal.  At a certain point, a library collection grows to a size that it cannot feasibly be dynamic and fresh using only the catalogers as the sole editors of the content.  There is a growing need for “marginalia,” independent of the MARC record, to tie the individual items within the library to each other, to events, to groups, to anything.  The separation between the “catalog” and the general information about the library makes no sense.

In the Absence of Suggestion, There is Always Search…

Besides the integration of general content, collection, and public contribution, the single most important improvement needed for the public interface is search.  It is amazing and somewhat appalling how, despite our claims that our systems are designed as being highly advanced information retrieval tools, they fail utterly at retrieving information.  My local public library recently deployed the federated search product WebFeat, undoubtedly in a well intentioned attempt to help their users navigate the various silos of information that inconveniently require searching individually:  the catalog, the audiobooks, the photograph collection, and the various databases they subscribe to.  It is also, by the gentlest assessment possible, a complete train wreck of a user experience.  Besides being slower than the stock catalog interface, it does a terrible job at searching.  It is understandable that the library would want to highlight and improve access to their database collection (as well as have a unified search interface for their “general collection”), but it does not seem likely that a borrower looking for something by Nora Roberts to take with them to the beach cares much about results from InfoTrac OneFile.  Requiring said borrower to enter their library card number before they can search just lessens the experience even more.

Another requirement the library places on the searcher, that they must be an excellent or informed speller, is also unfortunate.  As I try out these interfaces, there are two searches I try so I can see how effective they are in aiding the hapless searcher.  The searches are “Olive Kitteredge” and “Jody Picoult.”  It is depressing how unhelpful our search interfaces are.

For “Olive Kitteredge,” an understandable misspelling of Olive Kitteridge, the Pulitzer Prize winning best selling book, I got:

• Knox County’s SirsiDynix Rooms gave me a did you mean “Olive skittered”.  Olive skittered also produced zero results.
• Atlanta-Fulton County’s SirsiDynix iBistro gave me no recommendations, just zero hits and placed me in a browse index.  “Olive Kitteridge” did not appear within ten pages forward or back.
• Nashville Public Library’s III Millennium catalog gave no recommendation, just zero hits and returned me to the search form.
• Darien Public Library’s SOPAC gave me no recommendations, no results.
• Chattanooga-Hamilton County’s WebFeat search gave the recommendation “olive kittredge” and no results.  “Olive kittredge” also produced zero results.
• Seattle Public Library’s Horizon OPAC displayed “Did you mean: olive kitteridge?”  Success, at last.  This is not a stock Horizon feature, howeve. Other Horizon libraries just gave zero results, zero recommendations.
• Oakville Public Library’s BiblioCommons presented: “Did you mean olive kitteridge (1 result)?”.  Another satisfied customer.
• Collingswood Public Library’s Scriblio catalog not only tried to autosuggest the proper spelling as I was typing in the search box, despite submitting my search with the misspelled title, Olive Kitteridge was still the fourth result.

Seattle Public Library getting it right

Scriblio's autosuggest to the rescue

“Jody Picoult” seems a perfectly reasonable misspelling of the multiple best selling novelist and author of My Sister’s Keeper, which was recently adapted to film.  In the same order:

• Knox County’s Rooms gave no spelling recommendations and placed me in a browse search.  “Jodi Picoult” did not appear anywhere forwards or backward.
• AFPL’s iBistro timed out my session, gave me no results and placed me a browse index.  “Jodi Picoult” did not appear forwards or back.
• Nashville PL’s catalog:  “No entries found”.  Return to search form.
• SOPAC:  no results, no recommendation.
• WebFeat:  “Did you mean: Jody picounit”.  Jody picounit, unsurprisingly, returned zero results.  WebFeat did not give a recommendation for alternatives to “Jody picounit”.
• Seattle Public Library, despite passing the Olive Kitteridge test, returned one result:  Super searcher, author, scribe:  successful authors share their Internet research secrets by Loraine Page.  A content note includes the string “Jody Picoult” (presumably a misspelling of the author in the MARC record?).  No suggestions or recommendations are given.
• BiblioCommons, again, aced this:  “Did you mean jodi picoult (29 results)?”
• Collingswood’s Scriblio did not provide a correction in the autosuggest, but a Jodi Picoult book appeared as the second result, averting user frustration (and also providing a teachable moment on the author’s name).

Complete! Don't you feel completely satisfied?

My library still has no Jody Picounit

These are not edge cases.  These are searches for current best sellers and a Pulitzer Prize winner and both of them are only off by one letter.  Of the sixteen searches, eleven of them ended in failure.  While not comprehensive, these were eight libraries chosen mostly at random.  For all of the current fixation in faceted and graphical search results (and to be fair, Queens Borough Public Library’s AquaBrowser implementation passed the Picoult test and provided “kitteridge” in its similarity graph), none of these bells and whistles matter one whit if the search interface cannot even help the user past the search screen.  Amazon not only presented the correct “did you mean” suggestions, it also provided relevant search results with these bad searches.

Ebb, Meet Flow

Of course, correcting a search for “Jennifer Wiener” to Jennifer Weiner is irrelevant if the book the borrower is interested in will not be available for 89 days, as the Knox County Public Library was displaying last week for Best Friends Forever (as of this writing, the New York Times #1 Best Seller for Hardcover Fiction).  That is nearly three months.  Forget summer reading, you will be lucky to get this book before the winter solstice.  While I am normally extremely supportive of large, cooperative borrowing consortiums, such as Georgia’s PINES, the advantages of such a system, regardless of the size and scale, still completely break down when it comes to such enormous spikes of popularity.  It does not matter how many copies are in the system if everywhere from metropolises to backwaters has a run on the same title.  This is not exclusive to best sellers, of course, consider titles on school curricula or summer reading lists.  Backlogs are bad for credibility.

Popularity, however, is fleeting.  It is unreasonable for an underfunded library system to exhaust its limited collection development budget purchasing dozens of copies of the new hot thing which tomorrow may not circulate again ever (consider James Frey’s A Million Little Pieces).  For cases such as this, rather than borrowing from other libraries that have nothing to give, it makes more sense to borrow from the public.  Many of these most popular titles are best sellers, after all, and “best seller” by its very meaning implies that a lot of people own that book.  Once read and passed around to your circle of friends, what do you do with this book?  For these very popular, highly circulating titles, it makes sense to create a system that allows book owners in the community to donate their copy.  Once a particular title passes some predefined threshold (two holds for every copy, as an arbitrary example), provide a link in the best sellers list to encourage people to give the library their copy.  Links to this page would need to be present elsewhere, too:  after all, the person that owns the book wouldn’t be looking for it on the library website since they already own it.  Advertise on the library website.  Have an announcement on the local NPR affiliate.  Post the list of books the library wants to have donated near drop boxes. 

The donor would be given a tax write off based on the value of their book on the open market.  When the popularity spike diminishes, the library could either return the book to the original owner or, perhaps, register itself as an Amazon affiliate (as an example, I am not sure of the legalities or practicalities of this, nor is this an endorsement for Amazon.com) and sell the used copies with the proceeds going back to the library like any friends of the library book sale.  The tax write off (as well as satisfaction of performing a public good) would probably be more desirable to many potential donors than going through the process of selling the book themselves.

The Medium is the Message

What all of this points to is that public libraries need to place as high of an importance on the technology that they do on the social and physical aspects of their organization.  A lot of effort goes into speaker series, story time, game nights, and movie nights.  A lot of planning.  A lot of investment.  If that investment is not given, nobody will come to them.  The web presence is no different.  If the web tools are an afterthought, a haphazard, sloppy collection of off-the-shelf tools that neither help the user achieve their goals nor captures their interest, the public will write the library off.  Just as a speakers series is a combination public service and library marketing tool, the web site must be more so, as it is more public than any event.

At the same time, the library should not have to break the bank investing in the most cutting edge and expensive technology (or worse, break the bank with the run of the mill, dreadful applications currently pitched to them).  Many of these issues could quite easily be addressed simply by hiring a competent and creative developer.  By pooling these development resources, even more ambitious accomplishments can be achieved.  Georgia PINES (despite OCLC’s marketing department’s claims) built the first truly “web scale” ILMS simply because they had a need and were willing to devote the resources towards building it.  Joe Lucia, the University Librarian at Villanova made an intriguing and provocative statement on the NGC4LIB mailing list two years ago with this:

“What if, in the U.S., 50 ARL libraries, 20 large public libraries, 20 medium-sized academic libraries, and 20 Oberlin group libraries anted up one full-time technology position for collaborative open source development. That’s 110 developers working on library applications with robust, quickly-implemented current Web technology…. Instead of being technology followers, I venture to say that libraries might once again become leaders….”

He was speaking in this case of academic libraries (he mentions 20 public libraries, but I remain unconvinced that the average public library has all that much in common with its academic counterpart), but it is not too difficult imagine this in the context of public libraries.  There are, after all, nearly three times as many public library systems in the United States as there are academic libraries.  Surely, collectively, they could figure out how to fund such an endeavor to provide a truly powerful development team committed solely to the technology needs of public libraries.

If added to this was an infrastructure and environment that cultivated an opportunity to harvest the contributions of “super patrons” and “citizen developers,” as well as graphic designers, usability and accessibility experts, entire services could be provided by the constituency just as BiblioCommons, LibraryThing, or SOPAC solicits content.  One of the many distractions I had while writing this article came from a desire that I had to not just complain about my public library, but actually build some alternatives that could be contributed back to them.  However, as I mentioned previously, there is no machine readable access to their collection for me to build upon.  In order to write something interesting and, hopefully, useful, I first had to write a crawler to harvest their catalog.  I have yet to gain the nerve to actually run it; there is no robots.txt file, but it still seems rude and underhanded.  It is also ridiculous that I have to resort to such tactics just to sketch out some proofs-of-concept.

If all three tiers of this ecosystem were to become a reality (cooperative development team, local developer resources, and a public contribution network), the library would be well-placed to remain relevant for many years in the community’s consciousness.  It is difficult to see if the initiative or vision is available to establish such an environment, however.  Significant improvement would be rather easy to accomplish.  All it would take is a little imagination and some commitment.

Maybe I should just start my crawler and see what happens.

Thanks to:  Brett Bonfield for not only convincing me to write this article, but also tirelessly reviewing it and for guiding this along even when I was getting flaky.  Also thanks to Dan Chudnov for reviewing it and helping me find a better focus, even if he agreed with only about half of what I wrote.  Lastly, I’d like to thank my wife, Selena, without whom I would have had no inspiration, ideas, or “research subjects.”