 Thursday, January 23, 2003
Bush: Agency Merger Would Save Millions
"Gov. Jeb Bush's proposed merger of the Department of State and Department of Community Affairs would cut 218 positions and save the state $20.7 million, Bush said Tuesday....
In addition, some programs will be transferred to other state agencies, and one - the Florida State Library - would be eliminated....
'This is an effort to bring together like programs,' said Department of Community Affairs spokeswoman Alia Faraj. 'This will be not so much telling communities what to do as providing them with the assistance they need to do what they need to do....'
Some services proposed for transfer in the merger:
- Custodian of State Records, Records Management and Archives to the Department of Management Services.
- Florida State Library collections to Florida State University. The division of state libraries would be eliminated.
Spokeswomen for both libraries and environmental protection worry that consumer access to both government records and government regulators is going to be hurt by the merger." [Tallahassee Democrat, via librarian.net]
This may not be "telling communities what to do," but it sure will limit the support network for community libraries, which will mean additional cuts, reductions in resources, and a smaller world for each community. This is taking away assistance, not providing it. If you live in Florida, you need to contact your legislators and Governor Bush and tell them that Florida can't afford to be without a state library.
The Most Challenged Books of 2002
"Harry Potter series tops list of most challenged books four years in a row.... The ALA Office for Intellectual Freedom received a total of 515 reports of challenges last year, a 15 percent increase since 2001....
The 'Ten Most Challenged Books of 2002' reflect a wide variety of themes. The books, in order of most frequently challenged are:
- Harry Potter series, by J.K. Rowling, for its focus on wizardry and magic.
- Alice series, by Phyllis Reynolds Naylor, for being sexually explicit, using offensive language and being unsuited to age group.
- "The Chocolate War" by Robert Cormier (the "Most Challenged" book of 1998), for using offensive language and being unsuited to age group.
- "I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings" by Maya Angelou, for sexual content, racism, offensive language, violence and being unsuited to age group.
- "Taming the Star Runner" by S.E. Hinton, for offensive language.
- "Captain Underpants" by Dav Pilkey, for insensitivity and being unsuited to age group, as well as encouraging children to disobey authority.
- "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" by Mark Twain, for racism, insensitivity and offensive language.
- "Bridge to Terabithia" by Katherine Paterson, for offensive language, sexual content and Occult/Satanism.
- "Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry" by Mildred D. Taylor, for insensitivity, racism and offensive language.
- "Julie of the Wolves" by Julie Craighead George, for sexual content, offensive language, violence and being unsuited to age group." [ALA, via The ResourceShelf
Senate Limits Pentagon 'Snooping' Plan
"The U.S. Senate on Thursday voted unanimously to slap restrictions on a controversial Pentagon data-mining program that critics say would amount to a domestic spying apparatus.
By unanimous consent, the Senate inserted a moratorium on the program into a massive spending bill, which is expected to receive a final vote late Thursday or Friday.
The vote represents an unusual triumph of privacy concerns over the Bush administration's arguments that the Pentagon's Total Information Awareness (TIA) program would be useful for national security. If fully implemented, TIA would link databases from sources such as credit card companies, medical insurers and motor vehicle agencies in hopes of snaring terrorists.
Final passage of the moratorium is not certain, however. Because the House of Representatives' version of the omnibus appropriations bill does not include any limits on TIA, a conference committee will have the final say. ...
On the other hand, the Wyden amendment--co-sponsored by Democrats including Dianne Feinstein of California and Patrick Leahy of Vermont--bans TIA after two months unless Congress receives a detailed report or President George W. Bush decides that a halt would 'endanger the national security of the United States.'
Thereafter, if the Defense Department or any other executive branch agency wishes to release TIA to be used on American citizens, it must seek 'specific authorization' from Congress. Exceptions are 'lawful' military activities conducted overseas, or intelligence operations that target non-Americans inside or outside the United States....
Sen. Russ Feingold, D-Wisc., said after the vote that he would continue to pursue a standalone bill that would also place restrictions on TIA." [CNET News.com]
Howard Rheingold has more information explaining what we can do to make sure that this amendment passes.
News That Comes to You
"Instead of the hunt and peck of Web surfing, you can download or buy a small program that turns your computer into a voracious media hub, letting you snag headlines and news updates as if you were commanding the anchor desk at CNN....
Here's how it works. You fire up one of the news readers (also called news aggregators), subscribe to certain sites from a directory of thousands of choices -- say, BBC Online, ESPN, Salon, the Chippewa (Wis.) Herald and Bangkok News -- and bingo, you're in business. Whenever you sign on, a directory pane lets you see the most recent updates for each channel you've subscribed to. Within each channel you'll typically see a half dozen headlines and perhaps a summary, the entire item, and occasionally an accompanying photo. Want to dive in further? Click on a link and you're transported directly to the source's Web site. Some programs run through a Web browser, others through a standalone program. Most are free....
No, this isn't The Next Big Thing, and no, it won't make Web browsing obsolete. But from a news publication's vantage point, RSS allows a news site to instantly syndicate its content without any third parties involved. Internet news feeds give news organizations another way to reach that most elusive of creatures: the wired, tech-savvy professional. And you can bet that within a year or so, students will be latching onto RSS subscriptions in a big way....
Scot Hacker, webmaster for the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism, downloaded NetNewsWire (slogan: 'More news, less junk. Faster.') for a class several months ago. 'Within 10 minutes time I became convinced that RSS was going to become an incredibly important piece of Web publishing,' he says. 'I think of RSS like TiVo -- it lets me spend the same amount of time to take in a lot more media. For me it's not about speed, it's about saving time. I'm able to distill information much more efficiently.'
Roger Turner, a freelance software developer in London who inspects his 218 news feeds five to 10 times a day, agrees. 'Using a news aggregator has transformed the way I interact with the Web. News comes to me, on my terms. I feel in touch with 10 to 100 times as many sites as before RSS, with less effort....'
To reach truly large numbers of users, news readers will need to become integrated with other applications. Michael Krus, a Parisian who started NewsIsFree three years ago with a colleague in Switzerland because he grew tired of surfing to the same sites every day, says he thinks tying news readers to a Web browser, e-mail program or instant messaging program is the next logical step. 'That would be a killer app,' he says.
Among the developments already under way: The open-source Mozilla
browser and Netscape 7 come with sidebars that can display RSS feeds. There are news readers for handheld devices, and one being tested now that uses a ticker format to display headlines non-stop in the top line of your browser, like TV Headline News. Just double-click any headline to read the story." [Online Journalism Review]
Check out this great blog I just came across in my referers, Women in Information Technology: An annotated list of sites about and for women in the fields of library & information science, information technology, and computer science. Whew - try saying that five times fast. And there's an RSS feed!
"This site is a collection of organizations, resources, and cool links relating to, well, women and information technology. Originally founded by Jerry McDonough at the School of Information Management & Systems, the site has morphed somewhat over the years but has tried to stay true to Jerry's original vision.
And after eons of neglect, the new womeninit.net site rises from the ruins thanks to Movable Type. I plan to update it frequently this time, really!"
Argh! Again I find out from an online site about something a couple of my SLS libraries are doing. Both Midlothian Public Library and Thomas Ford Memorial Library are participating in Library Book Sales.
"LibraryBookSales.org matches you with rare, collectible and quality books that have been donated to public libraries. The money you spend goes directly to the library that sells you the book. You benefit because you can find quality books at great prices. Everyone Wins!...
Librarybooksales.org (and .com) has become one of the hottest spots on the web. New libraries are joining every day, and books are being uploaded as we speak. The project is open to any library. Public, private, institutional, special collections, educational, foreign or domestic. The goal is for libraries to generate much needed funds to continue serving the 'better good.'
The project is not open to commercial book sellers. These libraries can now sell their better books on the web. These may be books that have been donated to the library, duplicate copies, monographs or surplus materials...." [via TeleRead]
Wired has a prescient article in the February 2003 issue titled Hating Hilary. It sounds like Hilary Rosen is already trying to rehabilitate her image. It's an interesting profile of someone caught in the middle between the past and the future.
"Almost immediately after college, Rosen began lobbying for a private company on behalf of music publishers, and she eventually rose to become one of Washington's most influential lobbyists. In part, this is a reflection of the industry she represents; according to a breakdown done by the Center for Responsive Politics, the RIAA and the companies that own its member labels donated more than $5 million to parties and candidates in the 1999-2000 election cycle. But her influence is also a testament to her skill in manipulating the political process, which she does with a combination of disarming warmth and tactical ruthlessness....
Rosen says she tried 'endlessly' to find a licensing agreement that would have enabled the labels to join forces with Napster. But the industry rejected an offer of $1 billion over five years - and Rosen seemed unwilling to settle for anything less than Napster's demise.
'We knew we were losing the PR battle,' she says now. 'It was a tsunami. But instinctively, I always thought that people thought we were right. They thought it was a free ride, and boy was it fun, but it would never last.' Focus groups confirmed this, she says. "So while I knew their political strategy was drawing blood, I knew we'd win....'
In fact, Rosen tried to steer the labels toward the online future long before they saw it coming. In the mid-'90s, Rosen brought Dyson to a conference of music executives to brief them on how technology would transform their business. Dyson described for them the inevitability of digital delivery, an eventuality Rosen says she had begun to understand but wanted her bosses to hear from an outsider. But as Dyson spoke, the label executives became defensive, then furious. By all accounts, the meeting devolved into a shouting match....
Behind the scenes, Rosen has worked hard to convince the Big Five that they can't expect to hunt down and punish music pirates without investing for real in online services of their own; the public won't stand for it, and Congress may not either. So far, however, the industry's online efforts - held up by endless copyright and licensing issues - have been disastrous. While we were in Oxford, Rosen took a call on her cell about a standoff between her companies and the publishing industry, who were arguing over online royalties. When she hung up, she surprised me by venting her frustration.
'I finally convince the idiot record companies that they have to offer a product to compete with pirates, and now the publishers won't make a deal,' she said, throwing up her hands. 'They'd rather we shoot at each other until we're both dead. It's always one step forward and two steps back.'
Hilary Rosen would prefer it if the world's youth didn't think she was hopelessly uncool. She has an iPod. She counts both Al and Tipper Gore, as well as the rapper Chuck D, among her close friends. She helped found Rock the Vote, for God's sake....
Ten years out, Rosen envisions a world where recorded music is purchased not just in malls but on computers, cell phones, and cable systems. With CDs, she says, the industry has been selling the equivalent of Coca-Cola in only 1-liter bottles, while in the future, it will have to come in six-packs and fountains and every other kind of package.
'I think we're going to have online subscriptions,' she says. 'I think we're going to have song delivery. I think we're going to have portability and satellite delivery of new music. I think there are going to be as many ways to deliver music as we can think of.'
Rosen's tenure will likely be judged on whether the Big Five keep control over this new world of music, or whether they become part of a bygone distribution system - the milkmen of the digital age." [Wired]
Has Google Won? A Librarian Says Students Have More Data Than They Know What to Do With
"Like many other librarians, Steven J. Bell has watched students go to online databases, enter a few search terms, and get hundreds of articles in return. Swamped with information, and doubtless on a deadline, these students print out the first several articles -- making no effort to evaluate their quality -- and then run off to write their papers. Now Mr. Bell, library director at Philadelphia University, asks a question that might seem heretical for someone in his field: Is more information always better?
Mr. Bell, who poses that question in an article in this month's issue of American Libraries, the American Library Association's magazine, discussed his concerns in an interview with The Chronicle....
"There was a very interesting article recently in College & Research Libraries News ["Facing the Competition," December 2002] that basically said, We're giving up on information literacy because we can't reach the students anymore, and we're just hoping to come up with ways that they can search our Web site to come up with some information that will help them. That, to me, is throwing up the white flag and saying, Google has won. I think if we keep working with the people who create the databases, maybe we can come up with a product that has a better balance. ... There are loads of techniques that could improve searching, and they've got to be built into the systems better....
One thing that concerns me is that a lot of the services have a check box that says "full text." You click that, and you are eliminating what could be some very good articles that are available only in citation or abstract format. ... In the article, I call it "full-text fixation." We're creating a generation of researchers and scholars who are losing touch completely with the value of getting a citation that is on target for the topic, then walking to the shelf to find a hard copy or finding it in another database....
How we communicate that to the public and to our users -- that's becoming really important. I could bring you into the library and watch students do research. I could know that they are struggling, and go over and say, Do you need help? But they say, No, I'm fine. The mind-set is that all the information is out there, and that they just need to plug in a few words to find it." [The Chronicle, via WEB4LIB mailing list]
|
|
