"A January 13, 2004, Chicago Sun-Times newspaper commentary entitled 'Check out a cheaper alternative' included a different outcome suggestion for one of Governor Blagojevich's newest program ideas, which would 'give each child [in Illinois] a book every month from birth to age 5. That sounds like a nice gesture to encourage literacy. But it will turn out to be more symbolism than substance.

The $26 million for the first year of the program might not sound like much given the way government tosses around dollars these days. But every dollar counts when the state is running red ink into the billions, which is the huge fiscal challenge facing the governor. To cope with that challenge, Blagojevich has cut state funding for -- libraries.

Lack of books is not the root cause of illiteracy. Thankfully we have plenty of books in libraries. So here's a suggestion for the governor: Instead of giving each newborn a book, how about sending a library card and restoring some of the library funding?'

Click here to read the full article.
Copyright © The Sun-Times Company." [Suburban Library System]

Unfortunately, I'm not sure this issue is getting enough press here in Illinois, so it was nice to see this Sun-Times editorial pointing out how much more good would be done by restoring library funding rather than spending money on giving each child a single book each month. Libraries don't just support information literacy... they support plain old-fashioned regular literacy, too. This proposal just proves that the Governor doesn't use libraries and hasn't for some time (a major problem with politicians in general - talk about a disconnect from the real world!).

Before this goes any further, I hope the Illinois Library Association steps up and challenges Blagojevich on this issue. A few months ago, Dean showed me that ILA has implemented CapWiz to help raise the visibility of and response to library issues in the State. On the ILA Advocacy page, there are links to Issues and Legislation, U.S. Congress, Illinois State Legislature, and Media Directory. It's great to see this at the state level, and I'd love to find some statistics about its use. Kudos to those that put up the money to pay for this.

In the past, I've advocated for library organizations to make use of tools like CapWiz in the same way that the ACLU, EFF, and even the two major political parties do to make it easy for supporters to send faxes and emails to their legislators. ILA's CapWiz initiative appears to be a step in this direction, and indeed you can view a list of their Action Alerts. But the key (as proven recently by the Dean campaign and MoveOn.org) is mobility. How quickly can you marshal your forces and produce an impact?

So my hope is that ILA uses this tool to mobilize library supporters immediately to contact the Governor's office and point out to him what a boneheaded idea his proposal is in the face of past and looming budget cuts for our communities' libraries. Let's support our existing libraries and provide our children with more than just one book a month. We can do better than that, and guess what? Libraries already do better than that. Keep funding them.

"Continuing my theme of REALLY big things, LaCie has announced the Bigger Disk, a one terabyte external drive. More than enough space to store all of your music, photos and movies whether obtained legally or otherwise.

'The LaCie Bigger Disk, with the largest hard drive capacity available, is a unique innovation that packs an amazing 1 terabyte of storage space in a manageable 5.25" form factor. With this unsurpassed storage capacity, the LaCie Bigger Disk allows users to store nearly two years of continuous music and up to one month of non-stop MPEG-2 video.' " [Gadgetopia]

Now if they could just shrink this down to the size of an SD card....  ;-)

James Ellis sends word that the Wisconsin Historical Society offers three RSS feeds, and he believes that these are the first such feeds to come from the great State of Wisconsin. How great a use of RSS is this?!

• Wisconsin Historical Site News
• Wisconsin Historical Society Features
• Odd Wisconsin

I especially love that third one! James also notes that they're using using Movable Type's aggregator plug-in to make a
librarians-only web site. Go, James, Go!

We did do an actual press release for ListenIllinois, and the Audible folks sent it out to various wire services last month. Today I came across the press release on the Yahoo Biz site, which surprised me, even though it shouldn't have. Out of curiousity, I did some further searching and found that it was also picked up by Hoovers, EE Times, BusinessWire, Wireless Week, and Morningstar. Even though they are just regurgitations of the press release itself, it's nice to see our name get out there. Now on to the library press!

Of course, on a local level we're more dependent on the participating libraries doing the marketing themselves, and it looks like Lemont Public Library, which just officially went live, is the first to post information about ListenIllinois online. In this case, it's part of their newsletter, which you can view as a PDF document. It's a very brief blurb that was published before they actually went live, but it's on the same page as an article about the Library's wireless network. In fact, it's the first page of the newsletter. It's great to see them publicizing both of these services!

The one depressing point is the following statement from the article about wireless access:

"Internet access is filtered and cannot be temporarily shut off, as in the case of the adult public computers."

Thanks, CIPA! So if Jon Udell or Dave Winer ever passes through Lemont and wants to partake of the Library's free Wi-Fi, I guess it really will affect them.

Snopes Gets RSS Feed

"Tell one, tell all, the invaluable Snopes.com has finally gotten an RSS feed!

Snopes is required reading for people on the Internet. If it sounds too good to be true, if it's a little too conveniently in favor (or against) your favorite ideological position, or if it's a little too horrifying to be true, check it on Snopes before you get upset, or worse, spread the claims further. Because you'll meet someone who has nearly the entire site indexed in their head, and there's little that's more damaging to your point then to have it conclusive rebutted on Snopes.

I'd just like to take this opportunity to thank Barbara and David Mikkelson (FAQ link substantiating the names) for providing such a fine resource to the Internet.

And it's darn fun stuff, too.

Pass it along." [iRi]

Why do I go on so much about blogs and libraries? Two words: Riverdale E-Newsletter.

The Riverdale Public Library is one of my member libraries. It doesn't have much money, but it has a staff that does what it can and serves its residents well. Barb works there, and she is taking advantage of blogging to partner with the Village's other entities in order to build a community site for said residents.

Because they have little to no money and no tech staff, Barb is using BlogSpot to host it. She has created a blog of community news, created accounts for staff at the Village, schools, Chamber of Commerce, etc., and she's leading the way in posting items. All for free. And now that the site is ready to go, it will pretty much run itself.

SLS has lots of libraries that are bigger than Riverdale PL and have a lot more resources, and yet here is Barb leading the way. Blog on, Barb!

Imagine what blogging can do you for your library!

When the dust settles, we'll get them an RSS feed, too.  ;-)

Web Stars: Best of the Web: Blog Sites & Aggregator Tools

"Memingo
Memigo ranks the quality of individual news items according to the clicks and recommendations of registered Memigo users (as well as to your own clicks as you surf through the site). A fascinating and constantly changing compilation of news stories from an eclectic range of sites and feeds around the Web, the site delivers its content enjoyably fast. Memigo holds a lot of promise as a news aggregation service, but it's still an experiment, so expect a few rough edges. It aims to "cut through the infoglut" by delivering high-quality content through group consensus, but a few out-of-place stories occasionally float into positions that give them top billing. " [PC World, via Lockergnome's RSS Resource]

This is an interesting type of aggregation service that I haven't seen before. Granted, you don't get to pick and choose your feeds (although you can suggest one to add to the database), but it would be interesting to implement a Memigo site for all library feeds (or even just LISFeeds for the moment) to let users customize it to display the stories (not feeds) that are most interesting to them. Another intriguing aspect of Memigo is that it looks like you can log in, rate articles, and then get a customized RSS feed based on those ratings.

On a similar note, Dave Winer has been putting together a pretty powerful new site called Share Your OPML that lets folks upload the list of their subscriptions from their aggregators. It then polls these files to show the Top 100 Feeds in terms of the number of subscribers, who subscribes to them, the full subscription list for those participants that have approved the display of their file, a group aggregator, and more.

My first intent here is to ask fellow librarians to upload their subscription files to the site. I think we can do some interesting things with our files if we get enough of a critical mass, especially since Dave is promoting the idea of managed sets of  feeds by subject.

My second intent is to point out that there are similaraties between Memigo and Dave's project and that what we're really seeing here is a next big step for aggregators. A year from now, I think we'll look back and recognize that 2004 was a year of evolutionary change for aggregators.