orig­i­nally posted by the­gloam­ing

This is my new favorite library sign. I always think you can send a bet­ter mes­sage using humor than heavy-handedness, although in this case, the librar­i­ans are also mak­ing a great state­ment about privacy.

I’ve been mulling over a lot lately the trust librar­i­ans have built up with users just through our actions (they speak louder than words, right?). I think there’s a lot we can do here, teach­ing peo­ple (and espe­cially stu­dents) how to man­age their online iden­tity. “How to be a good dig­i­tal cit­i­zen” should also include how to rep­re­sent your­self online, in addi­tion to how to par­tic­i­pate and media lit­er­acy in general.

I’ve also been think­ing about “per­sis­tence” a lot lately, and I’ll be writ­ing more about that because I think it’s one of our biggest assets in the dig­i­tal world (from many dif­fer­ent angles, too).

In the mean­time, I’m happy to see Blog­lines has incor­po­rated OpenID, some­thing I wish libraries — and par­tic­u­larly library ven­dors — would pay more atten­tion to. To learn more about what Blog­lines is doing in this area, go to http://www.bloglines.com/about/news and scroll down to the cur­rent sec­ond item (or just try going here). (Hope­fully the folks at BL are in the process of turn­ing this page into a blog so that we can point to spe­cific news in the future, rather than one long page. Wink, wink, nudge, nudge, say no more.) Bonus points to them for adding openID authen­ti­ca­tion in the first place.

I’d like to think libraries could be influ­en­tial in edu­cat­ing Amer­i­cans about the ben­e­fits of OpenID and help folks tame some of this chaos. The more sites that use an open stan­dard like this (cough, libraries, cough), the bet­ter it is for all of us. And let’s face it, in a sit­u­a­tion like this, who are you going to trust — your local library or Big Brother?