Library Tech Confidential

It seems that Republican Vice-presidential nominee Sarah Palin, in the fine tradition of so many concerned municipal politicians from communities large and small, had a book-banning bee in her bonnet.

From “Mayor Palin: A Rough Record” in Time Magazine, via Librarian.net :

[Former Wasilla, Alaska Mayor John] Stein says “[Palin] asked the library how she could go about banning books,” he says, because some voters thought they had inappropriate language in them. “The librarian was aghast.” That woman, Mary Ellen Baker, couldn’t be reached for comment, but news reports from the time show that Palin had threatened to fire Baker for not giving “full support” to the mayor… [read more]

Threatening to fire the librarian for her refusal is somewhat unsurprising, given that Palin also reportedly sacked the heads of other city agencies for alleged ’loyalty’ to her predecessor.

Note to elected officials: undermining the merit principle for staffing and promotion in a non-partisan civil service is no easy shortcut to ‘cutting red tape’ or slashing ‘unecessary bureaucracy’; instead, it’s just another plodding step down the road back to the untrammeled patronage system of the not-so-distant past. Also, don’t mess with the library!

Photo credit: AKMuckraker via WIkipedia.

Table making library staff ill [YorkRegion.com] :

The main floor service desk [at Richmond Hill Public Library’s Central branch] has been cordoned off for nearly four weeks, ever since staff working at it complained of symptoms ranging from illness to allergic reactions, a librarian at the branch said. The desktop led two staff members to seek medical attention, one of which had to be hospitalized, the librarian added….

“(The hospitalization) was an unrelated matter when [a librarian] was at the doctor and that landed her in the hospital,” [the library’s Director of Public Service] said… “She had allergies, but when she was there they found something else. She wasn’t hospitalized, because of the desk.” [read more]

As a library ‘paraprofessional’, I greatly enjoyed this post over at The Liminal Librarian (Update: a solid follow-up post rebutting many arguments advanced in opposition to her original post is now also available). One of the choicest bits:

We’re not doctors, we’re not lawyers, and we can’t compare library school with law or medical school. We don’t have a monopoly on intellectual freedom or finding information. In some cases, sure, a MLS adds value [but] there are also MLS librarians who spend their days reading the newspaper and ignoring their patrons. Yes, librarians like to categorize things, but people aren’t so easily catalogable, folks…No, I’m not saying that everyone who works in a library is a librarian. I’m saying that people who are doing the work of a professional librarian, who contribute to our profession, who keep up with the profession, and who are committed to the principles of the field, deserve the title of librarian — regardless of their degree status.

This commenter’s views also really hit home, given my (nascent) plan to take a shot at the MISt part-time as a long-term career-building move:

My entree into the world of library work made me want to turn tail and run, not become a librarian: the issue of who is “real” and who is not is way too reoccurring… Only through a gracious mentor/boss was I encouraged to become a “real” librarian - and her urging was so that I would be able to make a career of it (financially), and for no other reason. MLS in hand I guard carefully against absorbing any of that poisonous mentality!

I drafted a blog post on this subject months ago, but decided to bite my tongue until I have a little more workplace experience under my belt. In a nutshell: I empathize with established librarians’ anxiety over ‘deprofessionalization’ and other threats to the library status quo in the digital age, but casually dissing paraprofessionals (especially those with non-library university degrees) is extremely counterproductive, at best. For the non-nutshell version, see my comment below.

Photo credit: “MLIS” by Flickr user herzogbr of Swiss Army Librarian (Creative Commons)

NY Public Library branch to share space with hotel [AP / Int’l Herald Tribune] : “The New York Public Library is selling its branch in midtown Manhattan, across the street from the Museum of Modern Art, to Orient-Express Hotels Ltd. and plans to share space in a new building with the luxury hotel.”

Kottke’s guest blogger has posted a fantastic interview with Cory Doctorow on copyright, 21st century literature, and appropriately compensating artists for the indexing and public availability of their work :

“You know, the fact that Amazon or Google want to show quotes from your book alongside search results for people who are trying to find out which books contain which string, I think it’s just crazy to say that you deserve to be compensated for that even if they could figure out a way to make money off of it. Indexing books is just not in the realm of things that we deserve to get compensated for, any more than library lending is.

And I know that in Europe they do have a library right, and you actually do get compensated for library use. I actually think that’s kind of gross. I don’t think that’s good public policy. If we want to subsidize writers with public money, don’t take it out of the budget of the library. What a disaster for public policy, for good stewardship, to take money out the hands of the public libraries. What a disaster that writers have actually endorsed this plan.”

If that doesn’t provide a clear enough picture of his position on digital re-distribution of copyright works, here’s what he says in the bio on his personal website:

“I believe that we live in an era where anything that can be expressed as bits will be. I believe that bits exist to be copied. Therefore, I believe that any business-model that depends on your bits not being copied is just dumb, and that lawmakers who try to prop these up are like governments that sink fortunes into protecting people who insist on living on the sides of active volcanoes.”

At the risk of violating my personal prohibition against bandwagon-jumping and/or endorsing unabashed declarations of historical inevitability… can I get an amen, brothers and sisters?

In any case, I think the “library right” to which he refers in the first quote above may be the “rental and lending right” established in Directive 1992/100/EEC (since replaced by Directive 2006/115/EC), although my familiarity with law there is not sufficient for me to say so with any great degree of certainty.

In Canada we have the Public Lending Right Commission. According to it’s FAQ, the Commission disbributes payment to authors of registered “works of fiction, poetry, drama, children’s books, scholarly books, and general non-fiction” that meet certain criteria, with compensation being based on their presence in the catalogues of a representative sample of Canadian public libraries rather than tied to circulation statistics or any other measure of use.

In February of this year, $9 million in public funds were distributed among some 15,000 authors (an average payment of $588 per author). Given that compensation was capped at a maximum of $281.05 per title, I guess that means the ‘average’ compensated author has 2.09 works in the registry; however, compensation is calculated using a sliding scale whereby recent works are worth more than older ones.

I can’t help but wonder if Cory, an ex-pat Canadian, has registered any of his numerous titles?

Library behind bars gets forced into closet [Toronto Star] : “[A volunteer who] amassed more than 2,000 volumes, from thrillers to psychology texts [was told to] move the prison library into a glorified broom closet, perhaps 6 metres long and a mere 100 centimetres wide… Officials [say] they wanted to use the library room to store protective vests. Guards tried to intervene; they offered a variety of alternatives, and asked to be present when the issue was discussed in management meetings. They were ignored.”

This is happening in the Toronto neighbourhood where I live, perhaps a 15-minute walk from my apartment.

In fairness, Wikipedia’s entry for the Don Jail notes that, because it was only designed to hold prisoners briefly before and during trial, it lacks all kinds of facilities, including a proper laundry and sufficient telephones, exercise space and visiting rooms.

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Sharing Study [OCLC] : “OCLC, the world’s largest library research and service organization, has released the third in a series of reports that scan the information landscape to provide data, analyses and opinions about users’ behaviors and expectations in today’s networked world.” (via)

Prisons purging books on faith from prison libraries [New York Times] : “[The US Federal] Bureau of Prisons [says it] was acting in response to a 2004 report by the Office of the Inspector General in the Justice Department. The report recommended steps that prisons should take, in light of the Sept. 11 attacks, to avoid becoming recruiting grounds for militant Islamic and other religious groups.”

Not all items about religion are being discarded; instead, administrators claim, the goal is to ensure that only “reliable teachings as determined by reliable subject experts” remain available to prisoners.

Prison chaplains and academics (who one imagines might consider themselves to be reliable experts on the subject) are reportedly disputing the quality and variety approved materials:

“There are some well-chosen things in here,” Professor Larsen said. “I’m particularly glad that Dietrich Bonhoeffer is there. If I was in prison I would want to read Dietrich Bonhoeffer.” But he continued, “There’s a lot about it that’s weird.” The lists “show a bias toward evangelical popularism and Calvinism,” he said, and lacked materials from early church fathers, liberal theologians and major Protestant denominations.

ALA’s Office for Intellectual Freedom has a solid post following the development of this story. Briefly: the initiative - called the Standardized Chapel Library Project - has since been put on hold and most pulled items will go back to the prisons, with the exception of “material that could be radicalizing or incite violence.”

Library cuts may have backfired, board says [Toronto Star] : “Library board officials said they were notified last week that the Toronto Civic Employees’ Union (CUPE Local 416) had won a grievance filed against the board over the Sunday closings.”

Ever since a planned crucial revenue-raising tax measure unexpectedly failed to pass earlier this year, various departments of the City of Toronto have tried to find ways to cut costs the TTC offered up a slew of ‘poor performing’ bus routes plus a fare increase, the police insisted it couldn’t spare a penny, and the library resigned itself to closing on Sundays.

Now TPL may have to pay it’s staff for Sundays either way — that is, whether their branches are closed or not — because their legal advisors apparently failed to acount for the effect of the collective agreement. The 11 branches located in ‘priority’ (read: disproportionately impoverished) neighbourhoods were to remain unaffected. With luck, if this development negates much of the hoped-for cost savings, perhaps the city will relent and revert to normal hours of operation.

UPDATE: Subsequent media coverage confirms the reversal on the Sunday closures.

• Library branches to reopen on Sundays [Globe and Mail]
• Ruling overturns library closings [Toronto Star]

“CUPE BC president Barry O’Neill says a decision late yesterday to close Canada’s only in-house public library bindery is a disgrace to the Vancouver Public Library board members who voted to close it down.” [Press Release @ CNW Group]

Border with Canada runs through library in Vermont village - “Walk across the carpeted floor to the circulation desk and you’re in Canada. But if you sit down on the couch, you’re back in the U.S.” [Canada.com]

Legislative library should stay open - “The provincial government’s decision to close the B.C. legislature library is difficult to comprehend, even taking into account the apparent need for a seismic upgrade of the 90-year-old building… A [a] core collection of materials will be moved from the library, at the back of the legislature building, to another government building on Superior Street. But many of the items found in the library — and not available elsewhere — will be carted off to a warehouse…” [Victoria Times Colonist]

Legislative library will be closed to make space for offices - “About half the 30 librarians will be sent to other jobs in government. As for the millions of precious, and in some cases priceless, materials in its dusty stacks, a treasure trove of Canadian history filled with the esoteric businesses of governments dating back before Confederation, will be sent to a warehouse. It’s also not clear the institution will ever come back to the legislature since the politicians, who are are short on space, have been eying the cavernous space for a warren of offices.” [Vancouver Sun]