Accessibility

Recently a place named Virtual Ability Island (VAI) in the three-dimensional virtual world called Second Life has provided me a fascinating glimpse of a quiet revolution in progress. I don’t know how big or important this quiet revolution will be, but it is a welcome development. At the risk of braying a bit myself, let me tell the tale.

I like Second Life and I think virtual worlds in general have a bright, significant future, but I have to agree with many tepid reviews of Second Life that note that most places seem like ghost towns, not vibrant virtual communities.  I’ve called this problem in Second Life the “reverse frontier” because the virtual landmass seems to grow faster than the resident population. Read More »

The dog days of August 2007 may be remembered as that magic moment when librarianship as practiced in Second Life finally received permission to dine at the adults' table. 

On August 3rd the Library of Congress announced a new initiative -- Preserving Creative America.  They made eight grant awards totally $2.15 million "...to address the long-term preservation of creative content in digital form."  The creative content being targeted includes the usual suspects, such as digitally created motion pictures, digital music, and digital photographs, but it also includes comic strips (Doonesbury) and editorial cartoons (Pat Oliphant) -- which I assume were not born digital, but perhaps I'm just revealing my quaint, old-fashioned notions of how cartoons are drawn these days.  Read More »

"If people were better informed about social networking sites and knew and used basic Internet safety tips, the cloud of fear may decline."—Robert Doyle, Executive Director of the Illinois Library Association
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Last Thursday's New York Times contained an article (a no-cost subscription is required) that provides a progress report on the $100 laptop initiative, officially known as One Laptop per Child (OLPC). The project is based at MIT's Media Lab and was first announced in January 2005. Led by Nicholas Negroponte, the OLPC project proclaims its main outcome goal thus: “a unique harmony of form and function; a flexible, ultra low-cost, power-efficient, responsive, and durable machine with which nations of the emerging world can leapfrog decades of development—immediately transforming the content and quality of their children's learning.”
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Last week, Andy Bridges, from ALA's Washington Office, put together some summary information on the recently released Public Libraries and the Internet 2006: Results and Findings study.
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Wowio, an LLC based in York, Pennsylvania, recently launched a free downloadable e-book service. The company's collection at launch is pretty sparse, but it does include both public domain and copyright-protected e-books. During my first use of the collection, I downloaded both The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn—if for no other reason than to relish Emmeline Grangerford's mournful Ode to Stephen Dowling Bots—and Slaughterhouse Five.
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Soon after Google announced in late 2004 the collaborative project—currently called the "Google Books Library Project," involving the five research libraries of Stanford, Michigan, Harvard, Oxford, and the New York Public Library—to scan millions of books, the five libraries became known as the "G5 Group."
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This week it's hot as a pistol across the United States, and as I sit in my office without A/C, a feeble fan drying the sweat on my face, I'm grumpy. Grumpy enough to line up a few peeves against the wall and slap them around.

Open-source software
Yes, I know, open source is a saint and you'd let your sister or brother marry it. But I hate the idea that for some librarians if a particular software is open source, hands down, it's the right choice. The right choice is the software that meets the mission. While the principles behind open source are admirable, when an open-source product doesn't meet your library's needs, your first obligation is to your users.
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Two news items that scurried across my attention in July have led me to conclude that, in this era of overlapping eras, we have entered yet another age.

The first item was an industry report that Apple shipped more than eight million iPod devices in the second quarter of 2006. That's almost three million per month or 100,000 per day, and the second quarter is not a big gift-giving quarter, unless Apple packaged all those iPods in large plastic Easter eggs. (Remember, you read it here first.)

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Earlier this week the Wall Street Journal reported that Google and an unnamed publisher were having discussions about leasing access to e-books. The general idea is that users would pay approximately ten percent of the list price for the printed book to be able to read the e-book for one week. In other words, they're talking about a pay-per-circ digital lending library.

When it comes to new (and recycled) schemes for pricing e-books, November has been a "Katy-bar-the-door" month. Amazon and Random House announced separate plans to sell e-books in less-than-complete chunks, such as chapters. If we manage to get through the remainder of the month without any more turkey announcements like this, we'll have another cause for thanksgiving. Read More »