Police backed on photo ban of APEC fence, Sydney Morning Herald, 3 September 2007
Tourists forced to delete fence photos, The Australian, 2 September 2007
flickr search on the APEC fence
Fortress Sydney, Digital Photo Gallery of Ted Szukalski
John Howard Readies Fortress Sydney, Stuff-Em-Up the hill backwards
© 2007 Bruce Phelan
Dysfunctional information behaviors and dealing with the millenials:
Dave Pollard at How to Save the World had a post on dysfunctional information behaviors. It includes a large list of dysfunctional behaviors ...(Via The Gypsy Librarian.)
Thanks Angel for drawing this to my attention. I'm posting it here too for future reference too. I wonder if blogs have a role in curing some of this dysfunction?
The Lethal Librarian wrote this post back in March referring to the Occupational Outlook for Librarians written by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. I missed it at the time, but because it's relevant to the librarian shortage debate, I've decided to repost some of it.
It’s also interesting to note the language they [U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics] use - they say in the March 2005 version of the page, “However, job opportunities are expected to be very good because a large number of librarians are expected to retire in the coming decade, creating many job openings.” In the version I saw today, it says “More than 3 in 5 librarians are aged 45 or older and will become eligible for retirement in the next 10 years, which will result in many job openings.” The difference is between “eligible to retire” versus “expected to retire” speaks to me, despite their identical claims about many job openings.
I understand the role of SMS messages in fanning the flames of the riot and reprisals in Sydney, but I wonder, isn't this going too far?
Jane, from Coogee, was surprised to find three police on her bus asking to inspect mobile phones. Each took a phone at random and scrolled through messages for five or ten minutes. Everyone obeyed. "The people were perfectly friendly about it," she said. "I thought it was a bit weird and a breach of privacy. But I didn't say anything. Nobody did."
[Australians are an obedient people - but for how long?, Sydney Morning Herald, 19 December 2005]
I find this sort of thing fascinating. It's also nice to see librarians being praised in unlikely places.
Unexpected places to encounter Warcraft geekery: "I was doing some research in the Boston Public Library about management ethics, which at first doesn't sound like it's related to World of Warcraft. I found this book that looked interesting about how librarians were expected to relate to those 'scary' questions from people who want geek-related reading, such as sci-fi or fantasy. In the book was a 'quiz' that was meant to prove to the unsuspecting librarians that they knew more about geek-related subjects than they thought.
One of the questions was,
Harry Potter is a student at...
a. Harvard University (where he is studying for an MBA)
b. Hogwart's [sic] School of Witchcraft and Wizardry (where he is studying to be a wizard)
c. The Jedi Academy (where he is studying under Luke Skywalker)
d. Lordaeron University (where he is studying warcraft)
The random Warcraft reference just about killed me in the middle of the BPL. I may be the only person since the original author to have read that book and gotten that reference. Kudos to the author of 'Science Fiction and Fantasy Reader's Advisory' for being a Warcraft geek!"
I don't usually repost other blog's posts verbatim, but it seemed appropriate for this one. It was nice to try a different venue, play in the trivia night (yeah, we should have won, but our 2nd place was pretty respectable for a first effort, and gives us something to look forward to for next time) and meet some more Sydney bloggers.
You know those people last night? How you politely asked the name of their blog and promptly forgot it? Fear not.
Disambiguation Blog -- Glen
Papertrap -- Mark
Spleenie's Rant -- Spleenie
James O'Brien -- James
Exploded Library -- Morgan
The Other Andrew -- Andrew [who has just posted pics of this on his blog]
For Battle! -- harry, Coz (Cozalcotal), Rob (Anti Ob), Amanda
Flop Eared Mule -- Amanda(Via Sydney Blog Meetup.)
Of course, it would be some consolation if the Kazaa decision might speed things along with the Australian iTunes Music Store, but I think that is extremely wishful thinking.
Apple Australia yesterday refused to comment on a launch date for its iTunes music store, which would allow the legion of Australians who own iPods to legally purchase songs, rather than rip, burn and swap.
[Kristy Needham, Music industry banks on opening of online store, Sydney Morning Herald (7 September 2005)]
Gormangate and Croningate: Prominent individuals in the library academia and professional associations write columns criticizing bloggers and are themselves flooded with criticism. A few responses were supportive, some were nuanced responses, others expressed strong disagreement on the issues (how I view my own responses). There was also a large number of mostly anonymous personal attacks.
Los Alamos Bloggers: An anonymous employee-run blog airs employees’ frustration about the management of the Los Alamos National Laboratory. In what would have been an organization’s nightmare, much dirty laundry was aired which was noticed in Washington DC and may have precipitated the departure of its unpopular director.
The Dog Shit Girl: A young Korean woman flouts manners and norms by refusing to clean up after her dog on a train. She is photographed, the photo is uploaded onto the internet, where she is identified and humiliated. She thought that she had been an anonymous face in the crowd, but once her identity had been discovered she was vulnerable to what was arguably disproportionate punishment at the hands of a cyber posse. There's one thing about this incident which I'd really like to know - were most of the people involved in bringing gae-ttong-nyue to justice, were they using their own names, pseudonyms or were they anonymous?
An anonymous author (“Ivan Tribble is the pseudonym of a humanities professor at a small liberal-arts college in the Midwest.”) writes an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education, stating that having a named blog is often viewed as a negative by university search panels. “The content of the blog may be less worrisome than the fact of the blog itself. Several committee members expressed concern that a blogger who joined our staff might air departmental dirty laundry (real or imagined) on the cyber clothesline for the world to see. Past good behavior is no guarantee against future lapses of professional decorum.”
This article - Heather Smith, Don't count out law librarians, American Lawyer (July 14, 2005) - provides some good examples of librarians meeting the challenges (and opportunities) presented by our current times. Here's one brief quote:
Schnader Harrison partner Donaldson says she's heard no negative feedback from clients when presenting them with bills for librarians' work. "They've been pleased with what [librarians have] been able to ferret out," she says. And since LexisNexis and Westlaw searches are billed as separate line items, cost-conscious clients have begun demanding that lawyers improve their efficiency by using librarians who are more skilled searchers.
Thanks to Library Stuff for the link.
I've tried to stay out of some of the debates which librarians have been having about Wikipedia. But this post by Karen G. Schneider is an excellent statement about why even tech-savvy librarians have concerns about Wikipedia. I don't share all of Karen's opinions about Wikipedia, but after feeling somewhat on the defensive about the value of blogging for the past week or so, it is nice to be able to point to some good posts and say, "this is why blogging is relevant and deserves its place amongst the other communications media."
What really caught my attention was that Karen's discussion also touched on the librarians as gatekeepers issue. This has also been in the back of my mind lately. I wanted to explore this issue in my previous post, but decided that this would be opening a huge can of worms which would distract attention from the main point of that post.
I don't feel up to studying this issue (or the Wikipedia issue) more deeply tonight. I just wanted to make a note of Karen's contribution for when/if I do return to this in the future.
I first started blogging by linking to interesting things which I'd read. I usually just linked, and provided very little commentary of my own. There's nothing wrong with this sort of blogging, especially you have a gift for drawing together very eclectic sources (which I didn't) and you aren't too opinionated (and I realize that I am too opinionated). For a while I preserved this metablogging style on my Meta Mondays, when I mainly provided just links with minimal commentary.
For some strange reason I feel like doing one of these tonight.
Michelle Goldberg, Salon, In theology they trust
This makes me feel relieved to be an Australian, but even so, this is scary stuff.
If you're too lazy to get the Salon day pass, at least read this Washington Post article which the above one references. Will it take a judge to be killed via a US religious right fatwa for people to wake up to what's going on here?
On to something completely different, Ernie muses about the sometimes awkward and disconcerting phemonemon of meeting people who know so much about him because of his blogging, and he knows nothing about them. Talk about being at a disadvantage...
I'm still exhausted from my last job search, and don't even want to think about job interviewing for the time being, but Meredith has some very interesting advice for job interviewers. Some of this information would also be helpful to interviewees, to help understand the process.
In my last post about job-seeking methods, I wrote that is possible to conduct a successful job search without relying on networking. I want to make it clear that although I've really had much luck with networking myself, that doesn't mean that it doesn't work. As a counter-point, I'm posting this example of how networking can work. I like it because the example is low-key and realistic, but still successful. [thanks to Fran M for posting this on the aliaNEWGRAD list]
Here's a very interesting post in How to Save the World about the growth in blog creation and the even larger growth in blog readership. I'm pasting the most interesting snippets, but encourage people to read the whole thing.
These surveys also indicate that the average blog reader stays only 90 seconds per page, and only 40 seconds per page on 'A-list' blogs.
...
What this means is that if blog readership continues to soar (doubling every 18 months) and newspaper readership continues to stagnate, in three years the average B-list blogger will be getting significantly more reader attention than the average unsyndicated US newspaper article or column, and the average A-list blogger will be getting almost as much reader attention as the average US daily paper.
According to the definitions on this post, I'm a happy C-List blogger so things won't be quite so exciting for me. For me, it's just about doing my own thing, and if other people get something out of it, great, and if not, well it doesn't matter. It's fine for me to think this now, but would things change if I were getting a hundred thousand hits a day? Would I feel any additional sense of responsibility if I were in this position, and would that take the fun out of it? Would the blog totally consume my real life? Of course, I don't need to worry about these things happening to me, but if there's any truth to this post, this sort of thing will happen to others.
I've been very busy in the past few days preparing for my move to Sydney. I leave tomorrow, taking the boat from Devonport to Sydney. I've been looking for apartments at www.flatmates.com.au, a great free Australian site. I'm not going to have much time for this blog in the next couple of weeks, so please excuse me if I'm slow in responding to comments or emails.
In the meantime, I thought that I'd post a link to Lies I learned in library school. I'm sure a lot of other blogs have linked to it (I've been behind in my blog reading lately), but I found it humourous (in that cynical kind of way) and fairly accurate.
On the weekend, the New York Times published this interesting article, Spaces for Social Study. Unfortunately, the NYT requires registration to read and then after 7 days, the article will be archived and can only be read for a fee. So read it now, before that happens.
It's about the renovation of the Teachers College library at Columbia University. Here are a few snippets.
"Gone is the notion that it is solely a physical repository for information and a place of quiet individual study where librarians patrol the stacks, shushing errant blabbermouths. Instead, the campus library has become an intellectual gathering place."
...
'We asked people on campus, 'What would make you go to the library,' given that you can get a lot of things you want to work with in your dorm room,'' Mr. Natriello [the library's interim director] says. ''What folks said was that coming to the library was much more of a social academic experience.''
There is a very interesting article in Salon.com about a controversy about the usage of RFID (Radio Frequency IDentification) tags in libraries. I'm not going to write too much about the article because I want to encourage people to to get the free day pass to my favourite news source, or even better, subscribe to it.
It is very strange to see some librarians on the opposite side of a privacy debate with the EFF, the Privacy Rights Clearinghouse and the ACLU. I had never heard about RFID in libraries before reading this article. I am as yet undecided about the issue. As a former systems librarian who also did a lot of work in circulation, I can understand just how convenient RFID tags could be. I can also identify with the argument that RFID tags will help protect patron's privacy by making self-check out more effective. On the other hand, it could be very damaging for our profession if there is any question or doubt about our commitment to patron privacy. The idea that we are being slightly hyprocritical would definitely play into the hands of John Ashcroft and supporters of how the USAPATRIOT Act affects libraries.
I had a great time on Maria Island (some photos will be posted soon), but I caught a very nasty gastric flu just after I got back. I won't go into the details :P Needless to say, it's been very light blogging for me this week.
The following two articles caught my eye:
Rachel Singer Gordon, The Men Among Us, Library Journal (June 15, 2004)
... Male NextGens buck librarian stereotypes by their very presence—both as male librarians and as energetic (and occasionally tattooed) younger professionals ... Unsurprisingly, NextGen men note that their workplace management still appears male-dominated and that men's premanagement salaries tend to track a bit higher. This may be owing to the encouragement men receive.
Michael Farrelly, They Lied to Us in Library School, Bookslut Library Rakehell (June 2004)
... I have searched lisjobs.com so many times that I have screen burn from the site. I have tried using and abusing friends and family and contacts who are friends of the family ... The sin of being over-educated, young, and not as experienced and in some cases I think, being a male. ... Men who work with kids are suspect and if you want to work with teenagers you might as well just register with the cops right now.
This is a topic I can't help but take an interest in. Typically, I have some contradictory thoughts about it. Sometimes, men can be at a disadvantage in this female-dominated profession. Sometimes male librarians have better opportunities and are likely to have more recognition. Either one, both, or none of these things can happen.
Right now, you can view this interesting article here. It has also been posted in the blog sociology LJ community (which is a very interesting place in its own right).
I love this quote from Barbara Quint: "Here he is working all night on something read by five second cousins and a dog, and I'm willing to pay him."
I was going to write about the recent Salon article about Groklaw and open source legal research on the SCO case, but Copyfight's Jason Schultz has already written about it, so I'm just going to link to that and post a brief excerpt from the Salon article.
[Pamela] Jones [of Groklaw] has been praised by just about everyone in the open-source world for her efforts to undermine SCO. Linus Torvalds, the creator of Linux, has said that Groklaw shows "how the open-source ideals end up working in the legal arena, too, and I think that has been very useful and made a few people sit up and notice." Bruce Perens calls Jones "paralegal to the world." Clay Shirky, the influential tech pundit, points out that "Groklaw may also be affecting the case in the courts, by helping IBM with a distributed discovery effort that they, IBM, could never accomplish on their own, no matter how many lawyers they throw at it." [hypertext from original not included]
From "Call me e-mail: the novel unfolds digitally", Adam Baer, New York Times (April 15, 2004)
"My younger employees say they don't have time to read books and instead focus on e-mail and Web writing," he [Eric Brown, creator of DEN] said. "There's this huge group of readers in our office - a communications company! - and they're reading snips and pieces.
...
A small community of so-called hypertext writers, many of them affiliated with academia, have been publishing more experimental work in online journals like The Iowa Review Web (www.uiowa.edu/~iareview) and BeeHive (beehive.temporalimage.com) for more than a decade. Such writing includes texts with animation and works created by using rules and random processes to generate something different for each reader.
...
What will take electronic literature to the next level, Mr. Wardrip-Fruin suggested, are multimedia projects involving so many inventive procedures that they cannot be reproduced or mimicked on paper. "Think of the textual analogue to video games," he said. "You can't really capture the way a video game works by printing it out; that's what will have to happen with electronic literature for it to become popular."
P.S. Now that the New York Times is making it very difficult to view older articles for free, I will be a lot more sparing in my links to them, and will only provide them with some excerpt.
I don't really have anything to add to this - I'm speechless.
There is something very wrong with the copyright industry when we have this discussion [about English postal workers humming/whistling tunes] as part of the question of what needs licensing. Displacement of Concepts has an analysis of this post by Cory Doctorow who saw this article from last February ("We Can Work It Out" - Kim Howells Invites Musicians To Work With Government On Delivery Of The Licensing Bill), which Cory describes as: A new business-licensing scheme in the UK will allow... [bIPlog]
From the Free Expression Policy Project, an updated version of Marjorie Heins's policy report, "'The Progress of Science and Useful Arts': Why Copyright Today Threatens Intellectual Freedom." It's worth a read. Also available in PDF format. [commons-blog]
One quote from the cited source: "Like copyright term extension, the DMCA has been defended as necessary to harmonize U.S. with international law. Two treaties crafted by the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) oblige member countries to "provide adequate legal protection and effective legal remedies" against circumvention of electronic locks on copyrighted works. ... But the head of the Patent and Trademark Office acknowledged that the treaties do not require the DMCA's "device-oriented" approach – as opposed to the more traditional "conduct-oriented" approach that targets copyright infringers and not the researchers who create new technologies."
This is a very helpful summary about the various issues associated with these two oppressive laws - and a guide to how librarians might respond to them.
...
I couldn't resist posting this site with librarian-related t-shirts. I have a fewfavorites, but they are all worth buying. (link first seen from Spinster Librarian, but probably all over the library blogosphere by now (I'm a bit slow in catching up).
[Library Stuff]
Take a look at Shades of Gray (not about the recently recalled Governor of California) and the follow-up.
He mentions O'Reilly's appearance on Fresh Air, Dave Winer's "funky RSS" comments, and takes the media to task for giving the Bushies a free ride over the most outrageous claims - and wonders why this might be. He uses the RIAA as an example of using the media to popularize outrageous claims.
Cheshyre reports in the LiveJournal Library Lover's community that John Ashcroft stated that "The federal government will disclose how many times the FBI has sought records from libraries and businesses under the Patriot Act anti-terrorism law."
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