Blogging Section of SLA-IT

Internet Archive & the FBI

I wrote about the Internet Archive back in February after returning from the Code4Lib conference.  Since then I have been checking out the site to see all of the awesome information it had available.  Yesterday I found out that the FBI was targeting the Internet Archive for information about one or more of its visitors. 

This from LISNews:

On November 26, 2007, the FBI served a National Security Letter (.pdf) on the Internet Archive's founder Brewster Kahle, asking for records about one of the library's registered users, asking for the user's name, address and activity on the site.

Like many libraries, the Internet Archive was unable to provide the information requested because it keeps all browsing information anonymous.

This from DownloadSquad:

Seeing that the Internet Archive archives public information, that anonymous browsing is allowed, and all that's required to sign up for an account is an email address, username and password (Kahle says IP addresses aren't logged) it doesn't seem as though the FBI will really find much helpful information. They will find a whole lot of Grateful Dead recordings, if that's any consolation.

The original report from Wired can be found here.

This just brings home the issues of privacy we're facing in the library and digital world.  If we continue to digitize our content - new laws are bound to pop up trying to make libraries keep more personal information ... this is just the beginning.

Reality 2.0: Transforming Ourselves & Our Association

Last night I got to hear Stephen Abram talk about the future of SLA & librarianship.  First (and most important) I have uploaded my pictures to Flickr.

Stephen started with a mini rant (a good rant) about the fact that there is no proof that the book is at risk.  Reading stats are going up and book sales are going up.  That said, do we hear that librarians are at risk? Ever hear this one, “Everything’s on the Internet.”  The fact is that librarians are at risk even if books aren’t.  In short, there are some serious issues we have to get stronger about talking about. 

Stephen mentioned that we’re about to experience some huge changes.  If you think about it, we haven’t had any major changes in a long while.  Our grandparents had a bunch of huge changes all hit them at once (phones, tv, 2 world wars, etc) and it’s time for that to happen again.  North America is way behind the rest of the world when it comes to technology.  In Europe, people are using their phones for everything.  They have free TV delivered through their phone and text messages for everything.  I’m not a fan of this movement - maybe it’s just because of the costs associated with it here - but - I just want a phone - I don’t need it to double as a TV.

When it comes to digitization, China is only 5 years from digitizing everything written in Chinese.  It’s not going to be long before everything is available in digital format.  We’re going to need the tools to take advantage of this content.

So, what does this have to do with SLA?  Everything! The world is changing and librarians have to change with it and SLA wants to help librarians make that change as smooth as possible.  One interesting point that Stephen brought up was the fact that when someone leaves an organization one of the first things they do is clear off their computer - bookmarks and all.  This means that all the great resources that long time librarians have collected are lost.  We have to start storing our data in collaborative spaces so that we can all benefit from each other’s knowledge. I love this! And this is why I took so much pride in working on improving the Jenkins Law Library research links (a pre-del.icio.us project) - I wanted to make sure we were sharing our resources with any one who might need them.

Stephen asks that instead of sharing the myth amongst ourselves that we’re collaborative, why not be collaborative?  I love this!  The fact is that the nature of associations is changing - something I wrote about in library school.  The main selling point for associations used to be networking - but now with tools like Ning, Facebook and LinkedIn - why do I need an association to find fellow peers?  With these tools threatening library associations as we know them, what can SLA do to continue to be important for librarians?  The answer is learning and innovation. 

One way that SLA is setting itself apart (in my opinion) is their Click-U.  Educational events for SLA members.  What I didn’t know is that they have a regular presentation by Gary Price where he shares the newest tools he’s found for researching and they have a monthly free course available.  Being a recently graduated student, I’m a bit too poor to pay for too many classes - so I love to find things for cheap or free!

SLA also offers members access to over 1000 e-books on leadership and management topics (apparently we were told about this - but I missed it somehow - after writing this I’m heading to the SLA site to check out my member profile).  They also offer what they call ExecuBooks Summaries - they are 4 page summaries of new releases.

The thing I’m most excited about hasn’t been released yet, but I’m keeping my eyes open for it, the Innovation Labs.  This area of the SLA site will be a testing bed for members to try out all kinds of free and proprietary software without having to install it or pay for it.  Some of the big names will include Acrobat, Dreamweaver, Blogger, Survey Monkey and Confluence.  It’s basically a place for everyone to play!!  This area of the site will also have over 25000 software training videos from atomic learning.  How great is that???

While this isn’t everything that Stephen talked about, these were the bits that I was able to write down as he sped through his awesome talk.  He certainly made me pay even more attention to what the association is doing for us - I hope he did the same for some of the rest of you.

Technorati Tags: njsla, sla

Fax via the web

When I started working at home I realized how inconvenient it was to not have a fax machine (we don't have a land line - but our printer can fax...).  I spent ages searching for a fax tool that would let me do everything with PDFs online.  Today I find a link to Drop.io fax on Lifehacker.

Drop.io itself is a pretty neat service:

Drop.io enables you to create simple private exchange points called "drops."

The service has no email signup and no "accounts." Each drop is private, and only as accessible as you choose to deliberately make it. Create multiple drops, add any type of media, and share or subscribe as you want. To make a drop just click the big red button that says 'drop it'

Adding fax, just makes it that much cooler!

You can now fax documents directly into and directly out of your drop, for free.

No more fax machines, or expensive online fax services. Faxing just shouldn’t be that hard - and it should be free. With drop.io it is both easy and free.

New LISNews Site

New from Blake Carver the man behind LISNews & LISHost:

I started a new site, LISWire - The Librarian's News Wire (http://liswire.com), and I'm doing my best to spread the word. You can probably guess what the site is all about from the name, but there's also 2 mailing lists, and a bunch of RSS feeds. Robin Blum and I are running the show and are looking for press releases and other news items of interest to librarians to get things going. You can sign up for an account and submit things you'd like to announce to the library world. I'll be cross posting most announcements to LISNews for a little while until we see how much traffic we get at LISWire.

I wonder if this means LISNews won't have press releases anymore - or if this is going to be in addition to that?  Either way - I'm subscribed - are you?