Reposting eBook User's Bill of Rights

I am reposting this eloquent post in support of, and with permission from The Librarian in Black:

"The eBook User’s Bill of Rights is a statement of the basic freedoms that should be granted to all eBook users.

The eBook User’s Bill of Rights

Every eBook user should have the following rights:

• the right to use eBooks under guidelines that favor access over proprietary limitations
• the right to access eBooks on any technological platform, including the hardware and software the user chooses
• the right to annotate, quote passages, print, and share eBook content within the spirit of fair use and copyright
• the right of the first-sale doctrine extended to digital content, allowing the eBook owner the right to retain, archive, share, and re-sell purchased eBooks

I believe in the free market of information and ideas.

I believe that authors, writers, and publishers can flourish when their works are readily available on the widest range of media. I believe that authors, writers, and publishers can thrive when readers are given the maximum amount of freedom to access, annotate, and share with other readers, helping this content find new audiences and markets. I believe that eBook purchasers should enjoy the rights of the first-sale doctrine because eBooks are part of the greater cultural cornerstone of literacy, education, and information access.

Digital Rights Management (DRM), like a tariff, acts as a mechanism to inhibit this free exchange of ideas, literature, and information. Likewise, the current licensing arrangements mean that readers never possess ultimate control over their own personal reading material. These are not acceptable conditions for eBooks.

I am a reader. As a customer, I am entitled to be treated with respect and not as a potential criminal. As a consumer, I am entitled to make my own decisions about the eBooks that I buy or borrow.

I am concerned about the future of access to literature and information in eBooks.  I ask readers, authors, publishers, retailers, librarians, software developers, and device manufacturers to support these eBook users’ rights.

These rights are yours.  Now it is your turn to take a stand.  To help spread the word, copy this entire post, add your own comments, remix it, and distribute it to others.  Blog it, Tweet it (#ebookrights), Facebook it, email it, and post it on a telephone pole.

To the extent possible under law, the person who associated CC0 with this work has waived all copyright and related or neighboring rights to this work"

Tutorials, macros, and catalogs, oh my!

During the last two weeks I got caught up in creating online tutorials using Wink. I wanted to add audio narration to the tutorials I created and I was thinking of buying an inexpensive USB microphone to add to my gadget arsenal. I also began to use Wink to create an online manual for the procedures I use to ftp and import MARC record files into the online catalog. All good maven-y things to do.

Like the macros I've written to edit records in OCLC that take milli-seconds to run and add a handful of fields to a record, the tutorials take hours to edit, but play for a minute or less. Sometimes when I step back and think about all the lines of code in a macro, and all the time I've spent in the last ten years creating them, I wonder about costs versus the benefits. The benefits are not to be undervalued. The macros help to reduce errors and increase efficiency. One of the fields added by the macros is "patron-facing." It is a local field that contains a single subfield with a single-character value that drives the format icon and search filter/limit option. It's a pretty important bit of data. When someone searches for a popular work such as "The girl with the dragon tattoo," the pretty icons match the right records because the macros I created helped ensure the integrity of the data. If a patron limits their search to the DVD of the movie, they will be able to find it. The tutorials I am creating will help my co-workers learn how to save, edit, and use the macros. The end result makes a better experience for the patron who use the catalog to get what they want.

But it got me to thinking on this Sunday day, why do we need to add another local field to the record with an arbitrarily-assigned one-character code to drive format icons and search filters? Why can't the online catalog use the same MARC data my macros use? My macros assign the format value based on data found in various parts of the MARC record, and all I use is an OCLC-version of BASIC computer programming language to do it. As elegant as my macros are, and as much as I love, love, love creating them, tinkering with them, and getting thanks and accolades when they work for other people, in the end, it would be cleaner if the programs that display and index catalog information could extrapolate from the MARC data to drive the format icon display and search filters. More thoughts about the online catalog development in my next post. I might buy the microphone anyway, and I am still the Macro Maven.

Tutorial software

I've been comparing Wink and Jing for creating short tutorials to explain how to import, save, and change macros. Both programs are free, although TechSmith offers a Pro version of Jing as well. Jing is very easy to use. Wink has more features for customizing presentations and offers more playback options. Jing could be useful for situations when we find a bug and we need to show the developers exactly what we are doing when something goes wrong. Wink should work very well for creating and sharing the tutorials that I have in mind.

Catching Up

I'm reading Everything is Miscellaneous: the power of the new digital disorder by David Weinberger (Joho the Blog) and I just finished reading Henry Jenkins' Convergence Culture: where old and new media collide. Both books are fascinating reads.

I was tickled to find myself quoted in Stephen's Lighthouse while catching up on my Bloglines subscriptions last weekend. Stephen Abram's inspiring presentation at my library earlier this year sparked the enthusiasm felt by many of the kcls27things participants in my department and division.

I saw this item first reported by the excellent Librarian in Black a few days ago.

PLCMC has followed up their trend-setting Library 2.0 program with:

Learning 2.1: Explore...Discover...Play.

In the first Library 2.1 lesson I learned about a nifty file conversion utility called Zamzar. I used it to convert a .wma sound file I created to an .mp3 file in less than a minute.

I've fallen behind on my posting because I am learning how to set up wikis on pbwiki in my spare time. My goal is to eliminate up to half the paper clutter that surrounds my desk and go digital and miscellaneous!

So long, farewell?

I can't believe we've already come to the end of our kcls27things learning experience. Participating in this program and being an advocate was the most satisfying experience in my professional career. If I am given the opportunity to do something like this in the future, I will leap at the chance. I would like to be part of whatever plans there are to implement Library 2.0 ideas and programs at KCLS in the future. This experience has left me feeling revitalized and excited about my career again! I intend to explore the virtual environment that is Second Life; create APIs and mashups; and use tools like wikis, Zoho, and Google Documents to collaborate with co-workers and friends, and post about my experiences in my blog.

Surprises: I never expected that I would have much use for Flickr until I started using it. I was so inspired that I bought a digital camera and found I way to use Flickr in my job. After a frustrating and fruitless experience trying to download podcasts with iTunes, I thought I wouldn't enjoy listening to podcasts. Then I fed them to Bloglines and everything changed!

This program had a remarkable effect on people in my department and division. Participants appear to be more engaged in their work. They have greater confidence, connect more with co-workers, and have a sparkle about them. Our collective energy, excitement, and laughter was infectious as new discoveries were made and shared with others. I hope our patrons will feel that way when they are invited to participate in Library 2.0 programs and services in the future.

2.0 libraries that we've seen along the way invite patrons to:

• imagine
• create
• connect
• collaborate
• explore

If Web 2.0 and beyond is the Internet made personal, then Library 2.0+ is the library made personal.

Imagine a patron entering a branch through a physical or virtual portal and receiving a warm greeting and an array of user-inspired choices with the message:



Welcome to Your Library. What would You like to do today?

Game On!

Had a fantastic time trying out Dance Dance Revolution, Guitar Hero, and Wii Bowling today. Many thanks to Barbara and Debbie for their encouragement. It's easy to see why these games are so popular and why they belong in libraries. Need more convincing? Read the Gaming issue of our electronic serial Library Technical Reports Sept/Oct 2006. Vol. 42, issue 5 in Proquest or other full-text online databases.

Assignment #22

I explored Webware and found a search engine called YoName which lets you search for people in FaceBook, MySpace, LinkedIn and a couple of other social networking sites. I found myself and a couple of friends in MySpace and FaceBook and a college friend on LinkedIn. LinkedIn is a social networking site for adult professionals. Exploring Google Labs earlier in the week, I found a tool called Google Notebook. I think it will be very useful. I downloaded the browser extension so that I can keep the Notebook open while I search Web sites and work on my blog. I do most of my kcls27things assignments and work on my blog at home so I think it is very cool to keep my notes on the Web instead of on two computers.

The dog ate my homework

... and other excuses could be a thing of the past with Web-based office tools that allow users to create and save their work online. I hope our patrons are already using Google Documents and Spreadsheets or Zoho because these services are really user-friendly and they are good for the environment (less printing, no need for floppy disks). I plan to use these tools for collaborating on documents with other people in my department.

Google Mars was neat and I pitted certain authors against J.K. Rowling in Google Trends. Rowling garnered a healthy amount of interest compared to other authors in my research set.

I stumbled upon a road trip planning tool that seems like a rather nifty alternative for getting somewhere: http://trippish.com/

Not just an exercise

I put Flickr to good use yesterday when I uploaded some photos and shared them with my work team. Baker & Taylor took photos of books that are being processed and housed off-site for Snoqualmie's opening day collection. I retrieved the photos from their ftp site, posted them on Flickr and sent a guest pass to members of the ODC team and other interested librarians. Here's one that caught my eye:

Are you being served?

After reading all five articles for this week’s lesson, I was not sure what I thought of them. I needed some mulling time. It seems to me that college and university librarians are the main audience for these articles and for the kinds of services they advocate. There’s value for public libraries as well but many of the Web 2.0 services do seem to be targeted at one particular demographic: college-age students. Events in Virginia earlier this week seem to bear this out. News reports repeatedly mentioned some of the ways college students are reaching out to each other during this tragedy: Facebook, blogs, IM, and Second Life. University and college libraries should be meeting their students where they are and serving their target demographic.
Public libraries serve a much wider range of patrons and some of them may be interested in Web 2.0 services and others may not. I’d love to see our library embrace Web 2.0 ideas and incorporate them into a thoughtful, well-rounded and diverse service plan that meet the needs of all our patrons.

Rollyo Ho Me Hearties! Finding Buried Treasure with Custom Search Engines

I searched for rss in the KCLS & Neighbors Rollyo and Google Co-op custom search engines and the results could not have been more different. Try it yourself by selecting "KCLS & Neighbors" and typing "rss" in My Rollyo search box on my blog.

In Rollyo, Tacoma Public Library's RSS feed service dominated the search results while KCLS was absent from the results list.

In Google Custom Search Engine, the same search produced hits for KCLS, but none for Tacoma Public Library's RSS feed service.

Then I searched "interlibrary loan" and was happy to see the KCLS Interlibrary Loan Request Form at the top of the results list in Google Custom Search. However, SPL topped the result list in Rollyo. KCLS was the fourth result down.

If there were time, it would be interesting to study how the "search robots" work in both of these services. How do they harvest or tag website content for retrieval? What criteria do they use for sorting results?

What I like about this kind of service, at least in theory, is the ability to quickly extract pertinent data from websites that contain a lot of information, some of it buried, like treasure. That brings me to my own experiment with creating custom search engines.

I'm not certain that my Rollyo custom search engine for "Stargate Atlantis TV" is more helpful than doing a regular Google search but I found creating a search roll to be a remarkably satisfying kcls27things exercise.

What's on Your iPod?

Veni, vidi, wiki

I came, I saw, I wiki. Admittedly, a terrible corruption of Veni, vidi, vici but do follow the link to the Wikipedia article. It's a hoot. I've been plagued by the flu and an eye infection this week so I'm blogging with one eye and a limited amount of oxygen reaching my brain.

I was very impressed with the look of SJPLC's Subject Guide wikis and it should be apparent to everyone by now how much I depend on Wikipedia to supplement my blog posts. I can see how wikis might be useful for compiling procedures for internal use, collaborating and sharing information with work groups across the library system, and as pathfinders for public use.

Something like SJPLC's Harry Potter subject guide could be created as part of a virtual branch display. Not only would it showcase our our collection but it could also highlight services that patrons may not be aware of: electronic reference resources, online serials, staff (or patron)-created reading lists, or links to special programs or events involving the release of the last book in the series.
Why not create a (moderated) Harry Potter/Deathly Hallows-themed blog and invite young readers to share their thoughts about upcoming release of the new book and provide links to and from a Harry Potter-themed wiki?
Why not plan a Deathly Hallows library event, publicize it on the wiki and the blog, take (child-safe) photos at the event, and then post them on the wiki and the blog?

There are many service possibilities in mashing together the amazing resources we already have with the applications we are learning in KCLS27things training.

Spoiler alert? Check out the book cover of the U.K. edition of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. It's very interesting ...

I have a crush on LibraryThing

LibraryThing is my favorite kcls27things "killer app" and probably the most difficult for me to write about because there is so much I want to say. I cataloged nearly every book in my home on LibraryThing. I think I'm up to 135 now. It's probably a good thing that they will start charging a fee after 200.

When I first signed up a couple of months ago, I thought I would catalog a couple of favorite books and call it good. I catalog books for a living so it would be a little crazy to catalog them as a hobby. Then I took the tour and read the comments in the Buzz section where I learned that I have the coolest job on the planet. Ignoring warnings of the addictive nature of cataloging books on LibraryThing, I cataloged a handful of titles which turned into everything on my book shelves. Over the next couple of days I unpacked boxes of old books so that I could put them up on LibraryThing. I happily reconnected with my collection of children's books and an old copy of Cricket illustrated by Trina Schart Hyman.

One of the coolest things about LibraryThing is the connection you can make with other people. While reading anglophile's booklist I discovered that we both loved horse stories by Marguerite Henry. (Alas, I couldn't find mine among my boxes). For a moment I was transported back to the enjoyment of receiving these books as birthday and Christmas presents and it enriched a personal connection with a friend (in real life).

LibraryThing offers the kind of services that I would very much like to see in our online catalogs: ratings, book reviews, and user-assigned tags. The catalog could become a virtual branch that fosters community, connection and conversation between users and the library.

WTF: 15 minutes of fame on Technorati

I wrote briefly about Technorati a few blog posts ago. I registered and claimed my blog and discovered that I already had a small community of KCLS bloggers who linked to my blog! (Hello! aseaberg, acrossanddown, and Truckin' Beagles!)

Technorati really amps up social networking opportunities. What struck me while searching for blog posts that mention kcls27things in Technorati is how many of us are forming communities of linked blogs. We even create community with people we've never met in "real" life.

As I also learned while tooling around in Technorati, kcls27things is a hot topic. The number of posts about 27things by KCLS bloggers reached a critical mass, inspiring the service to ask someone to write a Where's the Fire? (WTF) blurb explaining kcls27things sudden popularity. "WTFs are short blurbs that explain the buzz around people, things, or events—why the hot topics are so hot—and you can vote the best ones to the top." kcls27things made the Top 10 Searches today as you can see below.

Tagging is del.icio.us, Part 2

my del.icio.us tags-d032407
Originally uploaded by bright_eyed_girl.

This is a picture of my tag roll from del.icio.us, presented as a word cloud. Every tag I assigned to a website is displayed here. The tags I assigned most often are displayed with large fonts while the least used tags are displayed with small fonts.
One of my most frequently used tags is a bookmark I created for Featured websites. I used the link roll tool in del.icio.us to add the links to these sites in my kcls27things training blog. The links in the sidebar are updated as I add or remove this bookmark from sites that I tag in del.icio.us.

I am fascinated by tag clouds. I believe they reveal information about users themselves: their interests, preferences, and what informs their view of the world.

I would like to see user tagging in library catalogs, not to replace subject searching by any means, but as a way of opening up new channels of communication, or conversations, between libraries and users. I think this is a very exciting time to be a librarian!

Tagging is del.icio.us! Part 1

I enjoyed finding new tools for customizing del.icio.us that are bookmarked in the kcls27things account. I've been adding Library 2.0 bookmarks to my del.icio.us for a couple of months. I imagine this tool could be useful for building collections of good websites and sharing them system-wide.

One of the features I like best is that I can use del.icio.us to update information on my blog. I have two del.icio.us link rolls that display in the sidebar. When I add certain tags to websites, their links automatically show up on my blog. When I am tired of a link, I can delete it from del.icio.us or remove the tag so that it doesn't show up on my blog anymore. See the Help pages for more information and tools.

Service Alert!
The LibraryThing site announced that they are down this morning. Some elements in the sidebar will not display correctly.

A Clean, Well-Lighted Place

When I signed up for a MySpace account, I was a bit dismayed because it reminded me of a depressingly dingy, low-rent shopping mall. Then I visited MySpace pages created by the Public Library of Charlotte and Mecklenberg County and Steele Creek Library and I became a believer. Their spaces are nothing like the drab default profile pages that MySpace provides when you first sign up. Looking at these sites, I can see the value of building a library presence in MySpace and other virtual environments. They are engaging, informative, and offer teens a safe place to learn and play.

And build you must. MySpace is a do-it-yourself project. Knowledge of Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) really comes in handy. (Good thing I've been taking lessons at W3Schools at night). I suspect the boring profile defaults were designed to provoke users into changing them as quickly as possible!

I've been tinkering with my Profile on MySpace thanks to a gem of book I checked out from KCLS: MySpace Visual Quick Tips. I still have a lot of work to do but I am having fun learning!

Thanks, I'll stick with Bloglines

I tried Feedster. I wanted to like it because it had a shiny appearance. Searching was frustrating because I found too many irrelevant hits. I can't imagine stumbling serendipitously across something better than the sites that I already subscribe to. I preferred starting with some recommended blogs and working my out from there. Find a blog you like, see what's on the blogroll and follow the links.

Technorati on the other hand, wow. It's pretty neat. I signed up (another set passwords to remember), claimed my blog, and exported a nifty search tool to put into my blog. More exploration will follow, I'm sure.

I like Bloglines because I'm used to it. It's easy and I appreciate not being given a lethal dose of advertising every time I visit.