America's Next Top Information Professional

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Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community has been on my bedstand for about two years now. I’m reading it so slowly in part because it’s my bedtime book, but also because I’m enjoying it so much. His exploration of the decline in social capital is well-researched, clearly explained, and extremely genial.

I’m currently meandering through a chapter called “Against the tide? Small groups, social movements, and the net.” (As a disclaimer, the book was published in 2000, so all the references to AOL must be taken within their temporal context.) I haven’t really gotten deep into his examination of online communities, but the section on telecommunications starts with some telling anecdotes about the telephone and its effect on social life in America. Simply put, the propagators of the telephone failed to recognize some of the medium’s affordances. Putnam notes, for example, that phone companies were so certain that their main customers would be businesses that they discouraged using the telephone to socialize. Alexander Graham Bell himself thought the phone would be used much like the radio eventually was, to bring music into homes. No one imagined that the telephone would be a tool for plain old chatting and socialization. And yet, today it is an integral part of how families, friends, and acquaintances keep in touch. Putnam also points out that folks don’t generally meet new people on the phone, which is in marked contrast to online communications. I’ll post again as I keep reading.

(Incidentally, I don’t have a phone. Not a smart phone or a cell phone or even a landline. It wasn’t intentional, it just sort of happened. Generally I find it freeing, although there are disappointingly few payphones in service these days.)

In honor of Banned Books Week.

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This week in our course one of our tasks is to examine the 2.0 suffix, and to think about the potential benefits and risks of applying it to libraries, archives, museums, or other heritage institutions.

One of the problems I have with the 2.0ization of everything is its roots in capitalism and consumption. In Michael Casey’s and Laura Savastinuk’s guide to Library 2.0, they actually begin with Business 2.0, and use a tonne of business examples (whether Amazon or eBay) throughout the book. Something like the long tail is definitely a valuable concept for librarians and archivists to understand, but it is rooted in supply and demand. I read Casey and Savastinuk’s book a while back while writing a paper for ARST 540, and re-reading a chapter this week makes me think I need to revisit the rest of the book. I found they never really gave a satisfying statement of how Library 2.0 differed from these money-making 2.0s. I hope this doesn’t sound naive — I don’t mean that libraries cannot participate in the economy, it just unsettles me when we don’t examine our role in it.

Just to give a non-library example: I had the pleasure of hearing Patricia Williams speak a few years back, and she mentioned that her 13-year-old son had just created a Myspace page. Once she discovered this, she promptly dismantled it, both because he was a minor and her permission had not been sought and on top of the risk for data-mining. But she also expressed concern for identity formation on corporate sites like this. She puzzled over all of those quizzes: when you pick what kind of gangsta or which Golden Girl you are from a quiz provided on a website with financial interest in your demographics…is that really freely forming identity? Just the fact that it was called “Myspace” suggests the trap of consumer culture: you are given certain superficial choices (purple background or red?), rather than being encouraged to make significant choices.

This is an oversimplification, and Myspace is hardly an exemplary forum of participatory culture, but these kinds of concerns need to be addressed, especially when public institutions start getting in on the fun.

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I’d like to talk about Twitter and privacy. I have a good friend in the archival world who has refused to join facebook or most other social networking tools because of the amount of personal information they require to sign up. Most of these companies are not run in Canada, and can’t be counted on to be held to fine Canadian standards regarding the protection of personal information in electronic formats. But she joined Twitter, because all it requires is an email address. Simple, clean, and pretty not sketchy.

The other privacy concern I have with Twitter is more existential. I recently started a second account for my LIBR 559M course through UBC. See, I’ve been tweeting for months now, in a protected account, and I just wanted to keep those worlds separate. Not because I dish about my scandalous secret life, just because…my normal tweets are boring, except to my close friends. I like being able to crow about the sweet bargain I got at Value Village, but I feel a little weird informing all my classmates, professors, and whoever else about that.

In our class discussion board, we’ve been discussing this article by Erika Pearson about performance and identity in social networks. Sometimes the technology doesn’t permit the nuanced performances we need. Twitter’s simplicity means that you can’t really tailor your message or differentiate your audience. With email, I could, say send a forward only to select people in my address book. Twitter doesn’t permit that, except through direct messages, which are practically emails anyway. While I sometimes enjoy having public conversations on Twitter, that is done in consideration of a relatively limited audience. For me, this single volume means having a business account with Twitter and a personal account, and keeping my two streams of tweets separate.

(Don’t worry, I’m not so naive to think that my tweets or my emails are protected and secret. Obviously, emails can be forwarded and tweets retweeted. I mean more for general day-to-day clarity.)

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I’m on a listserv for zine librarians, and this morning someone sent out a link to this blog explaining why Duke’s Sallie Bingham Center for Women’s History and Culture has chosen not to digitize the 4000 zines in their collection. Although the librarian acknowledges that digitization would increase access and minimize physical wear on the items, she points out certain characteristics of zines which make them awkward to digitize. Namely, getting permission, honorably using fair use to deal with copyright, protecting zinester privacy, and respecting print culture. It’s a well-considered statement, raising concerns about the strive to digitize.

I had the odd experience last month of cataloging a few of my own zines, at my beloved Zine Archive and Publishing Project in Seattle. See, when I make zines, I don’t usually put my name on them. I enjoy the freedoms that come through anonymity. But when I was filling out the catalog record, I felt an obligation to enter the information. (There’s no AACR for zines, so this was a homegrown protocol developed by folks at ZAPP, which includes doing research outside the item to fill in information gaps.) The librarian in me won.

Some of these issues, particularly around cataloging and authority control came up at the Zine Librarians (un)Conference last March. The ties to print culture are really very strong, perhaps in part because so many zine librarians also make and read print zines themselves. Nonetheless, for one example of a great digital zine collection is the fantastic Queer Zine Archive Project.

Yesterday, a friend of mine said that her niche on the Internet is “cuddly animals.” (This was in a conversation about some friends who regularly post controversial political opinions as their facebook statuses.) This one’s for you, MJ!

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One of the libraries where I volunteer is looking for a new OPAC to replace its current DOS ‘un, which is nearly as old as I am. Although our current system has been quite a workhorse, we’d like something nice and shiny enough to allow folks to search the catalog through our website. (And to let us print spine labels using something other than a dot-matrix printer.)

Someone suggested Readerware but I’m curious about the open-source ILS options out there. Namely Koha or Evergreen or maybe even Librarything.  Does anyone have any experience with any of these, or recommendations of other systems to look at?