Los Angeles Times: Have an overdue book or unpaid fines? L.A. Public Library to offer 2-week amnesty program

By Matt Hamilton | January 21, 2016

Patrons of the Los Angeles Public Library who’ve racked up fines for overdue books will soon get a reprieve.

Starting Feb. 1, the city’s library system will offer a two-week amnesty period.

Overdue, undamaged materials -- including books, DVDs, and tapes -- can be returned to the downtown Central Library or 72 branch libraries. All fines will be forgiven, and patrons will again be allowed to use their library cards.

“We’re encouraging everyone -- children, students and adults -- to return their overdue materials so they can get back to discovering all that the library has to offer, and so others can enjoy these books,” City Librarian John F. Szabo said in a statement.

Outstanding fines will also be pardoned, including overdue fees for previously returned items.

Those with a lost or missing item can also replace it -- with a librarian’s approval -- and the usual fees for replacement will be waived, the library said.


There are some caveats: damaged or unusable items are not eligible for the amnesty program.

And if you already paid for fines previously levied by the library? Sorry, no refunds.

For the original article, please visit the Los Angeles Times. More information can be found on the Los Angeles Public Library website at http://www.lapl.org/missingyou.

The Conversation: Libraries on the front lines of the homelessness crisis in the United States

Libraries are increasingly a sanctuary for people who are homeless or mentally ill. We wondered how libraries function on the front lines of social service provision.

Prevalence of homelessness in the United States

On any given night in 2014, over half a million people in the United States found themselves without a home. While the majority of these people (69%) secured shelter for the night, many shelters do not provide daytime accommodations for their patrons. This leaves many in search of daytime activity and protection from the elements.

Unfortunately, many homeless are also living with debilitating mental illnesses. The intimate relationship between homelessness and mental illness is well-established. Almost all psychiatric conditions are overrepresented in homeless populations.

The transition from inpatient to outpatient psychiatric treatment that began in the 1960s, including the closure of state-run psychiatric hospitals, may contribute to the prevalence of mental illness among the homeless. Today, adjusting for changes in population size, US state mental hospitals house only about 10% the number of patients they once did.

So it is no surprise that libraries are coping with a large number of patrons who are homeless or have mental illnesses. Public libraries are, after all, designed to be welcoming spaces for all.

This can leave libraries struggling with how to serve a population with very diverse needs.

A major metropolitan library

This is an issue we know that librarians at a metropolitan public library we visited are grappling with. We became aware of this issue in speaking informally with librarians who work there. To our surprise, we learned that the library serves a large number of homeless and mentally ill patrons.

The librarians told us about some of these patrons. There is Big Bob, a large man in his 40’s who frequently regales the librarians with accounts of his exploits as a member of special ops forces in the military. There is John, a reclusive man always attired in combat fatigues and heavy-duty army boots who turned out, in the bitterest cold of winter, to be suffering from severe frostbite. And there is Jane, a young woman who, when it emerged that she was temporarily living in her car, turned the tables on the librarians by saying, “Shh,” so no one else would learn of her plight.

Some of these library patrons are homeless. Others have been diagnosed with a mental illness, such as bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, depression, or substance dependence. Tragically, many are experiencing both.

They come to the library for all sorts of reasons: to seek warmth and shelter, to use the restroom, to access the internet, to meet friends, and yes, even to read books and newspapers. One librarian estimates that about half of the library’s regular patrons are either mentally ill or homeless.

The library’s long-term employees report that the mentally ill were not always such a prominent component of its clientele. Their presence increased dramatically 20 years ago, with the closure of a local mental hospital.

How librarians can help patrons who are mentally ill or experiencing homelessness

Helping homeless and mentally ill clients is a challenge that libraries all over the country are grappling with, but library science curricula don’t seem to have caught up.

According to one newly minted librarian who received her master’s degree in library science a few years ago, contemporary library education typically includes no coursework in mental illness. It focuses on the techniques and technology of library services, especially meeting the needs of patrons for access to information.

Learning strategies to assist mentally ill and homeless patrons might not be on library curricula, but the American Library Association has long had policies in place emphasizing equal access to library services for the poor, and in 1996 formed the Hunger, Homelessness, and Poverty Task Force.

Across the country, libraries have developed helpful strategies for serving homeless and mentally ill patrons. One, at least for large libraries with sufficient numbers of personnel, is to designate a member of the staff as a specialist in these matters, who serves as a resource person for other employees.

At the metropolitan library we visited, one of the more civically oriented librarians acts as a liaison between various local mental health agencies and homeless shelters. She has cultivated a relationship with a mental health crisis clinician at the county hospital, who has organized workshops to educate the library staff about mental health and substance abuse.

This librarian’s work with homeless and mentally ill library patrons is currently supported by the library’s budget, but much of her progress was driven by her personal commitment. As she looks toward retirement, she worries that these services will fade when she leaves.

However, there are signs that libraries are embracing their role as a safety net. Libraries in San Francisco, Washington DC and Philadelphia are hiring social workers to assist with the needs of homeless and mentally ill patrons. Others in Queens, New York and Denver, Colorado have outreach programs that bring training services to homeless shelters and educate residents about library services. The Denver program even provides the bus fare to visit the library.

The librarians we talked to take their role as surrogate mental health workers in stride, and many regard their mentally ill patrons with a sense of mission.

Said one librarian who has worked at the downtown library for more than 30 years:

The library often serves as a destination for people who have no place to go. They can always come here, to be warm, safe, and entertained. At first, I didn’t know how important the library is to them, but one day before a holiday, a patron came up to me and said, ‘You guys will really be missed tomorrow.’ Some may resent the presence of the mentally ill in the library, but as far as I am concerned, everyone deserves a chance to use it.

To read the full article, please see The Conversation.

Nautil.us: The Deep Space of Digital Reading

Why we shouldn’t worry about leaving print behind.

By Paul La Farge | January 7, 2016

In A History of Reading, the Canadian novelist and essayist Alberto Manguel describes a remarkable transformation of human consciousness, which took place around the 10th century A.D.: the advent of silent reading. Human beings have been reading for thousands of years, but in antiquity, the normal thing was to read aloud. When Augustine (the future St. Augustine) went to see his teacher, Ambrose, in Milan, in 384 A.D., he was stunned to see him looking at a book and not saying anything. With the advent of silent reading, Manguel writes,

... the reader was at last able to establish an unrestricted relationship with the book and the words. The words no longer needed to occupy the time required to pronounce them. They could exist in interior space, rushing on or barely begun, fully deciphered or only half-said, while the reader’s thoughts inspected them at leisure, drawing new notions from them, allowing comparisons from memory or from other books left open for simultaneous perusal.

To read silently is to free your mind to reflect, to remember, to question and compare. The cognitive scientist Maryanne Wolf calls this freedom “the secret gift of time to think”: When the reading brain becomes able to process written symbols automatically, the thinking brain, the I, has time to go beyond those symbols, to develop itself and the culture in which it lives.

16TH-CENTURY INTERNET: The “book wheel,” invented in 1588, was a 

rotating reading desk that allowed readers to flit among texts by giving 

the wheel a quick spin. (Source: Wikipedia)

A thousand years later, critics fear that digital technology has put this gift in peril. The Internet’s flood of information, together with the distractions of social media, threaten to overwhelm the interior space of reading, stranding us in what the journalist Nicholas Carr has called “the shallows,” a frenzied flitting from one fact to the next. In Carr’s view, the “endless, mesmerizing buzz” of the Internet imperils our very being: “One of the greatest dangers we face,” he writes, “as we automate the work of our minds, as we cede control over the flow of our thoughts and memories to a powerful electronic system, is ... a slow erosion of our humanness and our humanity.”

There’s no question that digital technology presents challenges to the reading brain, but, seen from a historical perspective, these look like differences of degree, rather than of kind. To the extent that digital reading represents something new, its potential cuts both ways. Done badly (which is to say, done cynically), the Internet reduces us to mindless clickers, racing numbly to the bottom of a bottomless feed; but done well, it has the potential to expand and augment the very contemplative space that we have prized in ourselves ever since we learned to read without moving our lips.

Critics like to say the Internet causes our minds to wander off, but we’ve been wandering off all along.

The fear of technology is not new. In the fifth century B.C., Socrates worried that writing would weaken human memory, and stifle judgment. In fact, as Wolf notes in her 2007 book Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain, the opposite happened: Faced with the written page, the reader’s brain develops new capacities. The visual cortex forms networks of cells that are capable of recognizing letterforms almost instantaneously; increasingly efficient pathways connect these networks to the phonological and semantic areas of the cortex, freeing up other parts of the brain to put the words we read into sentences, stories, views of the world. We may not keep the Iliad in our heads any longer, but we’re exquisitely capable of reflecting on it, comparing it to other stories we know, and forming conclusions about human beings ancient and modern.

The Internet may cause our minds to wander off, and yet a quick look at the history of books suggests that we have been wandering off all along. When we read, the eye does not progress steadily along the line of text; it alternates between saccades—little jumps—and brief stops, not unlike the movement of the mouse’s cursor across a screen of hypertext. From the invention of papyrus around 3000 B.C., until about 300 A.D., most written documents were scrolls, which had to be rolled up by one hand as they were unrolled by the other: a truly linear presentation. Since then, though, most reading has involved codices, bound books or pamphlets, a major advantage of which (at least compared to the scroll) is that you can jump around in them, from chapter to chapter (the table of contents had been around since roughly the first century B.C.); from text to marginal gloss, and, later, to footnote.

In the age of print, nonlinear reading found its most elaborate support in the “book wheel,” invented by the Italian engineer Agostino Ramelli in 1588: a “rotary reading desk” which allowed the reader to keep a great number of books at once, and to switch between them by giving the wheel a turn. The book wheel was— unfortunately!—a rarity in European libraries, but when you think about all the kinds of reading that print affords, the experience of starting a text at its beginning and reading all the way to the end, which we now associate with “deep” reading, looks less characteristic of print in general than of the novel in particular: the one kind of book in which, we feel, we might be depriving ourselves of something vital if we skipped or skimmed.

The quality of digital media poses one kind of problem for the reading brain; the quantity of information available to the wired reader poses a different and more serious problem. But it’s worth noting that readers have faced this problem before, too. Gutenberg printed his first Bible in 1455, and by 1500, some 27,000 titles had been published in Europe, in a total of around 10 million copies. The flood of printed matter created a reading public, and changed the way that people read.

The German historian Rolf Engelsing argues that a “reading revolution” took place at the end of the 18th century: Before that point, the typical European reader had only a few books—the Bible, an almanac, maybe a work of devotional literature—and he read them over and over, so that they were deeply impressed on his consciousness. Afterward, Europeans read all kinds of material—novels, periodicals, newspapers—and they read each item only once before racing on to the next. Contemporary critics were doubtless appalled, but on the other hand, from that flood of printed matter, we got the Enlightenment, Romanticism, the American and French revolutions.

It’s true that studies have found that readers given text on a screen do worse on recall and comprehension tests than readers given the same text on paper. But a 2011 study by the cognitive scientists Rakefet Ackerman and Morris Goldsmith suggests that this may be a function less of the intrinsic nature of digital devices than of the expectations that readers bring to them. Ackerman and Goldsmith note that readers perceive paper as being better suited for “effortful learning,” whereas the screen is perceived as being suited for “fast and shallow reading of short texts such as news, e-mails, and forum notes.” They tested the hypothesis that our reading habits follow from this perception, and found it to be correct: Students asked to read a text on-screen thought they could do it faster than students asked to read the same text in print, and did a worse job of pacing themselves in a timed study period. Not surprisingly, the on-screen readers then scored worse on a reading comprehension test.

If those same students expected on-screen reading to be as slow (and as effortful) as paper reading, would their comprehension of digital text improve? A 2015 study by the German educator Johannes Naumann suggests as much. Naumann gave a group of high-school students the job of tracking down certain pieces of information on websites; he found that the students who regularly did research online—in other words, the ones who expected Web pages to yield up useful facts—were better at this task (and at ignoring irrelevant information) than students who used the Internet mostly to send email, chat, and blog.

Meanwhile, some writers are taking advantage of the formal possibilities of digital media to tell stories and communicate information in new ways. One of these new forms is what people in the 1990s called “hypertext”: text divided into units called “lexia,” which are connected by links, sometimes in a branching or tree-like structure, sometimes in webs or cats’-cradles or other tangled forms. (Technically, the Web is a hypertext, but the word often refers to single works with an internally linked structure.)

The digital novel Pry is the opposite of a shallow work; its whole play is between the surface and the depths of the human mind. It is exhilarating.

The impact of hypertext on the reading brain has, as you’d expect, received a fair amount of scientific attention. In 2005, the psychologists Diana DeStefano and Jo-Anne LeFevre reviewed 38 studies of hypertext reading; their expectation was that hypertext would be found to impose a greater cognitive load on the reader than linear text, because of the effort involved in scanning a page for links, and deciding which link, if any, to follow. DeStefano and LeFevre further hypothesized that this increased cognitive load would cause readers’ recall and comprehension to suffer. They concluded that this expectation was, generally speaking, correct, and Carr cited it in his 2011 book The Shallows, as evidence that the Internet is making us stupid.

In fact, though, DeStefano and LeFevre’s findings were equivocal. The cognitive load imposed by hypertext doesn’t correspond in a straightforward way to the number of choices presented at a decision point, or to the total number of links in a hypertext. (Indeed, a 1996 study by Michael Wenger and David Payne found that hypertext did not impose a greater cognitive load on readers than linear text, a result that DeStefano and LeFevre note in passing.) In two studies, hypertext seemed to improve comprehension. One involved readers with little prior knowledge of a subject, who were able to use a highly structured hypertext (one whose structure mirrored the organization of its subject matter) to learn more effectively than similar readers of linear text. In the other study, academically gifted readers learned better from unstructured hypertext than from linear text. The author, Amy Shapiro, hypothesized that these readers were obliged to engage more actively with the hypertext, in order to figure out the relation between its parts; this engagement led to increased understanding, the way puzzling over a difficult poem yields more than reading quickly through an easy one.

DeStefano and LeFevre also remark that “[f]ew of the studies that we reviewed considered affective factors such as engagement or enjoyment.” This may seem like a small point, but it’s not. In a 2008 study by the psychologists Tal Yarkoni, Nicole Speer, and Jeffrey Zacks, subjects were given two narratives to read, while their brain activity was monitored by a functional MRI scanner. One narrative was a fairly straightforward account of a day in a boy’s life; the other was the same account with the sentences scrambled. Here’s a bit of the latter:

Mrs. Birch called in a pleasant tone, “Raymond, take a bath and then you can go to bed.” Raymond noticed this immediately and asked curiously, “Am I four feet high?” He stood and went toward them in a slow, jogging run.

Based on the fMRI data, Yarkoni, Speer, and Zacks concluded that the scrambled sentences forced the readers to keep remaking their “situation models,” their mental representations of what was happening in the story. Situation models guide reading comprehension and memory; without them, we get lost, which explains, in neuropsychological terms, why the scrambled sentences were harder to remember. And yet, when I read the two experimental texts, I found myself thinking about how much more interesting the scrambled one was, and how much more fun it was to read. Maybe I’m just the kind of person who likes building situation models, but I don’t think I’m alone in this. If there were no pleasure in reading things that don’t make sense, who would read the Surrealists? Who would giggle at bad subtitles, or Mad Libs?

Comprehension matters, but so does pleasure. In Proust and the Squid, Wolf, director of the Center for Reading and Language Research at Tufts University, observes that the brain’s limbic system, the seat of our emotions, comes into play as we learn to read fluently; our feelings of pleasure, disgust, horror and excitement guide our attention to the stories we can’t put down. Novelists have known this for a long time, and digital writers know it, too. It’s no coincidence that many of the best early digital narratives took the form of games, in which the reader traverses an imaginary world while solving puzzles, sometimes fiendishly difficult ones. Considered in terms of cognitive load, these texts are head-bangingly difficult; considered in terms of pleasure, they’re hard to beat.

SHAPE OF READING TO COME: Reading’s future is 

signaled by interactive novels like Pry, which, along 

with text, uses video clips to expose its protagonist’s 

memories.

A new generation of digital writers is building on video games, incorporating their interactive features—and cognitive sparks—into novelistic narratives that embrace the capabilities of our screens and tablets. Samantha Gorman and Danny Cannizzaro’s 2014 iPad novella, Pry, tells the story of a demolitions expert returned home from the first Gulf War, whose past and present collide, as his vision fails. The story is told in text, photographs, video clips, and audio. It uses an interface that allows you to follow the action and shift between levels of awareness. As you read text on the screen, describing characters and plot, you draw your fingers apart and see a photograph of the protagonist, his eyes opening on the world. Pinch your fingers shut and you visit his troubled unconscious; words and images race by, as if you are inside his memory. Pry is the opposite of a shallow work; its whole play is between the surface and the depths of the human mind. Reading it is exhilarating.

There’s no question when you read (or play) Pry that you’re doing something your brain isn’t quite wired for. The interface creates a feeling of simultaneity, and also of having to make choices in real time, that no book could reproduce. It asks you to use your fingers to do more than just turn the page. It communicates the experience of slipping in and out of a story, in and out of a dream, or nightmare. It uses the affordances of your phone or tablet to do what literature is always trying to do: give you new things to think about, to expand the world behind your eyes. It’s stressful, at first. How are you supposed to know if you’re reading it right? What if you miss something? But if you play (or read) it long enough, you can almost feel your brain begin to adapt.

Most of the Web is not like Pry—not yet, anyway. But the history of reading suggests that what we’re presently experiencing is probably not the end times of human thought. It’s more like an interregnum, or the crouch before a leap. Wolf points out that when it comes to reading, what we get out is largely what we put in. “The reading brain circuit reflects the affordances of what it reads,” she notes: affordances being the built-in opportunities for interaction. The more we skim, the more we’re likely to keep skimming; on the other hand, the more we plunge into a text, the more we’re likely to keep plunging. “We’re in a digital culture,” Wolf says. “It’s not a question of making peace. We have to be discerning, vigilant, developmentally savvy.” And of course we have to be surprised, delighted, puzzled, even disturbed. We have to enjoy ourselves. If we can do that, digital reading will expand the already vast interior space of our humanity.

From: Nautl.us

Forbes.com: The Bill Gates Bump: How A Billionaire Is Helping To Save The Publishing Industry From Itself

By Grant Feller | January 6, 2016.

My daughter is studying Voltaire’s Candide and hates it. That’s OK, she’s allowed her opinion. But there’s a line in which I think Bill Gates would especially enjoy: ‘Fools have a habit of believing that everything written by a famous author is admirable. For my part I read only to please myself and like only what suits my taste.’

It seems that Bill’s burgeoning new career as a book reviewer on GatesNotes is under fire from those who believe literary opinions should be the preserve of the so-called experts. Or fools. Bill, on the other hand, is keen to tell the world which books suit his taste.

His highly influential blog (part of his brilliant network of content marketing tools designed to maximise his philosophies) includes a list of some of the 50 or so books he’s enjoyed that year, including The Road To Character by New York Times columnist David Brooks (a bit long and disjointed, I thought, but nevertheless thought-provoking) and The Vital Question by Nick Lane (brilliant on the origins of life and why we are the way we are).

According to those who bow to the superior skills of the literary critics, Bill, by presuming that anyone cares what he reads, likes and thinks, is helping to destroy the books industry which recent figures suggest is worth £10 billion to the UK economy alone and almost £300 billion worldwide.

Bill Gates, co-chairman of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation,
participates in a panel discussion during the Financial Inclusion
Forum December 1, 2015 at the Treasury Department in Washington,
DC. (Photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images)

This week, The Times newspaper printed a rather sneering assessment of Bill’s blog and how ‘struggling authors enjoy the Bill Gates bump’. Because when the world’s wealthiest man blogs about your book (or celebrity-blogs as the newspaper would have it) then the wretched lives of writers on the poverty line will be transformed overnight. Sales success is inevitable.

Some critics are outraged. The highly-respected DJ Taylor is quoted as saying: ‘What does Bill Gates know about books?’ He adds that ordinary people not steeped in literary criticism tarnish the industry: ‘There has been a loss of critical authority. You have to have some kind of language, some kind of protocols to have the conversation about the meaning of books.’

It’s a line that has been forcefully argued by Peter Stothard, the editor of the Times Literary Supplement, who believes that the rise of book bloggers is ‘to the detriment of literature’ because their tastes, knowledge and critical faculties cannot be trusted. Certainly can’t be as trusted as those precious types who sit in their ivory towers surrounded by mini-libraries of books that publishers have sent on to them, gratis. Presumably with companies like Amazon in mind (which accounts for 90 per cent of all book sales in the UK and whose book sales account for around 7 per cent of its $70bn annual revenue), Peter adds: ‘If the mass of unargued opinion chokes off literary critics…then literature will be the lesser for it.’

Has the mass of unargued opinion devalued film criticism or has it made bylined critics less snobby and more attuned to people’s tastes? Has the mass of unargued opinion devalued travel experts who jet around the world on PR-funded freebies, or has it made hotel establishments keener to keep the customer satisfied? Has the mass of unargued opinion destroyed news journalism or made it faster, fresher and sharper?

The most profound societal change that our digital age has created is the democratisation of opinion. Of course it’s always been there but the means of expressing it to a wide audience has always been highly restricted, the preserve of an elite few who enjoy telling us the difference between good and bad, right and wrong. Bill Gates might be good at making money, they would argue, but what does he know about books?

How conceited, arrogant and wrong. Presumably the same goes for book clubs, a phenomenon that conservative estimates believe adds up to 100million in individual sales in the US alone. Those, for instance, run by Oprah Winfrey (whose annual recommendation list causes a 2.5% decline in sales for all other books in the 10 days after they’re announced), Richard and Judy and Mark Zuckerberg, whose new online forum recommends titles that ‘emphasise learning about new cultures, beliefs, histories and technologies’. What do they know? Well, for one thing, they tend to know what people like – not ‘should’ like but will like.

In truth, most literary critics are brilliant, intelligent writers with a unique ability to know what books the wider public will devour and loathe. But that doesn’t mean their literary tastes are any better than Bill’s. And at the end of the day, if one of the world’s most famous individuals is able to enthuse a wider public, increase sales of books and spark intellectual debate (whilst making money for those poor souls known as writers), well isn’t that a good thing?

Even Voltaire would have raised a glass of absinthe to that.

Grant Feller is a media consultant and the Director of GF-Media

From: Forbes

GoodEreader: Technology has Changed the Modern Library

GoodEreader: Technology has Changed the Modern Library

By Michael Kozlowski | January 11, 2016

In order to be a professional librarian it warrants having your masters degree in library science. Technology has changed what it means to be a librarian, as many young people with a simple degree from their local college are now finding employment in a technology role.

Young people are working at local libraries as an “library associate”—college graduates who do the same work as librarians but receive lower salaries than their MLS counterparts. Their roles include troubleshooting patrons e-readers or setting up new research computers.

Professional librarians are a dying breed. They spend more time helping people find their missing sweater or hunting around for a lost iPhone. A New Mexico librarian recently said in an interview “I spend most of my time making change and showing people how to print from the computer or use the copier. I sure don’t get the reference questions like I used to.”

The future of libraries is technology. The first digital library launched in Bexar County in 2013. They received over $200,000 in funding to finance a huge e-book collection, 48 computers, 300 e-readers, and three Discovery Terminals. This is basically the first library in the world that doesn’t have a single print book, its all digital.

Last year the Harris County Library in Houston Texas launched a digital library card system dubbed iKnow, doesn’t offer all of the amenities of a full-service library card. It only allows you to borrow audiobooks, e-books, music and video online via Overdrive and can’t be used to check out hard copies of books.  The great thing about this card, is that you don’t have to go to the library in person, you can do it all online.

Speaking of Overdrive, they are the undisputed market leader in the digital library sector. The company has just announced that in 2015 eBook circulation surpassed 125 million, which was an increase of 19% from 2014 and 43 million audiobooks were loaned out. With these type of figures, it is no small wonder why professional librarians are no longer needed and technology specialists are in heavy demand.

From: GoodEreader

The Gaurdian: You are not what you read: librarians purge user data to protect privacy

The Gaurdian: You are not what you read: librarians purge user data to protect privacy

By Sam Thielman | January 13, 2016

US libraries are doing something even the most security-conscious private firm would never dream of: deleting sensitive information in order to protect users

Library ethics have long leaned towards protecting the privacy
of user data,’ says Graduate Center librarian Polly Thistlethwaite.
 Photograph: Alamy Stock Photo

Last week, with little fanfare, the Graduate Center at the City University of New York did something very few private companies would ever do to protect its users’ privacy: it quietly began to purge its interlibrary loan records.

“This policy change is motivated by the idea that libraries should not keep more information about their users’ requests than necessary,” wrote Beth Posner, head of library resource sharing at the school.

“We will continue to keep all requests from 2013 forward until further notice; eventually we will only keep a rolling history of one year or less, though, in order to help ensure that ILL requests remain confidential,” she told students and faculty in the email. “Previously, you could find a list of everything you ever requested through ILL.”

Perhaps that sounds like harmless information, but Polly Thistlethwaite, chief librarian at the Graduate Center, said that guilt by association with controversial books has a long history and that librarians have a duty to protect readers of “heretical texts”.

“Most librarians would say that you are not what you read,” Thistlethwaite said. “You are not the material you look at.” But others have disagreed. “There’s also really bad police work,” she observed.

“I was approached years ago at a different library about users who’d checked out certain astrological books,” said Thistlethwaite. The NYPD officer told her he was looking for the Zodiac killer. “Most police investigations are a little smarter than that, but sometimes they’re just not.”

Recently, it’s become more common to try to force librarians to turn over user information and compel their silence simultaneously. Multiple librarians have pushed back against “national security letters” that would do just that in the name of public safety – a dangerous order to resist, since those letters include a gag order. But in 2005, when the FBI served a national security letter to Connecticut’s Library Connection demanding reading records and hard drives, the librarians resisted with such force that the government capitulated.

The American Library Association had their backs, resolving unanimously to “condemn the use of National Security Letters to demand any library records”.

As use of the law to acquire patron records since the Patriot Act has increased, librarians have become some of the US’s foremost experimenters in data security. Now they’re doing something even the most security-conscious private firm would never dream of (but have often been encouraged to do by security experts): purging sensitive information in order to protect their users.

Thistlethwaite said that there was “nothing burning that prompted” the loan record purge; it was simply best practice – and one that many in the government and in private industry have been loath to adopt.

Data retention is becoming a more pressing issue. When infidelity hookup site Ashley Madison was hacked last year, its archives revealed that even when the company had charged users to purge their information from its records, it hadn’t simply declined to honor that agreement, it had added the credit card numbers they supplied to pay for the purge. When the US Office of Personnel Management was hacked, its database was revealed to stretch back fully 30 years, including employees who had left government service or even died. Personal information is valuable, and when users surrender it, it tends to become currency for marketers and law enforcement.

Interlibrary loans, said Alison Macrina, founder and director of the Library Freedom Project, form an ad-hoc record of departures from regular patterns of lending – the kind of thing that often interests intelligence and law enforcement analysts.

“It seems like it’s a more interesting data trail,” said Macrina. “It’s a book you wanted so bad that you went to special lengths to get it, and we know how intelligence agencies pay attention to breaks in patterns.” Macrina hadn’t heard about the CUNY Graduate Center initiative, but said it was a relief to her. “It’s taken a little too long but I’m really glad to see it’s happening somewhere.”

Libraries continue to develop ways to keep patron privacy at the forefront of the services they provide, including material accessed through library computers. Macrina’s group encourages libraries to operate “exit nodes” that aid the operation of difficult-to-trace web browser Tor – the Department of Homeland Security attempted to enlist the help of local law enforcement to shut down the project at a New Hampshire library last year, but was thwarted.

At a local level, Macrina said, librarians generally understand that the town police and the town library are part of the same town. But when it comes to federal authority, few librarians have qualms about “having an adversarial relationship”.

“They’ve antagonized us so much,” Macrina said. “Ashcroft called us ‘hysterical’, and it’s a profession mostly of women, so, you know. That didn’t go over very well.”

Disclosure: the author’s wife studies at the CUNY Graduate Center

From: The Guardian

Newsworks.org: How young librarians are figuring out the field's future

Newsworks.org: How young librarians are figuring out the field's future

By Taunya English | January 12, 2016

Jarrett Drake watches the scroll as digital files download
to his computer. (Emma Lee/WHYY)

[This story is part of the series "The Rebirth of the Library."] 

Today's information professionals say that Google hasn't made them obsolete.

Several years ago, Forbes Magazine listed the advanced degrees with the worst job prospects—and a master's in library sciences was No. 1 on the list. Despite that gloomy prediction and some staid image problems, young librarians say their work is relevant in the 21st Century and is as needed now as it has ever been.

"You say, I'm going to library school, and everybody is like, 'Well, aren't libraries kind of over? What are you going to be doing?'" said 34-year-old Jay Granger, a management and library and information sciences student in the online program at the University of Southern California.

He wears glasses and cardigans sometimes. Granger acknowledges the spinster librarian stereotype and doesn't seem too worried.

"But we will need to embrace a whole new kind of noise in the profession," he wrote in a blog post. "Shushing in the digital age will just get spit on your computer screen."

Granger says Google's search engine can't replace him; it just frees up information professionals to help with more complicated information needs.

"That's a great way to spend a day. I love doing that," Granger said. "You're trying to set up someone on the perfect date with the perfect source."

Corporations and startups hire librarians to organize all that information they collect about customers, and Granger says health researchers could use his skills, too.

"Big data is a big deal right now, but learning to use the tools that allow you to search millions of tweets at a time and understand the relationships between them, those are the things that librarians specialize in."

Born digital

Traditionally, librarians have a degree from a library school. But in recent years, many university programs have dropped the word 'library' from their name and now call themselves "information schools"—even when they continue to offer a library degree.

Twenty-eight-year-old Jarrett Drake learned librarianship at the University of Michigan School of Information. He's Princeton University's first-ever digital archivist, which is a librarian who preserves things created on computing devices.

"The term we refer to is 'born digital,' Drake said. "Facebook, Twitter pages, WORD documents, PDFs, spreadsheets, all of these kinds of digital documents.

His office is in Mudd Library where Princeton keeps 270 years of Ivy League history. There are administration letters, meeting notes, charters—lots of paper piled into boxes, and those boxes are stacked high on shelves. While touring the stacks, Drake pointed out an old, clunky, black typewriter used by one of the university presidents during the 1930s.

"Who knows, in 100 years or 200 years, people will come by and look at an old MacBook Pro and say 'Oh, look at that old, cool thing. Isn't that so nice.' And that's how I get when I look at old typewriters," Drake said.

His job is to figure out how to safeguard ones and zeros, and to do that, he gets help from a $10,000 machine called "FRED," a Forensic Recovery of Evidence Device. It looks like a big server with a dozen ports on the front. Beside the machine, Drake keeps a stack of cables, FireWires and USB cords to upload documents from just about any kind of computer.

The F.B.I. and D.E.A. use the same kind of machine to detect computer crimes. Drake says his library work follows a similar forensic approach. He wants to collect without contaminating.

"If a book comes to a library, you want to make sure there's no mold, for instance, that there are no bugs or insects, and so a virus scan is a digital version of that," Drake said.

You can imagine the archivists who worked at Mudd Library before Jarrett Drake gently handling the artifacts and rare books. Electronic files get the same kind of care and attention but updated for the 21st Century: Drake protects documents from bit rot and FRED stamps every file with a digital fingerprint.
Some of the science of the work is giving future library patrons access in some of the same ways that the original users interacted with and experienced the digital information.

"You can scroll up and down, and you hover over different things," Drake said as he demonstrated a cached Twitter feed.

Princeton is collecting artifacts from activist groups around campus, and Drake says, someday, historians will want to study those student-made hashtags and YouTube videos.

"Especially, you know, when and if Twitter goes belly up," Drake said. "How were people using records and information in 2015 and like, I don't know, it's 2055."

In other places, librarians are building digital collections that recognize social media as a primary source for research. Librarians in St. Louis and Maryland are stockpiling digital artifacts from the online BlackLivesMatter movement. At Brown University and the Bibliothèque Nationale de France they are archiving the Arab Spring.

Information professionals also see a future helping the rest of us manage our Snapchat stories and selfies. Many people are really bad about downloading that stuff to a hard drive for safekeeping. So, we clog up our cell phones and are drowning in digital mementos.

"All that ephemera of people's everyday lives may seem insignificant if we are only thinking about one person, but if we are able to collect that on a wider scale, that really gives enormous insight into who we are as a culture and as a society. Just as we study, you know, letters from 18th Century England, that's considered to be important," said T-Kay Sangwand.

She's a digital scholarship librarian with the University of California, Los Angeles, now, but before that, Sangwand worked for years at the University of Texas Libraries. For her, the future of library science is sharing information skills with marginalized people so they can build their own libraries.

"When people see my job title, they actually misread it, and see 'human rights activist' as opposed to 'human rights archivist' but I actually don't think they are very different," Sangwand said.

'Keepers of the historical record' 

In the 1960s, socially conscious librarians began to realize there are stories we're missing from our big institutions.

"A lot of times what was deemed important were the records of people in power, and the people who were generally in power were generally older, white men," Sangwand said. "The work that we do does have profound political and historical implications as keepers of the historical record."

So, today, librarian-activists work to collect other voices—such as the testimony of Josephine Murebwayire, a wife and mother of six—who survived the genocide in Rwanda. In 1994, paramilitary soldiers herded her daughters, her husband and neighbors from the Tutsi ethnic minority together on a field. Murebwayire was the only person in her family to live through that mass execution.

Sangwand helped teach preservation skills to local library professionals in Africa to launch a digital archive based at the Kigali Genocide Memorial. Artifacts and thousands of original beta videotapes remain there, but now the testimonies of survivors and perpetrators are available online for everyone to hear.

Modern librarians are continuing the tradition of providing access but their tools are high tech--and now--their collections are often 'born digital.'

Public libraries 

That's the work at universities and special collections, but neighborhood libraries say they are still relevant too.

The public library in Collingswood, New Jersey—just a few miles outside of Philadelphia--is exactly what you'd expect. But they are nods to the future and signs of how patrons are using the space differently.
There's free Wi-Fi, and in the sunny front window, you can sit at a high top table to drink coffee and set up a laptop. The museum passes are one of the most popular things that the library lends. Families borrow a pass for free family admission museums in Philadelphia.

Library director Brett Bonfield says when 19th century tycoon and philanthropist Andrew Carnegie began funding public libraries; the vision was to improve wellbeing for Americans.

Bonfield—who recently accepted the director position at the Princeton Public Library--wants to test that idea.

"I would love to know if people are financially literate, and if we can help with that," Bonfield said. "I would love to know if we could do things that would make people feel more engaged in their community, and that could show up as voting. Maybe they would be more likely to vote in local elections or national elections because of programs we've done or the collections we offer."

In Collingswood, once a week there's a story time in Spanish for preschoolers and their parents. Maybe story time--or the library's popular teen space-- translate to kids who do better in school later in life. Maybe all those uninsured people who used library computers to sign up for the Affordable Care Act are healthier.

Teens attend a Star Wars party at Collingswood Library.
 (Emma Lee/WHYY)

Bonfield says the future of library science is figuring out if libraries are actually delivering on the promise to make communities better.

Because libraries are so well liked—they serve the old and young—Bonfield says there's not been much clamor yet for them to justify themselves, but he says taxpayers want their money's worth.

"Are we using evidence in a systematic way to determine if we are fulfilling our fiduciary responsibility to those that pay our salaries?" Bonfield wondered.

One place that has used data to shape service is the Public Library of Cincinnati and Hamilton County.
"Police forces, fire departments do a lot of data gathering and examination of what's going on where, and I think libraries need to embrace that," said service operations manager Paula Brehm-Heeger.

Several years ago, her library did a formal study and, as a result, overhauled many of the ways librarians interact with patrons.

"We had this team of folks with this clipboard and this list of things and they walked around from area to area," Brehm-Heeger said. "We had morning, afternoon, evening, weekend observations to get some good snapshots of what was going on."

"People will tell you what they like and what they want, if you just let them, we were trying to get at—not what people's idea of what a library is—but what a library really is based on what people are doing," Brehm-Heeger said.

Some people were reading, but lots of them weren't. Many patrons wanted help with technology and resumes. There were also lots and lots of teens hanging out.

Brehm-Heeger says when she was growing up the expectation was that she'd go to the library "be quiet and sit and read."

"I'm a Gen-Xer and both of my parents worked, so after school, I was one of those kids that went to the library all the time," she said. "Sometimes I caused a little havoc and I was asked to leave the library on more than one occasion in my middle school years. But I loved the library."

As a result of the observation study, Cincinnati created a TeenSpace with lots of computers, some quiet zones and a place where noise and teen chatter is welcome.

From: Newsworks.org

[You can also listen to the story at the link above.]

American Libraries: Libraries Transform

American Libraries: Libraries Transform

Community disruption is leading to new roles for libraries

By Sari Feldman |  January 4, 2016

I have spent the past several months traveling across the United States visiting libraries, learning about their transformative work, and doing a lot of listening. Over the course of my travels, I have discovered that the Libraries Transform campaign is the right message at the right time. Libraries of all types are transforming to find greater alignment with the needs of campus, public, and school communities. From California to Maine (with stops in Kentucky, Nebraska, and New York in between) powerful community disruption is leading to new roles for libraries and library professionals. While many librarians agree this is an exciting time for our profession, many are also anxious about an uncertain future.

The good news is that the Center for the Future of Libraries is providing guidance around the most challenging changes for library professionals. Trends such as the sharing economy and Big Data are worthy of discussion for libraries of all kinds. The sharing economy has given rise to unexpected collections: People are turning to their library for everything from seeds to plant in the ground to telescopes to point at the sky. Big Data may be the domain of libraries in the future (who better than librarians to handle massive amounts of information?), but thought leaders today are grappling with policies related to privacy, confidentiality, and free access that affect all libraries. We transform, but we do so while staying true to the core values that have enabled libraries to build trusted relationships with our customers and communities.

Staying true to core values has enabled us to build trusted relationships with our communities.

While these disruptions may feel like a sea change in libraries, our work remains grounded in an enduring ideal: People walk through our doors with ideas, ambitions, and challenges, and we meet them with resources that foster individual opportunity, options, and optimism. This is true for libraries of all types. Where our profession has the tendency to draw distinctions among libraries, I see more similarities than differences in our work. As part of the Libraries Transform launch, I visited four distinctive libraries that share a consistent focus on addressing community needs through collaboration.

• Librarians from Thomson Elementary School in the District of Columbia are preparing tomorrow’s workforce by partnering with a service organization to deliver coding programs to students.
• Librarians at George Washington University’s Gelman Library responded to an emerging research need for data from social media, developing a robust aggregator called Social Feed Manager.
• D.C. Public Library is engaging instructors from local radio stations to help customers learn how to use its new recording studios.
• The Smithsonian Libraries recognize the value of turning outward, making their collections accessible and engaging via experiential exhibits.

Today’s libraries are not for the faint of heart, but libraries have always been at the crossroads of a community at its best and worst. There is no question that libraries must continue to prioritize collections and the legacy of reading, but our value today is less about what we have for people and more about what we do for and with people.

At different points in my travel for Libraries Transform, I speak about my own career transformation. It’s a messy story—bad hair and all—that traverses the physical and the digital, from the campus of the University of Wisconsin–Madison School of Library and Information Studies to the earliest incarnations of the internet to ALA’s Digital Content Working Group. Ours is a profession built with passion and perseverance. As libraries transform, our shared commitment to libraries as the center of campus, public, and school community life will ensure that libraries remain a vital part of the fabric that comprises our democratic society.

SARI FELDMAN is executive director of Cuyahoga County (Ohio) Public Library. 

From: American Libraries

The Daily Dot: How the Internet Changed the Way We Read

The Daily Dot: How the Internet Changed the Way We Read

By Jackson Bliss | January 1, 2016

Photo via Raysonho/Wikimedia Commons

As a professor of literature, rhetoric, and writing at the University of California at Irvine, I've discovered that one of the biggest lies about American culture (propagated even by college students) is that Americans don’t read.

The truth is that most of us read continuously in a perpetual stream of incestuous words, but instead of reading novels, book reviews, or newspapers like we used to in the ancien régime, we now read text messages, social media, and bite-sized entries about our protean cultural history on Wikipedia.

In the great epistemic galaxy of words, we have become both reading junkies and also professional text skimmers. Reading has become a clumsy science, which is why we keep fudging the lab results. But in diagnosing our own textual attention deficit disorder (ADD), who can blame us for skimming? We’re inundated by so much opinion posing as information, much of it the same material with permutating and exponential commentary. Skimming is practically a defense mechanism against the avalanche of info-opinion that has collectively hijacked narrative, reportage, and good analysis.

We now skim everything it seems to find evidence for our own belief system. We read to comment on reality (Read: to prove our own belief system). Reading has become a relentless exercise in self-validation, which is why we get impatient when writers don’t come out and simply tell us what they’re arguing. Which reminds me: What the hell am I arguing? With the advent of microblogging platforms, Twitter activism, self-publishing companies, professional trolling, everyone has a microphone now and yet no one actually listens to each other any more. And this is literally because we’re too busy reading. And when we leave comments on an online article, it’s usually an argument we already agree with or one we completely reject before we’ve read the first paragraph. In the age of hyper-information, it’s practically impossible not to be blinded by our own confirmation bias. It’s hard not to be infatuated with Twitter shitstorms either, especially when we’re not the target practice.

E-novels, once the theater of the mind for experimental writers, are now mainstream things that look like long-winded websites. Their chapters bleed into the same cultural space on our screen as grocery lists, weather forecasts, calendar reminders, and email messages. What’s the real difference between reading a blog post online by an eloquent blowhard and reading one chapter of a Jonathan Franzen novel? We can literally swipe from one text to another on our Kindle without realizing we changed platforms. What’s the real difference between skimming an informed political critique on a political junkie Tumblr account and reading a focused tirade on the Washington Post’s blog written by putative experts?

What’s the real difference between skimming an informed political critique on a political junkie Tumblr account and reading a focused tirade on the Washington Post’s blog written by putative experts?

That same blog post will get reposted on other news sites and the same news article will get reposted on other blogs interchangeably. Content—whether thought-provoking, regurgitated, or analytically superficial, impeccably researched, politically doctrinaire, or grammatically atrocious—now occupies the same cultural space, the same screen space, and the same mental space in the public imagination.  After awhile, we just stop keeping track of what’s legitimately good because it takes too much energy to separate the crème from the foam.

As NPR digitizes itself in the 21st century, buries the “R” in its name, and translates its obsolete podcasts into online news features, every one of its articles now bleeds with its comment section, much of it written by posters who haven’t even read the article in question—essentially erasing the dividing lines between expert, echo chamber, and dilettante, journalist, hack, and self-promoter, reportage, character assassination, and mob frenzy.

One silver lining is that the technological democratization of social media has effectively deconstructed the one-sided power of the Big Bad Media in general and influential writing in particular, which in theory makes this era freer and more decentralized than ever. One downside to technological democratization is that it hasn’t lead to a thriving marketplace of ideas, but a greater retreat into the Platonic cave of self-identification with the shadow world. We have never needed a safer and quieter place to collect our thoughts from the collective din of couch quarterbacking than we do now, which is why it’s so easy to preemptively categorize the articles we read before we actually read them to save ourselves the heartache and the controversy.


The abundance of texts in this zeitgeist creates a tunnel effect of amnesia.  We now have access to so much information that we actually forget the specific nuances of what we read, where we read them, and who wrote them. We forget what’s available all the time because we live in an age of hyperabundant textuality. Now, when we’re lost, we’re just one click away from the answer. Even the line separating what we know and what we don’t know is blurry.

We now have access to so much information that we actually forget the specific nuances of what we read, where we read them, and who wrote them.

It is precisely because we now consume writing from the moment we wake until the moment we crash—most of it mundane, redundant, speculative, badly researched, partisan, and emojian—that we no longer have the same appetite (or time) for literary fiction, serious think pieces, or top-shelf journalism anymore, even though they’re all readily available. If an article on the Daily Dot shows up on page 3 of a Google search, it might as well not exist at all. The New York Times article we half-read on our iPhone while standing up in the Los Angeles Metro ends up blurring with the 500 modified retweets about that same article on Twitter. Authors aren’t privileged anymore because everyone writes commentary somewhere and everyone’s commentary shows up some place. Only the platform and the means of production have changed.

Someday, the Centers for Disease Control will create a whole new branch of research dedicated to studying the infectious disease of cultural memes. Our continuous consumption of text is intricately linked to our continuous forgetting, our continuous reinfection, and our continuous thumbs up/thumbs down approach to reality, which is why we keep reading late into the night, looking for the next place to leave a comment someone has already made somewhere. Whether we like it or not, we’re all victims and perpetrators of this commentary fractal. There seems to be no way out except deeper inside the sinkhole or to go cold turkey from the sound of our own voices.

Jackson Bliss is a hapa fiction writer and a lecturer in the English department at the University of California, Irvine. He has a BA in comp lit from Oberlin College , a MFA in fiction from the University of Notre Dame, and a MA in English and a Ph.D. in Literature and Creative Writing from USC. His short stories and essays have appeared in many publications.

From: The Daily Dot

New York Times: New York Public Library Invites a Deep Digital Dive

New York Public Library Invites a Deep Digital Dive
By JENNIFER SCHUESSLER 
JAN. 6, 2016

Part of one of the “Tale of Genji” scrolls available for easy exploration now that the New York Public Library has released nearly 200,000 public-domain items from its special collections. 

Mansion Maniac, a whimsical online toy created by the New York Public Library, may seem like envy bait for the real-estate have-nots. With the help of a Pac-Man-like icon, users can explore the floor plans of some of the city’s most extravagant early-20th-century residences, culled from the library’s archives.

But the game is what you might call a marketing teaser for a major redistribution of property, digitally speaking: the release of more than 180,000 photographs, postcards, maps and other public-domain itemsfrom the library’s special collections in downloadable high-resolution files — along with an invitation to users to grab them and do with them whatever they please.

Digitization has been all the rage over the past decade, as libraries, museums and other institutions have scanned millions of items and posted them online. But the library’s initiative (nypl.org/publicdomain), which goes live on Wednesday, goes beyond the practical questions of how and what to digitize to the deeper one of what happens next.

Mansion Maniac, an online game created by the library, lets users explore the floor plans of old apartments using a Pac-Man-like figure.

CreditCourtesy of The New York Public Library

Mansion Maniac, a whimsical online toy created by the New York Public Library, may seem like envy bait for the real-estate have-nots. With the help of a Pac-Man-like icon, users can explore the floor plans of some of the city’s most extravagant early-20th-century residences, culled from the library’s archives.

But the game is what you might call a marketing teaser for a major redistribution of property, digitally speaking: the release of more than 180,000 photographs, postcards, maps and other public-domain itemsfrom the library’s special collections in downloadable high-resolution files — along with an invitation to users to grab them and do with them whatever they please.

Digitization has been all the rage over the past decade, as libraries, museums and other institutions have scanned millions of items and posted them online. But the library’s initiative (nypl.org/publicdomain), which goes live on Wednesday, goes beyond the practical questions of how and what to digitize to the deeper one of what happens next.

“We see digitization as a starting point, not end point,” said Ben Vershbow, the director of NYPL Labs, the in-house technology division that spearheaded the effort. “We don’t just want to put stuff online and say, ‘Here it is,’ but rev the engines and encourage reuse.”

A growing number of institutions have been rallying under the banner of “open content.”While the library’s new initiative represents one of the largest releases of visually rich material since the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam began making more than 200,000 works available in high-quality scans free of charge in 2012, it’s notable for more than its size.

“It’s not just a data dump,” said Dan Cohen, the executive director of theDigital Public Library of America, a consortium that offers one-stop access to digitized holdings from more than 1,300 institutions.

The New York Public has “really been thinking about how they can get others to use this material,” Mr. Cohen continued. “It’s a next step that I would like to see more institutions take.”

Most items in the public-domain release have already been visible at the library’s digital collections portal. The difference is that the highest-quality files will now be available for free and immediate download, along with the programming interfaces, known as APIs, that allow developers to use them more easily.

Covers of the Green Book, a guidebook published from 1936 to 1966 that listed hotels, restaurants and other establishments across the country that welcomed African-Americans.CreditSchomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Jean Blackwell Hutson Research and Reference Division, The New York Public Library

Crucially — if wonkily — users will also have access to information from the library’s internal rights database, letting them know which items are free of what the library is carefully calling “known United States copyright restrictions.”

“We are trying to make it so users can not only see things, but can make determinations about whether to use them in new ways,” said Greg Cram, the library’s associate director of copyright and information policy.

NYPL Labs, started in 2011, has been known for experimental projects aimed at spurring users’ own tweaks and remixes. One scholar used itsWhat’s on the Menu? project, which enlisted library users to transcribe its collection of 45,000 New York City restaurant menus, to create a new “data curation” of the collection. An engineer at Google has created a Google Cardboard application for its Stereogranimator, a program designed to mimic the proto-3-D effects of old-fashioned stereogram viewers.

Items from the digital collections have also found their way into projects like Urban Scratch-Off, a “map hack” that lets users scratch an aerial photograph of New York, lottery-ticket style, to reveal aerial shots of the city in 1924, and Mapping Cholera, which tracks an 1832 epidemic using geodata harvested from maps belonging to the library.

The new release will “reduce friction and make it even easier for people to get their hands on out-of-copyright material” owned by the library, Mr. Vershbow said.

The library plans to offer Remix Residencies, which will provide financial support for projects using the public-domain materials. NYPL Labs staff members also spent the weeks before the holidays creating quick-and-dirty demonstration projects, which, like Mansion Maniac, are being posted along with the release.

Street View, Then & Now allows users to compare current images along Fifth Avenue with wide-angle shots taken by the photographer Burton Welles in 1911.
CreditNew York Public Library

Street View, Then & Now allows users to wander up and down Fifth Avenue, comparing a current

image of any location from Google Streetview with wide-angle shots taken by the photographer
Burton Welles in 1911, a moment when groups like the Save New York Committee were already warning about the “wrong” sort of development.

On a less nostalgic note, Navigating the Green Book allows users to map a road trip using the Green Book, a guidebook published from 1936 to 1966 that listed hotels, restaurants and other establishments across the country that welcomed African-Americans.

If someone wants to “extract more data” from the guidebooks and improve his team’s stab at the digital navigator, Mr. Vershbow said, bring it on.

Phrases like “extract more data” may fall hard on traditionalist ears. But Mr. Vershbow said the spirit
of the enterprise was nothing new.

“It’s the old library mission: Take it and run, and make it your own,” he said.

From: The New York Times

Toronto Star: Toronto Public Library to lend out Internet through Wi-Fi hotspots

Toronto Public Library to lend out Internet through Wi-Fi hotspots

Take-home devices would provide free web access to people who can’t afford it at home.

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COURTESY OF NEW YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY

A portable WI-FI hotspot at the New York Library. A simillar system might be coming to Toronto; it's in the library system's new budget.

By: May Warren Staff Reporter, Published on Thu Dec 31 2015

Amid paperback copies of romance novels and how-to manuals, the Toronto Public Library would like to see something else available for checkout in 2016: the Internet.

Lendable Wi-Fi hotspots are already being experimented with in cities such as New York and Chicago, and are billed as a way to bridge the digital divide in urban centres.

City Librarian Vickery Bowles said the Toronto library has included $100,000 in its 2016 operating budget for lendable Internet at branches located in neighbourhood improvement areas, where there are larger numbers of people who might need the service.

She feels Internet access has become an essential part of the services libraries should provide.

“People who lack broadband Internet access at home, they’re really at a disadvantage when it comes to employment, looking for a job or access to government services and education,” Bowles said.

Modern libraries have already become hubs for free Internet. A lineup of people waiting to polish their resumes, check email or even fill out government forms online has become a fixture at many branches.

The Toronto Public Library would figure out the details after funding is approved by council. But the idea is basically to let patrons check out a physical device that can provide free Wi-Fi for whatever device they have.

The library is already seeking private donors who could supplement the city funding, Bowles said.

Andrea Saenz, first deputy commissioner at the Chicago Public Library, said that under a pilot project that started this year, librarians in the Windy City have lent out about 700 devices at seven branches, in neighbourhoods where people are most likely not to have Internet access at home.

The point is to bring people who have been left in the digital dark into the online conversation.

“We’re missing those voices, and we’re missing those people, those citizens as engaged actors online,” she said.

The project has been met with lots of enthusiasm, but staff are still figuring out who is borrowing the devices and for what purpose, surveying people when they return the hotspots.

“I would say the jury is still out. We don’t have a ton of data back,” Saenz said, adding there are safeguards built in, allowing the library to turn the devices off if people don’t return them.

Charity Kittler, library hotspot program manager at the New York Public Library, said the idea for its Wi-Fi project came to the president of the library when he was walking around the Bronx one day and noticed a crowd of people hanging around outside a closed library branch, using the Wi-Fi bleed from the building.

“So it’s not just that our libraries are packed during the day. Even after the libraries close, people are still there because it’s one of the few places you can get free Wi-Fi,” Kittler said.

In that city, where 27 per cent of residents do not have broadband Internet access at home, according to city statistics, the hotspots are a hot commodity.

“It’s not just that you’re not able to access the internet if you don’t have it at home, it’s that the things you used to be able to do in person are now only online,” Kittler said.

The biggest complaint, she said, is that the internet is not fast enough, and that people want to use the devices for longer, even though patrons have been able to keep them from up to a year.

As for less educational uses, Kittler said the library doesn’t judge.

“We try to tell them upfront, we don’t recommend marathoning Game of Thrones, simply because your internet will then slow down afterwards,” she said with a laugh.

Libraries lending Wi-Fi

What other major library systems are doing with lendable Wi-Fi hardware.

New York City

New Yorkers with library cards can check out Wi-Fi hotpots powered by Sprint at “lending events” in 11 branches in high-needs areas across the city.

Funded by Google, The Knight Foundation, The Robin Hood Foundation, Open Society Foundations and the library itself, the program allows patrons to check out the devices for up to a year.

Although the devices have been very popular, library hotspot program manager Charity Kittler said it’s only a pilot program and the future remains under discussion.

A similar program is run by the Brooklyn Public Library and the Queens Library, she said.

Chicago

The Chicago program is a two-year pilot that lets patrons check out hotspot devices from seven branches in neighbourhoods identified as having lots of people without home Internet access.

The loans are available for three weeks, and patrons can renew only if somebody isn’t waiting for the item.

The library applied for a grant from the Knight Foundation to help fund the project. Librarians had the same idea at the same time as their sister library in New York City, said Andrea Saenz of the Chicago Public Library.

The local Google office also kicked in some funding once it heard about the project, she said.

Kitchener

The southwestern Ontario city started its own pilot program, said to be the first in Canada, in October.

Mary Chevreau, chief executive officer of the Kitchener Public Library, said the library received a grant from a technology company to fund the pilot, which it hopes to run for a year. It’s hoped future fundraising would allow the program to continue.

There are 20 devices in circulation, available for checkout at the central branch for three weeks on a first-come-first-served basis with no holds or renewals.

“Our experience so far is that these things are extremely popular,” Chevreau said.

Kansas City

The Kansas City Library began lending out Wi-Fi hotspots to students and parents in the area school district in 2015. There are 25 devices in the program.

Library spokesperson Courtney Lewis said the program is funded by Mobile Beacon, an organization that works to provide non-profit with Internet access. The Kansas City Library hopes to expand the program with support from other private donors.

From: Toronto Star