TILT #80 — Let’s remake the world
Happy holiday week! I have no drop-in time, my snow tires are on, and I’m home with my lava lamp sharing the good news. A few images I enjoyed, to kick things off.
Don’t microwave your wet books, kids. RIP RFID.
Last newsletter came out just before Halloween. Chad’s was my favorite librarian costume.
I need a regular Horribly Designed Libraries feature. This month it’s Cornell’s Mui Ho Fine Arts Library, designed with seemingly no input from library-knowledgeable people (staff, students, accessibility experts). The “floors” are just metal grates. Possibly navigable via wheelchair or with a cane, but definitely see-through if you’re a person wearing a skirt. Cornell Professor Jonathan Ochshorn has been tracking the progress of this “low value” building for over a decade and has filed an official complaint with the State of New York Division of Building Standards and Codes over building code violations.
Will be interesting to see how this stupid floor works out when the snow starts in earnest.
While we’re talking about crimes against libraries, let’s look at the director of the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum who got fired because he lent out one of the only copies of the Gettysburg Address to a “pop-up museum” affiliated with Glenn Beck.
Or maybe the way ICE is in your library stacks, with library vendors collecting and selling data to, among other people, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. ICE, of course, has their own vendors, such as Palantir, who are hosting data on Amazon’s cloud service AWS.
In West Virginia, incarcerated people can use “free” tablets for reading and pay a per-minute charge for reading public domain books. This sucks. Scroll down to see how you can complain. Any readers from WVLA? Seems like the kind of thing they’d want to know about.
If you haven’t maxed out your charitable giving budget for this year, you might want to send some books to unaccompanied minors who came to the US and are currently housed in foster care agencies. The link goes to an Urban Librarians Unite post from last year but they’re still doing it this year.
In the zines we love category, Library Excavations is a project and publication series by Public Collectors that “highlights and activates” physical materials found in public libraries, usually in the Chicago area. It’s got a slight anti-weeding bent…
From that same general wellspring I also found the Library of Radiant Optimism a collection of texts and pointers to resources on how to remake the world.
Broadband report!
- Worst connected cities from 2018 — Texas, Louisiana, California, and Ohio figure in the top ten.
- In a broader context, the Internet Affordability Report. In Africa, the average cost of 1GB of data is a little over 7% of the average monthly salary. In US terms that would mean we’d be paying $373/month for a GB of data.
- Want to improve broadband access and use in your library? The Toward Gigabit Libraries Toolkit can help you assess and make plans about your community’s broadband needs.
It’s been a few weeks since the Macmillan embargo went into effect. I was interviewed about it for Marketplace. King County Library System, the top digital-circulating library in the country, is not buying any Macmillan ebooks, saying it’s a digital equity issue. A majority of Virginia Public Libraries are doing the same thing.
When you listen to Macmillan’s CEO talk he seems to not really understand how libraries work, claiming patrons could check out books from libraries in “three other states” if a book wasn’t available in their library. Librarians chortled. But hey it looks like visitors to Broward County (FL) can get “instant eCards” to enable them to access digital content. It’s a library PR decision and an awareness-raising move, one I hope doesn’t backfire.
A few things you might like to look at or know about.
- Augmented reality book covers. Look at the book through your smart phone and WHOA.
- Parker Higgins talks about how the Freedom of the Press Foundation stepped up to quickly archive the journalistic work from Splinter and Deadspin writers before their owners shuttered those online publications
- “How can tribal libraries use traditional ways of knowing and being to break free of the colonialist library organizational systems that reinforce a damaging worldview?” this IMLS funded project by the Saginaw Chippewa Indian Tribe will look into that and hopefully provide a framework that other libraries can use to decolonize their collections.
- The CyPurr Collective, NYC are a cryptoparty and cat-enthusiast collective who host digital privacy workshops. They have a lot of free-to-use materials over on Github.
- Krü Maekdo’s Black Lesbian Archives project is online and looking for contributions.
Continuing the SRS BZNS reading. Of particular note, the book woman book is a good read, all about pack horse librarians. However, the cover image is of a white lady — all three covers I saw from this book are white ladies — and the main character in this book…. isn’t white. It’s actually kind of a crucial (non-spoiler) plot point.
Nice cameo by Alan “I was at URI longer than the U.S. was in WWII” Gunther, library director at Providence Community Library’s Smith Hill branch. He was featured on Last Week Tonight talking about the library’s $5-off-fines coupon if people tried filling out their census form online. Not a lot of uptake.
Need to know more about the 2020 Census? ALA has you covered. Stay warm, stay counted.
Today in Librarian Tabs is written irregularly by Jessamyn West who also maintains librarian.net. It’s available in more-accessible format your inbox via TinyLetter. Thanks for reading.
