I just finished reading The Body Toxic by Nena Baker. What a frightening book. Frightening, but full of essential information that every American needs to know about what the FDA doesn't do to protect us from harmful chemicals in the products we buy and use every day. I wish I had seen the extensive notes in the back of the book before I started reading it. As it is, I'm planning to now go back and look at the articles and sites Baker references throughout this book. The focus of this book is primarily on chemicals that are known as endocrine disrupters and how our daily exposure to them affects our physiology and, in the case of women, even the health of our grandchildren. Whereas in Europe they have developed REACH to protect consumers from unnecessary exposure to some toxic chemicals, we in the US do not have a similar organization protecting us. Baker takes an in-depth look at the effects and uses of commonly-used chemicals in manufacturing and agriculture in the US such as atrazine, phthlalates, PBDEs, bisphenol A, PFOA, and PFOS. She also explores how the influence of large corporations on our government has been keeping the US behind relative to many other developed countries in identifying toxic chemicals and banning their use. She further looks at cases where big business has retaliated against scientists reporting on their discoveries of the effects of these chemicals with "damage control" campaigns and cries of "junk science." After reading this, I have a renewed appreciation for how careful consumers need to be about who they believe when it comes to these issues, and how important it is for all of us to be informed about the context of anything we read, including any unmentioned conflicts of interest that may exist in any author's, website's, government's, or organization's background. Baker's book is incredibly eye-opening and I highly recommend getting ahold of a copy. Here she is giving a presentation about her book:
As a person concerned about our environment, one thing that I try to minimize is how much I throw
away and what can be recycled. But I also am concerned, as everyone is these days, about my money, which is why I've chosen to take advantage of my health insurance's mail-order prescription plan. But when I receive packages from Aetna Rx Home Delivery such as the one shown here, where massive amounts of waste is generated by the shipping of a very small product, I am just appalled. And the fact that my complex doesn't offer recycling makes it that much more difficult to tolerate it.
Speaking of recycling, I recently heard about RecycleBank, a company that pays its users to recycle materials from their home. What a great idea. I'd love to see this in my neighborhood.
Imagine what would happen if we all did this to a few documents held in proprietary databases. Talk about the freedom of information, or the freeing of information, as it were.
There's an excellent article in the January 2008 issue of Library Journal by Michael Stephens and Michale Casey about transparency in libraries, particularly in relationship to blogging and listening to staff. This is a good one to read if you are in an administrative position and thinking about adding blogging to your workplace. I appreciated, in particular, this part of the article:
...organizations willing to accept some level of criticism in return
for ideas, suggestions, and the opportunity to change may be able to
turn around a difficult situation. Leaders with a thick skin may be
able to discern the legitimate criticism beneath the vituperation.
Perhaps this spoke to me because I keep hearing in my head the discussion that came up in my own library about what to do if a staff member writes something "bad." Which, of course, goes right to the heart of censorship versus transparency.
This posting about embracing change is another one of late that spoke to me. There is certainly a lot of discussion about embracing change in a way that seems to forbid any analysis about the types of change that might be embraced. How is nondiscriminatory across-the-board acceptance of anything ever a good thing?
Around 1 minute 50 seconds into this clip is a real gem that speaks to a of experiences I've had as both a patron and librarian, bookseller and customer:
There is a very fine line that exists between customer service and harassment, especially in the world of books. Whereas in other retail areas such as clothes or shoes, generally customers want and expect prompt service, bookstore customers and library patrons are, more often than not, people who like to browse and like to have some privacy in the process. It's not that they don't want help, but that usually they want to be the initiators. They like to know that assistance is available and certainly want it to be friendly, but they do not want to anyone hanging around them in their pursuits. This doesn't mean they're plotting to shoplift and you don't need to hire a greeting brigade for "loss prevention" purposes. I've seen it enough times in action to know that a very hands-on overly-attentive staff can have a chilling effect on the very people they are trying to serve.
I find it disturbing that those libraries discussing the advantages of following a "retail model" are rarely talking about how such practices may negatively impact patron behavior by indirectly creating more barriers to information access. They seem to be too busy wowing library conference goers with photos of their new merchandising techniques to mention the brutal weeding of the collections, the paraprofessionals working in place of professional librarians, or how outsourcing is leading to the privatization of public libraries, let alone any further trampling of people's first amendment rights.
This same episode of Black Books has another funny-because-it's-true segment in it - the ridiculous rules sometimes found in public places.
I think public libraries are more susceptible to this problem these days than independent bookstores only because those few independents that haven't been forced out by the big chain stores can't afford to alienate their customers by way of inane quirkiness anymore. Michael Stephens brought photos ofsimilar rules to his presentation on Library 2.0 last winter in Phoenix. What I love about the clip from the show is that the bookstore owner can't even read his own handwriting or remember what the rules are, yet they're still hanging on the wall. I think that happens often in libraries, where sometimes rules have been in place for so long that no one can even remember why they were put into affect to begin with.
P.S. - If you want to watch this whole episode, here's clip 1 - (there are 3 altogether; the first I've embedded is part 3 actually, so watch them from the bottom up). This is quite an amusing show for anyone who's ever been in the business!
Oh, Internet Librarian 2007, I am sorry I missed you. Perhaps we will meet next year. In the meantime, I've heard some great things about the conference from several of my colleagues who came back bursting with enthusiasm and frustration - enthusiasm for all the great new technology out there and dreams of what our library could be doing with it; frustration from being unable to go forward with almost all of it due to IS constraints that are out of our library's control. One of those returning made what I thought was a very important point today during a meeting - 2.0 technology is already the norm. It's not new anymore. And our library in particular (although I'm sure there are many others with the same problem) is getting more behind the times every day because of some very unreasonable web filtering that keeps staff from becoming web 2.0 literate. Which, of course, keeps us from helping our community with it. What's the easiest way to make a librarian's life a living hell? Take away their freedom to access information.
Anyway, one of the neatest things I heard about from the conference is The Public Library of Charlotte and Mecklenberg County's fine-payer for teens in Teen Second Life. Apparently, they have something like an ATM that the teens can use in-world to pay off their fines. What I love about this idea is that it's practical, it's located in a place where teens already are ("go where your users are"), and it has the potential to be used in some rather creative ways. Okay, they can pay off their fines in Lindens; now how about extending the service by making it possible for them to work off their fines in-world by reading, building, scripting, hosting events, etc.? It's great that this public library has taken initiative to reach their teen population in Teen Second Life. Here's hoping that more libraries will see the importance of creating a presence in virtual worlds in order to stay relevant to the part of the population who could become life-long library users.
Tankbooks' new design for public domain classics could give new life to old cigarette machines.
I'm afraid I haven't been around much lately to blog because an evil virus has lodged and spread throughout my laptop. Until I either find my startup discs or break down and buy a new laptop, my connection to the net is somewhat less than it used to be. This is probably a good thing, as I tend to spend way too much time engrossed in online matters. Being unable to use my laptop is encouraging me to read more books. Reading is a much simpler pleasure than being online, I find.
I am taking a class on virtual reference services in Second Life through the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. It just started last Friday. It meets once a week for 6 weeks. I managed to borrow a laptop that has a good graphics card in order to take it (my Toshiba, aside from being down and out, never did meet the technical requirements for SL). I'm really enjoying it so far. We meet on Info Island at the outdoor auditorium. My big feat for my first session was learning what timezone is Second Life (same as mine in Arizona) and how to sit on a bench at the auditorium facing in the correct direction. I'm happy and surprised to learn that Info Island gets about 5,000 avatars visiting per day. That's huge! I think there's great potential for providing library services in virtual worlds in the future. But in order to reach the general public in great numbers, these worlds need to be easier to access in terms of internet connection and speed, they need to have more intuitive interfaces, and mainstream computers need to be powerful enough to make them work well.
Here's a somewhat scary story about a guy being questioned by the FBI in regards to what he was seen reading in a coffee shop one weekend. Isn't this a bit much?
Illinois state senator Matt Murphy has introduced the Social Networking Website Prohibition Act, which would ban social networking sites from all public library computers and those found in schools in the state of Illinois. Why? On his homepage above, he says it's "to protect our children from online predators at schools and public libraries." Hmmm, this sounds strangely like the argument that censorship is for the protection of the people. Instead of banning it, why not work on educating kids about wise use of the social web? We do our children a disservice if, instead of teaching them how to deal with situations in life, we leave them unprepared for a future in which we are no longer around to shelter them. And by banning these sites in a public library, the rights of everyone to be able to freely access information are stamped upon. I hope our fellow Illinois librarians raise their voices in protest against this.
So you're not interested in Bookmooching, you just want back that book you lent your best friend's cousin over a year ago? Too bad you didn't have any of these book receipts to keep track of your personal library.
Forget those filtering screens - they never work anyway. What we need in the public library are some of these hoodies. We can sell 'em in our Friends bookstores and put our logos on 'em. Privacy @ your library.
The Beacon For Freedom of Expression has a searchable database for banned books that can be sorted by year, country, author, reason for censorship, and even type of censorship. Ever wanted to know all the titles banned by the Holy See? I'm not exactly sure how comprehensive this database is, however, since there are no listings for censored books in the U.S. in 2006 or 2005, and only one from 2004. Nevertheless, 55,000 entries isn't too shabby and the legal references for censorship of each title makes for some good research material. Wikipedia's entry on the subject is somewhat more entertaining and includes lots of links to other related sites, but some of the information presented is missing bibliographic citations.
Boing-Boing is one of my favorite sites for interesting pop-culturish news. They are also the only site I'm aware of that has an alternate viewing site for those whose web filtering software may be preventing them from accessing their page directly. Brilliant! Or, at least, it was until SmartFilter started blocking that one too. Thankfully, Boing Boing fans have one more option for getting around those nasty filters - checking out Google's cache.
