Category: ALA

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ALA Books LITA Media Personal presentation

Interviewing Dr. Vernor Vinge

Dr. Vernor VingeIn one of the more surreal occurrences in my working life, I will have the opportunity to interview one of the titans of the Science Fiction world, Dr. Vernor Vinge, at the ALA Midwinter Meeting 2011 in San Diego, CA. The interview itself will be on Saturday, Jan 8th, from 1:30-3:30pm Pacific time in the San Diego Convention Center Room 29 A-D.

Plans are in place to livestream the interview at the LITA Ustream channel, and in addition to a set of questions from myself, I’ve decided to set up ways to take questions from just about anyone who wants. At the bottom of this post is an embedded Google Form where you can ask your question of Dr. Vinge…I’ll sort through any in the next 2 weeks and pick the best of the bunch for inclusion. In addition, during the interview itself, we will be taking questions not only from the live audience but also from Twitter (use the hashtag #alamw_vinge) and from the Facebook Event page.

So: hit the form below, and ask your question now. Watch the interview live on Saturday, January 8th at 1:30 Pacific time, and ask your questions as they occur to you. I, along with several awesome librarians, will try our best to collapse all of these streams into an entertaining and informative couple of hours for all.
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Categories
ALA Legal Issues Library Issues

Library of Congress blocks access to Wikileaks

This is evidence of the insane world we’re currently living in…the Library of Congress, ostensibly the Library of Record for the United States, is currently blocking access on it’s staff computers as well as it’s guest wireless network to Wikileaks.

From the above story, the Library issued a statement, saying:

The Library decided to block Wikileaks because applicable law obligates federal agencies to protect classified information. Unauthorized disclosures of classified documents do not alter the documents’ classified status or automatically result in declassification of the documents.

Oh, really? Is that so?

Anyone online realizes this is a senseless act, and that anyone with any knowledge of the Internet will be able to get around this sort of filter trivially…this does absolutely nothing to protect classified information. As far as I can tell, it does nothing except make the Library of Congress look asinine. Perhaps the librarians running the LoC should take another gander at the Library Bill of Rights to remind themselves what exactly it is that they should be doing.

I hope that there is serious fallout for those who made this decision. ALA Council…here’s a discussion worth having.

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ALA Books Perpetual Beta

Contest over at Perpetual Beta

Just in case you follow me here, but not over at my American Libraries blog, Perpetual Beta: I’m holding a contest where I am giving away a copy of my newest book, Mobile Technology & Libraries. All you have to do is create a Google Search Story about libraries, and post it in the comments over at PB.

Free book, people! Show me your creativity!

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ACRL ALA MPOW presentation

Building a 21st Century Learning Environment

Here’s the MASSIVE slideshow from the preconference I was a part of for ACRL at the ALA Annual Conference just this past weekend. I was thrilled to be able to present with the team from my library, including the Dean of the Library Theresa Liedtka, our Head of Reference & Instruction Virginia Cairns, our curmudgeonly but kind Assistant Dean & Head of Materials Processing Mike Bell, and our current ILS Manager & Web Technologies Librarian and former Head of Access Services Andrea Schurr. A powerhouse of a team, I think we gave a great preconference about the process behind our renovations and new building. It’s a massive file, but it was also nearly 7 hours worth of content. Enjoy!

Building a 21st Century Library

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ALA humor presentation

ALA Battledecks, the complete collection

Here’s a collection of the entire Battledecks experience. Crazy funny, and awesomely inventive folks. <wayne&garth> I’m not worthy! I’m not worthy!</wayne&garth>

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ALA Library Issues LITA presentation

LITA Top Tech Trends – ALA Annual 2010

Here’s the video of the LITA Top Tech Trends panel from ALA Annual 2010. My impressions of the panel were mainly “OMFG I’m on stage with Lorcan Dempsey” and “How big IS this room?”…was very hard to concentrate on the content being put forth while actively involved in it. But I think we all had very interesting things to say. I’ll see about cleaning up my notes and putting them up in a post in the next few days.

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ALA humor Personal

ALA Annual 2010 Battledecks Champ!

I am truly, honestly surprised and thrilled to be crowned (or tiara’d) the American Library Association 2010 Annual Conference Battledecks champion. I still haven’t seen video of my competitors, but I can say with authority that they are all smarter, better-looking, and funnier than I.

Somehow though, I pulled it off. The official ALA video below doesn’t include my entrance, complete with luchadore mask (which I think got me bonus points). I wasn’t going to watch myself, but I realized I was so completely out of it during the thing that I barely remembered anything except the cataloger joke.

NOTE: about that. I worked as a serials cataloger for the 2 years of my degree at UNC-Chapel Hill, and took every class in cataloging offered. I have great respect for catalogers. But sometimes, you just have to go for the obvious joke. Please don’t hurt me.

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ALA Personal

Goodreader & the iPad

EDIT: please check out my new post, with the real problem identified. This post contains old information that is not correct!

Goodreader is by far the best interface and app for handling different filetypes on the iPad…PDFs, doc files, images, etc. But this morning at the ALA Annual conference I discovered one really scary security issue with it. By default, Goodreader doesn’t require authentication or any warning to connect via Bonjour, and it allows you to browse AND DOWNLOAD any files that are so shared. Sitting in the Conference Center lobby, I was able to connect to two different iPads, view and grab files arbitrarilly, and push files TO the iPads as well.

Goodreader Security issue

Goodreader Security hole

This is INCREDIBLY SCARY. In the first 2 minutes, I saw files that had credit card information, passwords, bank account information, and more.

If you are using Goodreader and are connected to any public wifi point, make sure that you have gone into Settings, Other Settings, and make sure that Ask Permission Before Connecting is ON.

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ALA Legal Issues mobile

There’s an app for that – OITP Brief on Mobile

The American Library Association Office of Information Technology Policy, better known as ALA-OITP, just released their Policy Brief on Mobile Tech, There’s an App for That! Libraries and Mobile Technology: An Introduction to Public Policy Considerations. Written by Timothy Vollmer, formerly of OITP and now working for Creative Commons, it’s a great “state of the union” brief on Mobile tech, and how it effects the library world in the current and near-future time frame.

I was honored to have been an early reader on this piece, and to have been able to give feedback to Timothy as he worked it up. If you have any interest at all about the future of libraries and the mobile world, this is a must read.

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ALA presentation

What have I gotten myself into?

Battledecks. ALA Annual 2010. Be there, if for no other reason than to laugh in nervous neighbor shame. Can’t wait to see how this gets counted in my annual review at MPOW.