Welcome Rebecca Blakeley, blogger of the month for March, 2008
Welcome to the podium Rebecca Blakeley, head of the Government Documents Department at the McNeese State University Library. Take it away Rebecca! And many thanks to our BOTM for February, Susanna Leers. Susanna was one of our most prolific bloggers with 40(!) posts for the short leep month! To see all of Susanna's stories, go to her blog. Below are Susanna's latest 10 posts (which I generated from her RSS feed with the handy rss2js feed converter). 3 Cheers for Susanna!! Continue reading
Rebecca Blakeley: blogger of the month for March, 2007
Rebecca Blakeley is head of the Government Documents Department at the McNeese State University Library in Lake Charles, Louisiana. She was selected to be a 2008 American Library Association Emerging Leader. Prior to McNeese, Rebecca worked in the Reference and Government Publications departments at the University of Rhode Island and also taught courses on Information Literacy. She received her M.L.I.S. in 2005 and her B.A. in Anthropology in 2003, both from the University of Rhode Island. Rebecca fell in love with Government Documents when she took an online course with Daniel O'Mahony, whose passion for "Documents to the People" inspired her to become a documents librarian. Rebecca is a techie wannabee and is neither Gen X nor Gen Y but somewhere in between. Feel free to visit her department's blog, Gov Docs on the Bayou. Continue reading
Gaiman’s ebook is “unbelievably painful to use”
And now a cautionary tale: Neil Gaiman -- who wrote the incredible Sandman graphic novel series -- and his publisher, HarperCollins, has put up his novel, "American Gods" online for free reading from the HarperCollins Web site. Cool, right? Well not so fast. As Cory over at boingboing points out, the book is only viewable using HarperCollins' BrowseInside system which loads pictures of the pages from the printed book, one page at a time, with no facility for offline reading. And this, dear reader, is the cautionary tale. Online content is *great* for access; but it *needs* to be open and usable, not locked up within a proprietary system with poor quality scans.
The whole thing runs incredibly slowly and is unbelievably painful to use. I think we can be pretty sure that no one will read this version instead of buying the printed book -- but that's only because practically no one is going to read this version, period. The fact is that the full text of American Gods has been online for years, and can be located with a single Google query. I managed to download the entire text of the book in less time than it took me to get the Harper Collins edition to load the first page of Chapter One (literally!). The "security" that Harper Collins has bought with its clunky, kudgey experiment is nonexistent: pirates will just go get the pirate edition. Unfortunately, the "security" has also undermined the experiment's value as a tool for getting better intelligence about the market. This isn't going to cost Neil any sales, but it's also not going to buy him any. We take our books home and read them in a thousand ways, in whatever posture, room, and conditions we care to. No one chains our books to our desks and shows us a single page at a time. This experiment simulates a situation that's completely divorced from the reality of reading for pleasure. As an experiment, this will prove nothing about ebooks either way.Continue reading
Fact-checking FISA debate
We've been trying to follow the FISA debate but it's not been easy since there's a lot of politically charged rhetoric going around. The ACLU has done some fact-checking to try and help out. The major sticking point seems to be whether or not there should be immunity for the telecommunications companies that aided the president’s warrantless wiretapping program -- the Senate bill has it, the House bill does not. As we noted in August, 2006, U.S. District Judge Anna Diggs Taylor found the NSA's wiretapping program unconstitutional. So it would seem that the telecom companies broke the law and violated their customers' privacy rights in participating in the NSA program. This, then, is why the administration is pushing for their immunity. See the Electronic Frontier Foundation for more information. Continue reading
New Online Legal Database: information about the rights of internally displaced persons
A new online database has been launched today: the Global Database on the Guiding Principles on Internal Displacement . This database is geared towards helping the more than 25 million internally displaced persons (IDPs) in 50 countries around the world who have been forcibly uprooted from their own homes as a result of armed conflict and human rights violation and need protection and assistance. Meant to assist policy makers and legal advocates in the development of national legal and policy frameworks for the protection of IDPs, the database provides instant access to official documents, including recommendations of United Nations treaty-monitoring bodies, reports of UN charter bodies, and UN General Assembly resolutions about the rights of these IDPs. A joint effort of Georgetown University’s Institute for the Study of International Migration (ISIM) and the Brookings-Bern Project on Internal Displacement, it is a resource for scholars, policymakers, legislators, and humanitarian activists to research, develop, monitor and enforce implementation of IDP policies.
The website is available in English, French and Spanish.