Will Unwound

My new Will’s World column for American Libraries magazine is now online.  For the purposes of today’s session of the Unwinder’s Tavern you need to quickly peruse it by clicking on The Coolness Factor.

The game that we will be playing in the Tavern today is called “Obsolescence.”

The rules are easy to understand: you simply fill in the blanks (my answers are in bold):

1.  What obsolete technologies do you still actively use? Fountain pens because they are elegant and give me the illusion that my writing is more elegant than it really is.  Also my manual 1940s Smith Corona typewriter.  It’s perfect for letting off steam while banging out angry letters to the idiots in Congress.

2.  What obsolete technologies that have vanished entirely do you miss the most? Phone booths because they are a simple statement of how privacy was valued in days of olde.

3.  What obsolete technology are you most happy to have gone, gone, gone? The slide rule.  Duh, I just didn’t get it.

4.  What obsolete library tool(s) do you most miss?  The card catalog.  I loved how you could tell the age of a book by just looking at the print on the card (handwriting, manual typewriter, selectric, commercial, computer, etc).  Also I liked how you could take a drawer into the stacks.  Plus I liked the smudge factor.  The cards with the deepest smudges were the best books. Also I miss the electric erasers we used to correct mistakes on catalog cards…what a feeling of power.

5.  What obsolete library tool do you miss least? The dreaded ditto machine.  Ink, ink…everywhere…and they didn’t give you a clothing allowance.

Now it’s your turn to play the game “Obsolescence.”  With the rapid rate of obsolescence no one is too young to play.  Remember the Palm Pilot?

In yesterday’s post I suggested that when it comes to funerals that pastors, ministers, rabbis, imans, zen masters, priests, witches, warlocks, and sorcerers should toe the line of an 11th commandment: Thou shalt not use power points.  The discussion in the Unwinders Tavern took an unexpected turn: are funerals for the dead or for the living?  It’s a valid and fascinating question but it doesn’t really speak to the evil of power points.

So I have come back to day with my list of reasons why Power Point Presentations should be banned from all library conferences (and funerals):

• The medium is not the message.  The message is the message.
• Power points make boring presentations even more boring.
• Power points make lively presentations boring.
• Power point presentations scream to the audience: “MAKE EYE CONTACT WITH A SCREEN, NOT WITH THE PERSON PRESENTING!” So the audience ends up looking at screens – their ithingies.
• Power points kill audience participation.
• Power point presentations insult the audience’s intelligence:  ”You mean I have to spell it out for you in writing?  You can’t listen, think and process? Duh”
• Power point presenters often face their power point presentations instead of their audiences.
• When Power point presenters sit down to fiddle with their power points, they often hide themselves behind the lid of their laptops.
• It is insulting to the intelligence of the audience to show cloud covered mountain tops when talking about the importance of reaching yearly goals and objectives.
• Power point presenters often darken the room so that their screens can be seen more clearly.  This induces sleep.
• Power points require multi-tasking, which we men are incapable of.
• Presenters who read their power points verbatim should be tried and convicted for cruelty to their audiences.
• Presenters who read their power points verbatim and then give out photocopies of their power points should be banned from speaking at library conferences for at least 5 years.
• Presenters who put up slides that do not jibe with the presentation (such as cartoons) ought to just use a canned laugh track.
• How about the dreaded term “technical difficulties?” Don’t you love to be in an audience in a darkened room when the presenter spends 20 minutes with the local tech guy to try to boot up a malfunctioning power point?  If you’re unlucky they will get it up and running.  If you’re lucky it won’t work and you get to watch the presenter crash and burn after trying to fly solo.
• Is it cruelty to animals to use cuddly pictures of puppies and kitties in a power point to illustrate certain basic personnel concepts such as teamwork, friendly service, and the tough love of progressive discipline?

Your turn.

By the way, my 2012 speaking schedule is pretty busy but I still do have some open dates if you are interested in a presentation that does not use power point.  Click on How to hire Will for the details.

Here is my annual Ash Wednesday post:

Today is Ash Wednesday.  Next to Good Friday it is the most somber day on the Roman Catholic calendar.  Those words “Remember man that thou art dust and until dust thou shalt return” were burned into my mind and soul at a very early age.  Even more indelible in my memory were the ashes that the priest rubbed on to my forehead in the sign of the cross.

Each year when I go to church to get my Ash Wednesday ashes I think “I’ve escaped the Grim Reaper one more time.”  But the pallor of Ash Wednesday doesn’t end with a somber chant and the rubbing of ashes.  Actually the worst part of the day is going to work with a big black cross on your forehead.  If you work in a public library, like I did, this always leads to a million questions from patrons and staff alike.  “Do you know you have a smudge on your face, Will?”  “Will, you been playing in the dirt again?” “Will, you’re scaring the little children.”

I suppose that’s a big part of the wearing of the ashes…to make people think about their own mortality.  To all these random comments I would have to say “Ash Wednesday marks the beginning of Lent and, oh yeah, just because you’re not wearing ashes doesn’t mean you’re not going to die.”  Talk about lifting staff morale. This was just hilarious for all involved…right up there with a train wreck for sheer entertainment value.

But it’s good for people to think about death once in a while.  Most people my age have made the first step…the last will and testament.  The second step is tougher.  This is where you pre-pay for your funeral costs.  This means you call the shots and pay the piper.  Don’t leave it to your survivors.  Undertakers prey on survivors who are usually too sad, too guilty, or too inebriated to make sound choices.  Leaving basic decisions about embalming, coffins, grave plots, and cremation to the survivors can lead to family fights just when the family should be bonding together for comfort and healing. Also you don’t want to stick your survivors with the bill, do you?  So have I pre-paid all my death costs?  The answer is no.  What happens if the undertaker I pre-pay dies or his business goes under?  Funeral directors don’t live forever do they?  Funeral parlors go bankrupt don’t they?  I’m going to wait awhile until the economy firms up, and then I’m going to choose a young undertaker.

One thing I am in the process of doing, however, is step 3: writing out my funeral instructions.  Actually, my wife beat me to it.  Her instructions are simple: a low Mass with no eulogy, no personal testimonies, no music, no pictorial displays, no flower children, no flowers,  no greeting book, no “hi my name is” stickers, and above all no power points.  She will pop out of her coffin and chew us all out if there is a power point.

Why no power point?  Here’s why:  several years ago we went to the funeral of a dear friend.  The Mass was solemn and sacred.  The sanctity of life everlasting was the liturgical theme.  So far so good.  Mass ended and the power point began.  I’m not kidding you in the power point Doug the Deceased became the “Man for all Seasons…Hunting Seasons.”  On the big screen at the front of the church was a gallery of photos of Doug the Deceased in an orange hunting jacket killing a diverse array of mammals, birds, reptiles and fish.

So much for the sanctity of life everlasting.  Go in peace, Doug.

1964 was a big year for sports.  The Cardinals beat the Yankees in the World Series, the Boston Celtics continued their reign as basketball’s best, and in football the Cleveland Browns ruled the NFL and the Buffalo Bills ruled the AFL (Super Bowl One was still 2 years away).

I was a 15 year old freshman in high school in 1964 and my life revolved around the seasons of sport.  I always had a ball in my hand….small and round in the summer, big and round in the winter, and oblong in between.

For me Thursday meant one thing: an hour and a half of pure reading pleasure. That was the day when the weekly edition of Sports Illustrated magazine reached my mailbox.  I would get home after practice, and there it would be waiting for me on the dining room table with the rest of the day’s mail.  Ironically, it was not the photography that drew me to Sports Illustrated; it was the writing.  If there are three better sportswriters than Dan Jenkins, Tex Maule, and Frank Deford, I don’t know who they are.  They didn’t just tell me that the Celtics were the best (that’s what newspapers were for), they told me why.

But then one grim, wintry day in February of 1964 a woman in a very demure two piece bathing suit (you really couldn’t call it a bikini) graced the cover of Sports Illustrated.  No, it couldn’t be.  This had to be my sister’s copy of Vogue.

And so with those humble and modest beginnings began the long and continuing saga of the famous Sports Illustrated Swimsuit edition.  I can’t say that I was particularly happy about this innovation.  Yes, the models inside the magazine were pretty if not alluring, but they took up six pages that otherwise could have been devoted to the top notch sports writing that I so looked forward to each week.

With each passing year, the bathing suits became skimpier, the models curvier, and the beach backdrops more exotic.  Sports Illustrated had created an enduring rite of winter…a new sports media event to fill up that dead period in the middle of February between the Super Bowl and the opening of major league baseball spring training camps.

By 1970, the year I entered the library profession, the swimsuit edition had become a major headache for public and school librarians.  ”What do we do with the Swimsuit edition?” was a question that was thoroughly discussed at monthly February staff meetings in libraries from Maine to Alaska.

The problem was quite serious.  A rare alliance of concerned Christians and radical feminists (the early 70s was when the “women’s liberation” movement got its start) expressed its strong opposition to the edition.  The concerned Christians were worried about the effect of the magazine on boys (dirty thoughts) and the women’s libbers were worried about its effect on girls (sex objects).

How did libraries respond?  In a variety of ways: a) put it out on the rack and allow it to be stolen (which it always was within 30 minutes!), b) put it behind the desk and require a parent’s note (the old “for sex see librarian” approach),  and c) simply pretend it got lost in the mail.  I remember working in one library where the matter went to the library board for consideration and the board president actually pulled out a magnifying glass to determine the veracity of the charge that one of Cheryl Tiegs’ nipples could be seen through her fishnet bathing suit.

Today I don’t hear so much criticism or concern about the swimsuit edition.  In our pornography filled world I suppose it seems rather tame, although this year’s cover sports a young woman whose “swimsuit” seems to consist of two pieces of dental floss and three postage stamps.

While librarians may no longer have to deal with the censorship issues that we did in the 70s, I was interested to note in a scan of the internet, that the swimsuit edition still does carry quite a bit of controversy.  The issue: is the cover girl too zaftig?

I’ll let you make the call.  Here’s the link: cover girl Kate.

I suppose it is the nature of blogging in a crowded field of library bloggers that one way to get attention is to declare war on some one or some entity.

That seems to be the case at least with the so-called library/publisher ebook war.

As with most wars the first line of attack is to head for the moral high ground, express your ideals (altruistic service to the public), demonize your opponent’s motives (GREED!!!), and react with righteous indignation when your opponent shrugs his shoulder, shakes his head, laughs up his sleeve, and simply walks away from the battlefield. The indignation becomes even shriller when the enemy completely ignores your pleas, your petitions, your threats, and your sense of moral superiority.

Yes, the publishers are in the fight of their lives, but their war is not with libraries; their war is with the way things are done in the digital age.  As Unwinder Mick so aptly puts it: “The digital revolution takes no prisoners.”  The Occupy Movement has, in its own endearingly incoherent way, tried to get across the message that capitalism is cruel to the poor, the unemployed, and the disenfranchised “little” guy.  But capitalism is also cruel to the big guys.  American economic history is littered with the carcasses of corporate giants who were unable to adapt to change.  As Mick points out…Kodak is the latest behemoth to fall.

Which brings us back to the book publishing industry.  If there ever was an industry that was characterized by the “We’ve always done it this way!” ethos, it would be publishing.  To understand this you have to reflect back on the history of publishing.  Yes, it has evolved recently into something very corporate, but as late as the mid 1970s the major publishers were basically mom and pop family run businesses.  Indeed at that time the great publishers were referred to as “houses”  as in “Our publishing house specializes in high end works of literary and artistic significance.”

The major players in the book publishing houses did not come from the bean counting, production, or marketing rooms of the house but from the literary kitchen…the place where magical creations were cooked up.  The great tradition of the American book trade evokes images of  legendary editor Maxwell Perkins working with Hemingway and Fitzgerald to create literary masterpieces or an obscure young editor named Judith Jones championing the work of an obscure cookbook author named Julia Child when everyone else had rejected her work as too complex and foreign. These were the days when we had a strong literary culture.  Independent bookstores abounded, libraries were in their heyday, and glue and paper was gold.

Now here we are a half a century later and the book trade is waking up to the fact that it has come late…very late…to the digital revolution.  The mom and pop publishing houses have all been razed and in there place stand the steel and glass structures of the so called BIG SIX.  The literary people have given way to the bean counters and the technogeeks.  Books are no longer “works.”  They are content commodities.

In a word, big publishing is frantic and desperate.  Their walk-in retail outlets are dying. Some of their authors are beginning to self publish; others are fleeing to Hollywood. Most upsetting, however, is that they no longer really understand what a book is or what a reader really wants.

Right now relating to libraries is the least of their worries. Pity the poor publisher.  He feels a lot like we do.

Note from Will:  On a regular basis I get emails from librarians who want to drink deeply of the collective wisdom found in our Unwinders Tavern.  If you have an issue that is bugging you feel free to send me an email at wmanley7@att.net and I will run it in this blog so that our Unwinders can comment on it.  Feel free to change identifiable details so as to protect your identity. I received this email last month.  Please give your best advice to anonymous.

Hi Will,

Just writing to thank you for your last Manley Arts piece about meeting librarians’ needs. Particularly the part about librarians not having taken a vow of poverty. I wasn’t going to rant but you did say you have a lot of free time… I am about to leave the field because the pay is so much lower than the modest ALA-recommended minimum my alma mater touted as de rigeur when I was looking into grad school. The professional satisfaction promised as a trade-off is not happening, either.

The other payoff missing from public librarians’ lives is the professional dignity I was expecting when I became a librarian several years ago. I thought being a librarian would be great, given my aptitude for technology and the written word combined with my social altruism. Whoops. Most of the young librarians I know regret their choice. The most ambitious of us are the most miserable because we know that we could, as they say in the dating game, “do better.” I can make databases, but here I am un-jamming the photocopier and repeating program dates and times for callers who don’t have a pen handy. (It’s not that I need to pay my dues and work up the ladder: this is the highest position under Director.) Patrons are disrespectful, clerks talk to us like we’re pages, and managers struggle to keep a straight face when we suggest salaries should reflect value delivered rather than time served. There is a stark difference in the types of personalities and demographics the field attracts today vs. the era of my coworkers’ entrance to the field. Our colleagues make us pariahs for so rudely writing them an e-mail when they are in the building. They have worked here forever and half of them can barely use computers, forget that PCs have been widely accessible for over fifteen years. We are smart, enterprising, eager professionals. Projects fail miserably because none of my dear elders know how to conduct a productive meeting or start and complete a project. Our ideas are met with “that’s very neat but this is how we’ve always done it” and our attempts at competitive salaries are met with “well you knew going into this you wouldn’t be making a fortune.”

What’s broken? Is it a clash of power structures? I theorize that in a women-run organization like a “traditional public library” the structure is like a family, where authority comes from physical age instead of from your job title which you earned with your ability, like how us Gen X-ers came up. Is it that the civil service system has ruined the money-for-work model, leaving us hard workers feeling cheated? I felt a moment of clarity the day I realized “this doesn’t have to be my problem.” Much as I love social programs, I am industrious and don’t need the system to provide for me.

As you say, basic needs must be met. After looking these last four years for one of these elusive “real-pay” jobs I have given up on librarianship as a career and switched directions to focus on a consulting business centered around journalism and web design. Sometime before my biological clock stops ticking I will type up that resignation letter and say: I cannot raise a family and pay my student loans for $15 an hour. You will have to find another “professional” librarian.

For a long time I was worried it was me: I interview poorly? I don’t know the right people? Wouldn’t you know, less than a year into Project: New Career and I already have a couple freelance clients. Stranger still, none of them have balked over money or yelled at me because they don’t know how to make a photocopy. Perhaps the libraries here will miss my abilities, but life is too short to stay on this train.

I imagine you field lots of letters like this so I won’t ramble any more. I’ll just say thank you again and maybe at least the donut thing will catch on.

Best,

Anonymous

Sometimes when I get an email from a librarian requesting help, the sender is not comfortable with the prospect of putting it on the blog for all you Unwinders to comment on.  There are obvious concerns about privacy and retaliation.

In this particular case, the email came from a group of librarians expressing concern about a new policy in their library.  Their concern is a fascinating one so I used my imagination in trying to figure out a way to get the kernel of their concern before you in a way in which they would feel comfortable.  This is the result:

The Place: The Strawberry Fields Public Library.  Strawberry Fields is a medium sized city (70,000) in the Midwest.  It is the hub of an agricultural area.

The Politics: Politically, Strawberry Fields is centered somewhere between the Tea Party and Moderate Republicanism.  Liberal Democrats are considered either commies, whackos, or simply misguided idealists. There is a strong strain of anti-government libertarianism within Strawberry Fields.

The Media: Strawberry Fields has one newspaper (“The Guardian”), three radio stations (1 evangelical Christian, 1 right wing talk, and 1 agricultural), and one government watchdog blog (“The Guard Dog”).

The Governance Structure: The Strawberry Fields Public Library is one of the twelve municipal departments under the administration of a city manager who reports directly to the Strawberry Fields City Council, a 7 member elected body.  Politically the members range from conservative to very conservative.  Although Strawberry Fields has weathered the recession better than most cities, the emphasis of the Council members has still been on fiscal frugality and low taxes.  Their efforts have been rewarded with a AAA bond rating (which has saved the city millions of dollars in financing costs) and a thriving commercial climate (a 500,000 square foot factory outlet shopping center is under construction).

The Library: The Strawberry Plains Public Library has managed to avoid any cuts during the recession.  Much of this has to do with the favorable local economic situation but much of it also has to do with the stewardship of  the Library Director.  She is a shrewd navigator of the local political waters.  Unlike most librarians, who are derisive of conservatism,  she knows how to play ball with the conservative politicians in Strawberry Fields.  At budget time she always emphasizes three things that are at the heart of the conservative agenda: 1) the library gives people the resources to pull themselves up by their own bootstraps, 2) the library supports families, and 3) the library has one of the finest Christian fiction collections in the entire nation.  As a result, the City Council’s support for the library has been consistently steady.

The Library Staff: There are 10 members of the staff with the MLS degree.  To varying degrees they feel that their director has sold her soul to the devil.  In order to placate the conservative City Council, you will not find any resources in the library supporting gay marriage or even gay sexuality, but you will find that an inordinately large percentage of the adult fiction budget is spent on the genre of “Christian fiction.”  Some of the librarians have expressed their concerns about institutional censorship to the director, but her response is that public libraries exist to serve their local community and that the collection reflects the Strawberry Plains community.  Her catch phrase is: “We support them; they support us.” End of dialogue.

The Immediate Issue:  A month ago, the local blog, “The Watch Dog,” ran a sting on the internet reading habits of  various city employees.  They made a FOI (Freedom of Information) request for the internet browsing logs of these employees.  These records revealed that city employees were spending an inordinate amount of time doing internet surfing.  In particular, this was during March Madness (the national collegiate basketball tournament) and the records revealed heavy viewing of various sports sites during the hours of the tournament.  There were other non-work related sites visited as well…Facebook, Amazon, Twitter, Craigs List, You Tube, and many others including pornography and gambling sites.  As a result, a number of employees were fired, the city manager was put on probation, and the City Council passed a series of draconian personnel rules regarding future punishments for “internet abuse.”

The Library Response: As you might expect, the library staff used two lines of defense to explain their highly diverse internet viewing: 1) the internet is a prime research and reference tool that is used to answer a wide variety of patron questions, and 2) since library employees share their work computers it would be impossible to pinpoint what employees viewed certain specific “objectionable” sites.  Based on this defense, no library employees were fired or disciplined as part of the sting.

The Specific Library Problem: The city manager, now under probation, last week implemented a strong set of administrative directives to end “internet abuse” during work time.  One of these directives made it a requirement for all city employees  to make a list of all internet sites visited during work hours and why and for how long the sites were visited.  These lists were to be submitted to the Human Resources Department at the end of each working week.  The lists would then be sent to the IT Department for random checks. No exceptions were made for the library staff.

The Library Staff Response: In a word the library’s professional staff, already frustrated with restrictive collection development practices, has reacted with outrage.  They feel that their professional integrity, right to privacy, and their patrons’ right to privacy have been violated by this administrative directive. Their outrage has been exacerbated by their inability to persuade their director to go to bat for them with the city manager and the city council.  Now they want to know what their options are.  These are the various options I can think of:

• Accept the directive and appreciate the fact that they have jobs in a well funded library.
• Send a collective letter of concern to the manager and council with signed names.
• Send a collective letter of concern to the manager and council without signed names.
• Threaten to unionize.
• Retain an attorney and sue the city.
• Contact the ALA Office of Intellectual Freedom for guidance and support.
• Ask the State Library to intervene on their behalf.
• Conduct a silent protest by using their own personal laptops and ithingies during work time.
• Other?

Note from Will: Many thanks to long time denizen of the Unwinders Tavern, Joe Schallan,  for this excellent post.  If you are interested in doing a guest post for the Unwinders Tavern simply send me an e-mail at wmanley7@att.net .  

I subscribe to Seth Godin’s blog, and in a recent post, he noted that “a significant byproduct of the connection revolution is that things that were private because they were difficult to measure will no longer be private.” He was commenting specifically on the information about individuals that companies can now obtain, archive, use for marketing, and sell to other companies.

Other observers have noted how willingly individuals in the online world give up their personal details. Often all a company has to do is ask.

In 1999 computer entrepreneur and billionaire Scott McNealy infamously said “You have zero privacy anyway. Get over it.” Though many took exception to what seemed to be his dismissive attitude toward privacy, many more noted that, well… he is probably right.

There is truth in what Godin and McNealy say. Companies, perhaps even more than government agencies, know an astonishing amount about us. And game us to get more. And then turn around and sell it.

It goes beyond data you may willingly give up. If you use Google and its applications, Google is working in the background to gather and store all kinds of information about you [Note from Will: this is really a scary link].

Where I live — Phoenix — property parcel and tax information, court case information, and recorded legal documents are freely available online, as they are in many jurisdictions around the country. Companies harvest the data in public records and resell it.

Given what both government and business are doing, it can truly be said that in the online world we are all naked. If we really do have zero privacy, I find it interesting that libraries have made a big deal about ensuring the privacy of patrons, even down to the level of wrapping holds in brown paper to discourage snooping among items on self-serve hold shelves.

I worked in a place that did that, and it was extraordinarily time-intensive, and we didn’t have enough volunteers to cope with it. We eventually moved to a system of opaque plastic bins. The patron’s hold was dropped into a bin so that it would be hidden, and a slip with the patron’s last name and the hold’s pull date was placed in a clear plastic pocket on the edge of the bin. This was still time and labor intensive, but less so than wrapping in brown paper. (We still had a problem with a few patrons methodically pulling items out of others’ bins to snoop on what they were reading. And any mixup of holds immediately created a customer service crisis and a ransacking of hundreds of bins, at great time and effort, to find the errant item.)

A number of our patrons thought we were being silly for even worrying about this and expending so much effort and stomach acid on it. We were told point-blank several times that we were wasting taxpayer money on the bins, plastic pockets, labels, and effort.

Our handling of patron holds became a case study in the unintended consequences of a library policy. Godin sees a world in which privacy is greatly reduced and in which we’ll know one another’s business to a degree heretofore unimagined. Other observers have not only asserted this but noted that few people will actually care about the loss of privacy. From that perspective, public libraries’ obsession with keeping reading behavior private seems quaint.

There’s a larger issue, of course, than the one of a particular library sinking thousands of hours into anonymizing holds. Do we really have a legal duty to do such things? (One reading of Arizona law says that we do.)

I have no doubt that maintaining the privacy of reading and web surfing is a core value of our profession and will remain so. In light of McNealy and Godin, however, I have to wonder if it is a value that is becoming irrelevant. Will our patrons even care? Has society moved beyond privacy? Are our efforts not only pointless but silly?

Perhaps an attraction of the public library in the future may be that it will be one of the last few places in which one can still have privacy. (Library realists will point out that even the library keeps patron records and server logs — presumably accessible through court order or ordinary hacking — and that our insurance of privacy is overrated.)

Me? I don’t like this brave new world. One writer’s remark that has resonated with me is that Google, Pipl, Facebook and their ilk have turned us into a nation of stalkers. And it isn’t just the nosy colleague from the next cubicle over. The search engine you use and the companies you do online business with are also stalking you. So are data miners and social media sites.

On the other hand, some say that Google, Pipl, and Facebook are your friends in a world of strangers, giving you the opportunity to vet a potential business partner, employee, or lover beforehand.

There are stories that when preindustrial people first encountered the camera and the images it produced, they felt violated — that the machine had opened a window to the soul and stolen it. What happens to us, and to our relationships to one another, when our souls are not only stolen but commoditized?

Perhaps there are some things that we shouldn’t get over.

5…4…3…2…1…Blast Off!

The library world airways are all atwitter again with ebook outrage.

The latest in a long string of bad ebook news is that Penguin is taking their library ebook ball home with them.  And last year we all thought that Harper Collins limitation of 26 circs per ebook was bad.  Now…it’s looking pretty darn good.  At least they’re playing ball with us.

In all this bad news there is some good news: we now know why publishers don’t like libraries lending out ebooks.  The answer is FRICTION!!!

You absolutely must read this article in American Libraries magazine: Ebook Talks: The Details.  It is one of the most revealing library articles I have ever read.  It describes what happened at the high level talks between the ALA top brass and representatives of the Big 6 Publishers on the subject of making ebooks available to libraries.  Here is the money paragraph:

“A key issue that arose in each meeting is the degree to which “friction” may decline in the ebook lending transaction as compared to lending print books. From the publisher viewpoint, this friction provides some measure of security. Borrowing a print book from a library involves a nontrivial amount of personal work that often involves two trips—one to pick up the book and one to return it. The online availability of ebooks alters this friction calculation, and publishers are concerned that the ready download-ability of library ebooks could have an adverse effect on sales.”

Here’s what I get out of this from the publishers’ perspective: friction is a good thing, which basically means that the harder we make it for library users to borrow an ebook the more publishers will support us. In other words publishers are in support of bad patron service…the badder the better!!!

This makes it easy.  All we have to do is create a list of how to bring more “friction” to our ebook services.  Here is my list:

• Make a 12 hour check out period for ebooks.  That should be enough time for really serious readers.
• Renewals will cost $5 per book for additional 12 hour periods.
• All ebook lending will  be done in the library.
• On-line checkouts of ebooks from mobile devices will be discontinued.
• All ebook collections will be cataloged solely in old card catalog drawers.
• The ebook service desk in the library will be labeled “EBOOK INFO FOR MORONS WHO BOUGHT EBOOK READERS WITH THE MISTAKEN NOTION THAT THEY WOULD GET HELP FROM THEIR LOCAL LIBRARY…HAHAHAHA”
• The ebook service desk will have a health warning: EBOOK READERS CAUSE BRAIN CANCER.
• The ebook service desk will have a button (like the ones at Lowes) that says: Push button for help.  And just like at Lowes no one will show up. Then after 15 minutes a hidden speaker in the desk will pour forth canned laughter.
• Patrons who check out ebooks will be prohibited from checking out glue and paper books. It’s only fair to those patrons who can’t afford ebooks and thus have to rely solely on glue and paper.
• We will petition ALA to come up with a new set of eREAD posters with a series of very rich celebrities reading ebooks with the underlying message: “IF YOU’RE RICH ENOUGH TO AFFORD AN EREADER YOU DON’T NEED TO MOOCH OFF YOUR LOCAL LIBRARY”

Your thoughts?  Is this enough “friction” for the publishers?

Let’s rewind to Friday’s post, shall we?

I put out a challenge to you to correctly complete a one question multiple choice test: Why did Will choose the header theme (an Xray of a golf ball) for this blog?

The correct answer was #5:  Will’s son, Dave, set up the blog for him.  Will didn’t really like the graphic that Dave chose, but Will didn’t know how to change it.

Congratulations to all of you who got the right answer.  You get free drinks all month.

What I found absolutely fascinating is how one Unwinder, Bill, went about answering the question.  He did research.  He went back to the earliest blog posts to find a clue, and he found one on Will Unwound #21: Hammerhead was Right…I am a Moron. This post basically tells the origin of how the blog was set up.

Bill’s approach intrigued me to the point where I am going to take a big risk and make a hypothesis that may end up offending everyone in the tavern – oldies and young’uns.

My guess is that Bill more or less comes from my age cohort (I may be completely wrong because I don’t know Bill), which means that he did reference before Google and the Internet ever existed (or as my 4 year old granddaughter puts it: too bad, Grampster, that you grew up when the Internet was in black and white).  Those stone age reference skills never leave you.  In those days you used all the creativity that you could muster to answer patron questions.  You had to be a veritable detective (which is why I think so many librarians are drawn to mysteries but that’s a whole ‘nother hypothesis!).

The hypothesis I am going to make today, however,  is that librarians who received their training (academic and on the job) in the pre internet stone age bring a level of creative resourcefulness to the reference desk that digital native librarians simply do not have.

If you recall, one of the answers in the multiple choice question about why I chose the Xray of a golf ball header made reference to the fact that the very first reference question I fielded as a paid, working librarian back in 1971 was “How many dimples are there on the face of a golf ball?”

Indeed, how many dimples are there on the face of a golf ball?  With Google it takes you less than 30 seconds to discover that the answer is 300 to 450 depending on the brand of ball.

But…how did I answer that question back in 1971?  First, I started by looking up “golf balls” in the Readers Guide to Periodical Literature (I think I went back through 10 volumes).  No luck.  Next stop…the golf section of the non-fiction book collection.  No luck.  Next stop…the downtown sporting goods store two blocks away from the library (yes, there were still mom and pop downtown sporting goods stores in 1971).  I bought a ball and hand counted the dimples.  To double check, I bought a different brand of ball and counted a different number.  A third ball resulted in yet a third number. Then I returned to the library, called the patron back, and gave him my findings.  He decided that he would buy the ball with the greatest number of dimples since he hypothesized that it would have superior aerodynamics.

My point: in the old days you had to get really, really creative.  I’m not saying that digital native librarians are not creative.  They are but in a different way and with a different type of training and a different set of skills.

Conclusion: we may be moving to a fully digital informational universe, but we’re not there yet and so we stone age people may still be of  some use.  Don’t sell us short.

Now…feel free to throw stones!