I tried to make allowances; English is not her first language. But then it wasn’t Vladimir Nabokov’s first language, either. Lolita may be a disgusting story, but he tells it with gorgeous prose. Perhaps you’re saying that his publisher provided a copy editor to catch and correct errors.

And that brings up a big problem with writing online. There are no copy editors. We writers must either proofread carefully ourselves or get someone else to do it for us. Now I confess that I don’t always proofread posts before they go live. When I read old posts, a typo or other mistake seems to leap off the page. I always correct it right away.

Typos and other word problems

Nowadays even the simplest word processor has a built-in spell checker. The first task of proofreading is fairly straightforward: look at all the places with red underlining.  The spell checker will mark everything that is not in its dictionary, including brand names and other things you may well have spelled correctly, but you should at least look carefully.

The next task of proofreading is less straightforward: looking for correctly spelled words that aren’t the ones you meant.

• The word processor’s auto-corrections that result in a completely wrong word choice
• Commonly misused words, such as there/their, its/it’s, that your brain knows how to use, but your fingers perhaps don’t.
• All words with apostrophes. Do they belong, or did you write something like, “Egg’s: half price while supply last’s”?
• Homonyms like sent/scent, summary/summery, magnet/magnate. They might seem as alike as to pees in a pot (oh! that’s supposed to be two peas in a pod, isn’t it?), but the wrong word distracts the reader from what you’re trying to convey.

Sentence problems

Microsoft Word and other sophisticated word processors flag grammatical errors as well. Again, the green underlining doesn’t mean that something is actually wrong with the sentence. You may intend to write a sentence fragment, especially in a list.

But it’s a place to start. Here are more things to look for:

• Overly long, complex sentences.
• Run-on sentences—independent clauses stitched together with too many coordinating conjunctions (and, but, or, yet) or worse yet, comma splices.
• Excessive use of passive voice.
• Excessive use of forms of “to be” even if the sentence isn’t passive. Think of a way to use a stronger, less flabby verb.

Punctuation

• Do you have commas wherever you need them, and nowhere else?
• Have you used colons and semicolons where you need them?
• How many exclamation marks, dashes, and ellipses can you simply delete?
• If you have an opening parenthesis or quotation mark, do you have a corresponding closing one?

Once you know what kinds of mistakes you’re most likely to make,  you can clean up a lot of mistakes in your article in much less time than it will take someone else to read it.

If you can work far enough ahead that you can wait for several days to proofread, so much the better. You are less likely to see what you intended to write even if your fingers and the auto-correction conspired to write something else. But that gets into issues of time management. Sorry. I can’t help you with that!

George [H. W.] Bush Library, Texas A&M University

For all the snarky humor about whether the new Bush library has anything but picture books, a presidential library isn’t a library in the normal sense of the term. Whatever books it has comprise only an insignificant part of its holdings. (President Bush has written a book, so his library certainly includes that one!)

Although they are called presidential libraries, they are more museum and archive than library. The Office of Presidential Libraries of the National Archives and Records Administration now oversees 13 presidential libraries.

The idea of a presidential library

During his second term, Franklin D. Roosevelt noticed that he and his staff had created a vast amount of material. He knew that some previous presidential papers had been lost, destroyed, ruined by poor storage, or even sold to private collectors for a profit.

He consulted with important historians. On their advice, he raised private funds to establish a permanent repository for all the various documentation of his time in office, then, in 1939 turned it over to federal government for the National Archives to operate.

Harry Truman decided to establish his own library in 1950. Congress passed the Presidential Libraries Act in 1955 to encourage each subsequent President to follow Roosevelt’s example. Herbert Hoover, the only living former President at the time, also established a presidential library.

At that time, the papers of a President were considered his personal property, but Presidential Records Act of 1978 established that all documentation of the constitutional, statutory, and ceremonial duties of the President is the property of the Federal Government.  The Presidential Libraries Act of 1986 further codifies the private endowments that partially offset the cost of maintaining the libraries.

Other acts of Congress and executive orders also govern presidential libraries. For example, President Clinton issued Executive Order 12958, which requires a review of classified material more than 25 years old.

Besides legislation directly related to preservation of presidential documents, the Freedom of Information Act established the right of any person to request access to documents of any federal agency, which, of course, includes the National Archives.

The Library of Congress houses many pre-Hoover collections, but others are widely dispersed among other libraries, historical societies, and private collections.

The contents and functions of presidential libraries

Modern presidential libraries provide access both for the curiosity of visitors and as a resource for serious historical research. Compiling and preserving that material presents great challenges, both in terms of the sheer volume of material and the variety of media that it represents.

Our earliest Presidents mostly left papers, either printed or in manuscript, and various artifacts (their desk, inkwell, official portraits, etc.). Scholars also need newspaper articles and other writings by people other than the President and his advisors.

By Lincoln’s time, photographs became an important kind of documentation. Photography represents new challenges, both for collection, preservation, and maintenance. Already, by the time of the Hoover administration, recordings of speeches had been added to the mix. Now Presidential libraries also collect and maintain video recordings, phone conversations, emails, web pages, and presence on social media.

Presidential libraries exist not to glorify a particular President, but to provide full documentation of his time in office. According to Mark Updegrove, director of the LBJ library, “It is not up to us to direct history and tell people what to think, but we do want them to know what he did and how it impacts your life.  What you think about that is up to you,”

Johnson’s library includes a life-like animatron of President Johnson that greets visitors. It also includes more than 640 hours of recorded telephone conversations.

Warren Finch, director of the George [Herbert Walker] Bush library, notes, “We feel that is one of our key missions in our museums and educational programs is to talk about civics, how the US constitution works, how the government works in practice,”

The new George W. Bush Library and Museum collection comprises

• More than 70 million pages of textual materials from the Bush presidency
• Official records from Bush’s service as Governor of Texas
• Archived White House website
• 375,000 still photographs
• 46,000 audio and video tapes
• 80 terabytes of electronic records, including almost 4 million photographs, both from the White House Photo Archive and a September 11, 2001 photo gallery. Other electronic records include more than 200 million email messages sent from or received by the White House email system, material from shared network drives used by various White House offices, and all records related to scheduling and appointments.
• Artifacts, including 43,000 gifts given to President and Mrs. Bush both by American citizens and foreigners, such as heads of state.

Archiving of Bush’s White House records began as soon as he left office. It has taken this long to process them and to build a museum and library to house and display them. According to the Freedom of Information Act, non-classified material will be ready for public inspection after January 20, 2014.

Sources:
Learn about the Presidential Libraries / National Archives
US Presidential Libraries Contribute to Research, Education / Voice of America
George W. Bush Presidential Library and Museum
Photo credit: Public domain, from Wikimedia Commons

It almost seems a stretch to call most people’s online behavior “reading” at all. They wander throughout the Internet searching for something in particular. They stop to read only when they find it.

Perhaps they want simple facts. Beyond just facts, people look for explanations of unfamiliar topics. They look for reviews of products or movies or books. They look for controversy.

Foraging

Foraging baboons

Whatever any of us look for, we’re seldom sure what it is when we start out.  So we search. We hunt. We sniff around until we find it. Then when we find a source of what we want, we raid it. We gorge ourselves on the value we have discovered.

In other words, we forage, just like medieval armies or wild animals looking for food. We search high and low, quickly abandoning places where we don’t immediately find what we want.

I just said that most people’s online behavior hardly counts as “reading,” but foraging behavior in general isn’t quite like having a meal, either. Real reading, like eating, begins once foraging has located the feast.

Technology writer Nicolas Carr used a different metaphor when he observed, “Once I was a scuba diver in a sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a jet ski.”

In print, Carr was the scuba diver. The online environment practically forces people into the jet ski mode. The Internet is too recent for us to know its long-term impact.

So far, no one treats print so superficially, unless perhaps they’re just looking up something in a dictionary. What makes the online environment different?

The linearity of reading a book or article in print hardly allows for instant gratification. Hypertext, on the other hand, promises instant gratification at the end of every link. Every browser has a back button for times when the promise fails.

For all the advancements in technology, reading online tires our eyes more than reading print does. On the other hand, it’s hard to stop.  If finding an answer requires leafing through half a dozen books, we might give up and decide we don’t care much.

Online, we find it easier to keep clicking than to get off the chair. As difficult and tiring as it can be, the online environment has become quite addictive.

It’s almost as if the Internet has rewired the human brain. And that shouldn’t be surprising. Societies of hunters and gatherers are seldom literate. The development of reading soon began to detract from human memory. Why remember what you can easily look up?

What the Internet has done to the human brain is nothing that hasn’t happened somehow or another many times before. It’s simply a sign on human adaptability.

What online reading means for online writers

Perhaps the most difficult task for any Internet writer is to understand how differently the “print mind” and the “digital mind” operate. Here are a few observations to keep in mind.

Research indicates that people looking at a web site for the first time will begin by scanning it. They want to decide whether it’s worth reading before they commit much time to it.

I assume everyone has learned something about the difference between formal writing and informal writing in English classes somewhere. Most strictly informational writing in the print world is formal.

Scholarly writing in particular has for centuries used “big” words that have a very precise meaning. It has likewise used long sentences with multiple clauses and phrases.

Scholarly sentence structure has the virtue of being very precise in its meaning. It also requires readers to read slowly and analytically. Once I got to college I was glad my 7th-grade English teacher had taught us how to diagram sentences. One of my professors assigned a book with only a few very long, complex sentences per page.

Even with shorter sentences, people online lack the patience to read the kinds of paragraphs we learned to write in school. Each paragraph for a school paper had to have a subject stated in a thesis statement and substantiated by other points. That meant it had to be at least four or five sentences long.

When I was writing for publication in academic journals, I wrote long sentences and paragraphs. I don’t write online that way. I want people to read what I write!

So I’m providing serious content using informal writing. If I write a paragraph that takes more than five lines (not five sentences), I look for a logical place to divide it.

Online readers’ habit of scanning also requires writers to provide additional signposts. Some involve hypertext. Otherwise, online signposts simply make greater use of certain print techniques.

From grade school through college, students hardly ever write anything that requires section headings and subheadings. Graduate level term papers don’t often need them, either. In print, it’s a technique reserved for theses, dissertations, books, and long journal articles.

Even a 600-word blog post needs headings, bullet points, and other typographical ways to make it easy for visitors to scan. The post might have exactly the information visitors want, but they’ll leave if they don’t notice it in a few seconds.

Photo sources unknown

First, the numbers

Library parking deck in Kansas City

The Pew questionnaire begins with some very general questions about the respondents’ communities, their access to the Internet, and their book-reading habits. The first question directly related to libraries asks about the importance of public libraries, and explicitly excludes school or university libraries.

Are libraries [very important / somewhat important / not too important/ not at all important] to [you and your family / your community as a whole]? 46% of respondents answered that the libraries are very important, and 30% said somewhat important to themselves and their families.

Regarding their community as a whole, those numbers were 63% and 28% respectively. In other words, 76% considered libraries personally important as opposed to 91% who considered them important to the community.

Women value libraries more than men. Hispanics value them more than either non-Hispanic whites or blacks. Middle-aged respondents value them more than either the youngest or oldest ones.

Parents of minor children consider them more important to themselves and their families than non-parents, but not any more important to the community.

On the other hand, it appears that household income, educational attainment, and where people live (urban, suburban, or rural communities) result in little significant difference.

Families making less than $30,000 per year value libraries more (on a personal level) than three higher income brackets. Otherwise responses that differ from the basic 76% / 91% come within the margin of error.

Personal experience with the library

Circulation desk at Newburyport Public Library

Overall, 84% of respondents report having visited a public library or bookmobile at some time in their lives. Women have done so noticeably more than men. Whites are more likely than blacks to have patronized the library in person, and blacks considerably more likely than Hispanics.

Other significant demographics more likely than others to have used public libraries in person include those with at least some college education, people younger than 50, and those with higher household incomes.

In contrast, only 53% of us have set foot in either a public library building or bookmobile in the past year. Fewer than half of men, Hispanics, those 65 and older, those with no education past high school, or who are not parents of minors have done so.

On the other hand, more than 60% of 16-17-year-olds, parents of minors, and people with some post-college education have visited the library or bookmobile in person over the last year.

Between 5 and 11 percent of us visit the library at least weekly, and 18-33% at least monthly. The only parts of the demographic breakdown that stands out to me are that the higher the household income, the less likely someone is to visit the library every week. And somewhat less striking, somewhat more non-parents visit every week than parents.

I also notice that among age groups, those 65 and older (40%) and 18-29 (57%) are the least likely to have used the library in the past year. My own personal experience helps explain the latter age group.

I was in college and graduate school during those years. I practically lived at the university library, but my use of the public library was the lowest of my life. This poll excludes the use of academic libraries. 58% of people with “some college” visited public libraries in the past year, but that group surely includes older people who attended college and dropped out.

Memories

Bookmobile. Monterey (California) Public Library

The questionnaire asked people for their memories of growing up. Did they use the public library as a child? Do they remember anyone else in their family using the library?

One would think that the experience of using or not using the library in childhood would be a good predictor of whether a person will use it in adulthood. Overall, 77% of respondents recall family members using the library. In contrast, 84% have personally used the library.

There is some correlation between the demographic breakdown in this question and some of the previous ones, but it seems to me that the most important aspect of this question is its reliance on memory.

I personally have some vivid memories. My mother was volunteer cataloger for both church and school libraries and did her work at the dining room table. My father took me to the university library to gather information for school papers as early as 8th grade. But those two memories would not count for this poll.

Once, when I was no older than junior high school, I searched high and low for a book that was due at the public library. I couldn’t find it, and finally they made me pay for it. Over a year later, I found it in my little sister’s room. It seems to me that I wondered why I hadn’t looked there in the first place.

I “sold it back” to the library as soon as I could. That memory would qualify for the poll! But on the whole, I have forgotten large parts of the ordinary, day-to-day reality of my childhood. I think it was nearly 20 years ago when I recognized that 2nd grade is nearly a complete blank.

So 84% of us report having been to a public library at some time in our lives and only 77% of us remember either ourselves or family members using it in our childhood. In some cases, I hope, people who never went to the library as a kid discovered it as a grownup.

In most cases, simple forgetfulness of childhood details account for that 7% gap. In fact, I’ll bet that some of the 16% who report not having ever used a public library actually did some time when they were in school. But they just don’t remember any more and haven’t been back since.

Source: Part 1: The role of libraries in people’s lives and communities / Pew Internet Libraries
Photo credits:
Parking deck. Some rights reserved by Jonathan Moreau
Circulation desk. Some rights reserved by Newburyport Public Library
Bookmobile. Some rights reserved by Monterey Public Library.

Since the dawn of the digital age, tangible books have been slowly disappearing. Remember those books that you hold in your hand, with pages that crinkle a little when you turn them, that smell slightly old and musty and … intelligent? Kindles and iPads and even audio books have started to replace our familiar, old hard-covered, yellow-paged friends.

But for those of us who still cling to our books and feel a certain amount of satisfaction in perusing the many different titles in all their unique sizes, shapes and colors can rejoice! The web is full of unique and colorful ways to display your collection. Check out these ideas for using home decor to showcase your personal library.

Tree-themed Bookshelves

What could be more appropriate than paying homage to the tree, the source of paper, when it comes to storing books? Take a look at some of these tree-inspired bookshelves. Ranging from whimsical to modern to downright funky, these shelves store books right on their branches. You can purchase a tree bookshelf or take on the challenge of building your own.

Fireplace Storage

No book burning here! This suggestion for showcasing books is great for those with unused fireplaces. It’s a visually striking way to show off a great collection of tomes.

Ceiling Border

Tear down that outdated wallpaper border near the ceiling and replace it with books! A bookshelf that lines the perimeter of the room is easy to install and makes efficient use of space that often gets overlooked. This technique is especially useful for smaller homes and apartments where storage space is at a premium.

Framed Bookshelves

If you’re hankering for a DIY project, try figuring out how to make these fabulous framed bookshelves a reality.

Ladder Bookcase

Looking for a unique spin on a traditional wall bookcase? Try stacking your books on a decorative or rustic ladder that leans against the wall. Ladder bookcases can be purchased or created from repurposed ladders for a more vintage look.

Hanging Books

Floating bookshelves such as these are pretty cool, but you can take is a step further with hanging books and really liven things up.

It may seem cruel at first, but take one look at this unusual book rack we saw on Etsy and you’ll surely agree: hanging books are enchantingly quaint. Another hanging book arrangement idea uses traditional bookshelves with a unique twist.

Stair Storage

Don’t have any bookshelves on hand? Not to worry — the odds are that your home has a built-in bookshelf that just has yet to be realized: your staircase! Stack books off to the side against the wall, where they won’t be walking hazards but will be on display to anyone who passes by.

Repurposed China Hutch

If you have a china hutch but are ready to get rid of Grandma’s china, think twice before selling off the hutch at the same time. A china cabinet can be repurposed into great place to show off your book collection. Just make sure to think of an explanation before Grandma comes over for a visit.

Just for Fun

These waves of shelves are a breathtaking way to display the treasures that carry you over paths and journeys. Customize them as far as is necessary to fit your very own nooks and crannies in the places you snuggle into.

Paul Moore is often found pondering the intricacies of home presentation and decor, working both in real estate and in corporate housing with Bakken Residence Suites.

Images are available through a Creative Commons license. From top to bottom, they are:

http://www.bigstockphoto.com

Wax cylinder (Edison)

The U.S. Constitution empowers Congress “To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.” In 1976, Congress set the limit at 75 years or the life of the author plus 50 years. In 1998, it extended both terms by 20 years.

At least that’s true for most of what comes under the copyright law. For some reason, sound recordings do not fall under the federal copyright law. Instead, they fall under, and are crushed by the weight of a tangle of federal and state regulations that have the effect of preventing them from ever entering the public domain.

Public domain simply means a body of works that are not subject to copyright laws. Therefore anyone is free to publish them or otherwise use them without having to obtain anyone’s permission or pay anyone for the privilege.

Copyright law for nearly everything

By 1998, any print materials (including movies, which are essentially printed on film) published before 1923 had entered the public domain. Some works published between 1923 and 1977 were also in the public domain if they had either been issued without a © symbol or their copyright had not been renewed after the end of the initial 28-year term specified under the old copyright law.

The 1998 legislation has the effect of preventing anything else from entering the public domain until 2018. And if business interests can persuade Congress to grant another extension before then, it will take even longer before anything enters public domain.

In some cases, no record exists of whether a particular work was ever copyrighted. These are called “orphan works.” It’s not like it’s illegal to use them as if they were in the public domain, but there is an obvious risk. Someone might own the copyright, object to the use, and easily sue for damages.

Most people find copyright law and what it allows them to do confusing enough. As I said, sound recordings have been left out.

Sound recordings

Closeup of the grooves on a vinyl record

According to a report issued by the National Recording Preservation Board of the Library of Congress in 2010: “The effective term of copyright protection for even the oldest U.S. recordings, dating from the late 19th century, will not end until the year 2067 at the earliest.… Thus, a published U.S. sound recording created in 1890 will not enter the public domain until 177 years after its creation, constituting a term of rights protection 82 years longer than that of all other forms of audio visual works made for hire.”

Here’s what it means:

• Recording companies secured copyrights to the recordings they made. Many older companies no longer exist, but the copyrights have passed on to successor companies.
• Recording companies may reissue any older recording they want to.
• If a recording company does not care to release its older recordings, they can and do prevent anyone else from doing so.

Preservation issues

Reel to reel tape deck. 1960 advertisement

The technology of preserving writing with ink on paper is older than the printing press. One needs only to look at the writing in order to be able to read it. If the paper tears or otherwise becomes damaged, there are time-honored methods of repairing and preserving it.

Sound recordings, on the other hand, require some kind of machine as a “mediator” between the recording and the listener. Sound recordings have existed in a wide variety of forms, including but not limited to

• Wax cylinders
• Wax discs
• Vinyl discs—with much narrower grooves than wax recordings
• Magnetic tape
• Compact discs
• MP3 files

Each of these forms requires different machines to play them back. In fact, magnetic tape has existed as reel-to-reel tape, cassette tape, and 8-tracks. Fixing a damaged recording is much more difficult than repairing torn paper. It might not be possible at all. The playback machine must also be kept in good repair.

The best way to preserve a sound recording is not to keep the original recording medium in good repair. It is to copy it to a newer technology. Enrico Caruso’s recordings, first issued on wax at a time when the cylinder and the disc were engaged in the first of many recording format wars. They have been reissued on every subsequent technology.

We can listen to Caruso’s recordings today because RCA, the copyright owner, can still profit from them. The vast majority of recordings are not commercially worth reissuing on a new technology.

Libraries have taken on responsibility for preserving our cultural heritage and making it widely available. Except that the current copyright tangle absolutely prohibits American libraries from preserving old sound recordings and making them widely available.

According to European copyright law, on the other hand, sound recordings enter the public domain 50 years after they were first issued. European companies can reissue any recordings issued before 1963 that they want to. They just can’t sell them here.

Source: Copyright Protection the Serves to Destroy / Wall Street Journal, March 15, 2013

Photo credits: Public domain, from Wikimedia Commons, except

Reel-to-reel tape player ad. Some rights reserved by Nesster.

Federal Trade Commission

The FTC’s Consumer Information page has separate tabs for information on

• Money & Credit
• Homes & Mortgages
• Health & Fitness
• Jobs & Making Money
• Privacy & Identity

It also offers a video/media library. There you’ll find not only videos, but audio tips and games. Quite a bit of the content deals with scams and consumer fraud, but the library includes tips on such things as saving money on gas, understanding how to understand “lumens” when buying light bulbs, and how to read bills.

Besides finding information on the site, you can take action: file a consumer complaint, register for do not call, get a free credit report, etc.

Financial Literacy and Education Commission

Before I checked out MyMoney.gov I was not aware that such a commission existed. The site itself is very well organized. It collects and categorizes information from other government agencies.

You can find, for example, a great deal of information about scams and consumer fraud from the FTC site above, but at MyMoney.gov, you can also find links to the General Services Administration, the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, the Department of the Treasury, and more.

In part, the site is designed around life events, with sections devoted to

• Birth/adoption of a child
• Going to collect
• Marriage/divorce/partners
• Home ownership
• Starting/losing a job
• Starting/buying a business
• Planning for retirement/Retiring
• Death of a family member
• Natural disasters and unexpected events

It also offers helpful calculators, worksheets, and checklists to help with various aspects of money management.

Consumer Financial Protection Bureau

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s site exists not so much to provide information as a place to get assistance. You can indeed read the reports, bulletins, and other information the bureau has published, but more than that, it is a place to file a complaint, tell your story (good or bad) about experiences, and pay for college.

The page for filing complaints enables consumers to deal with very specific issues:

• Bank account or service
• Credit card
• Credit reporting
• Money transfer
• Mortgage
• Student loan
• Vehicle or consumer loan

There, you can not only submit a complaint, but also track its progress through the system. Meanwhile, information consumers supply to the bureau helps it fine tune its procedures and improve its services.

At first glance, libraries don’t seem to have much to do with the housing crisis. At second glance, people who see their homes slipping away have no idea where to turn for information. Providing information is a core library function. Building community is another.

The problem

The housing crisis that got started in 2006 affected housing prices all over the country, but not equally. After having fewer than 6,000 annual defaults on mortgages for years, San Diego County saw more than 10,000 in 2006. The number grew to 38,000 by 2009. It was one of the hardest hit areas in the country.

The Housing Opportunities Collaborative (HOC), a non-profit organization with branches in five Southern California counties, began to offer free workshops that brought together credit counselors, housing counselors, realtors, and a variety of attorneys who specialized in bankruptcy, real estate, and tax law.

The suddenness and size of the crisis presented numerous problems for HOC. One of them concerned where to hold meetings. They needed a venue that the public would trust. After all, lots of hucksters hold seminars in a crisis, pitching products and services that might not be necessary or even be nothing more than a scam.

How the library helps

Susan Moore, who had just started a new job at the SDCL, saw the need and had no clear idea what she or the library could do about it. The library’s director encouraged her to look for a solution, even though it seemed not to be a typical library responsibility and even though the library faced steep budget cuts of its own.

Soon enough, Moore and the HOC found each other. Libraries have meeting rooms with the infrastructure necessary for both seminar sessions and private consultations. Libraries enjoy great credibility in the communities they serve. HOC for its part made sure that its volunteer professionals did not solicit business or even hand out cards.

Churches and other community groups would have also been comfortably neutral places for meetings, but SDCL has 33 branches. Besides fully equipped meeting rooms, it offered HOC the opportunity to deal with one contact at the library as opposed to lots of individuals in charge of lots of different organizations.

Another advantage of using the library soon became apparent. Many people facing foreclosure did not want their neighbors to suspect they had a problem. Meetings intended to serve a specific community turned out to be poorly attended.

In terms of area, San Diego County is one of the largest in the country. It stretches from the Mexican border north to the Fallbrook Branch, a driving distance of more than three hours.

I used to live there, and it’s an area where drivers don’t care much about long distances. It’s fairly easy to find addresses in unfamiliar neighborhoods, ideal for people who want to attend a meeting and not run into people they know.

Why should people in other parts of the country care about the partnership between SDCL and HOC? It shows a lot about how libraries operate and how librarians think:

• Librarians want to provide accurate, useful information—even if it can’t be found in traditional library information sources.
• Libraries frequently enter into partnerships with other local agencies, if only to provide meeting space.
• Libraries seek to offer special help to populations with special needs—in this case, people facing foreclosure, but also entrepreneurs, the unemployed, handicapped, immigrants, minority groups, the technically challenged, and much more.
• Libraries are not so much collections of information or entertainment as they are collections of services for their constituencies.

Source: Libraries Help Homeowners Fight Foreclosure / Deniz Koray in American Libraries
Photo credit: Some rights reserved by Allan Ferguson.

New technology and business

Audio cassettes made it possible for the general public to buy or rent movies to watch at home. Two formats clashed for market domination until, ultimately, VHS won its temporary victory over Betamax.

Everyone who had placed their bets on Betamax now had obsolete equipment and had to go out and buy something else in order to keep watching the latest releases. Business was great for companies that sold VCRs and other equipment that used VHS.

Blockbuster and other companies quickly cashed in on the new ability to watch movies at home. After all, not everyone wanted to buy their own copies unless it was a movie they knew they would watch many times.

With the invention of DVDs, the public quickly turned away from cassettes. They were less bulky. The picture and sound were better. No one had to fuss with rewinding them. In some ways, Blu-ray is even better, although it has never threatened the DVD format.

The new technology was a boon to manufacturers. Blockbuster et al. simply switched their holdings from cassettes to DVDs/Blu-ray and didn’t miss a beat. That is, until Redbox and Netflix offered more convenient delivery systems.

Now, cloud storage and streaming services have begun to catch on. Sales and rentals of any kind of disc are declining rapidly. They will probably disappear eventually.

New technology and libraries

Once libraries decided they were no longer only about printed materials, they have collected audiovisual materials in the latest available technologies. As technologies have changed, many libraries have kept much of the older material and the equipment necessary to play it.

Why? Not everything available on videocassette ever got transferred to DVD. Not everything issued on DVD will ever be available through the newer technologies, either. Few enough people want them for them to be commercially viable to transfer to new technology. Enough people want them for them to belong in at least some library collections.

So far, therefore, introduction of new technologies have been expensive both in terms of purchasing new equipment and formats and training staff to use them. They have not had significant impact on ordinary library services and procedures. Whether patrons take out videocassettes or discs, it counts toward the library’s circulation statistics.

As physical objects become obsolete, libraries will still offer the latest technologies to their patrons, but circulation is already taking a hit. Eventually, libraries and the governments or other institutions that fund them will have to agree on a new way to track the effectiveness and usefulness of library services.

Why circulation matters

Measurement of how a library is used and what it does naturally rely on counting things. Libraries keep counts of the number of people who walk in the door or who call on the phone. They count and itemize everything that patrons borrow, including the number of DVDs.

With the catalog, databases, and other information available through the library’s web site, it is no longer necessary for patrons to go to the library physically or call on the phone in order to use library services. Of course, the invention of the telephone caused a similar problem more than a century ago. There are ways to measure the number of people who use the library via computer.

Similarly, when patrons download movies (or other electronic media) using library facilities or view them while in the library, it would seem that that should be covered by statistics.

The situation probably varies from place to place, but Massachusetts does not allow its public libraries to count the use of licensed content in its circulation statistics. The library does not own it. If a contract is canceled, libraries can no longer make that content available.

That makes no sense to me. If a library buys something and then years later weeds it from the collection, patrons no longer have access to that, either. But during the time the library had it, no one questions counting how often it gets used. The fact that no one has looked at it for years, if ever, is one of the factors that justifies getting rid of it in the first place.

But as a top officer in the Pentagon once told an irate colleague of my father, “Aw hell, Doc. It don’t gotta make sense. It’s policy.”

For the short and middle term, it looks like library circulation will not suffer greatly from streaming movies as much as the rental stores do. On the other hand, library administrators are already looking for other measurements of how well they serve the public besides circulation.

Source: “Media Spotlight: DVD Circ Hold Steady, For Now” by Matt Enis, The Digital Shift.
Photo credits:
DVD display. Some rights reserved by Monterrey Public Library.
Others. Source unknown.

In the days when most immigrants arrived by ocean, they arrived in major ports and tended to stay there. If very many of a particular group of immigrants left the port of entry, they usually went to other major cities. Now, the port of entry is likely to be any city large enough to have an airport. Even smaller cities find themselves home to multiple immigrant populations.

Projects in small cities

My home town of Greensboro, North Carolina, for example has a significant concentration of Montagnards from Vietnam. I can’t easily find a list of other large ethnic groups, but I do find a website for the local office of Church World Service, which offers its services in several languages: Arabic, Burmese, English, French, Serbo-Croatian, and Spanish.

Immigrants in Boise and Twin Falls, Idaho speak Karen, Russian, and Hindi among other languages. The Idaho Commission for Libraries and the Idaho Office for Refugees have teamed up to find ways to tackle both the English language and computer and internet literacy challenges at once.

As an article in American Libraries reports, they obtained a grant to train 12 immigrants, presumably with adequate command of English, not only to use computers, but to train newer refugees from their homelands their native languages. They were trained to pass on digital literacy skills first in using a computer at all, and then using the internet in order to find

• online government services
• information about family and health
• educational opportunities
• jobs

The project began with the modest goal of reaching 200 people in six months. In fact, the trainers had reached 914 people in 212 coaching sessions within three months.

Although one goal of the project was to present the library as a place for learning digital literacy and using computers, organizers expected training sessions to take place in a variety of places. They hoped that at least 25% would be given in libraries. In fact, trainers chose library meeting rooms and computer labs for 71% of the training sessions.

This model should be fairly easy to replicate in other states and cities. Although the article mentions no other comparable programs, they probably exist.

Projects in larger cities

Probably no one is surprised that Minneapolis, a major American city, has a large and varied immigrant program. It had a large concentration of Scandinavian immigrants a hundred years ago. When the Franklin branch of the Hennepin County Library system opened in 1914, a third of its collection was in foreign languages, including not only Norwegian and Swedish, but also Yiddish.

The Franklin Learning Center opened in 1988 primarily to help US-born patrons study for the GED, but its mission expanded to teach English to immigrants from every inhabited continent. Computer skills have since become an important part of the center’s educational efforts—especially after the state announced that GED testing will be offered only on computers beginning in 2014.

The same American Libraries article describes computer literacy efforts of the Franklin Learning, especially outreach to Hmong immigrants originally from China, Laos, Thailand, and Vietnam.

Hmong culture presents special problems to teaching digital literacy. Many other ethnic groups (including US-born people) lack such basic skills as knowing what to do with the mouse. Most immigrant groups must struggle to learn English. Many Hmong arrive without any ability to read or write at all, because the several dialects of the language have not been written down until quite recently.

That said, staff at Franklin approach the problem much the same way the Idaho libraries do. One Hmong-speaking staff member serves a liaison to the community to determine its needs, recruit volunteer trainers, and monitor the progress of the classes they teach. The liaison’s duties include attending parent-teacher meetings at school and other community events to help families adjust to their new home as quickly and painlessly as possible.

Especially to librarians reading this post: an article that appeared in American Libraries a couple of months ago spoke to the need for librarians to write for “civilians,” not just other librarians. So far as I have been able to find, Reading, Writing, Research is the only blog written by a librarian for “civilians.” I would be happy to accept guest posts from other librarians!

Source: “New Americans and the Digital Literacy Gap,” American Libraries
Photo credit: Some rights reserved by Technology & Social Change