Week 5 readings

I apologize for the lack of weeks three and four reading blogs absence. They will be up shortly

Byrne, David S.(2010) 'Access to Online Local Government Public Records: The Privacy Paradox', Legal
Reference Services Quarterly, 29: 1, 1 — 21

I loved the readability of this article, and how close it is to some of the work I have done, and am doing now. The history of science department had a flood in their storage room this summer, and because of it they lost three boxes of records. This led the newly appointed chair to realize that nobody had touched their records (or thrown anything away) going back to the inception of the program in 1947. She rightly thought that this would upset those in authority, if they learned of it, and so I was hired to figure out what they ought to have been doing all along, and then quietly do it. So started a month of learning what documents count as public records and what is supposed to be done with them, and then going through what they have in order to dispose of it properly.

The stuff I found ranged from the eye gougingly mundane to the hilariously fascinating (a 1970s era professor defending his unorthodox hippie grading rubric to an unamused 1950s era department chair). I also have gone through the student records of about 100 people, found 10 social security numbers, and read some extremely personal correspondence. Most of these documents are going to Archives, but eventually they will be digitized, and freely available to any who are curious.

Avoiding giving away very important personal data is a scary reality in this case, but I was heartened by the case studies which were grave, but not as bleak as they might be.

My parents are currently dealing with a fraud case in which someone has co-opted their phone number and address. To what purpose is not yet clear, but the implications might be chilling.

All of the articles this week deal with the right to privacy, and how murky the legal surroundings are on every front for this issue. I was slightly aghast at some of the implications with the tissue issues brought up by the Charo article. While my personal opinions on the use of fetal tissue to create stem cell lines is uninformedly pro, the article also gave me pause with how much say is given up when such a donation is given.. One of my favorite science fiction series deals with a tissue sample is stolen from the protagonist and a clone grown from it becomes a major character- not the soulless abomination in the eyes of god that some pundits of the issue would have you believe be the outcome, but a separate person, and by law, the protagonists baby brother. (The Vorkosigan Saga)

We relinquish our right to to the privacy of our waste, be it bodily or otherwise, when we abandon it- leaving it to be picked up by the garbage men, or in the toilet, but if you lost a diamond ring down the drain, and it was recovered at the sewage plant, would they allow you to reclaim it? I think (tho the chances would be slim) that they would. Is the biological wealth of our tissue different? This most bugged me with the University of Washington's miserly reluctance to have the prostate tissue samples leave their university with the professor who collected them.

The right to privacy is an important one for librarians to pay especial attention to, especially for the reason you (Alan) mentioned in class, that sooner or later we are all health librarians, we are all privy to the worries, problems and needs of our patrons.

Assignment 1 - State of the Libraries: Montana

Almost all of the articles I found to discuss the state of libraries in Montana could describe any state. My favorite bit of local culture that I could winkle was that any discussion of new services or budgetary considerations was very careful to lay out the exact amount required, even down to cost per household.

Montana has a state holiday to celebrate the library. This is cool, and unfair. School libraries all over Montana are in trouble though. Budget cuts mean that the school district featured in the article no longer has sufficient staff for their elementary schools libraries to be accredited or even open for the entire school week. Access for school children is much harder outside of classes scheduled in the library, which everyone agrees is the wrong message to send to kids. In an older article I found about Butte elementary schools, they were forced to terminate all of their “library monitors” leaving all libraries staffed by a licensed teacher split half time between library duties and being the technology teacher. Much of the informal and personally motivated access to the library is cut off by the budget cuts.

Also near Butte, the public library has tried to increase access and convenience by setting up a pickup and drop off-site in a grocery store on the opposite end of town. I liked this concept especially as it is a good illustration of the shift in attitudes towards the goals of librarians, from the 19^th century perception that the collection is paramount to clearly putting the patron and the patron needs first. A remote site to pick up ones holds also would not be possible without the digital presence of a library, allowing for remote and asynchronous use of the library.

I found a few articles about the main library on the University of Montana- Missoula campus, but the vast majority of them were on events at the library, and not about the library itself. In the United Kingdom, bars or taverns are called pubs, which is short for ‘public house,’ and when I lived there I was struck by how much communal living goes on in them. Even the knitting club met in the pub. Perhaps because of the stigma of establishments that serve alcohol, in the United States, that role is very often filled by the library. My favorite Montanan example of this was the Strong Women Project exhibit, although there were dozens of events to choose from. The Strong Women Project is such local celebration of the women in the community, and in a space devoted to community, I was delighted at the idea, and that many of the images were available online. The picture at the top is of one such strong woman.

The Maureen and Mike Mansfield library on the University of Montana- Missoula also played host to a fracas this summer, for the only article I could find that dealt with the business of the library. A community user was arrested for disorderly conduct stemming from trying to incite other in the library to protest the new policy of limiting access to the majority of library computers by requiring a student log- in. Community use is still allowed on eight of the hundred or so computers, but only for hour- long stints, when prior to this policy change some community patrons would use the academic library’s computers for six to eight hour stretches. The change was made to allow students access to new digital resources that were not available to the public due to licensing agreements. When I first started this article I was worried that the librarians at Mansfield Library weren’t upholding what Marilyn Johnson called the ideal of little‘d’ democracy, in that access was being denied or limited. Reading further assured me that this was not the case.

When I first compiled these articles, initially grateful that they all fit within the requirements of the assignment, I was at a loss as to how to tie them together with a concept or theme of this class, as the purview, audience, and duties of each of these library types are so different. But as I read my summaries, I realized that they are all about issues of information access through the catalyst that is the library. For the Public library in Silver Bow, it’s a celebration of increasing access. For the elementary schools in the north western part of Montana, it’s about bemoaning a sharp decrease in access, both to the library facility and to a school librarian’s time for each student. For Mansfield Library in Missoula, it’s differentiating between the services meant for the community they serve, the university, and the citizenry at large.

http://www.dailyinterlake.com/news/local_montana/article_71ebeee2-c12e-11df-b922-001cc4c03286.html

http://ezproxy.library.wisc.edu/login?url=http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=n5h&AN=2W61170567323&site=ehost-live

http://ezproxy.library.wisc.edu/login?url=http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=n5h&AN=2W62410805144&site=ehost-live

http://missoulian.com/entertainment/arts-and-theatre/article_f48f32fa-3367-11df-a7a3-001cc4c002e0.html

http://missoulian.com/news/state-and-regional/article_a765bc7f-687c-5482-9dfb-38af3ceeb2bc.html

pans narrans- Week 2 readings

In The Science of Discworld II: the Globe Terry Pratchett, Ian Stewart and Jack Cohen describe the way the human brain and mind interact, and use the term pans narrans as a much better species descriptor than homo sapien.

Pans narrans or the storytelling ape is how McKemmish starts her chapter Traces, and I wish she was more coherent through the rest of it. I enjoyed her example of Children Overboard, but I had difficulty with the writing style, that made verbs of adjectives and wasn't particularly readable. Describing what archives are, what records are, and how they become so shouldn't be as abstruse as she made it. I did find her emphasis of the importance of context informing the meaning and information encoded into a document to make it a record, with the same photographs representing totally different bits of story depending on what archive had them as a record especially helpful in thinking about the concepts she was trying to get across.

I enjoyed the encyclopedia entries by Pawley and Rusch-Feja as things I already knew about put in complete, precise, cogent terms. I didn't learn anything by reading them (except the names of a few minor historic figures and the cool fact that the Soviet Union had a library for every two thousand citizens), but they were helpful as a connotation-check of many of these terms and concepts at a basic level.

Carrot Cake

This is the second LIS assignment blog I've had, but this one seems more systematized with all that other online profile business.

As a favorite character says, Let's see what happens.

Some biographical background. I am a Madison native, a second year special student (it's complicated), in my fourth class at SLIS. I've worked in four libraries and six different departments. I don't feel like I've been flitting as much as that statement denotes. I would like to be a Reference librarian in an academic library when I grow up.

All through Johnson's This Book is Overdue (I won't dignify the attempt to coin a terrible word by including the subtitle) I found myself enjoying what she had to say about libraries and librarians, but I only felt any sort of spark or recognition when things were going wrong for the librarians. When the narrative went all "Gee whiz!" I was more alienated, especially during the second life section.

I made carrot cake today for my fathers 64th birthday, which was yesterday. Yesterday was a brainspike of Lord of the Rings extended edition (brainspike: watching the entirety of something in basically one sitting or at one go.) and oniondip. I seem to be beating cream cheese into other things to make delicious unhealthfulnesses this weekend.

Look for a post on the Week 2 Readings later tonight