Immediate ALA past-president (and my former professor, longtime mentor, and all-around earthshaker) Dr. Loriene Roy and I attempt to answer this question in the new ALA Annual 2008 Conference podcast edition of the Library 2.0 Gang. Argue about what, you might ask? Privacy, library innovation, the deadness of the exhibits floor, how involved vendors should be in conference programming, and (if you make it through minute 50) olfactory marketing.

My ALA MARS presentation went extremely well, not only for the fact that I was on enough to crack people up, but for the mountain of positive feedback I received regarding a specific aspect of my talk. Tons of people expressed their surprise at my “brutal” honesty about the fact that most of what we’ve done with Skype and video reference at OU has not been particularly successful in terms of user reception or statistics. That we got up and dusted ourselves off after getting our asses kicked by Skype several times seemed to surprise many people in and of itself, but not as much as the fact that I let myself admit to/poke fun at this series of service “failures” in front of hundreds of people. That we tried multiple service configurations using a promising technology is obviously the most important aspect of what we did, especially in light of the mountain of good advice we are now prepared to give to other practitioners thinking about exploring something similar.

This is a outcomes-driven field quite self conscious about its own potential obsolescence; admitting failure of any kind is not the easiest thing to do. Think about the last time you heard someone disavow or even mildly criticize a program or service from a podium - at times it seems like we’re in the business of convincing ourselves/each other that we can do no wrong. Sadly, this perpetuates a culture ill-prepared to handle the typical result of experimentation: a series of resounding failures hopefully punctuated by modest success. This attitude also results in massive duplication of error that drags us all down - I for one would love to hear more crash and burn stories at conferences and the like, because they’re never without a series of important lessons for things to avoid in the future. This is along the lines of an article Lia and I wrote for Library Journal (before it was nixed, the subtitle was ironically “Getting Ready to Fail, and Like It” or something along those lines).

Here are the presentation slides for those interested - it’s a pared down and updated version of the talk I’ve been giving on OU’s Skype projects for some time, hence the familiarity.

ala 2008 annual conference, sunday june 29th 1:30-3:00. although it was pretty well attended, this session should have packed a ballroom - it was excellent.

intro: should we still care about online privacy? the ala privacy revolution project is partially funded by a grant from the soros foundation to promote discussions about library privacy, motivation came form a resolution from the intellectual freedom council several years ago. panelists: beth givens (founder/director of privacy rights clearinghouse), cory doctorow (author/blogger), and dan roth (wired senior writer). liveblogging and asking questions - jessamyn west and jenny levine.

dan roth: in the 10 years i’ve been covering business privacy has never come up. will talk about privacy from a business perspective - unless i’m asking questions about it, no one talks about privacy policy in the business world. the only time this happened was in 2005 when a company lost 500,000 of its employees’ personal information - he only knew about this at the time because it was time warner and he was working for them. while investigating the privacy loss, it turned out it had happened before - they had lost backup tapes of personal information at least 4 times in one year. why don’t people care about this more? for companies, there is very little incentive for them to protect user privacy. consumers are conflicted about whether they should care about privacy or not, so companies don’t see the incentive to push the issue. when data is lost, only tiny uproars occur. look at certain companies’ relationships to privacy - ask.com had a service called ‘ask eraser’ to offer users, but they benefited very little from their efforts. consumers don’t go somewhere because of its privacy reputation - do they ask what google is doing with their toolbar data? toolbars are useful, but google is collecting all of this information and no one knows what they are doing with/about it. “it’s not something that consumers have ever said they’ve cared about, so why should companies do anything about it?” conflicting information from survey - 80 percent of marketers say they do share private and personal information (even ssns) with third parties, whereas 75 percent of ceos of the same companies say they don’t. companies, websites, services - they all count on advertising to provide services. the importance of free web services has become so prevalent that an arms race will start developing between companies to direct market using personal data - that will lead to more data mining, personal information gathering, up to a point where we will all be very easily identifiable on the web. example of a company called phorm that teams up with isps and tracks users to serve up ads for them, unlike the traditional model - phorm will track where you go and serve you adds based on gathered information about your browsing habits. this will be very popular, and there is no way to opt out. now is the time to figure out where we stand in terms of privacy. our personal information has become a form of currency, and we should figure out how to leverage it. a very small and dedicated group of people used to care about being green, now everyone does - can the same thing happen for internet privacy?

beth givens: “i spent 11 years as a librarian, i feel right at home here.” the privacy rights clearinghouse deals with informational privacy (as opposed to constitutional privacy, which the aclu, etc. focuses on). lines between the two are blurred in reality. there are a number of other organizations that deal with privacy - the electronic frontier foundation, for example. the prc provides practical information to help people protect their privacy rights, so if you as librarians get a question about how get to get rid of unsolicited credit card apps, the prc website will help. what is the current state of informational privacy? there is much work to be done. .com chief executive scott neilly once said “you have no privacy, get over it.” he was roundly criticized for saying this - he explained himself by saying someone already has all of our records, so there’s nothing we can do about it. privacy is the claim of individuals to determine for themselves what when where information is divulged about them. we don’t have an overarching privacy law, we have a selective approach - one for medical records (hipaa), one for credit reporting, etc. “it’s a swiss cheese approach and there are lots of holes.” the fair credit reporting act gives you the right of access to your credit report - make it a habit of looking at it once a year. if you find errors there are procedures you can go through to correct them. do you hear common themes? access openeess accuracy enforcement security, accountability, usage. she sums these up as the fair information practices, or the principles of fair information practices (fips for short). without a omnibus privacy protection bill on the books, existing privacy policies are actually not privacy policies at all. throwing up our hands and declaring that privacy is dead is not constructive - take every opportunity to opt out of scenarios in which your personal information will be used. there are tips on opting out on the prc website. let legislators know how important this issue is to you. closes with the statement “once a librarian, always a librarian” - she know sthe pioneering work of librarians at protecting user privacy rights. hopefully we can all do a better job of making sure our privacy is more protected as we move forward. encourage your library users to visit prc and other non-profit advocacy organizations.

cory doctorow: i’m a science fiction writer, and i have a colleague who wrote a book about a future with no privacy where people were able to achieve the “techno-triumphalist dream” of spying on lawmakers as much as they spy on us - this assumes that we will have enough power to affect legislative process of the future. we’re talking about how policy and law and technology affect privacy - coding and internet architecture itself is political: “when we build systems and programs, we end up affecing the systems and policies that grow out of them.” should we protect the privacy of people who disclose personal information like on facebook - these apps are designed with the unfortunate tendency to reward the disclosure of personal information. we often conflate the personal/private with the secret - there is a huge difference, a lot of things are private and not secret. this determination about when and where to divulge personal information is related to how much social power and protection you have. in a society in which we no longer get to choose how our personal information is used, we will actually be controlled by a centralized politburo that manages our lives. why do we give up our personal information? blame the people who have established a set of social and technological norms that expect/compel us to give up our information in order to accomplish things. the poorest people are those with the least choice over what they buy. marketers and companies manipulate the web so that divulging personal information is par for the course on facebook, bebo, etc. you have to make an explicit act of will to avoid the logins, etc. in our systems. example of rfid public transport passes in london - they compelled users to divulge information via rfid by raising the cost of paper passes. not by consumer choice, but compulsion. the problem with gathering so much information is not that the state knows our every move, but that it creates an environment where the malicious can easily access personal information from huge databases. libraries are the last bastion of protection - drm creates a word-by-word capacity to track people’s reading, etc. habits, we should resist this. libraries have a moral obligation to boycott technologies that embody curtain-twitching tendencies of spies and enables different entities to watch our patrons - this creates an information economy based on the buying and selling of information. a modern economy based on limiting access to information is about as viable as an industrial economy based on limiting access to machines. surveillance societies are those that can’t trust themselves or each other - undermines community and security. it makes our haystacks bigger and our needles smaller. all of this information culling makes truly dangerous information lost in the ever-increasing haystack. it would be great if we could catch the people who blow up public transit, but we don’t catch them by clouding things with too much surveillance, too much information gathering. premise of videocameras for surveillance is that they not crime preventers, but ineffective crime solvers. cctvs don’t make us safer. the systems that we build today that control access to information will determine the quality of the society of the future.

questions

what is really at stake here?

beth - if we don’t take steps today to protect the last aspects of a private society, we will lose it completely. example of minority report - cameras that read the unique geometry of our faces, this is not science fiction but a upcoming reality. using driver’s license information to create a face-recognizable database that tracks our movements.

dan: what happens when our health records can be read by insurance agencies or our employees? what happens when you can’t get a driver’s license because of your driving history? once all this information is out there, it’s there for good and for the taking. what happens when we are a “nation of niches,” when we all fit certain marketing profiles? having all this private information out there will speed this process up.

cory: personal information is like uranium - raw uranium ore is not dangerous, but refined it becomes very dangerous. the same is the case for gigantic information databases of personal information - “the internet will never unlearn what paris hilton’s genitals look like.” personal and compelled disclosures will not go away - it will be like smog, we won’t be able to destroy it.

dan: companies don’t know what to do with the information they collect. what does safeway do with the information they get from your safeway card? they just stare at it now, but they will figure out what to do with it someday.

cory: by divulging personal information to companies “you’re not only leading the gun and handing it to the guy you trust today, you’re handing it to a series of guys in the future.”

jessamyn - these databases of information exist and we know about them. at what point do we need to say that the horse is out of the barn in terms of protecting our privacy on a personal level, and have we reached the point where we need to turn back the clock and create a totally new strategy to protect privacy that is top down?

cory: it’s not about turning back the clock, it’s about moving the clock forward to an age where legislated privacy is finally a reality. also, new tools and technologies exist that playfully help you browse and save information that don’t share info - passively multiplayer online gaming (pmog) is an example teaches the value of being safe and smart online and doesn’t communicate your information.

jenny: she spoke to the cretor of pmog last year and he expressed interest in libraries promoting pmog, but he hadn’t gotten much response from the librarians he spoke to about it. we need to recognize this as an issue and investigate strategies.

beth: the data valdez (re: exxon valdez) is coming and is already here - security breaches are constant, and it’s a constant battle to keep information private. it will be touch to galvanize people and raise that awareness around creating legislation that protects privacy - california is a benchmark in this fight.

cory: there are cool ways of making privacy less of a luxury. there are a few other technologies that protect privacy and make a game out of it such as sxip - login manager that creates fake logins when you visit sites. login managers. on the low tech side write return-to-sender on direct mail solicitations and return them.

question: is it a good idea to make yourself invisible?

dan: corporate privacy policies are malleable, they reserve the right to change them at any time.

beth: the right of access should be very powerful.

cory: there could be more transparency on the web server side and better privacy defaults - in open source software development this needs to be more of a consideration. if you just talk to a handful of geeks for ten minutes you can make an enormous amount of change for a huge number of people.

question: how do we as librarians convince people that privacy is important?

cory: a friend of his, a hacker, built something called a hackerbot that rolled around and sniffed unencrypted wifi transcripts and showed people the passwords they had just sent. something that showed users what they had just sent unencryped via library computers would be immensely powerful (like the mileage reading displays in new cars - akin to what happens when you stomp your foot on the gas).

beth: coming up with creative ways to inform people is incredibly important. using libraries as a launching pad is a great idea.

cory: the next generation of teachers will be able to use their own old facebook profiles they can’t get rid of to teach their students the consequences of overdivulging.

question: how do we balance privacy protection and privacy leniency?

dan: requiring people to check out cory’s books.

cory: “if you don’t participate in the electoral process, it will participate in you.” regime change is important. this country was built on the ideal that we should keep ourself safe from our own government.

the question i didn’t get to ask: what about the negative implications of the privacy debate on primary/secondary education - how do we encourage technoliteracy and creative teaching when parental/administrative protectionism (whether justified or not) already limits the use of new tools such as blogs and wikis in the classroom? my experience is that privacy concerns are severely affecting the development of teaching strategies that leverage new tech-based methods, which in turn limits our ability to teach responsible information use and sharing at any level.

You can thank Lia Friedman for this image - I know I do.

ECAR just released Web 2.0, Personal Learning Environments, and the Future of Learning Management Systems, a bulletin by Niall Sclater that critically examines the role and functionality of the LMS in higher education (subscription required to access). Sclater makes the salient point that the term ”learning management system” itself “suggests disempowerment - an attempt to manage and control the activities of the student by the university.” The bulletin focuses on several important questions concerning the role of the LMS:

• “Can we bring some of the social networking facilities that students find so appealing inside the institution?
• Should we use tools hosted elsewhere on the Internet by others?
• Should we simply allow learners to select social networking tools for themselves?”

Sclater also summarizes current arguments in the blogosphere for and against Learning Management Systems. I agree that 1) the typical LMS experience ends up rigidly reflecting institutional practices rather than supporting flexible learning, 2) “are being used primarily as storage facilities for lecture notes and Powerpoint presentations,” and 3) despite pledges to not sue at least a few of their competitors, dominant for-profit LMS incarnations are still stifling innovation in spite of their own inane attempts at interface design and functionality.

That said, as someone experienced in the difficulties of facilitating successful e-learning I believe that until expertise in online instructional design becomes more widely diffuse throughout academe that LMSystems are a necessary pseudo-evil. Beyond their obvious advantage to libraries trying to integrate their services into the daily teaching and learning practice of their users, the LMS provides a critical scaffold/structure through which institutions can manage the slow process of e-learning adoption (not to mention simple communication between learners and educators). Students shouldn’t have to learn a new interface every time they enroll in a new class, and a centralized system prevents them from having to do so. Most of the LMS products I have worked with have been disappointing in one way or another, but I am definitely a fan of the open source versions that tend to offer a great deal more flexibility than Blackboard, etc.

The ECAR bulletin also discusses the promise of browser-based and online PLEs (personalized learning environments) that allow students to “take ownership” of their learning process, which has already begun in a number of subtle ways - via tools such as the citation plug-in I wrote about yesterday, for example. Issues in interoperability are very much still a hurdle to truly individualized e-learning, so at present the LMS is an imperfect compromise. Encouragingly, centralized LMSs are improving in a number of ways - Sclater identifies attempts at moving past the course-based model, providing offline access, and integrating social networking features, among others.

A colleague just sent this around - OCLC has just released CiteMe, a Facebook application that searches WorldCat and formats citations. From the OCLC blog:

A nifty new WorldCat app has just been released on Facebook called CiteMe. Type in a title,

author, subject, or isbn and presto! A formatted citation comes up, right in the Facebook environment.

Of course, if you’re looking to do a whole bibliography in a click, staying on the WorldCat.org site is the way to go. You can build a list of all your works and generate your Works Cited page, quickly and easily. But for one or two listings or a quick refresher when you’re posting out–this new Facebook app can’t be beat!

My own research shows that about 60% of university students (at least at OU) are at least moderately well disposed towards this type of app in Facebook, and the vast majority of them tend to love citation formatting tools (because of their abject hatred of formatting citations). I’m one of those rare non-Facebook using librarians, so I suppose I’ll just have to wait to hear what people think of CiteMe.

That last part from the OCLC blog about formatting a bibliography at the WorldCat site was news to me. I looked around and they’re definitely fancying things up with a find more/do more approach - personalized lists of items, reviews, citation formatting tools, search plug-ins for Facebook and Firefox, etc. This is the kind of thing the Open Library is also angling towards, but using an open access, collaboratively authored approach. I’m always putting my money on the cheapest and most collectively run horse, but hey - anything that increases library findability on the web is a good thing.

Within five minutes of meeting me you’re likely to discover my three main characteristics - I’m a librarian, I come from a long line of wonderfully stereotypical Texans, and I love food. The combination of these traits means that I am hyper-aware of both manners and hospitality. It may come as news to some, but manners and hospitality are totally different things - often complementary, sometimes mutually exclusive, and always distinguishable. It’s possible to be both incredibly rude and wonderfully gracious at the same time (think Amy Sedaris), while politeness at its worst can end up masquerading as ersatz hospitality.

In Texas, manners and hospitality are crucial aspects of social interaction that serve distinct functions - learning to tell one from the other is therefore essential. Having good manners means that you’ve both mastered the art of being “puh-laaht” and developed a contextual sense of propriety. This goes way beyond knowing what fork to put where - it’s more about learning how not to step on people’s toes (be they literal or figurative) and avoid the deadly tendency to “run on,” i.e. talk or complain too much. Hospitality, on the other hand, is a bone-deep and intensely pleasurable instinct to make sure everyone is totally satisfied, usually achieved by asking “can I get you anything?” not once, not twice, but three times.

My education in manners and hospitality is vast, thanks mostly to the steel magnolia matriarchs in my family. On the manners end, my mother used to pretend she didn’t hear an interrogative if it started with “can I,” and even though I’m a reference librarian I’ve gotten “did you say thank you?” more than any other question in my life. To the horror and/or delight of those around me, I “yes ma’m” and “no sir” with abandon (especially when I’m in trouble). While mercifully not fancy enough to be a teenage debutante, I was nonetheless forced to endure cotillion from the same ancient instructor that taught my mother forty years earlier. On the hospitality end, making people feel completely welcome is an art that my Momma has perfected (as anyone who has had the pleasure of meeting her can confirm), whereas my Grandmother is legendary for creating gigantic feasts out of thin air (and more importantly for letting me into the kitchen to pour cans of Lone Star into the beer biscuit dough).

Speaking of which, both manners and hospitality are inextricably bound up with food. Politeness’ relationship to eating is paradoxical - as a child, attention to manners and the enjoyment of a meal are inversely proportional, although table rules do serve the important function of keeping chaos at bay (a favorite story in my family is about the time my Aunt Margaret stabbed my father in the hand with a fork for eating off her plate). A litany of admonitions runs through my head when I eat to this day - elbows off the table, hand off the saltshaker, napkin in your lap, use silverware, don’t shovel, mouth closed, back straight, don’t belch, never reach across, and on and on. I’ve at least managed to learn how far to roll the manners cart out depending on the company I’m keeping, which suits me fine. That said, I doubt I’ll ever escape the cardinal rule: never, ever take the last piece of anything, lest you deprive your elders and/or betters of it and end up looking grabby in the process.

Despite the fact that my childhood memory tells me that hospitality = pleasure whereas manners = pain, I’m all for politeness. I see it as the self-conscious rejection of rudeness, part of a social contract that makes day-to-day interactions between strangers far less unpleasant than they could be. I have always bristled when people describe southerners as “too nice,” which usually just means that they’re from (in my grandfather’s words) “Yankeeville” and therefore put more value on honestly answering questions like “how are you?” than on the notorious “bless your heart” turn of phrase, which once uttered lets you tear into someone essentially without fear of reproach. Now that I’ve lived in Ohio for a few years I have a bit more sympathy for those who disdain this kind of politeness, and it’s a (usually incorrect) assumption that Texas-style manners are rooted in insincerity that freaks people out. While I don’t agree I suppose I also don’t really blame them - I get why some people would rather be treated rudely than disingenuously.

Whereas the food and Texas connections are obvious, I only recently started thinking about the manners v. hospitality distinction in terms my librarian identity. A few weeks ago on an older episode of The Splendid Table I heard an interview with restaurateur named Danny Meyer, author of Setting the table: the transforming power of hospitality in business. Meyer did a beautiful job of explaining the basic differences between service and hospitality, and how an ethic of hospitality can be applied beyond restaurants to public service in general. I was struck by his description of hospitality as being all about memory - creating experiences so positive that they not only linger in the recipient but build community and reputation through word of mouth.

Whereas manners-based service is all is about etiquette, taking a hospitable approach can help create experiences that invite people to return and revise negative memories such as, for example, a lingering childhood terror of short-tempered librarians. The last thing I want to do is graft another ill-fitting popular business model onto information services, but I definitely think we should spend as much time creating truly hospitable environments as we do honing our Reference Interview manners (and come to think of it, much of my Library school experience was strangely similar to cotillian, right down to the white gloves). This is achieved as easily by removing red tape on our websites as it is by bringing personality, engagement, and humor to service points and classrooms. I’ve sometimes worried that pushing the “user-centered” focus to its extreme runs the risk of making librarians recede too far into the background. I also believe that it’s easy to risk making the idea of “service” ring hollow from simple overuse, resulting in a kind of assembly-line communication. Focusing more closely on an ethic of hospitality can help put us where good hosts should be: always in sight, but never in the way.

It’s the end of the quarter here at OU, the time when even the best of librarians is likely to dish out a few fake smiles. We’re busy, they’re busy, and everyone seems one straw away from breaking down. I’ve caught myself in inapproachable or impatient moments on the desk a few times recently, leading to this exercise in reminding myself that my goal is not just to deliver polite service but to offer those who communicate with me in my capacity as a librarian the same hospitality I show a guest in my home. This time of the year typically ends in me reminding myself that making library users feel welcome, taken care of, and personally valued is not just an aspect of my job but the entire point of what I do, and that helping to make the libraries I inhabit beer-biscuit hospitable is a simple way to preserve the essential free information spaces they provide.

I’m always interested in news about developing kiosk/remote/ library service models - particularly ones that seem like they will actually work - so I was happy to hear that a Contra Costa County Library BART station book lending machine is now operational.

The program is known as Library-a-Go-Go, and you can read a press release or learn more about the service while marveling at CCCL’s extremely good idea. According to a SeattlePI blog post on the subject, the kiosks are built by a Swedish firm Distec and weigh in at $100k apiece.

It seems like every time I’m in an airport I see another multimedia product being sold or circulated from vending machines, which makes a lot of sense and is a trend libraries can take lessons from. On a more localized scale, these sort of stations could provide a variety of convenient remote/extended library service options that extend way beyond simple circulation. CCCL’s model of setting up shop in mass transit locations and shopping centers sounds like just the ticket, and among other things provides an excellent means of marketing library services to untold numbers of passers-by. The Distec site also shows an example of the ‘Bokomaten’ machine installed on the outside of a library building, ATM-style:

Although I sort of doubt it, I’m wondering if the book dispenser has any other information help options built in - I don’t see a keyboard, but wouldn’t it be rad to be able to take this service and extend it to a one-stop library kiosk that users could fully interact with, complete with useful links, account information, and access to live library staff? At $100,000 grand it seems to me like each kiosk should have all the bells/whistles imaginable built in. Someday, someday.

Story via AL Direct.

There has been some discussion lately about ALA’s Emerging Leaders program excluding non-MLIS library staff from applying - Lori Reed over at Library Trainer rightly takes issue with this requirement, resolving to let her membership in ALA lapse in protest. Sarah Houghton-Jan and Paul Signorelli have also responded in support of Lori, advocating for the largest library professional organization for to become more inclusive and accessible from membership to virtual conferencing and committee participation.

I was among the first class of Emerging Leaders back in 2007, and was so green at the time of my application that I didn’t have enough awareness to really register the MLIS requirement, let alone be overtly critical of it. I did, however, have a big problem with the age requirement of 35 years or younger imposed on the first round of applicants. In response to a wave of criticism similar to this one, EL founders lightened this restriction in subsequent years to one of two similar criteria - applicants must have less than 5 years of professional experience or be under 35 years of age. This still excludes many who develop later interest in becoming “leaders” - something Steven Bell has had something to say about in the past. Despite the many toes that have been squashed in the process, I still value the attempt EL founders have made at creating an initiative that benefits those with fewer career connections.

I’m the first to admit that Emerging Leaders’ admissions requirements still need work, and inviting non-professional staff to apply is at the top of the list. Knowing what I know of them, I think that a discussion with EL spearheaders Connie Paul and Maureen Sullivan about changing the MLIS cutoff for the Emerging Leaders program would be a productive endeavor. Improving programs such as EL for the greater good of librarianship should always be the logical next move, and one Paul and Sullivan have shown themselves to be open to in the past.

I therefore hesitate to accuse the Emerging Leaders program of fostering an intentional campaign of exclusion. Here’s what I know about the folks who designed EL - they are seriously trying to give early-career librarians a shot at breaking into the stymied, who-do-you-know structure of a behemoth professional organization in hopes that it will motivate some much-needed change. That “librarians” is an operative word is hopefully more incidental than intentional - it’s possible that support staff were not calculatedly omitted from the program, and that the 35-years requirement was more of an arbitrary cutoff point meant to shake things up than a manifestation of overt ageism. Even if this isn’t the case, here’s the thing - Emerging Leaders was conceived of as one way to encourage the change that Reed and Houghton-Jan are advocating, and to my thinking it’s beginning to serve its purpose within the organization by inspiring this ongoing debate.

On a related topic, like Sarah and Lori I’m also way over this “support staff” business. Personally, I think has quite a patronizing ring to it. How about “staff,” which might do something to bridge the ideological divide so many organizations unconsciously (or consciously) promote between their workers? We definitely spend too much time distinguishing between the haves and have-nots in a profession that is, among other things, seeing its demographics shift in a way that continues to preclude the already tired professional/nonprofessional educational divide. How many people have noticed previously “professional” job postings lately that don’t require a MLS? Also, while many Systems staffers hold “only” a BS in computer science, I doubt they are similarly considered support staff.

Reed made an apropos, user-centered insight into this topic in her follow-up post yesterday:

During our new employee orientation the following question is asked, “How many of you are librarians?” A handful of people will raise their hands. The rest will squirm in their seats waiting, wondering what’s coming next.”To our customers we are all librarians” is the next thing new staff hear. With that statement you see a smile emerge and tension melt away.

When a customer walks through the door he or she does not care what initials you have behind your name. The customer wants service or information and all staff should be ready to provide it.

Once again Lia’s UCSD Arts Blog clues me into something rad: FontStruct, an awesome web-based program that lets you design fonts and share them via Creative Commons. Download and rate “fontstructions” in the site’s Gallery. A few examples of styles created with the program: