dangerously naïve or clandestinely seditious librarians?

I am, among other things, a Librarian. What sort of an image does that conjure? Bun and spectacles? Heaven forbid!! We are fighting that image, and I think it is certainly changing. But to go to the other extreme – here is a paragraph from an opinion article by Deroy Murdoch

“These dangerously naïve or clandestinely seditious librarians are beyond foolish. They potentially jeopardize the lives of American citizens.”

Wow!! Did he have his tongue firmly planted in his cheek? Unfortunately not. To return to his article, this is his introduction …

“As Congress considers reauthorising the Patriot Act, it explicitly should add libraries to the locations where federal investigators may hunt terrorists. Here are five reasons why: Marwan al Shehhi; Mohand, Wail, and Waleed Alshehri; and Mohamed Atta — September 11 hijackers, all.”

Apparently they all used libraries in the United States. His article goes on to describe how many libraries now routinely delete their records of individual borrowers and their activities.

“Like a handkerchief that can wipe the fingerprints off a smoking gun, many libraries now use computer software that automatically deletes each book’s check-out history as soon as it’s returned. Berkeley, California’s library now shreds Internet log-in records daily rather than weekly, as done before 9/11.

“We’re quiet rebels,” Cindy Czesak, director of New Jersey’s Paterson Free Public Library, told Fox News. Her institution collects every completed computer sign-up sheet. “After that, it’s removed and destroyed.” She added: “We bought a nice new shredder.” Paterson happens to be the Garden State town where Nawaf and Salem al Hazmi, Khalid al Mihdar, Hani Hanjour, and Majed Moqed rented an apartment in spring 2001. All five slammed American Airlines Flight 77 into the Pentagon. Death toll: 184.”

It is a disctinct dilemma for Librarian, and the ALA has written policy that outlines this situation
August 2003 “Guidelines for Developing a Library Privacy Policy.” Due, in part, to “increased law enforcement surveillance,” this document says “librarians need to ensure that they…[a]void retaining records that are not needed for efficient operation of the library, including data-related logs, digital records, vendor-collected data, and system backups.” It adds: “Information that should be regularly purged or shredded includes PII [personally identifiable information] on library resource use, material circulation history, security/surveillance tapes and use logs, both paper and electronic.”
The situation is difficult. I have blogged about this elsewhere. The first reported on two different articles. One reported that a library officer had been fired for giving a police officer the telephone number of a person whose wallet had been found in the supermarket. Another reported on a librarian who successfully refused to give the day’s internet sing-in sheet to a county Sheriff’s detective. Both were doing what they believed was the right thing. And then again, I noted that Dutch librarians were fighting the trend there to force libraries to supply personal information.

It remains a dilemma, and a challenge for Librarians everywhere.

The Science of Adolescent Sleep-ins

Anyone who lives with teenagers or has been a teenager (remember when?) knows about the dramas of their waking for their morning. Researching for News Bytes, I discovered an article about this phenomenon The Biology of Bedtime. Seems a team of researchers in Germany has come to the conclusion that sleeping in is “a defining mark of adolescence.” The article continues ….”Till Roenneberg, of the University of Munich in Germany, and his colleagues arrived at this conclusion by studying “chronotypes.” A chronotype is essentially an individual’s personal “circadian rhythm,” or 24-hour cycle of biological activity. For example, some people – dubbed “larks” – tend to wake up between 4 and 6 am and are ready for bed between 8 and 10 pm. Meanwhile, others – the “owls” – prefer to wake up between 8 and 10 am and fall asleep somewhere between midnight and 2 am. The majority of the population falls somewhere between these two extremes.”

The article continues to report that scientists can measure the end of adolescence by the turn around from later sleeping and rising to increasingly earlier sleeping and rising. And apparently the phenomenon was not limited to those in the cities who partied late, but extended across the population.

Hmmmm … Sceptic I may be, but there was no mention of the age-old adolescent need to push the boundaries. Partying or not, there is always the effort to push the bedtime later and later, simply because it’s a chance to test the rules … to limit the effects of lack of choice in our lives. And I think this is not limited to adolescents.

I wonder does Mr Roenneberg live with teenagers…??

Fascinating research, though. You can find the link on my News Bytes page.

Assertiveness – how do you rate?

When it comes to communication skills, the ability to be assertive is just so important. Vital in so many of the arenas of our lives. Vital to our relationships in all those areas. I’ve begun a series of posts on assertivenss in the blog I write for ITC itccommunicationedge, and it is a very useful training session to offer, because assertiveness is so vital, and so many of us need to learn to be effectively assertive.

I started the post with three questions,

Do you wish you had the confidence to speak your mind?

Do you feel you have the respect of your family and co-workers?

Would you like to improve your relationships?

hoping that they would apply to people who needed assertiveness either because they were too aggressive or too passive. So which one are you? And which one did the second question apply to?

Shakespeare the man vs the world of his writing

I blogged for ITC on a comment made by Christine Nehring about Shakespeare

“Shakespeare is a biographer’s nightmare. Not because the information about him is so overwhelming or incriminating but because it is so slight and so stubbornly innocuous. We forgive our great poets almost anything — suicide (Sylvia Plath), homicide (Ben Jonson), incest (William Wordsworth), hubris (Oscar Wilde), drunkenness (Edgar Allen Poe), insanity (Friedrich Nietzsche), sexual excess of every description (Byron, Shelley, Houellebecq — who not?). What we are loath to forgive is quiet respectability.”

Christine is certainly a clever writer. But I had to respond by asking what it is that we would want to be remembered for …

Today I have gone back to the original article to get some more context. And there is some more information available about Shakespeare, it seems, though very little. It paints a picture of a man given to a great deal of control and moral rectitude.

“This was not a man who left much to accident. This was not a man whom but for the capacious and shockingly imaginative plays that he left behind we would ever take for a free spirit.”

I wonder how often the personality of the writer is the same as the material they write. For many writers, you and me, right up to the published authors, writing is a chance to escape into fantasies and imagination, to create other worlds. And how many internet romances fizzle because the world of writing doesn’t always accurately reflect the world of the writer? And Shakespeare’s ability to leave little to accident produced some of the world’s best literature. Thankyou Shakespeare, whoever you were.

Male and Female brains – different?

Human beings don’t come with manuals. A typical lament. I wished I had a manual for the babies when they were born, and still do now they are teenagers. I wished for one as my mother aged, and I would dearly love some definitions as I navigate a marriage that is in its third decade. One of the greatest challenges has been growing up in the sixties and seventies when we desperately believed that men and women were equal, and somehow made the connection to the belief that therefore they must be the same. Fortunes are being made writing books and offering counselling sessions to our generation as we come to terms with the fact that men and women are different. And the manual? The scientific proof that we so dearly loved in those same decades. Still evolving… but not as clearcut as we would like. I found this site when I was researching for my news bytes in education . For children, simply put, the best conclusion reached is that so far there is no real proof that our brains are different. Thankfully the same research for news bytes bought an article They Just can’t help it which puts it in perspective. Here is the scientific theory. Now to just write me a manual.

Management theories

I read Stephen Downes’ posts because of his connections with education, but it was another interest entirely that led me to the post he referred to recently. I have always been fascinated with innovation and creativity, expecially when it came to the theory that one was either a creative thinker, or one could be taught to become one. And I have presented sessions on creative thinking techniques. But one of the techniques I include is that it is always possible to use ideas form other organisations or individuals – that taking ideas from one meilleu to an entirely different one, is creativity in itself. Now Stephen Downes has pointed to this blog post which reinforces that concept of innovation. It also looks at the concpet of the creative work group – that one person cannot do all the innovative thinking on their own, and that a group will produce far more creativity. The author introduces the concept called “Structural Holes.” The theory is that often the creativity occurs outside a particular workgroup, by individuals crossing the Structurel Holes between disparate work groups. Part Two of the Blog continues. I find it a very plausible and fascinating theory.

Email for schools

I remember when we bought a computer and installed email. Less than ten years ago. Until then, I had been working on a nation-wide committee where all the other members had fax and email. They were being as patient as possible with me, but it was obvious I was a nuisance. The quickest way to communicate a document to me was via fax at our local print shop. I had to type on the typewriter, then deliver the document to the print shop and pay for it to be sent. Now I’m on the other side of the ”fence,” and probably use email too easily and often. But it is difficult to send copies of an email to most of the members of a team and then have to post to the others. At work, it is so much easier to email material and yet even there, there are those who cannot or will not access their emails. I listened to a segment on talk-back radio recently about a school who had sent home a note about an incident involving a stranger in the girls’ toilets. Is that the best they could do, the radio host was asking? I had an appointment and missed the talkback. But the option is certainly there to use email to communicate with parents by email. Whether it would be appropriate in that particular case is up to the school. Would you email report cards? Could a parent email in information about a child’s absence from school? Could a parent book an interview with a teacher by email? ESchool news had put together a compilation of articles relating to email use by schools. …”As technology plays a greater role in education, it can also change the way those inside school buildings address key stakeholders on the outside. State officials, district board members, the local press, and students’ parents are just a few of the groups that desire constant information and updates. And there is no faster or more inexpensive way to reach a vast number of individuals than via eMail or the web.
At eSchool News, we have seen how effective communication through eMail and the web takes weight off an educator’s shoulders. Now, with the support of e-Mail Networks, we offer a collection of stories and features about this important issue.”

“A word wrapped in light”

It remains a concern that coming generations are not reading as deeply and widely as we thought we should. They spend hours idly absorbing from images and reacting with images. It was a pleasure, then to read this article, though it may have had a commercial prompting. So eloquently written ….
“It is true that the written word has been pushed to the periphery by the advance of new media over the past few decades. Certainly we read less, and read less challenging material, than we used to. Medieval learners, with their Latin studies and familiarity with the works of antiquity, strike us as either masochistic — or simply alien — today…. We disagree with the notion that images cannot be as cognitive as written words. In our work, we have found that images have a tremendous capacity for conveying content. We wonder if there mightn’t be a visual avenue of expression — a visual language — which does force the brain to translate symbols into concepts. Which does require one to engage his or her faculties of reasoning and analytical thought.Read the whole article

Logic Happens

Everybody’s seen the Kombi vans and old Holdens with their Magic Happens stickers. This Logic Happens sticker is an alternative to alternative. . . . .How to get the sticker

The Power of Word of Mouth Marketing

I came across this item when I was researching for News Bytes.
JupiterResearch Reports 20% of Online Consumers Turn to Other Online Consumers For Advice on Health and Medical Treatment
According to the JupiterResearch report, online consumers use support groups, live chat, instant messenger and e-mail, among other online media, to discuss health issues, including information about medications and treatments, with other consumers. “Online consumers reach out to their peers for concrete information, not just emotional support,” stated Monique Levy, Analyst at JupiterResearch. “Eighty percent of consumers that use consumer created health content (CCHC) said these interactions influenced their behavior, emotional well-being or attitudes,” added Levy.

And of course this has direct implications for e-marketers. But why should it come as any surprise? We know of the power of word of mouth. In an organisation like ITC, it is the most powerful membership-building tool we have. In this world of advertising overload, we all rely on word of mouth. And it applies just as much to the medical product mentioned in the article as it does to service providers. So as an organisation, we need our sneezers, as Seth Godin called them who will spread the word (or the idea virus) about our product or service. And if we have no system of referral, as suggested by John Jantsch at Duct Tape Marketing, then we are missing out on the greatest marketing tool.