A brash statement like a boycott can get a lot of attention in the short term. But where do you go from there? You’ve created an us-versus-them mentality, and asks other parties to choose a side. Given that both library and publisher interests lie in getting as many books in the hands of as many readers as possible, any move that actively prevents this from happening makes us no better than the publishers.

It’s the equivalent of holding our breath till we turn blue, or threatening to take our ball and go home. It’s an ultimatum that at best ignores the practical issues plaguing publishers and libraries and at worst makes us look hysterical. We’ve already got a growing portion of the public on our side. Let’s not do anything that makes us seem shrill or unreasonable.

Rather, I think we need to acknowledge this for what it is: a business transaction. To this end, we need to enter the fray with an open mind, a willingness to negotiate, and some clear-cut demands. I think Sarah Houghton-Jan’s eBook Bill of Rights is a fantastic starting point for us to begin this dialogue with the content providers. Because it needs to be spread to as many places as possible, I’m reposting it here:

The eBook User’s Bill of Rights

Every eBook user should have the following rights:

• the right to use eBooks under guidelines that favor access over proprietary limitations
• the right to access eBooks on any technological platform, including the hardware and software the user chooses
• the right to annotate, quote passages, print, and share eBook content within the spirit of fair use and copyright
• the right of the first-sale doctrine extended to digital content, allowing the eBook owner the right to retain, archive, share, and re-sell purchased eBooks

I believe in the free market of information and ideas.

I believe that authors, writers, and publishers can flourish when their works are readily available on the widest range of media. I believe that authors, writers, and publishers can thrive when readers are given the maximum amount of freedom to access, annotate, and share with other readers, helping this content find new audiences and markets. I believe that eBook purchasers should enjoy the rights of the first-sale doctrine because eBooks are part of the greater cultural cornerstone of literacy, education, and information access.

Digital Rights Management (DRM), like a tariff, acts as a mechanism to inhibit this free exchange of ideas, literature, and information. Likewise, the current licensing arrangements mean that readers never possess ultimate control over their own personal reading material. These are not acceptable conditions for eBooks.

I am a reader. As a customer, I am entitled to be treated with respect and not as a potential criminal. As a consumer, I am entitled to make my own decisions about the eBooks that I buy or borrow.

I am concerned about the future of access to literature and information in eBooks. I ask readers, authors, publishers, retailers, librarians, software developers, and device manufacturers to support these eBook users’ rights.

These rights are yours. Now it is your turn to take a stand. To help spread the word, copy this entire post, add your own comments, remix it, and distribute it to others. Blog it, Tweet it (#ebookrights), Facebook it, email it, and post it on a telephone pole.

This is a wholly worthwhile set of demands. (Thank you, Sarah, for putting this in such clear, effective terms. And even bigger thanks for making it a CC0 document.) Now we have to ask an incredibly tough question: how much are we willing to pay? Assuming HarperCollins and the rest of the publishing industry offers us a seat at the table, we need to be willing to put a price tag on the product we want to see.

What do you do in the meantime? Make your voice heard. Be reasonable. And share your letters, both to publishers and to authors. We’ve got a lot to learn from one another.

4:36 QUICK UPDATE: I linked to Eric Hellman’s poll on how much libraries and publishers alike are willing to pay for more flexible ebook content above, but I think it deserves wider attention. Libraries and publishers alike need to add their responses.

But there’s been little response from HarperCollins itself, aside from this:

I figure the least I can do is take them up on their offer. So here’s what I wrote:

Hello HarperCollins -

Since you’ve made an effort to reach out to libraries, I figured at the very least I owed you an email. I can blog and tweet and post the #hcod hashtag until the cows come home, but until libraries and publishers are talking to one another, it’s something of a lost cause. It’s important to remember that we have a common goal: getting books into the hands of as many people as possible.

 

Libraries have long been a part of the book-culture ecosystem, but we’e largely been ignored, or paid token lip service. But we have a role to play, and we’re eager to have a role both as content purchasers and as enablers of further book (be it e-, audio-, or otherwise) purchases. But publisher policies need to help facilitate that, not make it more difficult.

 

There’s a huge body of content being written right now on this subject, and I’m sure many of you are going through as much of it as possible. So I won’t take up too much of your time.

 

My question is pretty simple: how can we get a seat at the table? Is it possible for us to discuss this as business partners rather than antagonists?

 

Thank you,

Toby Greenwalt

I encourage everyone who has a stake in this to send a message in to the email HarperCollins has created for us. Just remember to keep it civil, and if you’re willing to share, please do so in the comments.

03/01/2011 UPDATE: I received a message in response from HarperCollins, directing me to read their “Open Letter to Librarians,” attached to the email as a press release. Suffice it to say, my question wasn’t answered. I share Peter Brantley’s response to the PR-speak: “meh.”

The Horizon Report for 2011 is out now, and they’ve created a video summary of their conclusions. It’s a great jumping-off point for anyone who might be interested in understanding how people are harnessing technology for their learning and community-based goals.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Now that I’ve been afflicted with Sudden-Onset Adulthood (both a house and a baby are imminent), I’m hoping to devote more time to getting back on the blogging horse. Expect more thoughts on this report (and other stuff, hopefully) soon.

The social anthropologist in maintains the belief that community develops one step at a time. What steps are you taking to establish the library within your core population? My talk at ALA focused on the what we’ve been able to accomplish with our public at MPOW; I’d love to hear what else all of you have done. Please leave notes, stories and suggestions in the comments.

Here are the slides from my portion of Sunday’s panel. If you go full-screen, you can see my  (somewhat vague) notes on the whole spiel.

They can’t survive as community-funded repositories for books that individuals don’t want to own (or for reference books we can’t afford to own.) More librarians are telling me (unhappily) that the number one thing they deliver to their patrons is free DVD rentals. That’s not a long-term strategy, nor is it particularly an uplifting use of our tax dollars.

Here’s my proposal: train people to take intellectual initiative.

Once again, the net turns things upside down. The information is free now. No need to pool tax money to buy reference books. What we need to spend the money on are leaders, sherpas and teachers who will push everyone from kids to seniors to get very aggressive in finding and using information and in connecting with and leading others.

I thnk @itsjustkate sums my reaction to this rather eloquently:

so, wait… we *should* be helping ppl learn to find and contextualize info? Oh! *smacks forehead*

Gee thanks, Seth. All this time we’ve been pottering about in our workspaces, dusting and shushing the entire time, with our hair in buns and cats in our pockets. All we need to do to reinvent ourselves is to espouse the core belief behind our profession.

But rather than get too worked up about this, it may be better to consider the big picture. If Godin is seeing our industry this way, then we definitely have a problem. And while the biblioblogosphere/twitterverse/Friendfeed spaces help maintain an active flow of ideas, it’s still an inside-baseball echo chamber. Granted, that’s a feature rather than a bug, but it’s a reminder of how rarely our efforts are recognized on the larger scale.

So I’m hoping Mr. Godin will read this and give someone from the library world the opportunity to demonstrate just how well and how often we help people (in Godin’s parlance) scale otherwise insurmountable intellectual heights.

There are dozens of librarians out there who could do this. Jessamyn West. Buffy Hamilton. Brian Herzog. Bobbi Newman. Jason Griffey. The Darien coterie. Richard Kong*. And that’s just a small sampling – any attempt to list everyone would be a futile effort. I’m inspired by my colleagues every day, and it gives me such hope to see so many people being awesome in public.

To librarians who don’t see this as their raison d’etre, please don’t let the door to the profession hit you on the ass on your way out.

And to Seth, how about it? Why not use your considerable megaphone to let us demonstrate what we’ve accomplished, and how much more we’re capable of?

*full disclosure: I work with Richard, along with a host of other awesome people.

I have a feeling that the title “Catalog Notices to Cell Phones” isn’t the most descriptive thing in the world, so I’ll also include a more fully-fleshed out description here. With any luck, they’ll get this added to the full website as well. Here goes:

Texting Your Library: Designing a Mobile-Friendly Service Platform

People are doing more and more with their mobile phones, but the market is a confusing mishmash of proprietary hardware, software, and service providers. How do you offer mobile-friendly library service that speaks to many types of mobile users, while providing the most bang for your buck? Toby Greenwalt, the Virtual Services Coordinator for the Skokie Public Library shares his experience building a suite of mobile services, including a mobile catalog and website. Special attention will be paid to ways libraries can use text messaging to send out account notices, offer reference service, and allow patrons to reserve items using their mobile phones.

Looking forward to (virtually)  seeing you there! If you have any questions beforehand, please leave me a comment and I’ll try to cover it in the presentation.

“Cut-and-paste should die, probably.”

-Jeff Wisniewski

When is the right time to re-do your website? Is the “dramatic overhaul” method actually detrimental to your site’s usability? Presenter Jeff Wisniewski seems to think so. Take a look at an overview of some of the most common mistakes made by library websites and web designers. It’s important to pay close attention to what gives your site value, so as not to harm the goodwill your design has already made.

I think Wisniewski makes a great point to treat the site evaluation and redesign process as an organic, transparent activity, making sure to include stakeholders both on staff and in the user base. Doing so makes sure that you haven’t overlooked anything and builds support in the long run.

Raw notes after the jump.

Website Redesign Pitfalls

Jeff Wisniewski

Web Services Librarian, University of Pittsburgh

has never worked on a submarine

Redesigning your website? These are the things you don’t. want. to. do.

Addressing the concept of redesign in general

Don’t look at it in the form of major disruptive redesigns every few years

Evolve/retune/

You may ask yourself: Do you really need a redesign?

Bad reasons:

“It’s been a few years”

“The boss says I have to”

“I’m bored with the site”

Good reasons:

Navigation is dysfunctional

Site doesn’t scale

Site is difficult to update

Code is too slick

Poor usability

Not performing based on goals/objectives

Redevelop v. redesign

Rejigger navigation under the hood w/o redoing front end

“Cosmetic surgery” – preserve navigation, but reskin

Prime example: Amazon 10 years ago v. Amazon now – very similar in appearance

What needs to be fixed in our website?

• • island nature of features (annotations, booklists, resource guides)

  • Focus on findability over anything else

  • Action-oriented resources, over resource lists

Jaret M. Spool – “The Quiet Death of the Major Re-Launch”

Redesign and the 5 Stages of User Grief

• Why did you change the site? It was fine as it was.

• This site is useless. What were you thinking?

• Just go back to one feature and we’ll be fine

• I don’t know what I’m going to do with the site like this.

• Okay. Fine. I don’t like, but I guess I can use it.

So why do we do this? Why do we put ourselves (and our users) through this issue every so often?

• “We’re gonna fix this, but we’re waiting for the redesign.”

• “We’re aware of this. It’s a known issue.” (Why build it all at once?)

Inverse relationship of user/designer satisfaction:

The longer a user has to get familiar with a site, the fonder they grow.

The longer a designer has to look at their site, the more dissatisfied they grow.

PITFALL: Must provide enough time for people to do this. Use this to determine what’s needed for the redesign.

“Spend your money where the water is”

Build the redesign around most commonly used features

Be mindful of Google PageRank

PITFALL: Proceeding w/o consensus – build buyin where necessary.

Avoid death by committee, natch

Small groups

PITFALL: Being the expert

Designing to satisfy librarians, rather than end-users

(These – surprisingly enough – don’t always mesh)

Aquabrowser as main example of this

Is a traditional page-based site the proper route?

Don’t let the design monopolize your time

• bring the content/services to the forefront

(see the templates used on the slides)

Don’t just look at other library sites

Remember: your site isn’t the only place people spend their time

Remember the SMART goal-making process

example: Use wiki to reduce the amount of time content takes to go live on a site from 6 days to 1 day.

PITFALL: Failing to communicate enough

Be transparent with redesign changes

Open up the process and treat it as a conversation

ex: Cook Library website redesign blog

PITFALL: Communicating too much

Example: Queens Library

connecting people with materials is a high priority

Spend time money and effort

remarkable content

engagement tools

user testing

“Cut and paste should die, probably”

Invest time for rewriting content

SEO a priority

Title and heading tags are your friends

Submit sitemap to google (Does Google have a mobile directory)

Finding decent design is easy; creating decent content is harder

PITFALL: Moving/eliminating content that’s being used

Take time to update analytics definitions

Start with a fresh content strategy

Develop a maintenance strategy

Slides posted at CIL site

]]> http://www.theanalogdivide.com/2009/03/cil-morning-session-website-redesign-pitfalls/feed/ 0 http://www.theanalogdivide.com/2008/12/99-memes-but-a-blog-aint-one/ http://www.theanalogdivide.com/2008/12/99-memes-but-a-blog-aint-one/#comments Tue, 23 Dec 2008 20:10:13 +0000 Toby http://www.theanalogdivide.com/?p=168 Because I haven’t posted in a little while, and I’m a sucker for a good meme, I’m going to try my hand at the 99 Things. I first came across the postings at David Lee King and Stephen Abram‘s sites. Mostly frivolous, to be sure, but who knows what insights may be gleamed?

THE 99 THINGS MEME

Things you’ve already done: bold
Things you want to do: italicize
Things you haven’t done and don’t want to – leave in plain font

Full thread after the jump.

1. Started your own blog. (well, obviously.)
2. Slept under the stars.
3. Played in a band. (bass, and superfluous stage presence)
4. Visited Hawaii.
5. Watched a meteor shower. (Growing up in New Mexico has its advantages.)
6. Given more than you can afford to charity. (Give sure, but not more than I can afford.)
7. Been to Disneyland/world. (both)
8. Climbed a mountain.
9. Held a praying mantis.
10. Sang a solo. (note #41)
11. Bungee jumped.
12. Visited Paris.
13. Watched a lightning storm at sea. (seems a little terrifying, if you ask me.)
14. Taught yourself an art from scratch.
15. Adopted a child.
16. Had food poisoning. (not fun.)
17. Walked to the top of the Statue of Liberty.
18. Grown your own vegetables.
19. Seen the Mona Lisa in France.
20. Slept on an overnight train.
21. Had a pillow fight.
22. Hitch hiked.
23. Taken a sick day when you’re not ill. (In high school, not at my current POW. I swear.)
24. Built a snow fort.
25. Held a lamb.
26. Gone skinny dipping.
27. Run a marathon. (Thanks again, everyone who contributed to the AIDS Foundation!)
28. Ridden a gondola in Venice.
29. Seen a total eclipse.
30. Watched a sunrise or sunset. (Again, NM has its advantages.)
31. Hit a home run. (Only if Wii Sports counts.)
32. Been on a cruise.
33. Seen Niagara Falls in person.
34. Visited the birthplace of your ancestors. (Got lost en route to camping and found myself in Fairfield, IL. Close enough, right?)
35. Seen an Amish community.
36. Taught yourself a new language. (only if markup languages count.)
37. Had enough money to be truly satisfied. (With any luck, these will remain mutually exclusive.)
38. Seen the Leaning Tower of Pisa in person. (Does this one count?)
39. Gone rock climbing.
40. Seen Michelangelo’s David in person.
41. Sung Karaoke. (What would I do without the occasional Noraebang?)
42. Seen Old Faithful geyser erupt. (Yellowstone in general is huge on my to-see list.)
43. Bought a stranger a meal in a restaurant.
44. Visited Africa.
45. Walked on a beach by moonlight.
46. Been transported in an ambulance. (Hopefully, this will stay this way, too.)
47. Had your portrait painted.
48. Gone deep sea fishing.
49. Seen the Sistine chapel in person.
50. Been to the top of the Eiffel Tower in Paris.
51. Gone scuba diving or snorkeling.
52. Kissed in the rain.
53. Played in the mud.
54. Gone to a drive-in theater.
55. Been in a movie. (Self-produced student films count, right?)
56. Visited the Great Wall of China.
57. Started a business.
58. Taken a martial arts class
59. Visited Russia.
60. Served at a soup kitchen.
61. Sold Girl Scout cookies.
62. Gone whale watching.
63. Gotten flowers for no reason.
64. Donated blood.
65. Gone sky diving.
66. Visited a Nazi Concentration Camp.
67. Bounced a check. (Thankfully, no.)
68. Flown in a helicopter. (Grand Canyon, age 2.)
69. Saved a favorite childhood toy. (Star Wars and Transformers FTW)
70. Visited the Lincoln Memorial.
71. Eaten Caviar.
72. Pieced a quilt.
73. Stood in Times Square.
74. Toured the Everglades.
75. Been fired from a job.
76. Seen the Changing of the Guard in London.
77. Broken a bone. (Feet, toes, ribs)
78. Been on a speeding motorcycle.
79. Seen the Grand Canyon in person. (see #68)
80. Published a book.
81. Visited the Vatican.
82. Bought a brand new car.
83. Walked in Jerusalem.
84. Had your picture in the newspaper.
85. Read the entire Bible.
86. Visited the White House.
87. Killed and prepared an animal for eating. (Fish, at summer camp)
88. Had chickenpox.
89. Saved someone’s life. (Again, something I hope I’ll never have to do. But I’d like to think I’d be able to.)
90. Sat on a jury.
91. Met someone famous. (Book signings, rock shows)
92. Joined a book club.
93. Lost a loved one.
94. Had a baby. (maybe not personally, but you get the idea.)
95. Seen the Alamo in person.
96. Swum in the Great Salt Lake.
97. Been involved in a law suit. (Class action against the record industry. Thanks for the $13.86, suckers!)
98. Owned a cell phone.
99. Been stung by a bee.

So who’s next?

Clearly, there’s a lot to look forward to. And don’t forget to vote! There’s plenty of information out there if you’re still looking for the facts.

Again, just sayin’.