Gaming in libraries

Quiet in the library, or you'll be pwned.
Librarians are not noted for being hip. But libraries do try to keep up with the world in order to remain relevant. One trend that has long passed the point of being easy to overlook is gaming. It's a huge industry; even Hollywood has started to see real competition for its audience (there was much debate over whether Iron Man suffered from the near-simultaneous launch of Grand Theft Auto 4 a couple months back).
Well, the American Library Association hasn't missed the boat. As I write this, it's conducting this study. Or at least planning to conduct a study. The goal is to see if gaming can be used to improve literary skills.
On the one hand, I'm delighted to see the ALA looking seriously at gaming.
On the other hand, though, I'm a little disappointed at the implication they'll only embrace gaming if they deem it promotes literacy. Other widespread library programs -- like chess clubs, puppet shows, antiques roundups and so on -- don't inherently promote literacy, but we pursue them anyway. Can't it just stand on its own merits? If one does take the stodgier view that gaming needs a literary angle, there's a huge body of work that clearly makes that case. Many video games have been spun out of the work of Edgar Allen Poe and H.P. Lovecraft, not to mention the world of sci fi.
But anyway, here at Twinsburg we're not waiting for study results. Our LAN parties have been huge draws for teens and young adults. And a new series of gaming parties will hopefully expand on that. Check out our Steam (it's a gaming thing) page for details: http://steamcommunity.com/groups/twinsburg.

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Public records no longer public?

Here's a story via the blog BoingBoing about some recent moves to electronically publish our country's legislative history. Publisher Thomson West received loads of help from Government Accountability Office law librarians (publicly funded) in compiling and scanning this information. A portion of those documents are being made available free of charge. But Thomson now says it owns the exclusive rights to these documents, as it's the "publisher."
It's a tricky situation we're likely to see more of in coming years. Typically, government documents are freely available to citizens. They have already been paid for through tax dollars, after all. When publishers come onto the scene, though, they have a financial stake in keeping this information out of public hands. They want people to use their, usually extremely expensive, databases or services to access what was once public domain.
So there's a bit of a dilemma. Is it better to have electronic, but expensive, access to these documents? Or is it better to keep public information freely available to the public, even if that public needs to track down documents the old-fashioned way in D.C.?

Are the days of the "new media" numbered?

There's a bit of an uproar in the blog world right now about some recent legal maneuvers on the part of the Associated Press. The AP holds blogs are infringing copyright when quoting news stories. Bloggers are crying foul, saying such use falls under long honored copyright allowances.
So who's right? I'm not the one to answer that (I'm a librarian, not a lawyer, Jim).
I will say this, though. On the one hand it's a little ironic that the AP is doing this. It frequently quotes other sources of material, for example, including blogs.
But copyright's a tricky thing in this digital age. Distributors of digital media successfully convinced legislators to hold their media to a stricter standard. Witness the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which, among other things, prohibits a person from breaking the digital rights management on an item he or she owns (sounds innocent, but consider that it could prevent you from watching, say, your DVD on your own computer) and also allows companies to hold people to use agreements they "consent" to merely by opening a package (to read said agreement, for instance). In other words, electronic copyright is much more of a gray area than print, and unlikely, when legislators refer to the Internet as plumbing, to improve anytime soon.
I should also mention, however, that as a former journalist I do see where the AP is coming from. Huge numbers of blogs basically repeat stories written by reporters, then crow about how "old media" is irrelevant. It's kind of a parasitic relationship that has had a very real effect on newsrooms, which are shrinking -- or outright closing -- across the country at an alarming rate. Until blogs start supporting investigative staff, not simply weighing in on what other people dig up -- the blogging world does actually need agencies like the AP to remain healthy.
Here's a news story about the whole brouhaha, as reported, of course, by the AP. One important thing to note is that the agency the AP is negotiating with, the Media Bloggers Association, is far from a representative entity. Actually, it's one guy, a right-wing pundit named Robert Cox. The fact that the AP is reporting the negotiations as representative of interested parties is quite telling about its motivations.
It'll be interesting to see how this shakes out.

PC World on Internet safety

We've all heard the horror stories about personal information making its way into pernicious hands via the Web. While it's certainly tempting sometimes to just swear off the Internet and live a life of Luddite bliss, that's simply not a viable option for most people in this day and age.
Here's a pretty good article from PC World on some steps you can take to protect your identity and safety online. If you're interested in a more hands-on approach, the library has a new class on Internet safety that should be appearing on the class schedule soon.

How to find old user manuals

I find myself referencing the blog LifeHacker pretty frequently in this space. It's a great source for finding tools to make the tech world more applicable to everyday life. Here's another great example of that, SafeManuals online.
Here at the library, we get occasional requests for help from people who have lost the user manual to a television or microwave or so on. Really, who hasn't misplaced something like that or tossed it out thinking it wouldn't matter. Hunting these things down on the Internet is a dicey proposition. Frequently the manufacturers want you to purchase another manual. If you can find a free manual online, chances are it's a contorted, confusing download that carries a high risk of putting viruses on your computer.
Safemanuals carries a measure of respectability -- the site gets its money from advertising. It also features a pretty simply search/browsing process to locate manuals in pdf format.

E-paper of the future? (Hint: it doesn't involve jetpacks)

We've written on this blog many times now about the progress of electronic books. Devices like Amazon's Kindle have shown the format's promise of low price (over time, anyway) and convenience has a basis in reality. It's still evolving, though. Features like color and the user interface will likely have to improve before most people start looking at e-paper as a viable alternative to a book. Here's an article from Computer World that takes a peek into the future, asking various industry experts about what's on tap.

Scientific American on photo fakery

One class the library offers that is growing in popularity is on Gimp, a pretty powerful photo-editing app. I love seeing how entranced people get when they learn just how easy it really is to totally fake a photo. It's one of those skills like lock-picking; most people would never in a million years use it for evil, but isn't it kinda fun to see how it's done?
Well, the technology behind photo editing is well ahead of the technology to detect such trickery. There have been some efforts by companies like Adobe to insert data into images indicating their authenticity. Those efforts have largely fallen flat, though. Detection largely relies on the trained human eye.
So how's it done, in this age when anyone with a computer has access to tools like Gimp?
Here's a guide I mentioned in the class, from the always impressive magazine Scientific American.
Even if you don't have much need for such detective work in your own life, the techniques can be pretty interesting. One, for example, takes the shape of the subject's pupil into account to determine whether his or her angle from the camera has been toyed with. Never woulda' thought of that.

spellcheck shenanigans

Here's a cautionary tale from the blog hothardware.com about relying too heavily on spell-check tools. A high school yearbook staff spellchecked their publication, apparently setting the check to automatically fix errors. When they got their boxes od copies back from the printer, they had some surprises. Spellcheck worked out kinda cool for some kids (Max Zupanovic became Max Supernova, for instance). Others, like the newly named Kathy Airbag and Alexandria Impolite, didn't fare so well.
In this heavily computerized age, it's important to remember there's still a place for human skill. Neat as tech tools are, there's still no good app that can be substituted for common sense. Always check a computer's work, and never assume spell check actually did its job!

"Free" wi-fi?

The popular and ever-useful blog Lifehacker reports that most locations of Starbucks will today begin offering free wi-fi access to customers (click here for the story). There's a catch, of course. You've still gotta buy $5 or more in coffee. What does this mean, aside from the likelihood of Internet postings becoming even more jittery and incomprehensible as all that caffeine kicks in?
Well, it points again to the "digital divide," that gap in people's access to the information world that is caused by factors like age, tech-savvy, and ability to pay for the Internet. Information has become a valuable commodity, as Starbucks has certainly noticed. All this makes libraries, with (at least in our library) really free wi-fi ever more relevant these days.