Libraries

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MARCIVE, Inc. will officially cease operations by the end of December 2024. Until then, the company will continue to function as usual, ensuring that all clients experience uninterrupted service. During this period, MARCIVE, Inc. will be reviewing all existing subscriptions and renewals on a case-by-case basis to determine the most appropriate course of action for each client.

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Visitors can now use public computers at Seattle Public Library, three months after a ransomware attack shut down much of its system.

Patrons can also now suggest new items to add to the library collection and use pickup lockers. Access to microfilm will be available in late September, the library posted online Tuesday.

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“Our new focus unlinks our services from brick-and-mortar, to make us nimble, responsive, innovative, and relevant to all communities as we go where customers are — both in person and online,” the report says. “This is a big departure from previous expectations that every library [is] as close to every type of Programming as possible.”

Several of the libraries that will be closed will have parts of their programming shifted to nearby community centers. In some cases, book borrowing services would move to book lockers or pop-up libraries, or mobile book-mobiles.

Seems to me that there might have been a better way to handle this.

Oh those sad, sorry publishers. It'll be so hard on them if they can't make as many billion dollars per year off publicly funded research. How will they ever survive on less than $19 billion?

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Although open-access advocates and library groups support the move, opponents argue the new policy will limit researchers’ ability to maintain control of their published work—and cut into the $19 billion academic publishing industry’s profit margins.

This one is for the library automation nerds like me. For the unfamiliar, Lyngsoe makes and sells material movement systems like check-in and sorting systems. Some of these are fairly simple things like a sorter with bins on either side and items are shunted into bins based on whatever criteria the library decides. Other systems can ferry library materials to different floors of the library and deposit them in the proper locations for a faster return-to-shelf time.

Religion is a hell of a drug.

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“The Bible says, ‘Blessed is the nation whose God is the Lord,’” he said. “Well, when you have leaders that are not allowing the nation to be blessed of God, they’re not doing godly things, you need to replace them, get rid of them, get them out of office, put people back in there that will. You’ve got schools where they’re fighting over allowing homosexual, LGBTQ material to be utilized to groom children. … There needs to be people that will take up and sue anybody that is allowing that sort of thing to go on in our school districts and in our libraries.”

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*On Sunday, the union representing 340 employees failed to reach an agreement with management.

Negotiations between Halifax Public Libraries and Local 14 of the Nova Scotia Union of Public and Private Employees have been ongoing since last October.*

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Here's how the scholarly publishing scam works: academics do original scholarly research, funded by a mix of private grants, public funding, funding from their universities and other institutions, and private funds. These academics write up their research and send it to a scholarly journal, usually one that's owned by a small number of firms that formed a scholarly publishing cartel by buying all the smaller publishers in a string of anticompetitive acquisitions. Then, other scholars review the submission, for free. More unpaid scholars do the work of editing the paper. The paper's author is sent a non-negotiable contract that requires them to permanently assign their copyright to the journal, again, for free. Finally, the paper is published, and the institution that paid the researcher to do the original research has to pay again – sometimes tens of thousands of dollars per year! – for the journal in which it appears.

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Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson and the Chicago Public Library (CPL) on August 15 announced the launch of “Chicago Book-Wrapped,” a new popup initiative offering instant access to a curated collection of ebooks and e-audiobooks with no hold times or library card requirements during special events in Chicago. The initial collection was curated to celebrate the Democratic National Convention (DNC) and features ebooks and e-audiobooks such as Democratic Presidential nominee Kamala Harris’s The Truths We Hold: An American Journey; former President Barack Obama’s The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream and Dreams from My Father; former First Lady Michelle Obama’s The Light We Carry; as well as guidebooks for visitors; ebooks on Chicago history, architecture, and food; and much more.

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*The decision Thursday went against a judge who had advised the Oklahoma Board of Education not to revoke the license of Summer Boismier, who had also put in her high school classroom a QR code of the Brooklyn Public Library’s catalogue of banned books.

An attorney for Boismier, who now works at the Brooklyn Public Library in New York City, told reporters after the board meeting that they would seek to overturn the decision.*

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*Imagine that your local public library is inhabited by an undiscovered race of tiny people. They’ve hidden themselves in the racks, tucked behind books and magazines, amidst history and fiction, new media and old. If you’re lucky, you might spy them — or at least their tiny homes, which are filled with minuscule beds, microscopic stools, itty-bitty flowers and furniture fashioned out of found objects such as board game pieces and one-use spice bottles.

And these little folks need help. You have been cast as a “Teeny Tiny Beings Residential Specialist,” charged with finding the micro-humans new homes. It appears the librarians — giants, like us, at least to the microscopic persons — have been moving things around. *

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*Three weeks ago, waist-high cardboard boxes filled to the brim with books cluttered every aisle of this industrial Georgetown warehouse. Stacked in rows, the still-to-be-processed books packed 90 boxes at its peak.

Now, two months after a ransomware attack shut down many of Seattle Public Library’s services, library workers are celebrating: They’ve finally finished sorting and processing a backlog of thousands of borrowed books. *

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*Toronto Public Library (TPL) experienced the largest spike between 2022 and 2023: in 2023, the library had 2,334 incidents, up from 1,362 the year before — a 71 per cent jump, the data shows. TPL also reported a 529 per cent increase in the number of suspected overdoses between 2022 and 2023. *

1913 - library established in Houston by a black community. Years later, the city disbanded the all 8 black board members and shut the library down

1939 - 5 black people thrown out of a Virginia library for “disturbing the peace” (they were quietly reading).

1961 - Geraldine Edwards Hollis and eight other students from historically-black Tougaloo College — a group known as the Tougaloo Nine — held a sit-in at a “whites-only” public library in Jackson, Mississippi, as an act of civil disobedience.

1970 - the first meeting of the Black Caucus of the American Library Association formed to address the fact that the ALA wasn’t meeting the needs of Black library professionals.

The late 1990s started to become the sweet spot for library inclusion and governance. Everyone was welcome to access books and media without restriction.

In the 2000s, technology emerged in public libraries in a quite inclusive way. There some libraries had PCs and some had ethernet and/or Wi-Fi (free of captive portals). Anyone could use any of those technologies.

2024:

• Ethernet becomes nearly non-existent, thus excluding:

  • people running FOSS systems (which often lack FOSS Wi-Fi firmware)
  • people with old hardware
  • people who oppose the energy waste of Wi-Fi
  • people who do not accept the security compromise of Wi-Fi (AP spoofing/mitm, traffic evesdropping, arbitrary tracking by all iOS and Android devices in range)

• Wi-Fi service itself has become more exclusive at public libraries:

  • captive portals -- not all devices can even handle a captive portal, full stop. Some captive portals are already imposing TLS 1.3 so people with slightly older hardware cannot even reach the ToS page. Some devices cannot handle a captive portal due to DNS resolution being dysfunctional before the captive portal is passed and the captive portal itself is designed to need DNS resolution.
  • GSM requirement -- some public library captive portals now require patrons to complete an SMS verification. This of course excludes these demographics of people:
    • People who do not own a mobile phone
    • People who do not carry a mobile phone around with them
    • People who do not subscribe to mobile phone service (due to poverty, or for countless privacy reasons)
    • People who object to disclosing their mobile phone number and who intend to exercise their right to data minimisation (under the GDPR or their country’s version thereof)

• Web access restrictions intensified:

  • e-books outsourced to Cloudflared services, thus excluding all demographics of people who Cloudflare excludes.
  • Invidious blocked. This means people who do not have internet at home have lost the ability to download videos to watch in their home.
  • Egress Tor connections recently blocked by some libraries, which effectively excludes people whose systems are designed to use Tor to function. So if someone’s email account is on an onion service, those people are excluded from email.

There’s a bit of irony in recent developments that exclude privacy seekers who, for example, deliberately choose not to have a GSM phone out of protest against compulsory GSM registration with national IDs, because the library traditionally respects people’s privacy. Now they’re evolving to actually deny service to people for exercising their privacy rights.

There needs to be pushback to get public libraries back on track to becoming as inclusive as they were in the 1990s. A big part of the problem is outsourcing. The libraries are no longer administrating technology themselves. They have started outsourcing to tech giants like Oracle who have a commercial motivation to save money, which means marginalising demographics of people who don’t fit in their simplified canned workflow. When a patron gets excluded by arbitrary tech restrictions, the library is unable to remedy the problem. Librarians have lost control as a consequence of outsourcing.

One factor has improved: some libraries are starting to nix their annual membership fee. It tends to be quite small anyway (e.g. $/€ 5/year), so doesn’t even begin to offset those excluded by technology.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.zip/post/15657357

Digital collections put library patrons’ privacy at risk

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