The free internet

When The Times of London began charging for access to its daily online edition, it was a watershed moment for my life as an internet user. The ethos of free and social and the commons was shown up, as with most things from Silicon Valley, as carefully constructed spin, half the conjuring trick leading us to a state of chronic and compulsive electronic consumerism (the other half of the trick, of course, is the creation myth as pronounced by its prophets - Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerburg, the Google dudes).

I cannot use sites like Hulu, because I have the wrong IP address; I must pay for apps; I need to buy a life on Farmville; ESPN wants 10 dollars a month to read the good stuff - plus ads; now, I need to pay to read The Times. 

The internet, therefore, is moving away from an ideal information state, where that information is free and available to all, and moving towards the state of a mobile, electronic mall, open, blaring and neon, 24 hours a day. The second generation digital divide is not that the citizens of Africa cannot access the internet, or electricity. Instead, it is the three card trick that internet companies are playing on the West - increasingly, we the users are being channelled towards a pyramid where our few cents are becoming a hill of millions (or billions) for the savvy and clever and entitled.

A commie rant? Maybe, or maybe a lament from a jaundiced information idealist, who bought into the opening day publicity - free for all, free for ever, access to everything, anywhere, anytime, until the end of time. If I can't even read the paper now, how long is it until the search engines become fully monetized, a cent a time - surely the rub-your-hands-together end goal.

Google: Good or bad?

Google lights up my life. I get sports scores in real time, know what the weather is going to be like in Rome tomorrow, convert my baht to euros, book flights and hotels, read the paper, blog. Google doesn't necessarily do all these things itself, but it does facilitate straightforward access to them. When I was young, growing up in the South Pacific, I sometimes wouldn't know who won the World Series until the following year, when the new season's preview magazines hit the bookstands - now I know the same moment that someone in New York or San Francisco or, less likely, Kansas City does.

I use Google in class a lot, teaching students how to use it effectively, primarily through using straightforward search strategies, but also using Google Maps, and Blogger, and Youtube, and as a starting point for research in numerous projects. Like a public library once was, Google is the place we head by default when we have a general need for information.

And, like a librarian, Google interprets our query and attempts to return the best possible result - not by in depth questioning of the user, or years of experience, or conversational nuance, but through use of an algorithm that is more secret than the recipe for Coca Cola. This does put the onus on the user more than the facilitator - to get the best results, our searches and keywords need to be carefully chosen. But Google is intuitive enough for most users to understand this to a basic level, and we can all usually find something we want on the first page of results.

So that is my perception of Google. I view it not as a great storage unit of information, but as a sort of robotic librarian - it knows where to go to get the information I want, even at 3a.m.

But a great deal of the information that Google can go and get would not have been in the public library of 1976. In some ways, Google is a library of iniquity: pornography, paedophelia, bomb making, terrorist tips, racism, gambling - these are all growth markets, partly because of the accessibility to these type of sites, as facilitated by Google.

Of even greater concern, I feel, is the deadening effect of Google. As in a casino, the world becomes timeless as we surf the net. Instead of great novels or poems, great pop songs or even great TV advertisements, Google encourages output in the form of blogs, or tweets, or email, or videos of our dogs bodily functions, or Facebook, or more usually - nothing. At least watching a TV show in the middle of the day, even if it was a rerun of Kojak, represented a linear event. Time passed, notably. Narrative occurred. There was a beginning and an end.

Now, using Google, it is possible to pass whole afternoons without even that minor achievement. Cricinfo scores flick over. Farmville swells, grows, recedes, swells again. 1979 is still on Youtube, and so is Benny Hill. I blog, I email - and at the end, I am pretty much at the same point at which I began. I want the man who ate McDonalds every day for a year to sit in an apartment, Googling from 8am-5pm, and find out which was worse for his health.

I'm overstating my case? Perhaps, but when 200 of the richest people in America get together to discuss brain-computer interfaces, it is time for people to dissent. Grow potatoes, write a haiku, wrestle with your son - anything. Take an hour a day that you would spend online and do something human instead.

I love Google. It is the advance of my lifetime that has most changed the way I carry out that life. But none of that change has been creative, none has been physical, and none has made me a better parent or husband or person.

Censorship in a school library

When I first started in my role at this library, a teaching staff member went to the shelves, found a copy of Ben Elton's Post Mortem, opened it to an explicit scene and brought it to show me. She wasn't outraged or offended, but felt the text was unsuitable for students at the school.

I read the page as she watched. It was explicit, as she had said, and contained high level obscene language. I agreed to consider the place of the book in the collection, put it in my desk, read it again, put it back in my desk - eventually, the next time we weeded, I included it in the deselected items. We had other Ben Elton that students could read, I told myself. It was old, and dog-eared. It had to go.

What I was doing, in effect, new to my job, eager to please faculty, was placing myself in the position of censor, whatever rationale I was using to justify my actions to myself. I read a page of a popular novel, and judged it to be unsuitable for students using the library, and had thus withdrawn it from circulation.

Is that appropriate? In Kentucky, it was not appropriate for library staff to withhold The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen from an 11 year old library user who wanted to read it. My context is slightly different, as my salary, at a high-end private school, is paid by parents, not by county taxes; I work under Thai law, which has a different commitment to information than American law; most of my library users are adolescents, or younger; I was removing the text from circulation, rather than refusing to let a specific user borrow it.

My rule of thumb is to not purchase texts which will be offensive to users. This is reflected in the library purchasing policy. But I know that there are advanced students, leaving for Unversity later this year, who may benefit from reading American Psycho (they are studying sexuality in the American novel); the graphic novel collection would be richer, and probably better, if I was willing to select items that contained challenging content. I also feel that I am imposing my interpretation of 'social conscience' on the library and its users.

So what is the solution? I don't think it is to have a drawer of controversial texts that are issued to users signalled as mature enough to cope; or even to mark the due date sticker with 'Year 10 and above only'. It is not appropriate, to my mind, to extract a book from the collection because it has a passage of writing that may revolt or horrify or titillate the reader. But is it correct operating procedure to, alternatively, fill the shelves with mature content?

My compromise is to not buy every book I feel I should, and to take the middle-ground, motivated by the context of the library, and my perception of the requirements of the library stakeholders. If there are disputed texts, I now consult with those stakeholders before making a decision. However, if a student requests the library purchase a text, I will almost always approve that request.

But I still feel that my selection hand is too heavy, and that rather than facilitating straightforward access to information, my caution is in effect a form of defacto censorship - and that leaves me feeling just a little bit grubby.

The Bookless Library

Do libraries need books at all?

Cushing Academy, in Massachusetts, has made the decision that they don't, and that the future for school libraries is digital - ebooks, databases, portable devices, the web.

The result? Their new digital library is the hub of the school, with increased use and the need for more librarians to help students effectively navigate the digital world. Cushing hasn't thrown away its paper holdings - they have been redistributed to relevant departments within the school. But the library itself has been reborn, digital.

I admire them for so completely accepting the challenge of technology. One of my primary goals with Harrow students is to have them being information independent (and information authentic) by the time they leave school. I define this as their being able to access, interpret, present and acknowledge authoritative information - which increasingly means, electronic information. By exposing students so fully to digital information, and scaffolding that exposure with thorough, expert advice from information professionals, Cushing Academy is surely going to meet that goal in a way that is highly relevant to success in the 21st Century.

But I also agree with the dissenting voices in the debate. I believe in, and love, the stillness of the page. Reading a book is, I agree, a singleminded process - there is only one tab open. Books are not, thankfully, connected to the grid. Tactile, silent, pleasurable, lovable, dog-eared - books are the primary reason that I am a librarian.

They are not, however, the primary reason that all students come to the library. Some want to read The Hunger Games, or Bear Grylls, or Charlie and Lola. Some want to game. Some need to print last night's homework - now. Some want to watch Youtube, go on Facebook, browse car image sites. Some want to do research. Some want to talk to their friends. Some like the air-con. Some feel happy and safe sitting alone in a chair reading Asterix. Some read the papers, or Time magazine. Some need help. Some want to do Mathletics. Some want to....

Which I guess is my point. I think Cushing Academy, with an end-goal of information independence in the digital age, has done the right thing. But I want Harrow library to not just be about Electronica, with a capital E. I don't want it to just be for research, or even research and ebooks. I want it to be for research and reading and being social, or being alone, for surfing or lying prone in a beanbag, reading Meg Cabot or The Great Gatsby for the first time. I want you to come here and connect, charge up and fearlessly onwards. But I also want you to be able to come here and disconnect, to power down, to look, slowly, quietly, longingly - backwards, or sideways, or yes, even forwards.

Database Training

In the second term, library staff will be offering database training to teachers at Harrow. The main focus of the training will be on EBSCO, and how to use it effectively in the classroom. Other resources that we subscribe to, including Britannica Online, Issues Online and Netlibrary will also be demonstrated.

The training will take place one day a week during term 2A. Each week's training will be on a different day from the previous week, so that teachers with activities have the opportunity to attend.

An email, with dates and locations, will be sent out early in the new term. Teachers who are unable to attend but would like to learn more about the school's electronic resources can contact library staff - we will be happy to arrange a time that suits.

We are also happy to demonstrate the databases to Harrow parents.

Does 2 + 2 = 4?

Not always, according to the boffins at New Scientist.

The Last Word is a useful site hosted by that magazine, where you can search for answers to those scientific (and mathematical) questions that have always baffled you.

So, if you added two librarians to two insurance underwriters, would the answer be four? Or a quiet night in? Or chaos theory?

Japanese Films

The SF World Cinema at Central World is showing a retrospective of the master Japanese filmaker, Akira Kurosawa. The films run from January 6th - January 19th, and will be in the original Japanese with English subtitles. Entry is free, and made possible by the Japan Foundation of Bangkok.

Here is a link to the schedule.

Kurosawa was the pre-eminent Japanese filmaker of the 20th Century. He won the Palm d'Or in Cannes, and was awarded an Academy Award for Lifetime Achievement in 1990. The film he is perhaps best known for is the epic Seven Samurai.

Merry Christmas

Is Santa Claus real?

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year from all the staff at Harrow Library!

Best Teen Books

Here is a link to a list of the best teen books, as voted by readers around the world.

The library holds many of the titles listed, so come and borrow them when the new term starts!

Remember, you can check which books are available by using Oliver.

Merry Christmas!

Merry Christmas! Hope you have a great holiday and enjoy a well deserved break. Read lots of awesome books and we will look forward to seeing you again in Term 2. We probably won't write much on the blog over the holiday, so keep reading - we will update it again next term, promise!

The week of Christmas is nearly upon us!

This is the last week of term 1, and it has gone so fast.
This term we have had so many fun things to do in the library. We've had storytellers, creativity day, making stuff day, Guinness World Records day and many other activities.

We have a lot of things planned for next term, so make sure you come in and see us when you get back.

This week we have a festive theme at the library. For making stuff day (Wednesday, Primary lunch) we will be making mini cardboard Christmas trees. They are very cute, you should come and make one!

3 sleeps till the end of school, and 18 sleeps till Santa...