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This situation, and many others like it (1984 and the Kindle, etc.) is what inspired us to start the Readers’ Bill of Rights for Digital Books project, over at: http://readersbillofrights.info/ We hope that this guide is useful to librarians when evaluating what is (and in the case of Overdrive, what is not) worth purchasing and supporting.

I think the only way that we can expect things to change is if we collectively avoid heinous digital restrictions upon our right to read. I agree with Doctorow–just say no to DRM!

As happy as I was to see the “issue one” issue of my post take off I am equally disappointed to see “issue two” be neglected. So I’m glad to see it mentioned. Maybe its just me but my concern (and its not unfounded given issue one) is that publishers want to meddle in the library policy. Right now many libraries offer library cards to patrons who fall outside their direct population. Some of these cards are issued on a reciprocal policy, the idea you give our patrons access to your stuff and we’ll give your patrons access to our stuff. But many systems allow anyone outside their service area to purchase a card. So for $25 or $65 a year you can have access to all services of that system including digital services. THIS is the area I’m concern publishers want to meddle in. It may be small and may seem insignificant but its a small step into allow publisher to dictate library policy. Of course I could just be paranoid :-)

Sounds like HarperCollins and Overdrive really want to drive people to get their eBooks through torrent downloads or some such thing. Somehow I always knew Overdrive was too good to be true & haven’t rushed to buy into it. If other publishers follow HarperCollins’ lead it will turn out I was right. In my state libraries buy into Overdrive as a consortium, with the purchased titles being available to all the patrons from those libraries. 26 uses per title is laughable.

[...] Harper Collins vs. Libraries – battling for the future of lending digital content (Jessamyn West) [...]

Just as offensive, in my mind, is the part of the Overdrive letter that references “publisher concern” with consortia and shared collections. Not only do they want to screw our ebook access, they want to ensure that consortia are destroyed or at least vastly weakened. Because, you know, it might just be too easy for libraries to fight this kind of crap if they had the size and leverage to fight back by refusing to buy their titles. Kind of reminds me of the current situation in Wisconsin. When it comes to dealing with vendors, consortia are the collective bargaining of the library world.

[...] news has had the biblioblogosphere buzzing (e.g., Library Journal, Jessamyn West at librarian.net, Sarah Houghton-Jan at Librarian in Black): OverDrive has announced that they will be changing [...]

[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Library Feed, librarian.net. librarian.net said: §: some library love links from astronauts and actors and poets and fans http://j.mp/hsT4rr [...]

Congratulations – I think. Seems like a relatively odd mix of people, especially if you’re not mentioned in the article itself.

Trevor’s Facebook is friends-only, for what it’s worth.

You rock – what other reason need there be? ;)

Seriously, I can see where that would seem a bit odd. It’s not like we library folk need bodyguards or M&M clauses in our contracts! But from where I sit, it is nice to see people who do good things get recognition and a modicum of fame.

That’s so funny, I looked at that issue and never caught on, but that certainly looks like you on the front! Too cool Jessamyn!

You are hanging with Nancy Pearl! and blogging it for posterity…

I think that is Salman Rushdie not Keith Michael Fiels….(at least according to Trevor’s tags).

Simon, Jessamyn has already identified all the folks in the photo, and thanks Jessamyn for the edit.

Jess, this is officially the Coolest Thing Ever. And here’s a hint: sometimes if you ask a cartoonist nicely, you can get originals out of them. Might be worth a try.

In order of height on the illustration, you are only beneath Toni Morrison and Salman Rushdie. Unless you count the balloons. Somebody really likes you at LJ. :-)

Random, maybe, but what fun!

Very cute! I am glad that you continue to be famous for whatever reason.

Outstanding–now if you can only get to be an action figure like Nancy Pearl…

What ever else it might be,
it is still the kind of thing which a lot of people put in picture frames & place upon their walls.

Did you ask just how much it would cost to get hold of the original art work?

The neat thing is that Biblibre teamed up with Bywater to help the move happen.

There is an interesting thread on the Koha mailing list at the moment where people are pushing for Liblime to make the code available in a public repository.

I sincerely hope this happens.

Thank you so much for the kind words :)

My daughter has a Kindle and gave me one as a gift (which I ended up selling on eBay because nothing I wanted was available in Kindle format). My impression is that the entire Kindle system is inherently anti-library. The device must be linked to an individual, and the delivery system is clearly set up to make people 100 percent dependent on Amazon for all their reading. They don’t want you reading library books or buying books at Borders or anywhere else. They also don’t want you loaning books to your friends; you can’t transfer a Kindle book to another Kindle owner. If you sell or give away the device you must de-register it, and all the books in it disappear.

They’re trying to groom lifelong, loyal Amazon customers. That goal is intrinsically incompatible with what libraries are about.

I’ve noticed that the typical Kindle user is someone who loves gadgets, travels a lot, has plenty of disposable income, reads everything on the NYT bestseller lists, and thinks libraries are for poor people. One Kindle-loving friend told me that she doesn’t read books from libraries because they (the books) have “germs” on them.

As one of the first public libraries in the U.S. to start lending Kindles to our patrons, we were involved with the “is it legal to lend Kindles” debate and I was quoted in Library Journal a few months back about this issue. The LJ reporter gave me a contact at Amazon (director of marketing), whom I called and emailed about this issue. I stated that if Amazon told us to cease and desist from lending Kindles, then we would do so. I never heard a peep, so I assume we are covered.

To me, lending a Kindle with loaded e-content which our library has paid for is no different than if our library purchases a paper book from Amazon and lends that. Until I hear otherwise, we are full steam ahead. Many other libraries are doing so as well. So, Jessamyn, I am with you regarding libraries erring on “the side of continuing to do whatever it was that they were doing, in good faith, and let the vendors let them know if they’re not doing something correctly.” We did our best to get Amazon to respond.

And, responding to Steve’s comments, I don’t believe that the typical Kindle user is someone who merely loves gadgets. There was a survey a few months ago which showed that the majority of Kindle users are middle age or above. We have a retirement community in Hanover and many people there have enjoyed the larger font sizes that are available. In addition, someone posted on the Kindle blog that he is severely handicapped and could never hold a book or turn the page. The Kindle has opened a whole new world for him. We need to stop thinking about this as a new, fancy gizmo and instead think about how it can open worlds.

I am not trying to help Amazon make a profit. Coming soon is a great tablet e-reader from Plastic Logic. Take a look at their video on You-Tube.

Mary White, Director / Howe Library, Hanover, NH

Deeply ironic: one of the first folks on the list I clicked on, Carlie Webber, notes on her blog ( http://blogs.bccls.org/carlie/index.php?/archives/268-Loving-and-losing.html ) that she is losing her job: “I will not have a job as of July 1, 2009. BCCLS is eliminating the YA Services Librarian position.”

I have studied your post and it helps me to promote my paper machine products. I am new in this business so I am still looking for material that can help for my promotions

Thanks for the GODORT shoutout Jessamyn. GODORT’s actually running *several* google custom search engines. Besides the one you mention, there’s also one searching 1090 Nongovernmental Organizations (NGOs) with consultative status with the United Nations and another searching 340 Intergovernmental Organizations (IGOs). These search engines will be very helpful to students and researchers on many topics in which IGOs and NGOs are active (AIDS, global development, environment, human rights, gender etc.).

On the non-GODORT side of things, I’m also building a custom search engine of library Questions&Answers sites (I described it over at LibrarianInBlack) so I’d highly recommend that libraries of all stripes create blogs with their questions and answers.

Connie Crosby did over at http://conniecrosby.blogspot.com/2008/03/movers-and-shakers-2008-announced-in.html

[...] Comment on know any Movers & Shakers? by amy [...]

[...] Comment on know any Movers & Shakers? by amy [...]

Chrystie, come on over to FriendFeed... soon. before Twitter completely fries out ;-)

Thank you, Jessamyn, for annotating the list for us!

[…] Ditto. I know more M&S peeps from this year than any other. Posted in Movers and Shakers | Trackback | del.icio.us | Top Of Page […]

Hi Jessamyn:

Thank you for putting the list together. I agree a wiki would be good for next time–I was working on pretty much the same thing as you over on my blog.

On a wiki we could add more details about each person, too.

Cheers,
Connie

[…] Jessamyn’s better list for 2008 […]

Talk about a better mousetrap!

[…] Journal’s list of Movers & Shakers is up. I grabbed this list (which includes names) from Jessamyn West’s page. All I did is add a link to the blogs if I could find one. Because we all need more blogs in our […]

[…] to all of the other 2008 Movers and Shakers, including the Lady of the Rebel Yell, Michelle Boule, New Jersey Transformer (more than meets the […]

[…] Librarian.net has a list of all M/S-ers by name. […]

Thanks for posting the list this way! Saved me dozens of clicks.

[…] them all! LJ tends to list the honorees by cute tagline rather than by name; Jessamyn West wrote a post that lists them by name, and Connie Crosby wrote a post that lists them by name and includes a snippet of each article in […]

[…] Library Journal’s navigation makes it impossible to browse the profiles by name, so Jessamyn West sensibly made a version of the list with names. […]

[…] Journal’s 2008 Movers & Shakers! Use Jessamyn’s handy list if you want to see people’s names instead of just the cutesy titles. If you’re bored, […]

[…] to the Library Journal Movers and Shakers of 2008!  (I’m linking to Jessamyn West’s better list which includes names.)  […]

[…] A huge congratulations to Michelle Boule with whom I had a chance to work recently, Stephanie Squicciarini from just up the road in Fairport, NY, and the other Library Journal Movers and Shakers for 2008. […]

[…] Jessamyn for putting all of the names next to the […]

Good catch, Alice. And there's bigger story. I just returned from having dinner with the head of HR from a major newspaper. She shared the inside story on the convulsions the print media is undergoing. This isn't a restructuring,she told me, it's bringing the house down to the studs. In a fortnight, Chicago Tribune fired 2,500 staff and NY Times fired 100 reporters. How could lil' ol' Library Journal stand a chance in this environment?

[…] desconocido wrote an interesting post today!.Here’s a quick excerptI read the whole article on salaries called What’s an MLIS Worth (for the record, I have an MLib.) and I have to say I could not get over the fact that women in librarianship, in all parts of librarianship earn less than men. … […]

The persistent gap in salaries for the two sexes just hacks me to the bone. As my feminist scholar wife would say to me “that’s the patriarchy, dear,” and she’s of course absolutely right. It’s everywhere, and all-powerful to boot.

You asked if librarianship is as bad as everyplace else. Perhaps. But the institution that is competely retro when it comes to such things is academia as a whole. Most institutions are so socially backward and patriarchal as to be laughable. Most corporations–yes, those evil, greedy, bloosucking monsters–have far more progressive social policies than do most universities and colleges. From my experience, it’s the larger institution’s old-boy clubbiness that impacts salaries across the board at the university; unfortunately, all too many women in libraries are slaves to the patriarchy and ‘enforce’ these systems in their own organizations. I don’t see such inequity where I work now, but have seen it quite clearly elsewhere.

Somewhere in one of the more subversive books I picked up during my Foundations of Librarianship class, I learned that originally, at least in the US, most, if not all, librarians were men. Thanks in large part to Carnegie, library construction boomed in the late 1800s and early 1900s. There weren’t enough male librarians to staff them all, and the small town libraries couldn’t afford them. When Melvil Dui opened his library classes to women, it wasn’t due to any sense of equality, but cold hard economics. Women would work for less. The legacy follows us to this day.

But you have to ask, who is doing the hiring and salary reviews here? With an 80/20 margin, is there still not a significant number of women in administrative positions who can change that? (I can’t get Table 4 and beyond to display. Maybe the information is there.)

Thanks for the link to “What an MLIS is worth.”

MLib? I’ll have an MS (in LIS) in three classes, and there are still MLS programs floating around, in addition to the majority (MLIS programs).

This field = alphabet soup.

I’m not sure I understand how this can be. When I was hired for my job in an academic library (both of my library jobs actually), there was one salary; take it or leave it. Perhaps men are more likely to go up for promotions and get raises that way. My salary is determined by the position, not the gender.

This survey is obviously a lot of work, but some of this is straight up misleading. Not only is the response rate (the number of graduates reporting) rate around 40% every year, but there are also a fair number of library schools that don’t report data, and someone should be asking why. After looking at these tables, I must make the comment that I know of abolustely no one who starts out at $40,000 working at a public library in my home state…and I do keep track of this stuff.

So, Robert, who decides on the promotions?

Sigh.

http://shelfcheck.blogspot.com/2007/10/shelf-check-125.html

I work in a library where the majority of the faculty and staff are women and the majority of the department heads are men. And I think this is a pretty common scenario.

Because we are door mats.

See also; why teachers and nurses (the other two traditional educated female jobs) make a lot more than librarians. Hint - unions and strikes.

(As a non-MLS library staffer, I’ll just point out that MLS librarians make more than the rest of us, and that public libraries, especially, have been exploiting part time employees badly for years.)

i am a licensed social worker who works as a pseudo-librarian in a resource center/specialty library.

i cannot speak to the issues within the librarian community but they sound similar to social work problems.

we are a predominantly female profession where the majority of administrators are male. it seems that they seek out those positions more while women tend to seek out hands on, rubber-hits-the-road type jobs. obviously there is a pay differential between the two.

another issue i’ve been trained to avoid is that women do not negotiate as hard as men do for their salaries, raises, etc. so, if a female librarian accepts whatever is given to her and a male coworker pushes for even a bit higher, when it comes to raise time and they both receive the same percent, the amount is very different. each year they both receive the same rate of a raise but the desparity between the dollar amounts only grows. i’m sure there is a mathematical word to explain this more clearly but i can’t pull it out of my ancient memory.

another difference is biology. when women have babies, take maternity leave, etc. they generally take more time then men who become fathers. some may decide to stay at home full time and return to the profession after a few years. this stops their pay from increasing all while their male counterparts continue to receive updated training, ongoing raises, promotions, etc. when a female returns to the workforce she has to catch up from all that missed time.

what are the answers to this? in social work we were taught to be more assertive when negotiating pay, to not be afraid to ask for more benefits, and to not fear managerial positions. i think administrators also need to be aware of these issues and find ways to decrease the pay gap.

Jess Bruckner - I don’t know what your home stat is, but I’m pretty sure we’re there ($-wise) in New Jersey.

As for males’ salaries being higher, it’s impossible to justify, in my opinion, although the article did point out that men are still by FAR a minority in the profession.

Based on my experience and observations (as a male librarian), I have noticed several factors that may be coming into play:

1) I know many women who a) were unwilling or unable to relocate geographically to higher paying positions or b) went to a lower paying job for sentimental reasons (i.e. to be the Children’s Librarian at their hometown library instead of moving to a higher-paying admin job somewhere else. I have jumped several states in the past few years for higher-paying employment, but the people who have stayed in their home regions have stagnated in their positions.

2) More men than women go into libraries only to go into management. I went into libraries to become a manager only; I don’t really have a deep, ingrained love and respect of books and reading. I get my job satisfaction from freeing my staff to fulfill the library’s mission. If our mission changed overnight, my staff would fulfill that mission with no protest from me. Not all librarians feel that way.

[…] more here […]

Sharon,

If a librarian decides to go for promotion, a dossier is prepared by the candidate, sent to a committee of three fellow librarians, then to a university committee. Promotion in this case is from Assistant Prof to Associate Prof, not any change in duties, but it does come with a $2000 raise. With our male/female ratio almost any committee is going to be two female and one male.

So why the double hell don’t people go to COSWL Cause and make noise?
So why the triple hell did the LIS education discussion list–JESSE- refuse to let me post even a news note about the 89 day Vancouver strike?
The issue is Pay Equity and the place to go is here:
http://blogs.ala.org/coswlcause.php?title=why_isn_t_your_headline_why_the_hell_are&more=1&c=1&tb=1&pb=1

And just this past week on Fox News Sunday Laura Bush said:
Transcript: Laura Bush on ‘FOX News Sunday’
Monday, October 29, 2007–

BUSH: Well, the fact is I’ve been involved for a long time in policy and I think I just didn’t get a lot coverage on it.

I mean, I really do think there’s a stereotype, and I was stereotyped as being a certain way because I was a librarian and a teacher and, you know, had the careers that traditional women have that were considered traditional women’s careers.

[…] Original post by jessamyn   […]

[…] Original post by jessamyn […]

[…] (via librarian.net) […]

Thanks so much for posting the link to this article. I’ve forwarded it on to my library school colleagues. It’s really amazing how many were touched by him.

[…] Thanks especially to Library Journal for putting up the 1973 article from the interview they did with him. And thanks to Jessamyn West at librarian.net for posting a link to this article. […]

[…] Original post by unknown […]

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