So, I may have mentioned earlier that this is the month I’m away giving talks and talking to librarians instead of typing on my blogonet. I’m partway done. I’ve been to Florida and Alaska and Austin Texas and I’ll be stopping by Portland Oregon next week and then I’m pretty much done. I’ve done a few talks you’ve maybe heard before but the biggest news is the panel that NYPL’s Jenny Engstrom and I did at SXSW on Tuesday. It was called How The Other Half Lives: Touring The Digital Divide [link goes to our slides] and it was a look at how libraries are dealing with people on the other side of the digital divide.
Some of this is stuff you’ve heard before but some is newish. We were lucky enough to give our presentation after the FCC released the results of their broadband study but before they actually released their Broadband Plan, so there was a lot to talk about but not too much to fight about. The talk was well-attended, well-tweeted and folks asked a lot of questions and stuck around to talk more. I’ve just gotten back from Texas so I’ll save more links and discussions for a little later. Thanks to everyone who showed up and who supported us in our desire to get this talk on the roaster at SXSW. I think we gave people a lot of food for thought.
There is another side to this matter, though. While having the infrastructure available to serve up content is important, having content available is just as important. Broadband build-out is getting better but the spectrum of content providers is on track to shrink due to the actions of nation-states for good or ill. Even other nations with representation on the AACR/RDA maintenance board are becoming unfriendly enough to net content to the point of where US freedom online is the anomaly rather than the norm.
I’m especially fond of your last half-dozen slides; they’ve given me some food for thought. Not sure how much my audience (kids and teens) needs help in this area–they’ve grown up in a world where the internet has never not existed.