This started out as a set of internal guidelines for the staff at MPOW, but some friends expressed interest in it, and it seems to have struck a nerve, so I'm posting it here, so it is easier for people to find and to link to.

Using QR Codes in the Library

QR codes are new to North American, but have been around for a while in Japan, where they originated, and where everybody has a cellphone that can read the codes. They make it simpler
to take information from the real world and load it into your phone. As such, they should only be used when the information will be useful for somebody on the go, and shouldn't normally be used if the person accessing the information will probably be on a computer to begin with.

Do Use QR Codes:

• On posters and display projectors to guide users to mobile-friendly websites.
  
• To share your contact information on posters, display projectors, or your business card. This makes it simpler for users to add you to their addressbook without having to type it all in.
  
• In display cabinets or art exhibits to link to supplementary information about the items on display.
  

Don't use QR Codes:

• to record your contact information in your email signature. Somebody reading your email can easily copy the information from your signature to their addressbook.
  
• to share URLs for rich, or full-sized, websites. The only URLs you should be sharing via QR codes for are mobile-friendly sites.
  

When Using QR Codes:

• Make sure to include a human readable URL, preferably one that's easy to remember, near the QR code for people without QR Code scanners to use.

A Manifesto for the Library

Last week John Blyberg, Kathryn Greenhill, and Cindi Trainor spent some time together thinking about what the library is for and what its future might hold. The result of that deep thinking has now been published on John's blog under the title "The Darien Statements on the Library and Librarians."

Opening with the ringing statement that

The purpose of the Library is to preserve the integrity of civilization

they then provide their own gloss on what this means for individual libraries, and for librarians.

There is a lively discussion going on in the comments on John's blog, as well as less thoughtful sniping going on in more "annoying" blogs. I think that this is something that will engender quite a bit of conversation in the month's to come.

I'm a Shover and Maker!

Since only a few people can be named "Movers and Shakers" by Library Journal, Joshua Neff and Steven Lawson created the "Shovers and Makers" awards "for the rest of us," under the auspices of the not entirely serious Library Society of the World. I'm very pleased to report that I have been named a 2009 Shover and Maker (by myself, as are all the winners).

The Shovers and Makers awards are a fun way to share what we've done over the past year or two and they're definitely a lot simpler than writing the annual performance review that HR wants. Think of this as practice for writing the speaker's bio for the conference keynote you dream of being invited to give.

LITA Tears Down the Walls

At ALA Midwinter 2009, Jason Griffey and the LITA folks took advantage of the conference center's wireless network to provide quick and easy access to the Top Tech Trends panel for those of us that couldn't be there in person. The low-bandwidth option was a CoverItLive live-blogging feed of comments from attending that also included photos by Cindi Trainor, and a feed of twitters from attendees. The high-bandwidth option was a live (and recorded) video stream of the event that Jason captured using the webcam built into his laptop.

Aside from the LITA planned events, the fact that we could all sit in meant that there were lots of virtual conversations in chat rooms and other forums that sprung up as people joined in from afar. Unfortunately, because my Sunday morning is filled with laundry and other domestic pleasures, I wasn't able to join in on the "live" chatter going on in parallel with the video or livebloggin.

Owing to funding constraints and my own priorities, my participation at ALA is limited. I've been to LITA Forum once, and might go again, but I focus more on the OLA other regional events. This virtual option from LITA let me get a peek at what's going on and hear what the "big thinkers" at LITA have to say. I hope they can keep it up, and will definitely be talking to local folks about how we might be able to emulate LITA in our own events.

A (Half) Year in Books

According to my reading log, I read twenty-five books this year, and nothing since I started All Families are Psychotic in July. I certainly didn't read very much in the fall but, as I predicted, my commitment to recording my reading fell off dramatically. There are at least two or three more books that didn't make it onto the journal.

This year I also tried to participate in the Book a Month Challenge, initiated by Katie Dunneback. My participation in the challenge tapered off in July, at about the same time that my reading journal did. The hard part about the challenge wasn't usually reading the book or writing the review, but selecting a title. I had the same problem when I was asked to write a blurb for a new book for the library newsletter at MPOW.

But by August, work of various sorts had consumed all my time, leaving little time for recreational reading, beyond my weekly reading of the Economist.

The Desk Set Drinking Game

After hearing that Amy Buckland had never seen Desk Set before, I vowed to rectify this situation. She then proposed the idea of the Desk Set Drinking Game.

So, we need some rules. I've got a basic set, but I'm sure there are plenty of other ideas.

The Rules

Drink Every Time:

1. somebody uses the word "Brain"
2. somebody answers a reference question (right or not)
   • make it a double when Bunny answers question
   • chug when Richard Sumner answers a question
3. somebody names Santa's reindeer (since this counts as a reference question, you need to drink twice)
   
4. you see Richard Sumner's socks
5. the staff go on "break"

So, if you have any other suggestions, please leave a comment!

July Book a Month Challenge: Independence

Doctorow, Cory. Little Brother. New York: Tor, 2008.

Doctorow has responded to the United States' gradual increase government surveillance of the civilian population and the federal government's use of "terrorists" to clamp down on speech with Little Brother: a short novel describing what happens after San Francisco's Bay Bridge is destroyed. By focusing on a small group of tech-savvy teens, Doctorow shows both how the government might co-opt existing billing and security systems to quickly create a police state, and what domestic resistance to that police state might look like when when mobile phones are portable computers and everybody has access to good encryption technology.

While I enjoyed Little Brother, It had several flaws. The most minor of these is the main character's screen name, or alias: when the novel begins, Marcus goes by the name "W1n5t0n", but soon changes it to the more commonplace "M1k3y". If he had only used the names in the opposite order, giving him the name "Winston" for the majority of the novel, and all of the time that he was running his resistance operations, it would have created a stronger tie to Orwell.

More seriously, Doctorow seems to be trying to do three different things at once with this novel and, as a result, is not as successful at telling the story as he might have been. The story of Marcus coming of age and maturing both emotionally and politically against the backdrop of the "terrorist crackdown", and his resistance to that crackdown are the two parts of the story that work very well. Unfortunately, Doctorow weighs the novel down with a lot of technical detail that slows the pace. I found the "how to hack" and "how it works" sections of the novel interrupted the flow of the narrative, and I suspect that the readers of this book will either already know this information, or not care about the details. It might have been more appropriate to cut down on the explanations in the body of the text and provide an afterword explaining that much of the tech is possible today and pointing to the 'net for details.