Testing Zemanta: topic = civil liberties

All right, so I'm now generating a new blog post just in order to test this Zemanta plugin. Since it's late and I want to get some sleep, let me just cut and paste some text I wrote during my civil liberties and privacy research.

Many people may assume that the Constitution ensures us a right to privacy, but in fact, the word “privacy” never appears in our Constitution, and laws about privacy differ from state to state. The concept of privacy is ambiguous, abstract, and difficult to define. Privacy can mean being left alone and not subjected to unwanted intrusions, or it can refer to shielding one’s self and one’s interests from access by other people, corporations, or government. While the Fourth Amendment protects against unlawful search and seizure, this amendment is usually not taken to apply to library records or online data. In the wake of the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, the USA Patriot Act removed many safeguards against individual privacy, and libraries are finding it more difficult to protect patrons’ privacy and rights. The ALA maintains that libraries are critical for promoting an unrestrained flow of information for all, and that privacy is essential in the “exercise of free speech, free thought, and free association; and, in a library, the subject of users’ interests should not be examined or scrutinized by others” (ALA, 2003).

Image by library_mistress via Flickr

Okay, it looks like this has the potential to be really cool -- instant links and tags and images -- but the only problem is that my "Preview" screen no longer works. Eh??? I'm hoping it will work out all right when I post the blog; I guess there's only one way to find out.

Finally on campus; finally time to post!

At the end of a 24-hour journey from Sydney I found myself in Pittsburgh late Saturday night, and since then I've been busy just about every minute with on-campus activities, classes, interactions with other Cohort 8 students, and preparations for the Civil Liberties and Privacy presentation that my small group delivered this morning. It's been exhausting, but gratifying; it's great to meet my classmates in person, and I continue to learn a lot. I'm getting the sense that my initial MLIS education is really coming together during this intensive on-campus session.

Other people's presentations have provided interesting insights into issues that concern librarians, and researching my own topic over the last couple of weeks has been really eye-opening. I also found Dr. Currier's lecture on intellectual property and copyright laws very interesting... for example, who knew you could copyright a gesture? In fact, already this week I've been filling my notebook with "who knew" questions: "Who knew you could use Microsoft Word to generate a summary of your document?" "Who knew there were so many orphaned works in copyright limbo?" "Who knew there was a Zemanta plug-in to automatically locate images and articles that relate to your blog post?"

Speaking of which, I should download and use that service right this second; my blog is too text-heavy.



Okay, I just downloaded Zemanta, but now I need to restart Firefox to make it work. Meanwhile, let me just post this blog entry... perhaps it's the last such overtexty document I'll deign to post!

Craving a room full of books

I miss libraries... with so much else going on this summer, it's been too long since I've been in one! The internet helps me feel "connected" in some sense, but the flashy-clicky nature of computer work is nothing like the meditative focus that comes from browsing, sitting, and reading books... ah, libraries. I'll be sure to visit Pitt's library system once I arrive back in Pennsylvania!

Right now I'm back in Sydney after visiting the coast, the Snowy Mountains, and the Blue Mountains, all gorgeous places. In a couple of days I'll be flying from Sydney to LA to Pittsburgh, all in a row... meanwhile I've got to try to help prepare a Hot Topics presentation and finish reading the two books assigned for LIS2000. So far it's going just barely smoothly enough for me not to seriously panic. This morning (Aussie time... evening for the others) I chatted online with my Hot Topics partners; it was reassuring to exchange words in real time. We got some things ironed out, but I've got several tasks ahead of me in the immediate future, and my next challenge will be to find nearby internet service that doesn't run me into the poorhouse. Right now I'm using the hotel's hourly broadband rate -- and am almost out of time as it is -- so this blog post will be accordingly truncated!

As the Beatles once sang, I've got nothing to say, but it's OK.

Here's my Koha assignment at last!

First, the hyperlink:

Elizabeth Livingston - Aboriginal Culture

Now, here's a list of the books therein. (Titles with colons are incomplete, displaying only the text before the colon. I couldn't find an easy way to resolve this within Koha.) They're in no particular order -- is there a way to order them?

Mysteries of the dream-time: Cowan, James

Arguments about aborigines : Hiatt, L. R.

Aboriginal settlements; Long, J. P. M.

Myths and legends of the Australian aborigines /Smith, W. Ramsay

Australian aborigines /Nile, Richard.

The Australian aborigines : Maddock, Kenneth

The aborigines /Wiltshire, J. G.

Australian Aborigines and cultural tourism :Finlayson, Julie.

Kriol of North Australia : Sandefur, John R.

The life and adventures of William Buckley : Morgan, John

Dreamtime heritage : Roberts, Ainslie.

Oracle of the dreamtime : Hakanson, Donni.

Coming into being among the Australian aborigines : Montagu, Ashley,

The Mardu aborigines : Tonkinson, Robert.

Aboriginal myths : Reed, A. W.

The Australian Aborigines, how to understand them, Elkin, A. P.

What became of the Australian Aborigines? Gamack, Ronald S.

Aboriginal art of Australia : Finley, Carol.

A documentary history of the Illawarra & South Coast Aborigines, 1770-1850 :

Disposal of the dead among Australian aborigines : Haglund, Laila

Aborigines and colonists : Reece, Bob

The Aboriginal-white encounter : Bain, Margaret S.

Wise women of the dreamtime : Lambert, Johanna

An annotated bibliography of the Tasmanian Aborigines, 1970-1987 / Sagona, Claudia

Encountering aborigines; Burridge, Kenelm.

Slave to the creeping green bar

G'day from Cooma in the Snowy Mountains. I checked into an internet-ready motel fairly early today, solely in order to keep working on these Koha citations, and I've been at it ever since, because this connection is sooooo sssslllloooowwww. Every single new screen to come up forces me to wait through 30-45 seconds of glacially creeping green status-bar "progress" before displaying the coveted "Done" in the lower left corner -- and this assignment demands a lot of clicking. I've got Sky News on TV for background diversion, and they've cycled through the same headlines so often they'll surely enter my dreams tonight (fishermen rescued off Australia's east coast, human bones washed up on Phillips Island, gunman loose in Sydney, father-daughter pot bust, blizzards in New Zealand; repeat). But at least the Goddess of Koha has heeded my pleas and is no longer pretending not to recognize ISBN numbers; they're all going through now. I don't know what was up with the earlier impertinence!

I'm still a bit baffled by Koha, however. What's a "z39.50"? Why can't we see author and title info on some of the pages? Why must we enter random numbers before proceeding? Hrmph. The system doesn't always run smoothly, either, occasionally yielding little snafus that actually wouldn't bother me much at all if I weren't on a connection whose speed evokes 1993. I dream of a future in which bona fide high-speed internet cloaks the planet... until then, my apologies for this text-only post, but a picture or video would take all night to upload!

Aw, OK, as a pittance, here's a link to a library cartoon.

from The New Yorker, August 12, 1950

Marsupials and KohAAAAAHH!

What a wonderful vacation this is. I'm posting a photo from yesterday -- Paul and I did indeed see Pebbly Beach's "surfing roos"; the whole beach was full of them! We counted over 30 kangaroos, but we were practically the only people there. Australia seems to be full of such splendidly remote locales. Then today we got friendly with some wombats and koalas at a wildlife sanctuary, but it didn't quite compare to the thrill of seeing so many marsupials in the wild.

Tonight we chose our motel specifically for its WiFi, and I've been attempting to work on the Koha assignment. Auurrrgh. I could accept that the assignment involved a lot of clicking through random data screens, and I could handle having to work with ISBNs rather than authors and titles, but what's truly infuriating me now is how few ISBNs seem to link to Library of Congress records. What the...? I thought the LoC housed every book ever published! Is it just because the books aren't in Pitt's library system? There's no indication. It occurred to me that my ISBNs might refer to paperbacks rather than original hardcovers, but even when I located the hardback data, overwhelmingly many of the ISBNs simply resulted in a "file not found" screen. So I went to catalog.loc.gov, but even when I've pulled ISBNs from the LoC's own online catalog, this has been happening again and again. 10-digit, 13-digit, hyphens, no hyphens, no difference. What explains it? Did I choose too obscure a book topic? How come Koha gotta treat me so mean? What's the point of Koha, anyway? I'm losing sight of the big picture amidst all of this annoyance.

So my Koha virtual shelf still only contains, like, two items, but at least my virtual photo album is filling up with gorgeous shots of the land down under! I'll aim to find another WiFi-offering motel tomorrow night and continue this mad odyssey into Koha organization, hopefully with a bit more success.

Ulladulla, Panopto, and "Surfing Roos"

I'm posting from a motel room in Ulladulla, a coastal town around 200 kilometers south of Sydney. Australia is a magnificent continent, full of gorgeous open spaces, mellow friendly people, and utterly unexpected flora and fauna. In a national park yesterday I stood by a waterfall as a flock of huge bright yellow cockatoos squawked and flew between treetops over my head. Today I looked down on a rainforest canopy from atop a 45-meter-high steel tower on an oceanside mountain. And tomorrow we'll visit Pebbly Beach and its famed "surfing roos": kangaroos who like to swim in the ocean. How cool that roos like to swim! I just hope they won't be deterred by the cold; it's mid-winter down here -- but quite mild, as winters go.

In MLIS news, I've been seizing internet connectivity wherever I can find it so as to keep up with course viewings, assignments, and communications. This morning in Wollongong I spent 45 minutes in an internet cafe nearly tearing my hair out... The network was glacially slow, and when I asked the proprietor what the problem was, he shrugged and said, "Eh, the internet's not working right today." His cavalierness accentuated my own technological dependence in stark relief. It's somewhat like an addiction ... most of the time it feels manageable (or at least, that is to say, I can feed my monkey), but as others ranging from Nicholson Baker to the cafe proprietor have pointed out, technology isn't always reliable!

When looking for a motel this evening we were certain to select one that advertised Broadband, and thus after watching a lovely sunset over the Pacific, I settled in to catch up on Panopto viewings and add to my Hot Topics wiki page. I hope I'll be able to participate fully in the group presentation preparations while on the road. I've been enjoying researching the topic when I've had the chance.

I'll try to post again soon!