Andromeda Yelton

I just had the pleasure of spending an hour listening in on a streamed LITA board meeting. I have somehow, and entirely to my shock, become a diehard LITA politics junkie; I’ve been to almost all the board meetings for the last three conferences, and I appreciate that LITA is feeding my addiction — er, making meetings more widely available to non-conference-goers, and both conducting and making available its business outside of conference times. And — as I’ve often been the only rank-and-file member present at board meetings — I was also thrilled that I wasn’t at this one. I think the more LITA makes its meetings available (streamed or amply reported, well-advertised, etc.) the more the members will participate, and that’s good for everyone. So: hats off to everyone who made that happen.

I was troubled, though, by part of the discussion. All you LITA-watchers out there (which, admittedly, may be just the board members and me) know that the board has been convulsed for the last year or so — as long as I’ve been watching, anyway — with issues surrounding transparency. How much is enough, or too much? What’s the obligation of the board to its members in terms of streaming, reporting, and communications? How might it be constrained (or not) by ALA policy, the legal framework, et cetera? What are the comfort levels of individual board members with respect to different levels of transparency, and to what extent do we need to be compassionate about people’s differing comfort levels, and to what extent do board members have an obligation to put their feelings aside (if necessary) in service to the membership? To what extent does streaming technology constitute a service — or favor, or obligation — to the membership?

These issues have proved difficult to resolve.

Toward this end the board meeting today featured a guest, a lawyer who commented on legal risks associated with streaming and archiving of board meetings. And it’s important to do some due diligence on that front. But the lawyer, and the risks, were the only angle on transparency on the agenda. And, to be blunt — isn’t that a little like having hearings about birth control that don’t include any women? Or hearings on SOPA that barely include representatives from tech, indie art, or free culture?

Risk analysis, to me, implies a thoughtful consideration of costs and benefits. And, yes, there are legal concerns that LITA needs to be aware of. But — librarians’ seemingly obligatory risk aversion notwithstanding! — the fact that there is a risk to something does not ipso facto mean we must run away from it. The question should never be, “is there a risk” (the answer is always yes). The question should be, do the benefits justify it?

For all that I appreciated that the board livestreamed this meeting, and has streamed some others in the past, I’m flexible on what its ultimate streaming policy should be. I respect that board members’ comfort levels vary. What I absolutely do not think LITA should waver on is an outspoken commitment to communication and inclusion, backed by action.

I’ve been trying for the last few years now to answer the question, “What is LITA?” I’ve been mostly failing, but insofar as I’ve come to an understanding, it’s that LITA is its members — some of the most wonderful people I’ve ever had the fortune to meet. And one of the things that was brought home to me at the LITA Town Hall meeting this past Midwinter — an excellent discussion, by the way — is that the members want to feel more connected, more included. They know this is a place that should be a home for them, but they’re not always convinced that it is.

Benefit number one of an outspoken, proactive commitment to transparency: it tells the members we’re included.

Benefit number two: it shows us ways that we can translate inclusion into action. I shouldn’t have to spend years being that wonkish weirdo who sits in on board meetings, and has all manner of IM and happy hour conversations with board members I happen to be friends with, just to start to have a working sense of what LITA is and what it means in my life. If it takes that much work for me to start to have any grasp on it, how can the average member have any hope of it? Proactive, multimodal communication, transparent board actions, give more members the chance to understand what LITA is and how it connects to their lives and how their lives and skills and needs, in turn, can connect to LITA.

Benefit number three — I think the biggest, and the least discussed — is that transparency allows the membership to hold the board’s feet to the fire. My notes — of course I take notes; I am a ridiculously thorough note-taker — of the last few years’ worth of meetings are absolutely littered with loose ends. Discussions the board has had over and over, where I can’t even tell if they’ve reached a consensus, or where I thought they had and can’t tell why it’s on the agenda again. Issues put on the table without a resolution. Motions put on the table without a vote. Action plans proposed, and not followed up on.

This is not how the board should operate. Many of its members are my friends; I like and respect them; I am sad I have not had the opportunity to get to know the rest of the members, and I trust I would like and respect them as well. But this is a board that needs, for the sake of itself and the members and the association, to be more accountable to the membership. This is a board that needs members — not just me, who might as well have “crazy LITA gadfly” tattooed across her forehead — saying, hey, about that thing you said you’d do…

The amount of creativity and skill I’ve seen among LITA members is really, truly, inspiring. This is an association that can and should be doing far more to, quite frankly, change the world. But for that to happen, the membership needs to hold the board to a higher standard. And for that to happen, the membership needs to know what’s going on. And it needs to be possible for them to do that even if they can’t afford to go to conferences and don’t have the tremendous social good fortune to get half-drunk with board members in a hotel bar.

So: yes. There’s a risk, the more transparent the board is, that…someone, someday…might sue them for…something never specified. And that risk needs to be thoughtfully considered. And it needs to be considered in a discussion — a thoroughly reported, whether streamed or not, discussion — that also takes into account the benefits of a board that is more open and accessible to its membership. And takes into account the risks and benefits for all the stakeholders, not just lawyers — who constitute, I daresay, a small fraction of the LITA membership.

With any luck that will be — like today — a discussion at which I am not the only non-board member in the room.

Last week Mike Shatzkin blogged about Barnes & Nobles’ refusal to sell Amazon-imprint paper books. It’s been a controversial move but Shatzkin thinks that B&N is playing the game right, leveraging its dominance as a paper bookseller — still a key factor in getting books in front of readers, in appealing to authors — to fight back against Amazon’s dominance in other parts of the space. Amazon may have the long-term edge, but right now B&N is using the leverage it has (and paper shelf space is leverage) to prevent a monopoly that would crush it.

You know who else puts paper books in front of readers? Libraries.

We don’t just put them out there, either; we recommend them and we pick a few to showcase every year. ALA awards 38 book, print, & media awards — some for books, others for journal articles or other things not necessarily part of the library circulation picture — but two dwarf the rest: Newbery and Caldecott.

Toby Greenwalt’s done some interesting guerrilla research on the effects these awards have on book sales. By enlisting contacts in the awards committees, he was able to get snapshots of Amazon sales rank for the awardees before and after they were announced. In every case the immediate bump in sales rank was dramatic. This is especially true for the Newbery and Caldecott winners, which went from sales rankings in the 20,000s to #32 and #101, respectively.

Amazon sales rankings don’t give direct data on profits, of course; Amazon’s notoriously secretive about that sort of information and I don’t have access to, say, BookScan, but I’m willing to take this as evidence that the ALA’s blessing via these awards translates directly into profits for their rights holders. Makes them, even, into the big-win books that subsidize the rest.

The question that Shatzkin’s article brought to mind, then, is: how many of these books are available, as ebooks, to libraries?

So I did some research. I looked up the Caldecott and Newbery winners and honorees, 2010-2012, along with their publishers (both the imprint and the top-level publisher; the former tends to be listed with the book but it’s the latter whose policy governs library ebook lending), and the publisher’s stance toward library ebook lending at the time of the award. (I used availability in OverDrive as a proxy for library ebook lending policy in some cases.)

Here’s what I found. Of 23 honorees:

• 9 are from publishers that sold ebooks to libraries at the time of the award. (Not all exist in ebook format, using “availability for Kindle” as a proxy for “available in ebook format”, but if they were, their publishers make ebooks available to libraries. One is from HarperCollins before it announced its 26 checkout limit.)
• 1 is from HarperColins, after it announced its policy of selling to libraries with a 26 checkout restriction.
• 12 are from publishers which did not sell ebooks to libraries at the time of the award. (2 publishers, representing 3 books, have since partnered with OverDrive.)

One proved hard to track down. There’s nothing available by that publisher in my local OverDrive, but that doesn’t necessarily signify; the book is available in Kindle ebook.

So just to be clear: over half of the books that ALA has honored with its biggest awards since 2010 are books that the publishers would not at the time — and may not now — let libraries lend electronically. Over half.

Debates over library ebook access often descend into handwringing about access — we could back off from this, we could act on other principles, but patrons want these, we value access, these are the terms on which we can provide it. But this? This is not a question of access. This is a question of praise.

We are blessing these books, on our biggest stage.

We are handing their publishers money. Real, verifiable, money.

When they allow us, literally, nothing in return.

When is it okay to stop bringing hugs to a knife fight?

A week or so ago I wrote about the magic of holding a little 3D-printed skull in my hand: a tiny, tangible emissary from the future.

Today an old college friend pointed to a story on human time travelers.

No, really: people of such immense age that they lived through things that you would think lost to living memory. Civil War widows receiving their pensions in the 21st century. A man who saw the assassination of Abraham Lincoln and talked about it — on television. (Go. Watch.)

I find I react in much the same way. And it’s the same way I reacted, studying classics, when I read something like the letters of Cicero, and felt there, across a language and an ocean and two millennia, we were having a conversation. The same way I react to a really good book or an exceptionally good conversation and, perhaps, the single feeling I associate most with the best of libraries: the feeling that a barrier that separates me — from times or places or people — has grown tissue-thin, that light and sound can come across it as it shimmers, that I can put my hand right up to the thing that separates us and something else can touch me back.

I’m a show-me-the-money girl who hangs with early adopters. I love seeing my friends out there on the bleeding edge, telling me about all the things that are going to be tomorrow — or won’t, more likely, but could be — a million possible tomorrows in a joyful technicolor static. But for me, why again did I want to spend a few hundred dollars on a product without even a service history? What would I do with it in my life?

I was just attending the ALA Midwinter tech wrap-up webinar, where bleeding-edge friend Jason Griffey was talking about makerbots and libraries, and fielded the inevitable question from people like me: why do we care? What would we do with this in our library lives?

Yesterday I was stomping around the forest with my husband and five-year-old daughter. I read Ken Jennings’ Maphead not so long ago and it reminded me I’ve always been curious about geocaching, and it was a nice sunny day and technology was an excuse to get outside in it, so I told Ms5, we’re going to look for a treasure in the woods! And we did, and it took a while — intermittent signal as we drifted below the ridge — and suddenly there it was, a taped-up little box under some shards of wood in a fallen-down tree. Right there on the line between metadata and magic.

It’s what hits me, over and over, as I look at location-based services and augmented reality — geocaching, Layar, Foursquare, Scan Jose, name what you will — the world is full of secrets hiding in plain sight, simply there waiting for us to look at them. The world is full of mysteries and wonders we don’t need an invitation to see, merely the willingness to look. Jamie Larue said that in the past libraries were about bringing the world to the community, and now they’ll be about bringing communities to the world — I wonder where the desire lines are running through reality, waiting for us to tumble upon them, insinuate information and make a thing of wonder.

Isn’t that what libraries were always for? Secrets in the world, hiding in plain sight, waiting for you to stumble upon them and have your world opened with one heartstopping lightning bolt, look around in new ways?

I pledged to a Kickstarter project a few months ago — it was already past its funding threshold, staggeringly so, one of those magic moments when the internet descends on someone full force and long-tail rivulets snake down into a flood — but he was selling skulls. The most lovely filigreed skulls, arabesques and curlicues, a romantic steampunk memento mori. I needed one for my office. I ordered one.

I didn’t realize, somehow, how small it would be. It fits in my palm just right and stares back at me staring at it. Nor how fragile — less than plastic, more than paper, it is like a butterfly — in the old sense, both “butterfly” and “soul” — a whisper, a breath, a fragile thing landed here from the future. A moment of pulling back the curtain between now and what could be.

I work for a startup now. My whole life is what-could-be, stepping into the space filled with nothing and making a something be there. I am easily transfixed by possibility these days.

So this is how I’d answer that question, the question of why. Because discovery is wonder. Because possibility is love. Because, amid the stacks and silent places, the forests and convention centers, there are secrets whispering to us, licking at the edges of our minds and asking to transform us. Because information and imagination were ever thus, and associating that with books was a wonderful historical coincidence: not a shackle.

Building on my previous post about mapping libday8, what I really want is a dashboard where I can drop in and get the pulse of things — see what’s going on in people’s library lives right now, dip my toe in the stream and feel the variety, not try to keep up with the enormous volume of data. So I built a libday8 visualizer.

This uses a Google map as previously described (updated with today’s data — it’s slow and mysteriously twitchy about displaying properly, so if you don’t see it, try again later or try the Google link; haven’t figured that out yet — but I did fix the iframe issue via finding a WordPress plugin allowing me to do iframes). I’m also:

• pulling in the Flickr libday8 tag via RSS, with the WordPress RSS in Page plugin. (Also libday7, just to fill out that space while we wait for libday8 to have much content).
• using the standard Twitter widget (with a customized color scheme) to pull in the #libday8 hashtag.
• pulling in the libday8 tag from WordPress.com, also via RSS, though via some other strategy I have apparently already completely forgotten. This is by no means all the blogs involved in Library Day in the Life, but it’s a lot easier to pull in the wordpress.com tag via RSS than it is to use some actual Python or something to munge the social media field from pbworks, and I’m feeling lazy.

How I’d make it better (because it’s always good to reflect & learn!):

• Figure out what the deal is with the map not reliably displaying.
• Spend some more time on the Flickr custom CSS to deal more intelligently with the range of image aspect ratios.
• Figure out why my data-munging didn’t preserve links to people’s social media, so I could display it properly in placemarks.
• Do the data-munging to break out everyone’s blogs, and figure out how to turn that into an RSS aggregator searching those blogs for the libday8 tag. (Or perhaps short-circuit this step by figuring out what table structure would remove most of the munging overhead, and ask Bobbi pretty please to structure the libday9 table for my personal convenience.
• Figure out how to munge the data about library type/employer so as to provide some sort of faceting on all this.

Anyway, I had fun doing this and I’m hoping it will be a fun way for me, and you, to experience libday8.

Bobbi Newman’s Library Day in the Life project is an awesome idea (which you should go sign up for), but I admit I’ve had trouble getting into it. There’s (traditional ironic librarian problem ahoy!) just so much data I don’t know where to start. So I’ve been thinking about alternative ways to visualize the data and provide entry points. I thought it would be fun to see the #libday8 participants on a map.

Behold, a map!

(The iframe embed Google generated didn’t seem to be working, but you can click through the image to play with the interactive Google map.)

How I did this

I thought I was going to have to write some code, screen-scrape the HTML wiki into CSV, learn a Google maps API, blah blah blah. It turns out I did not! As with so many tech problems, this reduced to “beat it with rocks until it works”. Unlike many tech problems, no actual code was required; it was mostly copy-paste. To wit:

Step 1: =ImportHTML is your friend. Google Docs will automagically import tables from web pages as spreadsheet data. I followed these instructions; just a matter of changing the number N until the right table materialized. (Note that =ImportHTML is case-sensitive; =importHTML won’t work.)

Step 2: Copy-paste as values. The automagic import is a whole bunch of spreadsheet functions, so it can’t be imported into the tools I needed later in the process. However, this can be fixed. Create a second sheet for the spreadsheet. Copy the first one and paste as values into the second; this will keep the parts you can see (turning them into static values) and throw out the functions generating them.

Step 3: Geocode the data. To get good mapping, you’ll need your address data to be geocoded — latitude/longitude rather than just text. Luckily, the robot servants can do that for you. It turns out there are roughly a bajillion gadgets you can stick into your Docs spreadsheet to make it do awesome stuff — lots provided by Google, plus you can invoke arbitrary custom gadgets if you know their URL. Pamela Fox has a geocoding gadget for you, so I could turn the human-readable address data into lat/lng coding with a few clicks, following the instructions at her site.

Here’s the spreadsheet I ended up with after that munging. I used several sheets as intermediate copy-paste steps so you can trace some of my thought process there.

Step 4: Google’s Spreadsheet Mapper tool. Make a copy of their default spreadsheet, according to these instructions, and customize it with your data. To wit:

• Pick a template — doesn’t matter which as you’ll be overwriting most of it
• Alter the static variables to what you want (in my case, just a “Library Day in the Life” title)
• Alter the KML style variables, if you care (totally optional; just lets you change color schemes and so forth)
• Change the Unique Variables to be the column headers you will be using for your data (in my case, the same columns as in the #libday8 wiki) — same order as on your spreadsheet for ease of copy/paste (see, I told you this is mostly a copy-paste problem!)
• Change the HTML layout (scroll down to the bottom of the template sheet — easy to miss). You’ll definitely need to remove references to any static variables you deleted, and add references to your unique variables (it gives you special variable names in curly braces to use). You’ll have to copy-paste to a text editor as you can’t edit the cell in place (make sure to use a text editor, not a word processor — nothing that’ll insert weird invisible characters!). You may want to prettify it.
• In the Placemark Data sheet, copy-paste the data from the final version of your spreadsheet.
• Make sure that “Template #” is filled in with the template you just modified for all the columns, and that your spreadsheet data is filled in to the correct columns (in particular, note that the lat/lng data has a special place). Delete any rows without lat/lng data as they will throw an error and you can’t map them anyway.
• On the “start here” sheet, there’s a Google Maps link. Tada! Make sure to change the visibility on your map to something that other people can see.

Here’s the spreadsheet mapper stuff I ended up with.

Still some things I’d like to improve — I’ll need to re-import & re-munge the data when all the participants have signed up; I don’t love the HTML format I ended up with for the placemarks (would welcome others’ design work here — see that spreadsheet mapper for the format, which is a little wacky); and the import didn’t preserve the links to people’s blogs, twitter accounts, etc. (or the line breaks between them), so I’d like to figure out how to make them live. But as a first pass, I’ll take it.

So: yeah. Lots of beating things with rocks and googling for documentation and a TON of copy-pasting. Not a single actual line of code. Thank you to all the people who did write the code that does the automagical steps, and put it out there for free. And to Bobbi and everyone who signed up for providing data. (Data! Yum.)

I wrote this twitterbot. It takes deadlines for getting involved with ALA, today and in six months, from my 2011 Emerging Leaders team’s project, and it posts them to Twitter, so you can see them integrated in your everyday (perhaps) life. So it’s easier to find out about what’s going on with ALA.

That is not what this post is about.

I put the code for the bot up on github. That’s what this post is about.

It’s all there if you want to learn how I wrote it, or if you want to modify it to write your own twitterbot. The code, and also a README where I tried to extensively document the things I needed to do to make the code work: setting up the development environment, obstacles I encountered along the way, et cetera.

But you’re here through the blog, which means you may want the English, not the Python, explanation, so here is how I made my twitterbot work:

I was extremely bullheaded.

My approach with technology is always: Assume it’s possible. I ran into obstacles — things like “I don’t actually have any idea how to write a twitterbot” or “I don’t know how to make Python talk to MySQL” or “I don’t know how to use OAuth to let my bot post to an account” or “I have no idea what a cursor is in this context” or “what in the name of all that is concise or clear am I supposed to make of this launchd documentation” — and I just assumed there was an answer out there, somewhere, and if I googled my error messages, and altered my code and reran it to see what changed, and read the documentation even if it made limited sense, and just generally beat it with rocks long enough, my code would work. With code, nearly everything’s possible. I just have to figure out how.

That isn’t really what this post is about, either.

Then I put my code on github. That was scary. This is what this post is about.

I put it on github because I want you to use it. I put it on github because the library world is full of amazing, creative people doing amazing, creative things with technology, alone and in their basements, and if you know them and ask them maybe you can get it, and it shouldn’t be that way. It should be somewhere you can just…get it. And use it. And make it better. Even if you don’t know the right people. Even if asking is scary.

I put it on github because I know it’s deeply flawed. I know just enough about code to know an inkling of how very many things there are that I do not know about code. To know that I’m tripping over aesthetic standards I don’t even realize are there, that there are performance and etiquette issues I am utterly blind to. And as an introvert I have a reflexive, nearly hardwired, inclination to not share an idea before it’s burnished and glowing and perfect.

And one of the great lessons of 2011 was that if I push myself to share those half-formed ideas earlier, before it’s comfortable, they run up against other people’s half-formed ideas which, together, turn out to be ten times better than either alone. Things I thought were daunting obstacles turn out to be trivial, in the face of resources or connections or skills someone else has.

We here in librarianship tend to let the perfect be the enemy of the good. I am giving you this flawed thing because I believe that the world is better if we are open with our ideas. I believe that our technology will be better if we share. And yes, we are nearly all self-taught and yes, as such we see the myriad of ways our code is not production code and we know there are many myriads more we do not see, and if we share it will still be better.

So I am going to take that step. Even while I — not characteristically daunted — am shaking inside over this. Even if I feel like I’m running into heavy crossfire, shouting encouragingly about how great the weather is up here.

I made a Connect group for people doing Code Year. I made a Libraryland github organization I want to add you to, so we can find each other. I made a bot for you.

It’s made of duct tape and wire, and people will see. I know only that I know nothing. I plant my flag upon this hilltop nonetheless.