LibraryCity

On Jillian the Tiger Cub, a national digital library endowment, and the power of the American ego

David Rothman — Wed, 22 May 2013 08:33:00 +0000

Never underestimate the power and glory of the American ego. Granted, it can show its bizarre sides—for example, in the antics and hairdo of Donald Trump. And yet I see the good, too. We have the Carnegie Corporation of New York and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the rest, not “Library Donors Anonymous.”

At least some might bristle at this quest for publicity and immortality, as opposed to pure altruism. But let’s remember that despite all the government-and-corporate-enforced conformity around us, we are still in many ways a national of individualists.

Didn’t Walt Whitman title a poem Song of Myself, notwithstanding such lines as “For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you”?

Shrewdly, then, when the San Francisco Zoological Society held ZooFest 2013, charging anywhere from $500 for single tickets to $25,000 for sponsorship of a table, it let guests bid to name a Sumatran tiger cub. The winner, at $47,000, was Jillian Manus, a literary agent for Newt Gingrich and a number of nonVIPs. Walt Whitman would have understood her choice. Yes, of course—“Jillian.”

Would I prefer that tax money entirely cover the care and feeding of Jillian the Tiger Cub—or America’s libraries? Very much so. And yet realistically that is not possible right now. Hence the need for a national digital library endowment which could appeal as deftly and charmingly to the wealthy as ZooFest does. By way of White House and Congressional ceremonies, as well as public participation in fund-raising committees, the super rich could enjoy major recognition for their donations to libraries. But why digital? Because it’s by far the most efficient way of making the greatest number of books and other library items available to the most people—not to mention such possibilities as permanent links from book to book, so that, for example, our nonfiction books can be better documented than the present variety.

The digital library endowment would not be a cure-all, far from it. But it would be better than nothing. At all levels of government, local, state, and national, many budgets have shrunk, especially in the library world—this at a time when shocking numbers of American families are living in poverty and rely on public libraries as bootstraps.

Still don’t understand the direct and indirect benefits of a national digital library endowment? Consider that in the 2010 fiscal year the total spending on public library content in the U.S. was less than $1.3 billion, which, on a per capita basis, is about the cost of a somewhat upscale hamburger. The endowment must not replace all fund-raising and other nonprofit work in the library area (and, in fact, should focus on a different kind of donor from those supporting local library foundations). But not every city has a Bill Gates or Warren Buffett. Clearly we need a true national effort; per-capita spending on library content varied from $1.42 in Mississippi to a still-not-adequate $7.79 in Illinois for the 2010 fiscal year. Even the most radical changes in copyright law could never substitute for ample money for books and other acquisitions. Beyond financing content, the endowment could also promote the Web-era professional development of teachers and librarians, particularly the school variety, given the potential of books and other library materials to raise academic achievement with the right mix of guidance and inspiration.

The endowment would be just one revenue stream for the digital incarnations of libraries. But the wealthy can at least help. An editor for the conservative Wall Street Journal acknowledges that the 400 richest Americans owned just slightly less than the bottom half of the country as of 2007, the last year for which the latter statistics are available. For a complete picture, read Plutocrats: The Rise of the New Global Super Rich and the Fall of Everyone Else, a Penguin book by Chrystia Freeland, a Rhodes Scholar now an editor at Reuters. Far from a rant, her book is a well-reported series of detailed vignettes conveying the perspectives of the wealthy themselves as well as of their critics. Especially disturbing to me is the fact that some of the richest Americans are cutting back on domestic donations in favor of those abroad, rather than seeking a balance. Beyond that, public libraries everywhere can be far from the top of the super wealthy’s priorities, a marked departure from the Carnegie tradition.

Consider Bill Gates. He deserves praise for all the computers and Net connections he has helped put into America’s libraries, but if you look at his foundation’s annual report for 2010, the most recent year for which I could quickly find a working link to a PDF, you’ll see listings for a mere $14.3 million for libraries under his “United States” program and just $22.6 million under “Global Development” (some domestic library spending might be included there). Even if you assume that libraries are tucked away in other categories, the total appears to be minuscule compared to the more than $2 billion spent on grants of all kinds. Simply put, at least in regard to his foundation’s relative priorities, Bill Gates today seems a long way from Andrew Carnegie, both nationally and globally.

I can think of eviler acts than diverting money from libraries to fight starvation, AIDS, and malaria. Still, how to fill the vacuum and use a cohesive national strategy?

Perhaps America’s super wealthy could somehow magically crowd-source the task among themselves, but a national digital library endowment would be a far, far better idea, with far more openness and accountability than the public now enjoys from the Gates Foundation. The endowment could be public or nonprofit, although the former approach would respond better to public needs, such as for the partial financing of separate but tightly intertwined public and academic systems. With just one national digital library system, the economic and academic elites are likely to dominate at the expense of, say, young dyslectics who need accessible books and software like Voice Dream (shown), or ambitious workers or small business people trying to improve themselves. Needless to say, our national digital library systems could share unencumbered content with the rest of the world, promoting American culture and winning us international goodwill along the way. Far from being a U.S.-only concept, in fact, this one might work in some other countries as well, with both local and American donors. That said, I hope our billionaires will not forget their homeland.

For more on the endowment idea, see A national digital library endowment: More details, an FAQ, and an invitation to librarians and others to help shape the proposal, as well as the original posting (summarized on the Atlantic’s Web site). Among other things, LibraryCity.org suggests that collections could be named after rich benefactors, who could even sponsor individual books from lists approved by professional librarians isolated from the financial side of the endowment. Names like Ms. Manus’s and her husband’s could appear in tasteful ways in the fronts of the books. Imagine the benefits of The Great Gatsby going into the public domain years ahead of time, with fair compensation to descendants of F. Scott Fitzgerald. Watch the Baz Luhrmann movie, then download the book and related commentary immediately for free from your local library’s Web site, which can pick up the national catalogs and cobrand with the national systems. No, this wouldn’t be the only business model used. Authors and publishers of hot best-sellers and other books could be paid by demand, with digital queues if need be to keep library spending within budgets. Purchase and subscription plans, the latter available for free or at low cost to the poor, could accommodate bestseller fans who didn’t want to wait.

I have no idea whether Jillian Manus would go for the digital library endowment proposal and work with her husband and with her well-placed Republican contacts to get the endowment on the agendas of both the super rich and the nation as whole. But I will contact her. If she follows through, it will be in the spirit of William F. Buckley, Jr., my political opposite, who in the 1990s wrote two passionate “On the Right” columns in favor of a well-stocked national digital library system. Today’s politicians—in both parties—need to catch up with WFB. Bill was a bestselling novelist and member of the Authors Guild, by the way, not just a political commentator and one of the fathers of modern conservatism. As much as anyone, he was sensitive to the importance of fair compensation of writers. That essential has been in the much-evolved TeleRead/LibraryCity plan from the time I sketched out the first version in the Computerworld of July 6, 1992.

Ms. Manus’s endorsement of the endowment and national digital library concepts would be a constructive response to Paul St. John Mackintosh, a UK poet-journalist-translator living in Eastern Europe. He raised valid points about wealth gaps in a literary context, with her $47K tiger donation used as an example. A library endowment, of course, would indirectly help expand the book market and thus aid writers as well as society as a whole. Significantly, too, Ms. Manus is not just interested in the dollars and cents of the book trade but also in such educational causes such as Communities in Schools.

Her husband, Alan Salzman, a lawyer, is CEO and managing partner of VantagePoint Capital Partners, a venture capital firm with green energy investments in solar energy, power grid systems, and the Tesla electric car, shown here. Ideally both he and she can think of e-libraries as like the Tesla—disruptive but worth the trouble in the long run, given all the benefits, including those on the private side.

The proposed public and academic digital systems would be for the commonweal. But along the way, commercial publishers and booksellers could profitably piggyback on the two systems’ shared infrastructure and take advantage of, for example, the permanent links between books. The private sector itself cannot provide the same archival trustworthiness that serious networked books need over the long haul. At the same time, new and existing corporate players, from tiny startups to giants such as Amazon and Google, could serve as contractors. The current Digital Public Library of America project originated at Harvard has many virtues but is basically just a collection of links, item descriptions, a search engine and related computer code, as opposed to a true archive.

It takes prescience and guts, not merely deep pockets, to lavish countless millions on Tesla-style startups before they turn a nickel of profit. Let’s hope that Salzman, his wife, and other rich people can look beyond the usual philanthropies and also see the future in a national digital library endowment and the two intertwined library systems. Paying for Jillian the Tiger Cub’s food was a good deed, with or without naming privileges; but let’s not forget the care and feeding of Americans’ minds.

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E-book usability news: Adjustable line spacing now on the Kindle Fire HD 8.9” and perhaps other Fire HDs—although I still can’t narrow the spaces sufficiently

David Rothman — Mon, 13 May 2013 20:07:29 +0000

LibraryCity knocked Amazon for not letting users of the Kindle Fire HDs adjust their line spacing. But guess what I noticed just now within the font-related submenu of my Kindle HD 8.9” model running version 8.3.1 firmware?

Alas, on my several files tested, I still couldn’t narrow the spaces sufficiently on the HD even though the Kindle app for Android, as in previous versions for my Nexus 10, pulled off this trick just fine. Apologies if the HD improvement is old news, but Amazon pushes out updates automatically, and this is the first time I myself became aware of the line-spacing change. May Amazon soon get the line-spacing act right for all its Fires! Just offer the same flexibility as on the Nexus 10. I assume that smaller HDs have the same current improvement as my 8.9” model does, but I don’t know.

On another matter, in case you missed the news elsewhere, kudos to Amazon for adding voiceover to Kindle’s iPhone and iPad apps—following complaints here and elsewhere. Will this feature show up on all platforms where the hardware allows? Still on LibraryCity’s usability agenda for Amazon (among other dreams):

–Text to speech for future Kindle Paperwhites or similar front-lit models.

–Abandonment of proprietary formats or at least the choice of ePub for those preferring it. Yes, proprietary ones should be still be downloadable for those dependent on them. Like DRM, proprietary formats detract from books as a permanent medium. Evil!

–Making a social DRM option available for publishers, if even if most major ones still stubbornly insist on traditional DRM. With social DRM, not technically true DRM, user-specific information is embedded in books to discourage piracy. The advantage to users is that they can avoid format lock-in; social DRMed books will work on a variety of machines, just so they can read whatever the format is. Of course, the best DRM by far is none. One thing I like about the Digital Public Library of America is that the DPLA is keen on some business models that can reduce libraries’ dependence on DRM for e-books.

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Voice Dream e-reading app: Stellar for text to speech—and promising as a general reader

David Rothman — Sat, 11 May 2013 08:24:00 +0000

The latest: An update of this post focuses on education-related issues of read-aloud apps. Also, I’ve just tried a promising Voice Dream beta with paging; more to come. Finally, NPR on May 20 ran a segment on developer Winston Chen. – D.R.

A Catch-22 dogs those of us who most often read e-books visually but also want to hear them when we’re exercising or driving.

The usual e-bookware doesn’t always come with or work with text to speech capabilities. Even if it does, we can’t control the aural part as closely as we’d prefer.

I myself like the Moon+ Reader Pro Android app, and I’m in love with the added-on “Amy” voice, a British-accented delight from another developer, Ivona, now an arm of Amazon. But I can’t revisit already-viewed text quickly enough while I’m hearing audio by way of the Moon-Ivona combo.

A special read-aloud program isn’t the ultimate answer, either, since I’ll then be stuck with a weak app for general use. Even based solely on text-to-speech performance, in fact, this category of software can disappoint.

Enter the Voice Dream Reader app for iPads, iPhones and iPod Touches. At $10 it’s more expensive than the average app but provides enough value to justify the cost.

Winston Chen (family photo below), a Boston-area man and a middle-aged IBM alum, created VoiceDream during a year’s stay on an Arctic island where his wife was teaching. Voice Dream is not a full solution to the above dilemma. But it comes enticingly close, letting me e-mail notes and snippets and enjoy some other important features of a full-strength reading app for general use—while at the same time giving me more precise control over the spoken text than other TTS alternatives do in the iOS world. Significantly, more book-like paging is on the way as an alternative to the existing scrolling. (Update, May 13: Sure enough, a just-related beta has paging—I’ve tried it and will say more about this and other features in the next day or so.)

A list of Voice Dream’s glories is here. The app even includes its own Web browser, as well as the ability to find and download Project Gutenberg books with minimal fuss, and Chen tells me he’s open to working with the Digital Public Library of America by way of an API, which could mean similar capabilities. Voice Dream even hooks into Dropbox’s search feature. And print-impaired people using Bookshare can also benefit from integration.

The list of positives goes on and on. I still pang for the charming “Amy” to show up in Voice Dream despite her Amazon connection and the risk that the company monopolistic tendencies will overcome a genuine chance to earn goodwill. Hey, Jeff! You can do the right thing. But meanwhile VD—there, I said it; sorry!—offers a built-in Acapella speech engine and a free “Heather,” an American-accented voice. You can still hear the robot in “Heather,” but she is almost as good as “Amy” (herself not quite 100 percent human-sounding). At least 60 voices in 20 languages are available for a few dollars each: “English, Mandarin Chinese, Japanese, Spanish, French, German, Italian, Swedish, Danish, Norwegian, Finnish, Dutch, Portuguese, Russian, Czech, Catalan, Polish, Turkish, Greek, and Arabic.” More languages and other major enhancements for Voice Dream, as both a visual and audio reader, are on the way, including a mode to enjoy books one page at a time rather than scrolling.

Already Voice Dream is living up to its name for members of the accessibility community, in addition to those without disabilities.

Not everyone likes everything in the app, to go by the reviews of the paid version in the Apple app store, even if the average rating is a respectable four-star plus. Still, compared to other iOS apps that allow aural reading from a wide variety of books, this one shines. vBookz EPub and VBookz PDF, for example, as far as I can determine, will not let you take notes, and Blio won’t allow you to export your notes to email, your printer, or other destinations, as Voice Dream does.

Mind you, the other products are far from losers; Blio offers multimedia capabilities, for example. But if you especially value accessibility mixed with annotation- and sharing-related features—“musts” for truly superior software in such areas as the upper grades in K-12—then Voice Dream is the champ. vBookz and Blio can’t seamlessly pick up items for reading from Instapaper or the Web (the screenshot shows the Voice Dream library filtered to display only Instapaper items—double-click for a better view). What’s more, those rivals lack Voice Dream’s rich selection of dozens of optional voices, selling for just a few bucks a throw.

Furthermore, Voice Dream’s promo says it can read ePub, PDF (though some complain it isn’t true to the appearance of source PDF—which would be a nice option, if Chen could offer it, even if it meant that TTS wouldn’t work while you were in that mode), Word, RTF, Apple Page, PowerPoint, .txt, and HTML.

Given Voice Dream’s obvious merits for nonDRMed books such as public domain titles, librarians and educators should not just try the app (a mere $5 for institutions buying 20 copies or more, and no cost for a demo with very limited read-aloud capabilities) but also provide Chen with detailed feedback. No, I haven’t any financial ties with the company, direct or indirect, and if I run across an alternative better than Chen’s, I’ll talk it up. I’m just eager to see a good and socially useful product succeed.

Chen estimates that 30 percent of the app’s users are blind, 50 percent suffer from dyslexia or attention deficit disorders and the like, and 20 percent lack any print-related disabilities. I myself suffer from a minor disability, my difficulty seeing light-weight fonts against a white background; and I resent the persistent indifference of Amazon and many other hardware and software vendors to needs of people with similar challenges. Voice Dream to the rescue, at least for nonDRMed texts read on iOS devices!

Selections within Voice Dream’s rich assortment of fonts should please not only the contrast-challenged but also a much larger group, the millions with dyslexia, in the United States and elsewhere. As for those with attention issues, a focused reading mode—shown here—displays just a small amount of text at a time for greater concentration.

Of more importance for me, Voice Dream provides excellent control over both the written and spoken versions of the text. Want to revisit a previous paragraph on your screen without interrupting the audio reading? Voice Dream makes this a snap in either the full page mode or the the focused reading one, and it moves quickly even within long books. In other words, this app excels for people with dyslexia and others whose enjoyment and comprehension of books could benefit from simultaneous visual and audio presentation of text. The yellow in the above screen shot jumps from spoken word to spoken word, so users can associate the actual texts with the spoken sounds. If you are not disabled in the least but want to read Henry James closely, Voice Dream could still be of interest.

An e-mail Q & A with Winston Chen (edited)

Q. Am I missing something, or is there no way to go into a paging rather than scrolling mode?

A. I’m almost finished with this new feature, but still working on perfecting it. It’ll work the same as scrolling, except it stops at page boundaries. I really want to avoid doing the left-right page flipping that most book reader want to emulate.

Q. What about the ability to pick up bookmarks and notes and highlights from machine to machine, even across platforms? Via Dropbox you could implement that capability if it isn’t there already. Perhaps if there are no legal issues, you could even make the syncing compatible with that of a great Android app, Moon Reader.

A. Synching across devices is easily the most requested feature. The problem is that Apple iCloud synching for the kind of database I used is currently unreliable for bi-directionary synchronization. Until Apple fixes it—which I’m hoping for iOS 7—turning this feature on would be a bad idea.

Q. I truly truly loathe DRM but am wondering if you could arrange with Adobe and/or OverDrive and other library vendors for VoiceDream to be usable with library books. OverDrive, of course, is the main show.

A. I have not reached out to Adobe yet, but I plan to.

Q. How many people are now using VoiceDream?

A. Voice Dream now has 20,000 customers for the paid app and 110,000 customers for the free app.

Q. Will you be expanding to platforms beyond iOS? Which ones? When?

A. The next platform is probably Android. But I haven’t committed to it.

Q. What would you do if Amazon dangled a nice offer in front of you? I was among the first to discover Stanza, and I pounded the table for it when I owned TeleRead—only to see it vanish down Amazon’s maw. Can you assure us that you won’t sell your company, at least in the next five years? And not to Amazon? More recently I talked up Ivona on the LibraryCity site and elsewhere, and then sure enough…

A. I’m aware of Stanza, which I still use despite all. I don’t have any wish to sell the company. This company gives me such fulfillment that a lump of cash cannot fill. My main market and future focus remains building tools for people with learning disabilities, primarily for education. I have no intention to be a general purpose eBook reader, even though some people use my app that way. [Oh, but Voice Dream is so close now to being an acceptable GP reader, especially with paging on the way! – D.R.]

Q. Are there any personal reasons for your interest in Voice Dream? Do you have any reading-related disabilities? Anyone in your family?

A. I knew nothing about reading disabilities until after the first release of the app was out. But I quickly moved the product in that direction when I realized that for these people TTS is not just a nice-to-have but a life-changing tool. Then, it was a matter of keeping close to my customers, listening to customers, and making my product better for my customers.

Q. Is it possible that angels should take more risks on one-person app shops like yours, given your success? Or could it be that the real reason for your success is that you were more interested in serving humanity than in making a buck?

A. Since I started working on this app, I couldn’t get away from it. I believe a good profession needs to (1) produce decent income, (2) have enjoyable day-to-day work, and (3) makes a positive impact on society. I’ve always believed that the best jobs in the world have all three and have them in balance. That pretty much sums up my vision for Voice Dream.

I’m working on some very exciting features for the next release which should be out in a few weeks:

-Personal Pronunciation Dictionary

-Adjust default speech rate, pitch and volume for each voice

-Speech rate in the voice settings now overrides the default speech rate for the voice used.

-More navigation options: rewind or fast forward by sentence, paragraph, page, chapter, highlights, bookmarks, 15, 30, and 60 seconds.

-Footer indicate page number, percentage, chapter name, and current navigation unit for rewind and fast forward.

-Additional voices: Chinese, Japanese and Korean.

-Sort by Add Date, Title, Author and Size for articles in the Home screen

-Option to scroll page by page in addition to free scrolling

-Two finger double-tap to play/pause

More on the future of Voice Dream

I asked Chen if he would also add the ability to adjust line-spacing, a more-than-just vexing omission from the current Kindle Fires [update: actually my Fire now has line-spacing, but it didn’t work properly when I tested it on a few files]. No luck. In fact, he says I’m the first to request it. Perhaps I shouldn’t be surprised since so many users of text to speech programs have low expectations. Anyone else care to speak up, maybe in the comments area of this post? Fortunately Voice Dream’s present line-spacing is close to optimal for me. But I truly, truly believe that Voice Dream fans should have that choice.

Another possibility for Voice Dream, as I see it, might be additions within the existing “Advanced settings” menu leading to all kinds of customizations without confusing novices, who could simply ignore them. Chen says that might end up on his list.

Returning the topic to libraries, I asked Chen if he would sell Voice Dream to the DPLA, the innovative Douglas County library system in Colorado, or another noncommercial library organization to distribute to users, maybe even as FLOSS, short for free and open-source software. He is willing to strike library deals, but with a limitation—the product could only be used with content from the respective library collections involved. Same for deals involving publishers’ collections. Otherwise, he says, that would be the same as selling the company, which, in the interest of control over the app, he doesn’t want to do. Too bad. Whatever Chen has in mind, it is not genuine FLOSS. I myself could envision talented developers like Chen getting large up-front payments for their products, if they beta-tested well, and then additional money could come later on, with the understanding that the developers would hang around to develop new features and oversee user support. Fees might also reach the developers as the user base grew. The advantage of a pure FLOSS approach instead is the possibility of tapping a larger pool of talent, with the main developer still influencing the evolution of the product.

At least, thanks partly to the existence of the DPLA—extremely API-oriented—companies like Voice Dream will have a head start in the library world even if they market primarily to individuals rather than libraries directly, and I’d hope that Douglas County’s e-book-tech initiative and any others would take the same open approach. The proprietary DRM issue will remain for public libraries, so that’s still a complication. But as noted, Chen is trying to overcome it. In the end, perhaps one scenario would be for libraries to evaluate Voice Dream and other products and promote the acceptable ones on their sites and take small cuts. Maybe they’d be sold under different brand names from the usual offerings and include library-related optimizations. Just a few thoughts. Who knows how this will shake out.

Some good news is that a free “Lite” version of Voice Support is available from the Apple app store and includes everything in the paid version but the ability beyond more than a few hundred characters at a time. So you don’t even have to gamble $10 for at a meaningful look at Chen’s baby in action. If you value accessibility blended with powerful sharing and annotative capabilities, go for it and share your own reactions with us.

An update written around 7 p.m. Eastern Daylight Time, May 11—mostly on Voice Dream’s potential for education

In the “first edition” of this post, I asked readers for any corrections. Winston Chen kindly pointed out two typos, and he also gave me his own thoughts on the quality of the voices.

“Bridget is shockingly good and in my view just as good as Amy from Ivona. Paul is the best male American voices from any TTS company. They’re my best-selling voices. And, to my knowledge, no other mobile TTS reader offer NeoSpeech voices. They’re the same voices used in Kurzweil for $1,500 a seat.” I bought “Paul” and will still “voice” my preference for “Amy” over him and the already-purchased “Bridget,” but they’re both excellent by today’s standards of TTS for consumers, and this is strictly subjective anyway. Hello, LibraryCity visitors—your own thoughts on the inflection, general pleasantness, and other traits of the various voices? About the review in general, Chen said: “I really appreciate your deep insights, some of which other reviewers failed to pick up. For example, how I handled the interaction between the visual and the auditory. It took me a long time to work out the complex logic for a satisfactory solution. In other words, the feeling of fluidity was actually very hard to achieve. With the new release, it’ll get even better. For example, it’ll save visual and speech locations independently.”

My Sister The Retired Teacher, meanwhile, weighed in with her own take when I took my iPad with me to lunch at her house. Dorothy taught special-education kids among others during her many years in the classroom, and, in fact, she holds a masters degree in this field. She liked Chen’s efforts. Read-aloud books are hardly new, but Dorothy appreciated Voice Dream’s ability to work with any title in the common formats it supports, not just with a particular book or collection. Dorothy offered her own suggestions for Voice Dream. First, since the needs of children and other readers vary, users should be able to choose between (1) just words being identified in distinctive colors when spoken, (2) lines being marked instead, and (3) a mix of the two other modes, Voice Dream’s current approach. She felt that some readers with special needs might actually find the word-level identification to be too much of a distraction. Anyone else’s thoughts on this?.

Second, Dorothy wanted default colors used for identification of spoken words to be closer together and for the app to avoid the bright yellow, since stark color clashes might upset some children with attention challenges. While readers can adjust colors, she thinks that a quieter approach would be better to start out with. Here again, I’d welcome others’ reactions. Perhaps the solution would be a choice of themes—canned color combos for different kinds of readers—even if I myself very much like Voice Dream’s current default mix.

Third, after trying out Voice Dream’s dictionary, Dorothy also called for the ability to increase the size of the font with young children’s needs in mind. No problem as a future change, I’d hope.

Fourth, Dorothy called for continuous scrolling rather than Voice Dream’s jumping ahead by the page. She felt that would be less jarring to young reader-listeners.

And fifth, she was concerned that even with different voices used, Voice Dream sometimes pronounced two words as one.

Inaccurate aural spacing does not bother me too much as a reader-listener if it isn’t too common and too serious; but people learn to read in part by listening and processing the information not just word by word but also syllable by syllable. So if Voice Dream and its voices and other TTS products can improve in that respect, it’ll increase their value to young children. Yes, even Ivona’s Amy has her own pause-related quirks. At the same time, parents should remember that the most accurate TTS voices in standard U.S. or U.K. English or other varieties still can’t replace the warmth and interaction of old-fashioned reading to a daughter or son. Parents, not just teachers, ideally will discuss stories with young children and ask questions on such matters as the motives and actions of characters within the material. I’m confident Chen would agree with this standard tenet of early-childhood education.

Despite the concerns above, I see Voice Dream as an incredibly useful way to impart information—on a variety of subjects—to older children who need it or who, like me, simply enjoy a book while exercising.

Encourage text reading constantly? Help students overcome text-related learning disabilities? Yes! But should all other learning cease until students are perfect readers? Some may never be and could more or less live as if in the Jules Verne novel where the telephone-delivered news replaced printed newspapers. I hate the possibilities of In the Year 2889, one reason I’m grumpy when librarians are agnostic about the value of text vs. other media, given the efficiencies of words on paper or on the screen. Not always, but so often, they’re the best conveyors of facts and emotions. But I’m also a realist about individuals and see Voice Dream-style programs as an essential way for e-libraries to better serve millions of the print-impaired and help keep books alive, however people enjoy them. The current DPLA has given some attention to presentation issues, but not nearly enough, considering all the complexities here, one reason why I favor intertwined but separate public and academic systems online. The former would care more about presentation issues for the masses, including K-12 students and people in the lower socio-economic groups, two frequently overlapping categories, alas. Besides, the separate organizations could still share a common technical services organization in close touch with leading researchers on and off the campus.

Stay tuned. I’ll give Winston Chen a chance to reply to Dorothy and me. Meanwhile a big thanks to both of them, especially since the education-related issues raised here about text to speech are generic, not just limited to Voice Dream.

Close to 9 p.m.: A quick response from Chen to Dorothy’s reactions

“I just read through your update. Your sister’s suggestions are spot-on. I already added the ability to disable word highlighting and line highlighting, so there’ll be four modes: no highlighting, word highlighting only, line highlighting only, and both word and line highlighting. While she has a point about the word highlight color being too strong, I’m not going to tamper with those defaults. That has a way of infuriating customers like nothing else.”Similar Posts:

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Amazon’s book city #1 avoids cuts in library hours but still might reduce its library book budget—already below the U.S. per-capita average

David Rothman — Fri, 03 May 2013 18:09:08 +0000

Update, May 7: The missing $56K for materials was restored in the final version of the budget last night. Kudos to all the library advocates who spoke up! See, it’s worth the time! – D.R.

Now it’s definite. Alexandria, VA—honored as Amazon’s “most well-read” city in the U.S. despite ample evidence to the contrary, especially among our many low-income people—won’t have to cut library hours.

Vice Mayor Allison Silberberg, a council and library board member, too, has emailed me: “Due to the Library Board’s incredible efforts to find other funds and adjust personnel, the library hours will not be cut, as originally proposed." Still open is the pesky issue of Alexandria’s per-capita spending on library materials (around $3.25) being under the national average (probably over $4 right now). Despite this, the draft city budget proposes a $56,000 cut in the budget for books and other content.

Ms. Silberberg sensibly asks why Alexandria would “have a $7 million library system and then decide not to fund $56,000 to maintain the book materials and collection. I have listed this item in my Add/Delete list for our city’s budget.” The $56K is around an eighth of the library budget itself. The total proposed 2014 budget for Alexandria is about $627 million, with the adoption vote scheduled at 7 p.m. Monday, May 6. Alexandrians can speak out here.

Significantly, Alexandria is a well-off city with a $102,435 median family income and its share of BMWs and million-dollar-plus houses despite the 14 percent of under-18 residents living in poverty. Imagine the poorer localities that could far less easily come up with the equivalent of the now-AWOL $56K.

Ideally, then, as an expert on both public policy and nonprofits, such as the ones written about in her book Visionaries in Our Midst, Ms. Silberberg will support LibraryCity.org’s proposal for a national digital library endowment (also discussed on The Atlantic’s site). It could be a nonprofit. But the endowment would be most effective as a public agency making a better connection between the library world and wealthy philanthropists, who would enjoy well-publicized national recognition from the White House and Congress.

Not every city in the U.S. or its territories comes with a deep-pocketed givers like Bill Gates, and in the 2009 fiscal year, Guam spent just 16 cents on library content. Even Gates Foundation has not meaningfully funded libraries’ acquisitions of actual e-books. Yes, money could go for other purposes, such as the Web-era-related professional development of school librarians, besieged in so many cities (latest horror story from Philadelphia here). The endowment could even help the very poorest of our poor communities hire a few more school librarians than otherwise, as well as help address library-related digital divide issues.

Council member Justin Wilson has already endorsed the basic endowment idea, which is crafted to minimize conflicts with local fund-raising efforts such as those we have in Alexandria. As I see it, the Alexandria City Council could make its mark on national policy and draw positive attention in the media by way of a formal resolution urging the White House and Congress to create the endowment. If need be—I hope this changes, when Washington is no longer so austerity-fixated—the initial costs to the taxpayers could be next to nothing since funding would come from the private side.

Also of interest: Is your local library budget about to be slashed? Here’s an example of how you can fight back.

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Cut in Alexandria, VA, library hours not needed, says city staff memo. Also: Councilman Justin Wilson endorses LibraryCity’s national digital library endowment plan

David Rothman — Mon, 29 Apr 2013 03:19:46 +0000

Justin Wilson, a councilman in Alexandria, VA, Amazon’s “most well-read” city, now threatened with a reduction in library hours, has shared a city staff memo saying that the hours cuts aren’t necessary. He says the library board will have the final say. Would board members challenge the memo? I’ll try to reach Board Chair Kathleen Schloeder for an answer. Meanwhile see page four of the actual staff document (PDF here).

Still definitely left open is the issue of funding for library materials, which, under the proposed budget so far, would take a $56K hit. Alexandria’s spending in this area is already considerably under national and state averages, so, if you live in this well-off Washington, D.C., suburb, speak out before the council locks up the budget in early May. In fact, the add/delete session on the library budget is tonight, and so far the cutters are winning. Immediate action from library advocates, please!

On another matter, Council member Wilson is gung ho on the national digital endowment concept LibraryCity has been advocating. “I think the idea of leveraging additional private resources for our libraries—both nationally and locally—is a wonderful idea,” he emailed me. “As you may know, the Alexandria Library system relies on donations from the Library Foundation, and the numerous ‘Friends’ groups around the City." Exactly! And the national endowment proposal is crafted in a way to help, not complete with, these essential local efforts.

In reply to my questions, here’s what Justin Wilson wrote tonight:

1) Ultimately, it’s up the Library Board, but as detailed in the memo I provided, we believe they will now have the revenue they need to avoid the cuts to hours.

2) As a regular library user (along with my wife and young children), I share your support and concern for our libraries. Understand that we are significantly increasing taxes AND making a myriad of cuts throughout City government—in places I would never want to consider cutting.

Based on the draft Add/Delete proposals for tomorrow evening’s Add/Delete work session, there is not currently a majority for restoring the $56k, but anything can happen as the Council deliberates.

3) Under State law, we do not have that authority [to impose a library-linked surtax on the most expensive houses]. All real estate must be taxed at the same rate. [Of course I hope that ultimately can be changed in time through legislative or judicial action when the political climate allows. - DR.]

4) I think the idea of leveraging additional private resources for our libraries—both nationally and locally—is a wonderful idea. As you may know, the Alexandria Library system relies on donations from the Library Foundation, and the numerous "Friends" groups around the City.

Thanks for the note. Have a good week. I’ll keep you updated.

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Is your local library budget about to be slashed? Here’s an example of how you can fight back

David Rothman — Sun, 28 Apr 2013 23:03:26 +0000

This letter has gone to Mayor William Euille (photo below, contact information here for him and other top officials) in Alexandria, VA, the town that Amazon inaccurately depicted as America’s book city #1. Also see a local Friends group’s talking points for library advocates—and the other side: a city staff memo saying the library board can avoid a reduction in library hours. – D.R. (updated 11:25 p.m.)

Even in cold-blooded business terms, the proposed library cuts in Alexandria don’t make sense—neither the trimmed hours nor the stinginess toward paper books, e-books and other items

What’s the better scenario for the taxpayers in the end? Alexandrians on welfare (or drawing the minimum wage)? Or motivated citizens given a decent chance to upgrade their reading and other skills during hours convenient to working people?

In a city with a proposed $626-million budget and an abundance of $1-million-plus houses containing 50-inch flat-screen televisions and pricey Colonial-era antiques, the slashing of some $150,000 from the people and books budgets would hardly be a wise route to fiscal sanity. I’ll offer a better solution, a library-linked real estate surtax limited to the citizens who can truly afford it.

Doubt the need? The Alexandria Library’s per capita budget for books and other content was just $3.25 for the 2012 fiscal year, less than the cost of a Big Mac hamburger. My sympathy goes out to the library’s director, Rose Dawson (yes, same as the Titanic heroine), who I’m confident is trying to do her best with the resources available. The $3.25 is less than the $4.22-per-capita spending for America’s libraries as a whole in FY 2010, per statistics from the Institute of Museum and Library Services, as well as the $3.77 Virginia average. Alas, the misguided economizing makes a mockery of Amazon’s ranking of Alexandria as America’s “most well-read” city of more than 100,000. This in a city where most of the high school students qualify for school lunches and, as I’ve noted on the LibraryCity.org site, aren’t exactly raised by Dickens-and-Austen-loving parents! While I favor the creation of a national digital library endowment (http://librarycity.org/?p=6933), it would be no replacement for robust local support of public libraries here or elsewhere.

Want proof that Alexandria is embarrassingly behind? See Table 23 at the Web address of http://www.imls.gov/assets/1/AssetManager/FY2010_PLS_Tables_19-29A.pdf.

Instead of shortchanging K-12 students and other library users of books, our city could reap plaudits in the national media, by dramatically boosting the materials budget so we surpassed rather than lagged the state and national averages. We’re a well-to-do Washington suburb—at least in terms of mean income, skewed upward by our multimillionaire residents—rather than rural Mississippi. Let’s give the budget story a newsworthy twist, a happy ending, so the Amazon ballyhoo is a little closer to reality.

I’ve just emailed a Washington Post editor about our city’s current miserliness toward the Alexandria Library, in regard to both the proposed hours of operation and the purchase of new books, and I have also written about it myself on the LibraryCity.org site at http://librarycity.org/?p=7443. May the city administration respond in a helpful way! I know that City Manager Rashad Young’s heart is in the right place; I’m aware of his membership on the executive board of the Urban Libraries Council (http://www.urbanlibraries.org/2012-2013-executive-board-pages-66.php). The council exists to strengthen and promote “the value of libraries as essential public assets.” I am certain that Mr. Young is dismayed by the tough choices, so, to reduce the unpleasantness, here are some some friendly suggestions for him and other city officials, especially council members who will vote on the budget.

Short-term, please find other ways to save money; and if need be increase the city’s debt, since the amount would be tiny in the grand scheme of things. Long term, as a partial source of funds for our library, Alexandria should at least slightly raise the real estate taxes on houses in the very upper range. We need a special library surtax in those instances, given the importance of libraries to young people, seniors and other Alexandrians. If any of the wealthy object, we’ll all know what this is about: the hyper-privileged versus those reliant on the Alexandria Library as a life-improver. Fight this out in the Virginia legislature, with national publicity, if state legal obstacles exist (update, 11:25 p.m.: Councilman Justin Wilson says they indeed do). Encourage other localities throughout the country to create similar surtaxes.

Actually, the “versus” isn’t quite the word to use in many cases when discussing the wealthy and the rest of us in the United States. Guess who, along with the workers themselves, benefits from the upgraded skills? Why, the American business owner, of course—both large and small. That includes shareholders. Recent technological developments, such as 3D printing, as well as worries about increased transportation costs, could bring home a lot of business from China, at least if we’re prepared. Well-financed public libraries can result in smarter workers able to pay earn more and pay more taxes.

I’m certain that the most enlightened of our wealthy citizens would gladly shell out a little extra, remembering that Andrew Carnegie, not a social worker, not a teacher, not a librarian, but an industrialist, is regarded by many as the patron saint of the the library world. At the same time Carnegie, while spending millions on several thousand library buildings in the U.S., his native Scotland and nations as remote as Mauritus and Fiji, expected cities to stock the stacks adequately and pay other operating expenditures. Let Alexandria not be Scrooge.

Just an aside: I really, really like the official Alexandria Web site, which is rich in information and, yes, includes a budget forum where citizens can discuss the proposed library cuts.

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Amazon’s book city #1, Alexandria, VA, may cut library hours: Time for a digital-era national endowment to help ease U.S. libraries’ financial woes?

David Rothman — Sat, 27 Apr 2013 09:09:00 +0000

Update: We won! Library advocates successfully fought cuts in hours and the materials budget.

Leaving us in the dark about the source of this tidbit, a Washington Post headline in the Style section blog says: “Alexandria, Virginia: the most well-read city in America.”

Similar words show up elsewhere in the media about my hometown, the oft-paradoxical Washington suburb of some 146,000 where a bronze Confederate soldier stands in the middle of Washington Street despite an African-American mayor and a generally progressive city council.

Alas, however, our #1 ranking isn’t based on actual books and other items read per capita.

Rather our spot at the top reflects what the Post accurately mentions in the third paragraph. That’s per-capita “sales data of all book, magazine and newspaper sales of both the dead-tree and Kindle variety since June 1, 2012,” in cities of more than 100,000 inhabitants. Just one company, Amazon, gave us our new intellectual honors, from its own statistics alone. No one else. Not the U.S. Department of Education or the Census Bureau. Not Harvard researchers. Not Mensa. Not the New York Times or the New Yorker or the New York Review of Books. Not Jehovah Himself. But you’d never guess that from the headline, and my local boosterism will go only so far.

I cherish the postcard-scenic stretches of the Potomac waterfront and the wealth of history in this town where George Washington whooped it up at Gadsby Tavern and prayed at Christ Church on the street now named after him. But geo-loyalties notwithstanding, I’ll still email an editor at the Post and request a retraction or at least clarification of the glib headline, in the interest of throttling down complacency. I spoke to a library staffer here. She’s appalled, too, and her colleagues undoubtedly agree even if the Amazon honor is a handy way to show the demand for library books among those already sold on reading. I’m writing this essay to save the rest of the city and the world at large from Amazon’s reality-bending machine. No, Alexandria isn’t rural Mississippi. But it would be an absolute lie to say we’re the #1 book citadel. We might not even be in the very first tier as a reading town when you consider the population as a whole rather than the wired citizens like me who frequent Amazon. Remember the digital divide? Well, it’s alive and well along with a continuing print divide.

Forget the Amazon hype. Books-A-Million couldn’t cut it regardless of a prime location on King Street up the hill from the Potomac, and I doubt that sales lost to Jeff Bezos and his crew were the only reason. What’s more, although we have a Barnes & Noble and at least one stand-out bookstore for kids, the city hardly teems with general-interest indie bookstores selling new books, at least not by Manhattan or Seattle standards.

Worse, Alexandria City Manager Rashad Young has proposed a $93,454 cut in the library personnel budget despite the harm this could do to working people reliant on libraries to advance themselves through literacy training and in countless other ways. Library officials say they will reduce the schedules of three of the city’s four branches by two hours a week. Talking Books Service hours will go from 35 to 20 a week, and the materials budget for books and other items will decline by $56,000 even though it’s already well off its peak. The decision will come in early May, so any Alexandrians reading this should speak up as soon as possible; go here and look for “FY 2014 Budget Public Input.” Meanwhile don’t forget to check out the talking points document that library supporters have prepared.

Rightly or wrongly—I’d hope that Young is wrong—he may perceive most of us as believing that our tax money could be better spent in other ways.

Why support our own local “Library of Alexandria” to the extent its friends prefer? Just buy your books at Amazon, B&N or elsewhere, right? I’m 100 percent confident those are not Young’s own feelings and that he means well and loathes the hard choices that the city’s fiscal challenges have forced on him, but in my opinion this is still a poor showing for a member of the executive board of the Urban Libraries Council. And more than a few genuine library-haters do feel precisely that way, based on my own virtual encounters with them during the many years I owned and edited TeleRead, a popular site among e-book buffs (the overwhelming majority of them pro-library, thankfully). Who gives a squat about the plebes?

Unfortunately, as is the case in so many other places, we’re talking about one city for the well-to-do and another for the underclass. Consider the statistics below in deciding the truthfulness of Amazon’s depiction of Alexandria as reading city #1 for the second straight year:

–The 2009 mean price of detached houses in Alexandria is said to have been $755,470, and the mean was $539,651 for all housing units. But as noted recently by Vice Mayor Allison Silberberg, a member of both the library board and the Alexandria Equal Opportunities Commission, most of our high school students qualify for free or discounted school lunches. Do you really think their parents are bringing them up on Dickens and Austen?

–T.C. Williams, the only high school in the Alexandria, was rated a poor-performer by the U.S. Department of Education. Our city’s schools are not as rotten as many would say, and critics need to factor in such challenges as the high number of students from low-income families, especially those for whom English is a second language. Still, typical students’ reading scores here are not stellar.

–More than 15 percent of adult Alexandrians were illiterate in 2003, according to a PBS-reported estimate. I wonder how much the numbers have improved since then, assuming they have. Nearby Falls Church came in at 6.6 percent, and the best showing in Virginia, a mere 6.3 percent, was from Poquoson City. Those differences hardly flatter Amazon’s book city #1. Probably jibing with the mainstream thinking of literacy specialists in the U.S., a writer for a venerable Canadian educational association notes the benefits of the “double duty dollars” that result when adults are educated; their children come out ahead as well. The reverse would almost certainly tend to be true. Won’t illiterate adults stand more of a chance of raising a new generation of nonreaders and poor readers? This is a big reason why LibraryCity favors a family literacy approach described in detail here—e-books, paper books, whatever works best for specific individuals—rather than just spending more on the children themselves. Enlighten the parents and teach them how to teach their children to read. The encouragement of verbal interaction at a young age can also go a long way, and the better-read the parent, the higher the quality of the conversations in time.

–The Alexandria’s library system’s number of some 7.5 checkouts per capita in the 2012 fiscal year—1,102,993 checkouts—might strike many as not that bad. But how useful is this raw statistic if we’re to consider Alexandrians as a whole, not just the elite? Think of the circulation number as like the mean price for detached housing, with our average skewed by the high end. The very most devoted readers will borrow the maximum number of books in one swoop and come back again and again.

For comparison’s sake, I wandered over to the library Web site of neighboring Fairfax County, with a population of 1.1007 million, and saw a reference to 13,034,816 loans in the same fiscal year from a collection of “more than 2.4 million items available for checkouts.” So the per-capita loan figure in the county would be a whopping 13 in a year, versus 7.5 in Alexandria. Care to take back that City #1 foolishness, Amazon?

Library foes might say the lower per capita figure in Alexandria justifies a lower library budget. My answer would be the reverse. Just what can Alexandria do to get people reading more?

The library crisis is really an education and jobs crisis in disguise, considering the complex nature of the best-paying work around here.

So why can’t the media focus on Alexandria’s realities rather than the pollyannaish pap that Amazon spoon-fed the media? The terrible thing is that the people at Amazon are no dummies and almost surely know how little correlation can exist between the number of book readers in a city and the sales statistics from a specific retail outlet, even a gorilla. Talk about an Amazoncentric vision foisted on the unsuspecting! Let me share a few sentences from the press release, quoting none other than the ex-editor of Publisher’s Weekly (for which I blogged during part of her time there)—now on the Amazon payroll:

“’The results of our annual Most Well-Read Cities list is [are?] proof that people across the country are reading, and also that we’re still seeing the popularity of Fifty Shades of Grey,’ said Sara Nelson, Editorial Director of Books and Kindle. ‘It’s fun for us to see facts like the citizens of Cambridge are buying the most books in the business category or that one of our favorite novels of 2012, Gone Girl, is the best-selling book in the Most Well-Read City, Alexandria.’”

Never mind that three titles from the Fifty Shades of Grey series appear on the Alexandria list and follow Gone Girl, itself hardly a literary classic, in popularity among Amazon’s customers in Alexandria. Let’s not be snobs, especially since Shades titles can lead fans to to other, better books. Instead dissect the actual Amazon news release carefully, and you’ll notice that it immediately segues from mentions of hot books in various cities to the arrogantly unsupported conclusion that “people across the country are reading.” At least as based on the information supplied—no actual dollar amounts or unit sales in the entire news release!—the perky paragraph doesn’t even make sense in context. I’d guess that the Amazon people knew it. Whatever the case, America’s news media blithely swallowed this swill. In fairness to the Post, it did joke about the criteria for the honors: “…they were going to have a swimsuit competition but the weather has been so weird and no one had been to the gym in a while…” But then I’d bet that at least 20 people read the baseless headline for every one who made it to the third graph with the actual mention of the contest’s cash-register connection, and, unless they had ESP, any possible irony eluded them. What’s more, even the author of the Post item was blind to the inequality angle.

Not that the Post is alone in its all-too-frequently-manifested elitism and the related parochialism. The New York Times itself has been too easy on the Digital Public Library of America initiative—a worthy start toward a national digital academic library, but definitely not a true “public library” respecting the five rules of library science. Once again we see big media’s obliviousness to the needs of the average American and below. The Times printed an op-ed published from Harvard librarian and history professor Robert Darnton, the original proposer of the DPLA and a former Times reporter. But it refused to publish my letter-to-the-editor with my own take on the DPLA. I couldn’t get an op-ed in the Times even though the Chronicle of Higher Education would later run thousands of words I wrote in an essay on the same topic. Yes, the Times receives lots of submissions. But national digital libraries are a cause dear to me, and I’ve been on the case for two decades. For the slanted and incomplete coverage, I blame the Times, not Bob Darnton, whom I respect for his DPLA efforts.

Instead of letting Amazon or the DPLA set the agenda for e-books and libraries, perhaps the Washington Post and the New York Times should do their homework and investigate library issues from a “savage inequalities” perspective and also show more concern for the average library user. The Post, in fact, did exactly that in January 2012 in a must-read look at libraries’ e-book crunch. Let’s see more like it, and Alexandria could be a fascinating case study. Our public library system is probably far, far better off than the typical system, making the funding saga of the libraries here all the more newsworthy, just as that craftily stupid news release from Amazon does, along with the launch of the DPLA’s demonstration site.

As a partial remedy, LibraryCity is proposing a national digital library endowment that not only could help finance e-books and other content but also help pay for Web-era professional development of school librarians, as well in their hiring in districts that could not otherwise afford them. I won’t go into the many details in this post. But they are spelled out here and here. To answer one question up front, yes, the new endowment could help free up some local money for maintenance and addition of all kinds of library services and even for spending on paper books for districts that preferred that option. A quick snippet from the FAQ for the proposal: “Mississippi spent just $1.42 per capita on public library books and other content in fiscal year 2010, according a report from the Institute of Museum and Library Services, IMLS; and Illinois, the champion, came in at a still-less-than-stunning $7.79. Libraries in my own state, Virginia, birthplace of Thomas Jefferson, far more of a friend of books and libraries than are most of today’s politicians, weighed in at $3.77 per capita. The Old Dominion at least exceeded the minuscule 57 cents in the territory of Guam for that year and the 16 cents in FY 2009.” Via the Department of Labor’s Web site, I also found that American households are spending an average of some $115 per year on books (textbooks excluded) and other reading materials, compared to about $2,600 on entertainment of various kinds. Well-funded libraries and the right kind of librarianship could expand the universe of regular readers and change this for the better.

Unfortunately, according to Kimberly Nathaniel, the Alexandria Library system’s spokesperson, the per capita spending in the system on all materials last year was a mere $3.25 per capita—that’s less than the $3.77 Virginia average for FY 2010 and the national one of $4.22 provided in statistics from the Institute of Museum and Library Services. Adding to the library system’s challenges is Alexandrians’ dramatically growing demand for e-books. And here the city manager wants to cut spending on materials by $56,000 even though the collections budget is already far, far down to less than $500,000 from its peak of around $600,000 in fiscal year 2005! While those last comparisons aren’t directly apple to apple, given the different fiscal years involved, the big point comes through. Next time you want a paper or electronic library book and there are a zillion people ahead of you, think about pitiful content-budgets and the need for a national digital library endowment as a partial solution.

As for the Digital Public Library of America, among the endowment’s potential beneficiaries, I wish it all kinds of luck on everything. But it really needs to turn itself into the Digital Academic Library of America in time rather than trying to be a “Public” Library” and unwittingly jeopardizing the franchise of the real McCoys. Americans deserve a separate but intertwined digital library system for public libraries that would share resources with the academic system but not be controlled by it—given the different needs of the typical patrons of the two different kinds of libraries. Do we want battles between Flaubert-loving academic librarians and public librarians focused on bestsellers or on the narrowing of the digital divide? It’s hard enough for the DPLA to create even an academic library in style, considering the fund-raising challenges its brilliant people have experienced with its current approach. What to say about a library catalog of more than two million items but only one linked item related to Philip Roth, with other great American authors slighted to a lesser degree? While off to a promising start, especially on technical issues, the DPLA has a tough row ahead if it won’t change its tack. It should let an authentic public library organization like the Chief Officers of State Library Agencies bring about the public digital system—while offering help to COSLA or the like as requested and while coordinating and combining such matters as interoperability, technical standards and R&D.

But what about the Alexandria City Council? Here’s what I would recommend in regard to Amazon and the DPLA:

–A nationally publicized official resolution condemning Amazon for irresponsibly stealing attention from the book needs of the nonelite of our city. No boycott suggested, just a demand for an apology. Given Amazon’s domination of online bookselling, we’re long since past the point where wired booklovers like me can avoid doing any business with the company. I myself in fact am a huge fan of Amazon’s technology on the whole and can see companies such as Amazon or Google as possible contractors for a Digital Academic Library of America as well as for a Digital Library of America (let’s avoid the word “Public” to keep the coast clear for the brick-and-mortar libraries!).

–A second resolution from the Alexandria City Council—supporting the Digital Public Library of America, while making it clear that DPLA needs to drop the P word from its name and promote the creation of separate academic and digital systems. The two library systems in fact could share a technical services organization and infrastructure to minimize redundancies. Another possibility could be an endowment-aided buyout of OverDrive (the nation’s largest supplier of library e-books) if available for sale—one way to build on existing e-library efforts and reduce the tolls of middlemen, thereby reducing the burden on taxpayers.

–Local participation, maybe assisted by grants from local philanthropists, in the DPLA’s efforts to bring the nation’s rich history online. This is one area where Alexandria could shine and help its own tourist sites really come alive with old photographs, documents and perhaps even audios and videos. It could leverage the DPLA’s technical resources and much else. But please—don’t interact with the DPLA without making very public the need for a separate national digital system for public libraries, even though it’s important to work closely with the academics.

–A third council resolution requesting U.S. Rep. Jim Moran and Virginia’s two senators to lobby their colleagues and the White House for a National Digital Library Endowment that would get around the budget mess on Capitol Hill by focusing at first on philanthropic contributions. Moran recently said he was moving back to Alexandria from Shirlington and needed space for his 10,000 books. Imagine what e-books (no shelves required!) could do for Alexandrians like him? And how about older baby boomers losing mobility, as my book-loving wife has. The technology is only going to get better and better. Meanwhile, for young people growing up in cash-strapped households, the digital endowment could vastly expand the range of books available.

I hope that other local public library systems in the United States can also follow the above suggestions in their own ways. Just don’t let the glamor of the DPLA, originated and still dominated by Harvard and friends, distract from public libraries’ traditional mission. The right public system at the national level could help local libraries promote recreational reading and offer a wealth of items to serve the diverse needs and interests of people in cities like Alexandria. In a video interview, Vice Mayor Silberberg has recommended that children wanting to be doctors be steered to books on science and medicine. Our local public library, in partnership with a national system, needs to be a source of the right words, images and sounds for encouragement of young people and their ultimate role models, their parents. This isn’t merely about learning and knowledge and academic achievement in the usual sense; it’s also about fodder for dreams. In the best of ways, Alexandria, VA, can be the “most well-read city in America” for real.Similar Posts:

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Amazon’s book city #1, Alexandria, VA, may cut library hours: Time for a digital-era national endowment to help ease U.S. libraries’ financial woes? | The Travelin' Librarian:
29 Apr 2013 [...] Read the full article @ LibraryCity.org. [...]

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Promising DPLA debut—but please don’t confuse special-collection items, exhibits and APIs with a full-fledged ‘public library’ demo

David Rothman — Fri, 19 Apr 2013 03:08:00 +0000

A caveat first. The Digital Public Library of America is evolving.

What’s more, I’m a booster of the organization and of the people behind it, including the new executive director, Dan Cohen, who so decently reacted after the Boston Marathon bombings.

But for now, the academic-and-hacker mindset is prevailing at the DPLA over the traditional public library one, judging from the demo’s worthy but rather limited debut today. Not necessarily a bad thing, mind you. But then, why insist on the P word in the organization’s name? Also, the K-12 appeal so far is not quite as great as I’d hoped despite some terrific exceptions. More positively, the DPLA has given us a promising blend of special-collection items, mixed with welcome wrinkles such as ways to narrow a search by a timeline or geography. I’m looking forward to many more items in the same vein, just like those of Europeana, which links to more than 22 million books, films and other digital content at participating libraries. One of my favorite novelists, the not-so-fashionable but (to me) readable Sinclair Lewis, even shows up in the DPLA catalog by way of correspondence with his actress girlfriend.

Let me note the DPLA’s other strengths—for example, still more goodies which you’ll never find at a typical local public or K-12 library, and which might be excellent additions to its collection, by way of APIs, linking, or pickups of unencumbered source content from institutions ranging from the Smithsonian to Harvard. The DPLA stores relatively little but rather links to its gems and laudably shares the Web addresses of the target pages—it offers more than two million items. Especially I appreciated an app that would let me search both the DPLA and Europeana collections at once. I did not find a single item on George Gissing, the Victorian novelist, within the DPLA itself. But 14 results popped up from Europeana.

That experience, however, reminded me of the downside of such heavy reliance on links: the PDF of Gissing’s masterpiece New Grub Street took forever to download, perhaps because of the U.K. isn’t exactly next door to Alexandria, VA, though the cause could have been different. Now, imagine a DPLA with far, far more books on its own speedy servers—endlessly backed up and otherwise protected against risks, including perhaps those of the cyber-terrorist variety. Yes, I can see national libraries backing up each other’s unencumbered holdings, among the powerful arguments for the DPLA’s focus on free.

So—what about K-12? The DPLA’s presentation more or less missed the boat here. If you search for items by and about Mark Twain, you don’t start out on the first results page with a little bio and a list of his major works; instead you plunge directly into the links in no immediately apparent order. Granted, there are some “by subject” links on the lower left, with more on another page. But guess what the first are? Recreation (because of the existence of Mark Twain Forest in Missouri), timber management (same), Fire (fire crews in the forest), Camp sites, facilities, etc. (obviously) and Boats and boating (a river apparently flows through the forest). You have to drill down one more level within “subjects” until you find Twain, Mark, 1835-1910, and even then you’ll see just 11 results (though I’m happy to find two good guides among them, one for readers at large, one for teachers). Why didn’t the DPLA do a better job of sorting out the material for humans?

Certainly students should learn to search through not-so-well-organized items—life isn’t always well structured, and they’d better get used to it—but this robotic craziness will tax even the patience of adults. Granted, many library catalogs suffer from similar sins. But I thought that the DPLA could learn from others’ mistakes and at least use the disambiguation techniques of Wikipedia, also funded in part by the Sloan Foundation. While I love the idea of teachers and kids searching the DPLA for original texts, images and sounds, I’ll also remember the fourth of the Five Laws of Library Science: “Save the time of the reader.” Time is precious in K-12, given all the territory that public school teachers must cover to prepare the kids for standardized tests.

Has anyone used the term “library kit” or “library component”? In a sense that is what the DPLA prototype is rather than the somewhat incomplete but still more polished site I was hoping for. I’m reminded of an an observation by Donald R. Smith, the veteran teacher-librarian and Apple Distinguished Educator, that teachers are looking for solutions they can adapt to meet students’ daily needs. The current DPA, with exceptions, such as the Twain guides, isn’t offering enough of them for the typical U.S. school despite all the gigabytes of source material.

Of course, the current site is just a demo project, with which the DPLA hopes to raise money and reel in more volunteers and learn plenty along the way, and I wish it lots of luck. I applaud the DPLA’s eagerness to attract API developers and other good-hearted techies. Still, the DPLA more or less telegraphs its present organizational mindset when the top of the home page fails to mention the magic words that could be a major part of the organization’s reason for existence and eventually a separate public system’s: “For students” and “For teachers.” I just see a general “Get Involved” and “For Developers.” Not the best way to court K-12 folks and benefit from their feedback. The DPLA needs to hear in detail from all kinds of people—techies, educators, librarians, passionate library-patrons, you name it.

The site does offer some Exhibitions of possible interest to educators and discerning members of the public, and I loved the choices of some topics ignored or mangled by the mainstream media, such as Activism in the U.S. and Bread and Roses Strike of 1912: Two Months in Lawrence, Massachusetts, that Changed Labor History. Yes, that is part of what a library should do. But it is not enough by itself. As of May 1—I’ve updated this—I can find only five or so items related to F. Scott Fitzgerald (not even his public domain books—though at least I spotted two teacher’s guide). What a shame. There’s “content” and then there’s “content.” Even with a deadline, why didn’t the DPLA flag someone as prominent as Fitzgerald for special attention? Wouldn’t at least some young readers identify with Amory Blaine, the protagonist of This Side of Paradise?

At least Fitzgerald fares better than Philip Roth, present in only one of those two-million-plus items. If you search for “Philip Milton Roth” or “Philip M. Roth” between quote marks, moreover, you will find nothing. Even given that this is only a prototype, and that the DPLA had to work with the limitations of copyright and resources, I find the treatment of Roth to be bizarre. The DPLA, despite its many positives, seems currently driven far more by the interests of its volunteers and participating institutions than by a desire to reflect the highlights of American culture. We need both approaches.

On top of that, the DPLA site has a museum-type look that most likely won’t draw in typical public library patrons—or at least those outside the museum-going set. Stay-at-home PBS regulars might demand more dazzle. Why aren’t there videos on the home page, for example? Granted, the typical public library system doesn’t have them there. But then it lacks the DPLA’s resources.

For now, let’s appreciate the the DPLA as an extremely promising demo project with a grab bag of interesting content and root for the organizers to heed some wise advice from one of its participants: Don’t try to be all things to all people. Please. Drop the “Public” and rename the group “the Digital Academic Library of America” or something similar. As the DALA, the current DPLA could succeed big time. Furthermore, it could still partner up with real public libraries and share content and technical resources and even people. But again—don’t risk letting elite academics, however brilliant and however well intentioned, dominate the nation’s public library systems in time. Public libraries are another world. Be part of it but don’t act as if you’re preparing to invade it. Respect the wishes of the Chief Officers of State Library Agencies, which didn’t want the DPLA to use the P word. Talk about ways for the DPLA to grow closer to the public library community! Work with COSLA on a separate public system.

Both systems, I believe, could benefit from a national digital library endowment, with the Institute of Museum and Library Services overseeing or helping to oversee the distribution of the money. A foundation-aided purchase of OverDrive, hardly flawless but still the biggest and probably the most experienced provider of e-books to school and public libraries, certainly could help, too, as could a choice of an academic interface or an easier-to-master one for those with simpler needs. Just don’t confuse the missions and typical users of the two kinds of systems; avoid “one big tent”! The DPLA, in failing to give K-12 its full due even by demo standards, has unwittingly illustrated the pitfalls here.

Update, April 19, 2013: See Public library, not public domain, from The Legal Genealogist. While the DPLA favors the unencumbered, many of the resources it points to come with limitations. For a round-up of reactions to the demo, see Librarians Respond to DPLA Launch at TheDigitalShift.com—especially reactions from Jessamyn West, who correctly describes the site as more for librarians than for the public. On the whole, I think librarians have set their expectations too low. Especially since the the DPLA wants to call itself a “public” library, people need to evaluate it by the accompanying standards.

Tweaked on April 21 with the Roth example and other refinements.Similar Posts:

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2 comment(s) for this post:

Tom Peters:
19 Apr 2013 Excellent review of the nascent D(P)LA e-resource. I agree with all your major points. Tis a pity that the usual suspects (Twain, Fitzgerald, Cather, et al.) are so under-represented at the launch, but hopefully that will improve with time and growth. I too wonder if one library can embrace and fully serve the richness and diversity that is America.
Promising DPLA debut—but please don’t confuse special-collection items, exhibits and APIs with a full-fledged ‘public library’ demo | The Travelin' Librarian:
22 Apr 2013 [...] Read the full article @ librarycity.org. [...]

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LibraryCity’s take on K-12 libraries and the Digital Public Library of America

David Rothman — Wed, 10 Apr 2013 05:37:00 +0000

Yes, LibraryCity has been on an S. R. Ranganathan kick lately (here and here).

Still ahead is a DPLA-related essay on his Five Laws of Library Science as applied to K-12, including school libraries—a follow-up to the LibraryCity post by Apple Distinguished Educator Donald R. Smith, a teacher-librarian with 40 years of experience. If you want to share any relevant thoughts for the next Ranganathan-inspired essay, just e-mail LibraryCity or use the comments area of this post. The essay should be online in the next week or two, after some crucial research materials arrive.

Meanwhile—some other ideas on K-12-related matters. The DPLA should work with state and local libraries toward the creation of a public national digital system with a strong K-12 component. The public system should cooperate with but be separate from the mostly higher-ed-oriented system that the DPLA seems eager to create despite some good work in the K-12 area.

Don’t let the university dog wag the public tail. Both count, so, no, the metaphor isn’t exact. Still, I fear that academics and friends are imposing their ways on the rest of the world or at least accidentally shortchanging it.

Consider this example in a K-12 context: Harvard Prof. Robert Darnton, the originator of the DPLA idea, says in the New York Review of Books that experts could update some math and agronomy books and others in the public domain. Excellent. I also like DPLA leader John Palfrey’s vision of the DPLA providing shared resources to help schools meet the new Common Core Standards (Core site here). Both ideas would cut schools’ content costs for those items. And yet they are hardly a full-fledged solution, even with plenty else thrown in. Schools, for example, may find that software apps written from scratch, not traditional textbooks and reference works, are the answer in more than a few math-related situations.

Also, don’t forget the nature and extent of the crisis (beyond the outrageous layoffs of school librarians despite their proven importance to students’ academic development). It isn’t simply about the sizes of school libraries, of which the numbers of books are tiny fractions of major Internet e-bookstores’ offerings (despite improvements). Rather the issue is also about how current and otherwise appropriate the content is for individual students with widely varying needs and interests. An abundance of appealing up-to-date books won’t hurt. Good luck at this. For the year 2012, drawing on reports from 4,385 school libraries, the American Association of School Librarians found that the “Average copyright year for the Dewey range 610-619, health and medicine, was 1996.” Imagine—fast-changing fields, and yet our K-12 students were relying on 16-year-old books written when Bill Clinton occupied the White House! Now think how up-to-date the library holdings were on government matters and other topics. Just how far can the DPLA go in facing those challenges, even if the copyright lobby will somehow miraculously allow terms to be shortened immediately and even if the library group experiments with new models for content creation for the schools?

Innovation is a “must,” but as DPLA leaders would agree with me, it is no substitute for decent funding of school libraries. Significantly, a 2011 School Library Journal article alerts us to major gaps in school library funding between rich and poor districts, which, as I see it, strengthens the case for a a more national approach, in partnership with public libraries, blighted by the same “savage inequalities.”

Alas, we’ve been through this before; will policymakers ever learn? Back in the 1990s a Clinton Administration man was telling me, right there in the Executive Office Building, that wiki-style sites would reduce the need for real e-libraries for K-12 students. I’m sorry, but alternatives to the usual copyrighted material will go only so far in the schools today despite the many glories of the public domain, Creative Commons, and wikis. And yet I haven’t seen specific, fleshed-out solutions from the DPLA to content-related fiscal issues, beyond abbreviated copyright terms; and even if the organization comes up with ideas, I worry that K-12 and general needs will still lose out to university needs during the implementation. As a partial remedy, something doable even with all the talk of “fiscal cliffs” and the rest, LibraryCity has published a detailed proposal for a National Digital Library Endowment to help address the inequalities by making it more attractive than now for the wealthy to donate. K-12-related efforts could be a major recipient of funds from the endowment, which would focus on the super-rich and big philanthropies rich to reduce overlaps with local money-raising efforts.

Let the DPLA, however worthy, not preempt far more focused K-12 efforts such as the ones LibraryCity has suggested, especially in the area of recreational reading, where schools rely heavily on copyrighted content, not the top priority of the Harvard-originated group. The DPLA or at least an academic system forked from it should also benefit handsomely from the endowment. I just don’t want people in Cambridge, Boston, or Washington to be the overlords of America’s public or school libraries in the far future, having slowly expanded the DPLA’s role year after year even if the group’s founders did not intend that. A national public digital system answerable to state and local librarians, and funded in multiple ways, including but not limited to the endowment directly or though the Institute of Museum and Library Services, could care more about the library needs of K-12 students and their role models, their parents. Certainly when it came to K-12, the Department of Education could also play a role in helping to fund the public system. But especially given the multigenerational aspects of the literacy crisis—book-shunning parents breed book-shunning kids—we shouldn’t just farm the school library issue out to Education and leave IMLS out of it. In fact, IMLS already helps support school libraries among others.

As I’ll note in the next essay inspired by Ranganathan, child-and-family-friendly efforts are too important simply to fall within the DPLA’s “big tent,” especially when the DPLA was deaf to the pleas of the Chief Officers of State Library Agencies to drop the “Public” from the Harvard-originated initiative’s full name, the Digital Public Library of America. The word “Public” harms the franchise of our country’s brick-and-mortar public libraries. Similarly the DPLA has not included public school librarians or educators from K-12 public schools in its leadership—yet another reason why we need one digital system for universities and a separate but tightly intertwined system for the rest of America. K-12 libraries are a long way from being general public libraries. But they are even more different from academic libraries (even though, if anything, colleges and universities should provide more content for K-12 and public libraries than they do now). Here’s why this matters. The issue isn’t just raw information or public domain classics, but also how to package content for K-12 and also develop teachers and students’ own research skills, some of the very points Don Smith made. Better for the DPLA to concentrate on other areas, where it’s stronger. John Palfrey to his credit has recognized such musts as K-12 students’ need for information literacy to separate facts from hooey, and he himself is now head of school at the elite Phillips Academy Andover, even if it’s a far cry from a public school with a full Bell Curve’s worth of students. But based on the DPLA’s past performance as a group, I just don’t see the organization as neglecting university-related essentials to give K-12 and public libraries a break.

* * *

Likewise of K-12 interest: Librarians should check out an EdTech article, headlined Why Our After-School Book Club Can’t Wait to Get Its New E-Readers, by Matt Renwick, a Wisconsin elementary school principal, who has also written on the topic here and here in his blog, Reading by Example.

Notice the success he is enjoying with the kids in turning them into regular readers? And his awareness of the times when paper books may be better for K-12 students than e-books? No oversell. And also a recognition that digital reading “requires a shift in instruction” (such as teaching students how to measure the progress in reading a book by way of a bar at the bottom of the screen, rather than by how many physical pages remain). I also like his displeasure with the quality of popular-level journalism on e-book-related topics.

On the Diigo site, Matt Renwick assembled useful pointers to both good and bad articles for advocates of e-books for K-12. Will the DPLA give the same loving attention to those matters that he and other K-12-oriented people are (yes, I’m aware of the organization’s laudable interest in a summer reading app—one way to help fight the famous fourth-grade slump)? Although the DPLA can try to respond, the real solution is the twin-system one.

* * *

Also coming up on the LibraryCity site (I’m not sure when): Public libraries and the Internet Archive. COSLA should encourage public libraries to work with the Archive’s Open Library Project right now. But that is no substitute for trying to patch things up with the DPLA while simultaneously insisting on the dual-system approach as well the dropping of the highly problematic P word from the DPLA’s full name. I’ll explain why in the forthcoming post. Despite all my caveats, I actually see the DPLA as far more of a potential positive than negative for America’s public and school libraries.

Note: It’s early Tuesday morning as I wrap up the above. This is a “first edition,” and I’ll welcome corrections, however minor.Similar Posts:

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Sad fate of ‘Five Laws’ book shows need for DPLA-related efforts to keep old masterpieces alive

David Rothman — Fri, 05 Apr 2013 00:53:26 +0000

Oh, the irony! In The Five Laws of Library Science, S. R. Ranganathan argued in the 1930s for libraries as improvers of life for rich and poor alike. Now Google Books has digitized 30 million titles, but you won’t find Laws on the Web in its entirety from Google at any price.

You’ll see a teaser instead, just snippets and descriptions of commercially sold paper editions.

If you go to Laws’s listings at Amazon, you’ll notice that the price of a new hardback edition now starts at $45.95 from a third-party seller, plus the $3.99 shipping. Just one new hardback copy is in stock from Amazon itself, for $54.99 with free Prime shipping. Amazon itself doesn’t carry the paperback right now.

The fate of Laws is one reason why I am so pleased—despite the need for separate national digital library systems for the respective patrons of public and academic libraries, not just “one big tent”—that the Digital Public Library of America will launch its demo project on April 18. May the DPLA if possible get Laws online for free access! Via the New York Review of Books, you can read more from Robert Darnton, who proposed the DPLA. From this promising debut, I hope that the DPLA will eventually fork itself into two tightly intertwined library systems focused on the needs of their mostly different constituencies in ways that honor Ranganathan’s memory. In fact, state and local libraries could originate the public system, carefully safeguarding their autonomy.

Meanwhile—a wonderful twist! It turns out that via the HathiTrust, a DPLA partner, an e-book version of Laws is already downloadable at no cost. I don’t know the full legal situation but see a Creative Commons license that allows noncommercial reproductions with attribution, but not derivative works. Is Hathi treating Laws as an orphan? Laws came out in 1931, a year still covered in the United States by the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act. Whatever the case, I’m ticked that the Laws is out there, complete with its famous precepts that libraries must help connect readers with books and books with readers. Given the miserable ranking of Laws on Amazon, however, I wonder how many young LIS scholars have read the actual book version of the Ranganathan’s wisdom, including the first law: “Books are for use.” Sad. I’d urge the students to download copies from Hathi directly or, after the debut, by way of the DPLA link. Ranganathan’s Laws is source material with well-crafted anecdotes that make his wisdom still fresh after eight decades, and it is not that hard to extrapolate from “books” to “e-books” or “Web sites.”

For full preservation the DPLA ideally will be able to back up all content in the near future to a centralized system of servers with different storage media, in many locations. A big wish of mine! Meanwhile the organization’s links to Hathi-type resources like Laws will be valuable in other ways.

In the Review, Bob Darnton describes how this will work. "The user-friendly interface will…enable any reader—say, a high school student in the Bronx–to consult works that used to be stored on inaccessible shelves or locked up in treasure rooms—say, pamphlets in the Huntington Library of Los Angeles about nullification and secession in the antebellum South. Readers will simply consult the DPLA through its URL, http://dp.la/. They will then be able to search records by entering a title or the name of an author, and they will be connected through the DPLA’s site to the book or other digital object at its home institution. The illustration…shows what will appear on the user’s screen, although it is just a trial mock-up."

With items from collections at Harvard, the Smithsonian, the New York Public Library, and other major institutions, not judt Hathi,the DPLA will be a rich content source for students and other library patrons in many fields of study.

Even with millions of digital items available, however, this won’t be a substitute for the newest books, the ones in highest demand by typical public library patrons. Still, despite the DPLA’s shortcomings of today, I agree with Executive Director Dan Cohen: “We’re just getting started.”

What better example of the potential than the Ranganathan one? Far more desirable for readers to type dp.la and be able to search for the actual Laws book without effort than to have to reach it via a little link at the bottom of a Wikipedia article!

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How a national digital library system could serve K-12: A veteran teacher and school librarian speaks out

Donald Smith — Sun, 31 Mar 2013 17:02:00 +0000

Donald R. Smith spent 40 years as a public and private school teacher and as a school librarian. A Brown University graduate living in Howell, New Jersey, he is an Apple Distinguished Educator (“’Class’ of 1995,” the first). Also see other thoughts on the DPLA and K-12. – D.R.

In responding to your concerns for the development of a national digital library system that will meet the needs of the world beyond higher education, I must start out with an insight from my experience.

Particularly in the K-12 world there was a need for products to solve problems encountered daily in the classroom. Most teachers are searching for solutions which can be readily adapted to their students’ immediate needs.

Teachers want products and processes which will help them and their students meet local, state, and federal requirements in a timely way. Their world is totally different from mine when I began teaching decades ago. There were no national or state-imposed standards then. What happened in the classroom almost totally reflected the resources that were locally available, as well as the wishes of the school board. Students did not always receive the best education.

In proposing a statement of purpose for a National Digital Library I was simply seeking to state in a few sentences reasons which would describe a system that would better emphasize the real needs of our educational community and the citizen who is a product of it. I know that the scientific research and R&D communities need inclusion, but I’m really concerned about how my clients—our kids and their parents—are going to utilize the National Digital Library.

The front end to the system is of special interest to me. It must be tremendously user friendly and offer relatively quick downloads of data. But you can’t make it so easy that it becomes like a wiki. Maybe I’m just overly cautious because—between Google and Wikipedia—the average user just jumps in and then doesn’t really look around for other answers. I was a bug about kids browsing, especially when they were using a print library. Sometimes the book they really needed was there just six inches to the left and they didn’t see it. That’s why browsing on the Internet by going link to link to link has some worth to it. But often kids especially just go for the quick fix and don’t look for alternative answers to a problem. That’s where browsing skills are really important, because you begin to make associations that allow you to transition to more complex learning and skill levels. I’m very critical of the “show and tell” approach that so often goes in the classroom. Teachers have to make sure that students aren’t just satisfied with the first answer they find—even though that could be the right one or the one they really need. Students will only find that out by testing, by looking for alternatives, and the right interfaces for K-12 could encourage this.

In writing a mission statement for the nation’s digital library I am also concerned about the disenfranchisement of many of our citizens. I worked for years in a community where many did not have access to the internet in their homes and more than likely still do not, and I understood the need to serve everyone—urban, rural, rich and poor, gifted and nongifted, people with mental or physical disabilities, and Americans of all racial and ethnic backgrounds. But so often the wishes of the most vocal or powerful won out instead. If we do not provide for those of us in all cultural and intellectual realms, we will truly disenfranchise the people who most need the information that a National Digital Library could provide.

During my 40-year career, I also found that the world of educational professionals had limited access to the resources which were part of their major study. I’d like the DPLA to work toward a higher profile as a K-12 resource. As a generalist and librarian as well as a “searcher” of knowledge all my life, I often had a better handle on the availability of the “stuff” of a field of inquiry than most of the practitioners did in those specialties. The governors of the K-12 world are focused on delivery systems and not necessarily exploring and understanding the world of resources that are available. It’s possible that everybody is just looking for a “quick fix” for public education today in particular. We need more than that.

Another issue is the range of the DPLA’s content. Adults and K-12 students alike need access to information beyond all requirements of those in academia. Those in academia have the responsibility to assist citizens in acquiring necessary information to fulfill their daily lives. We cannot place intellectual barriers to our library and have it address some needs of the general population, but mainly those of academia. To deprive people of needed information is to disenfranchise them in many ways. I repeat my plea, “The National Digital Library should be the symbol to us of our most cherished freedom—the freedom to speak our minds and hear what others have to say.” That is why I support LibraryCity’s approach to development of a digital library.Similar Posts:

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Beyond a ‘Digital Attic’: How the DPLA can honor the Five Laws of Library Science—and help libraries in Orange County, Florida

David Rothman — Sun, 31 Mar 2013 02:07:00 +0000

This is the era of bits and bytes and multimedia and 3D printing, not just books and other texts. But Shiyali Ramamrita Ranganathan’s Five Laws of Library Science would still apply today in spirit even after more than eighty years.

Educated originally as a mathematician, S. R. Ranganathan was a library-science genius who studied librarianship in Great Britain and worked as the librarian at the University of Madras. Accurately or not, he is said to have beaten out 900 competitors for the job. He peppered his writings with Indian philosophy, dressed Ghandi-simple, and avoided coffee and tea.

His laws, spelled out in a 1931 book available from the HathiTrust in full text, are: 1. “Books are for use.” 2. “Every reader his book” or her book. 3. “Every book its reader.” 4. “Save the time of the reader.” 5. “The library is a growing mechanism.” Reincarnated, what would this law-giver think of the Digital Public Library of America initiative out of Harvard—more a creature of the academic world than of our public libraries? In his opinion, would the current DPLA vision be addressing the America’s most pressing library needs in such areas as popular content, K-12, and family literacy?

I have many doubts, alas, even as a DPLA proponent. Later in this post, I’ll do my best to analyze the extent of the DPLA’s present compliance with all five laws. For now, though, here’s an extremely apropos headline in the Orlando Sentinel, run March 23 and spotted by TeleRead’s Susan Lulgjuraj: Soaring e-book demand strains Central Florida library budgets. This is the very stuff that the DPLA should fixate on if it is to honor Ranganathan’s second law. Walter Pacheco writes in the Sentinel:

For 25 years, Jennifer Krantz had been a frequent visitor to Orange County libraries, borrowing everything from mysteries to cookbooks to romance novels.

But since her boyfriend bought her an Amazon Kindle Fire tablet at Christmas, Krantz, 37, now rarely steps inside a public library.

“The library’s e-book service is great because I don’t have to park, walk to the library, find the book and check it out,” said the accountant. “The only complaint I have is that I have to wait longer than usual for an e-book because the library seems to stock few digital copies of the titles I want.”

Krantz represents a growing number of Central Florida readers depending on their public libraries to fuel their consumption of e-books, downloadable audiobooks and other digital media. At the same time, librarians across the Orlando area are scrambling to meet that increasing demand while facing rising e-book costs and budget cuts.

Why doesn’t the DPLA as an organization care more about about Floridians’ needs, especially in regard to Law #2, “Every reader his book”? What about the many readers like Terrence Johnson, a 30-year-old Orlando man and Kindle user? “The wait for the e-book is a little frustrating,” he told the Sentinel. “I know I can head to the library and check out the print book, but I really don’t like reading the print version.”

No, it isn’t as if the DPLA has not shown a commendable interest in copyright reform for the benefit of public and academic libraries alike, to increase the availability of older e-books, and, in fact, I’ll give the group a nice mention in this regard in another post in the next few days. But guess what? If Johnson is like Jennifer Krantz and most other public library patrons, he’ll want modern books, including the hottest bestsellers. “Every reader his book,” please!

Better laws and publishers more sensible about e-book prices for libraries still won’t wipe out the nasty truth that America’s libraries are able to spend just $1.3 billion or so annually on books and other content out of an already-less-than-adequate $11 billion in operating expenditures reported to the Institute of Museum and Library Services. Add in capital expenditures, for buildings and so on; and the percentage of spent on actual content drops still more. Couldn’t the efficiencies of a full-strength national digital library system help libraries go further in giving “every reader his book”? Especially if (like libraries in Canada and certain others in Colorado, Massachusetts and California and elsewhere) America’s libraries start moving away from an excessive and expensive dependence on outside vendors to store and distribute e-books? Who comes first? Vendors or taxpayers interested in the most and best library-books and other content for them? Hence the desirability of two national digital library systems—one public, one academic—to respond to people’s individual needs in the spirit of Law #2. Libraries should use, respect, and fairly pay good contractors. But the former, not the latter, must be the ones running the show.

Daniel J. Cohen, the DPLA’s new executive director, ideally can agree with the above, at least in time, if he does not already. For now, he sees the group as a way to extend local libraries’ “commitment to the public sphere, and provide them with an extraordinary digital attic and technical infrastructure and services to deliver local cultural heritage materials everywhere in the nation and the world.” And I like those ambitions and many others (even if the DPLA technical infrastructure envisioned so far won’t sufficiently wean public libraries off vendor-controlled servers). Holder of degrees from Princeton, Harvard and Yale and conversant in fields ranging from digital history to theology, Dan has a background as a very accomplished professor at George Mason University, in Northern Virginia, from which he is moving to Boston; and I’m expecting many good things out of him for the DPLA as an academic library. But the organization should try harder than it has so far to help public libraries in Orange County and elsewhere follow Ranganathan’s Law #2 and the others in ways that leverage the efficiencies of digital technology. Similarly the DPLA should do more to help ordinary Americans achieve their personal goals—vocational, professional, health related, financial, you name it—rather than just rummage around the digital attic. We should embrace the past, present, and future.

With that in mind, I hope that the DPLA won’t take a Not Invented Here stance and ignore the detailed suggestions in such LibraryCity posts as a plea for a forking in time into two separate but tightly intertwined digital library systems respectively serving public and academic libraries; an argument for a Library-Publisher Complex for the digital era; an essay headlined ”Dwarf-sized public e-libraries vs. abundance”; a proposal for a national digital library endowment; and the related FAQ. Believe me, Ranganathan’s ghost is on my side.

Let’s return to all his laws now in a DPLA context:

1. “Books are for use.” In other words, S. R. Ranganathan didn’t simply want books archived, and if you chained a book to avoid theft, as did certain librarians, you might as well have done the same to a human, as S.R. more or less saw it. He wanted books read.

The DPLA to its credit is exploring new ways to get more knowledge online for free, and S.R. would love those efforts. He would not, however, like the DPLA’s lack of sufficient interest in the related digital divide issues—such as the availability of the right hardware for e-reading as well as instruction in using the hardware. And what about the issue of absorbing the content through study guides, multimedia and in other ways? Those are just two reasons why we need two separate national digital library systems even though the public and academic systems could share some board members, plenty of content, a two-system catalog for the interested, and even a common technical services organization dealing with infrastructure and digital divide issues (the latter in coordination with for-profits, nonprofis and governments).

In the use department, something else comes to mind—the fact that e-readers and other devices make books more accessible in rural areas and for many people with disabilities who have problems reading traditional books or who face mobility challenges getting to the library. S.R. was keen on bookmobiles and even library books carried by mules, a precursor of today’s efforts to address the digital divide in the countryside and elsewhere. As for disabilities, consider all the millions of aging Americans who cannot splurge at Amazon and who would rather not be at the mercy of volunteers or book delivery services. I’m confident that Ranganathan would be just as passionate about library e-books as about mules and bookmobiles in the first half of the 20th century.

2. “Every person his or her book.” The DPLA mostly gets a big, fat “fail” in this regard. In terms of books, the current focus is on the classics and other public domain books, when, as noted by public librarians like Susan Flannery in Cambridge, Massachusetts, the masses crave the newer titles. “The books we purchased in last 12 months went out an average of 6.5 times last year,” I quoted her in one of my posts calling for a national digital library endowment. “The rest went out 2.44 times.” Ranganathan wanted library books for all socioeconomic groups, not just well-educated scholars interested in public domain items. Some classics will be required in schools. But the preferences of typical readers, especially for recreation, are elsewhere. Too bad. Even as a nonacademic, I like Dickens and Dreiser and others, but in accordance with Ranganathan’s teachings, libraries must serve all kinds of people.

Aggregation of for-profit library services such as those from OverDrive and 3M isn’t an answer, no more than copyright reform by itself is. Ideally the DPLA will also care about the financing of content and actually see if there are ways to align more closely the interests of libraries and publishers and lobby jointly at all levels of government so books get the financing they need and the number of library titles multiplies. According to the Economist, libraries make up a mere five percent of publishers’ sales and the average U.S. library branch offers a mere 4,350 books compared to Amazon’s more than 1.7 million. But what if these pitiful numbers were dramatically scaled up? For publishers who fret about libraries “devaluing” books and stealing from retail sales, my answer is simple: “What sales?”

The average American household spends just $115 a year on books and other reading material compared to around $2,600 on entertainment in general. Hardly nirvana. For written content especially, publishers and others would benefit from new business models—powered by people’s love of the “free,” but still fairly compensating publishing houses, writers and others. Not to mention public libraries’ promotion of reading in general, books and writers.

3. “Every book its reader.” Ranganathan had in mind open shelves and even pondered such questions as how high the ladders in the stacks should be. The DPLA’s final record in this regard, as with Laws #4 and #5, has yet to be written (and even on Laws #1 and #2, nothing is locked up absolutely). But I would suggest that its programmers and librarians experiment seriously with proactive Amazon-style systems that tip readers off about new titles likely to match their interests. Require patrons’ consent, given the privacy issues here. Good metadata, precisely located interbook linking (particularly with library-stable links), annotations, blogs and other forums can help the discovery process.

4. “Save the time of the reader.” What would be more time-saving than e-books that you could call up from your home? Libraries should worry more about serving readers than about protecting the buildings that house paper books (besides, other ways exist to draw crowds, such as story-telling hours).

In an era of two-job families strapped for cash and time, not everyone can get to the library for the copyrighted books in highest demand. For now, just a fraction of libraries’ collection expenditures are going for the book-related medium most respectful of readers’ time. As I’ve noted, the fault is not the libraries’ alone, considering some publishers’ insistence on highly unfavorable terms for libraries. But ideally DPLA can help educate the publishing houses.

5. “The library is a growing mechanism.” Here is where e-books could especially shine, given the ease of adding to collections without weeding the shelves of older physical items to make room for more. (Patrons not wanting to access books beyond a certain age could filter them out.) This is one more reason for the DPLA to honor Ranganathan’s memory and work much harder than now to go beyond a digital attic and some technical tools. Whatever the age of material, libraries can also grow through annotations and other user-added content.Similar Posts:

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2 comment(s) for this post:

Dan Cohen:
31 Mar 2013 Thanks for the great and helpful post, David. To be clear on #2, I'm very interested (as I know others are within DPLA) and plan to be rather forthright (as I have in interviews already) that we really need to rethink the business models around ebooks so that public libraries and their readers are served better. If DPLA "fails" currently in this regard, it is because (as you note) the ebook landscape is hard for everyone right now. I do hope that DPLA can act as an intermediary or coordinator of action to make this situation better. On the other points, I do think that we have a good plan that will begin to address discovery and use issues. We're just getting started! Thanks again.
David Rothman:
31 Mar 2013 Thanks for such a prompt and classy reply, Dan---you're indeed giving #dpla its due! I truly truly hope that the DPLA succeeds, and meanwhile the group is very lucky to have attracted someone with your talent and background, just as it is in the case of others like John Palfrey. Let's hope that publishers, and the makers of copyright law, will indeed become more library friendly. At the same time, as I've emphasized, the DPLA and America's libraries need more: enough financial resources. How do you feel about the idea of a national digital library endowment, with both public and academic libraries benefiting (ideally, as I see it, in separate but very tightly intertwined systems)? Those are the details that I wish the DPLA people would spent much more time discussing. I'm delighted to see your own open-mindedness toward new business models. The DPLA is still not paying nearly enough attention to the library needs of the non-elite, which can't be served without more resources being available. That said, I couldn't agree with you more that the organization still has the power to change---the reason I'm speaking up now. I'm rooting mightily for the success of the demo. That certainly could help the endowment idea to which I linked in the "Five Laws" post. Right now you must be hyper-busy with the move to Boston as well as with planning for the DPLA's eagerly awaited debut next month, but if your schedule somehow allows, I would be happy to get together with you face to face in Northern Virginia about steps toward the creation of the endowment. I myself favor a government agency. But let's get the idea out there and see how various stakeholders, from local librarians to IMLS, would feel. A wiki/forum mix, with major efforts made to court currently under-represented communities, like K-12 and small-town public librarians, could be excellent as a planning tool toward refinement of the endowment proposal. It could be that many will be too busy with their routines to participate. But it would be wonderful to give them a chance. Beyond more attention paid to the financial side and wooing of potential contributors with sufficient interest in public library needs, I'd also like to see other improvements, especially in the K-12 area. In fact, later today or tonight I'll publish some observations from Donald Smith, a teacher and school librarian for 40 years in private and public schools, and I hope they'll be similarly helpful. Like me, Don wants higher standards in schools (our championing of the non-elite is not an effort to dumb down libraries or schools---just the opposite!), and no small part of this would be the fostering of good research skills. This is one area where the DPLA really has a chance to shine with links to outstanding source materials from the Smithsonian, the National Archives and countless other places, if it can devote enough resources to helping teachers and students make the best use of them. We need to look far beyond providing and distributing stellar unencumbered metadata. On another detail, one more reason why the DPLA is lucky to have you as executive director is your interest in the development of good tools for creating unencumbered content (I'd intended to write that letter to Bob and John---though I think your being executive director will, in a good sense, render that matter less urgent). As with the other things mentioned above, that'll require sufficient resources, which an endowment could help make available. Volunteers are great. But the DPLA needs to be driven most of all by national needs, as opposed to the interests of techie volunteers, however brilliant, even though their inspired input is also essential. No need for a detailed reply right now. But perhaps this note will be handy, as a compilation of talking points for a telephone or in-person chat later on. Best wishes, David 703-370-6540

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