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<?xml version='1.0' encoding='utf-8'?><html lang="" xml:lang="" xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"><head>
<title>Without a Net</title>
<meta content="pdftohtml 0.36" name="generator"/>
<meta content="West, Jessamyn" name="author"/>
<meta content="2012-01-19T17:59:10+00:00" name="date"/>
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<p><a id="p1"></a>
<a id="p2"></a><a id="p3"></a> <a id="p4"></a></p>
<h1>Without a Net: <br/>Librarians Bridging the Digital Divide</h1><p> Jessamyn C. West <br/><a id="p5"></a></p>
<div style="page-break-before:always;"></div>
<p id="top">Copyright 2011 by Jessamyn C. West All rights reserved. </p>
<p>Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data West, Jessamyn, 1968– Without a net : librarians bridging the digital divide / Jessamyn C. West.</p>
<p>p. cm.</p>
<p>Includes bibliographical references and index.</p>
<p>ISBN 978–1–59884–453–5 (pbk.) — ISBN 978–1–59884–454–2 (e-book)
</p><ol>
<li> Libraries and the Internet—United States. </li>
<li> Libraries—Information technology—United States. </li>
<li> Internet access for library users—United States.</li>
<li> Public access computers in libraries—United States.</li>
<li> Library employees— Effect of technological innovations on—United States.</li>
<li> Library orientation— Technological innovations—United States.</li>
<li> Information technology—Study and teaching—United States.</li>
<li> Libraries and community—United States.</li>
<li> Digital divide—United States. </li>
</ol>
I. Title.<p></p>
<p>Z674.75.I58W47 2011</p>
<p>020.28504678—dc22</p>
<p>2011000993</p>
<p>ISBN: 978–1–59884–453–5</p>
<p>EISBN: 978–1–59884–454–2</p>
<p>15 14 13 12 11</p>
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<p>Originally Published by Libraries Unlimited, An Imprint of ABC-CLIO, LLC</p>
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<section id="copyright-page" type="copyright-page">
<h3 id="toc_1">Note from the author</h3>
<p>I wrote this book in 2011, but much of it holds true today. Understanding the digital divide means understanding the people affected by it and understanding the technology that thwarts them. This book is a combination of practical and philosophical approaches to working with the digitally divided. You can read more about this book on its website: <a href="http://www.librarian.net/digitaldivide/">Without a Net: Librarians Bridging the Digital Divide</a> </p>
<p>
In 2018, I asked the original publisher, ABC-CLIO, to revert the rights to me so I can revert them to you. With help from 44 generous folks on <a href="https://unglue.it">Unglue.it</a>, I was able to pay the reversion fee, and add a Creative Commons license so you can share this book freely.</p>
<p>- Jessamyn</p><div style="page-break-before:always;"></div>
<div class="agate-info">
<p>© 2011-04-30 by Jessamyn C. West</p>
<p>ISBN: 9781598844535 .</p>
<p>URI: <a href="https://unglue.it/work/113915/">https://unglue.it/work/113915/</a> (this work).</p>
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<hr/>
<div class="dedication"><a id="p6"></a>In memory of Steve Cisler <a id="p7"></a> </div><br/> <a id="p8"></a>
<hr/><div style="page-break-before:always;"></div>
<h2>Contents</h2>
<ul id="pdf_toc">
<li><a href="#copyright-page">Author's Note about the Creative Commons Edition</a></li>
<li><a href="#p12">Preface</a><ul>
<li><a href="#p12">Why I Am Writing This Book</a></li>
<li><a href="#ch2_2">Where I Came From</a></li>
<li><a href="#ch2_3">Where I Am</a></li>
<li><a href="#ch2_4">What We Have</a></li>
<li><a href="#ch2_5">Where We’re Going</a></li>
<li><a href="#ch2_6">Caveats</a></li>
</ul></li>
<li><a href="#ch3_0">Acknowledgments</a></li>
<li><a href="#ch4_0">Introduction</a><ul>
<li><a href="#p24">Why Our Work Is Important—Defining the Digital Divide</a></li>
<li><a href="#ch4_2">Computers, We Have Them</a></li>
<li><a href="#ch4_3">People Are Offline for a Reason</a></li>
<li><a href="#ch4_4">Moral Imperatives and Technological Definitions</a></li>
<li><a href="#ch4_5">Who Is Offline, and Why?</a></li>
<li><a href="#ch4_6">What Libraries Can Do</a></li>
<li><a href="#ch4_7">About This Book</a></li>
</ul></li>
<li><a href="#ch5_0">1 People in the Library</a><ul>
<li><a href="#ch5_1">Library Staff—You Are Here</a></li>
<li><a href="#ch5_2">Library Patrons—What They Need, What They Receive</a></li>
</ul></li>
<li><a href="#ch6_0" id="p9">2 The Bigger Picture—Who Makes the Tools We Use</a><ul>
<li><a href="#ch6_1">What Is a Default and Who Decides?</a></li>
<li><a href="#ch6_2">The Media, the Decision Makers, and How They Interact</a></li>
<li><a href="#ch6_3">Synthesis—How It All Works Together</a></li>
</ul></li>
<li><a href="#ch7_0">3 Planning—Strategies, Techniques, and Tools</a><ul>
<li><a href="#ch7_1">Library Policies</a></li>
<li><a href="#ch7_2">Leading versus Following—Tech Assessments</a></li>
</ul></li>
<li><a href="#ch8_0">4 Planning for Pedagogy</a><ul>
<li><a href="#ch8_1">Our Toolbox</a></li>
<li><a href="#ch8_2">Setting Up the Classroom</a></li>
<li><a href="#ch8_3">Instruction Happens</a></li>
<li><a href="#ch8_4">The Technology Itself</a></li>
<li><a href="#ch8_5">Are You Accessible?</a></li>
</ul></li>
<li><a href="#ch9_0">5 Basic Instruction and Explanations</a><ul>
<li><a href="#ch9_1">Tech Terms and Meanings</a></li>
<li><a href="#ch9_2">What Is a Computer?</a></li>
<li><a href="#ch9_3">What Is an Operating System?</a></li>
<li><a href="#ch9_4">What Is the Desktop?</a></li>
<li><a href="#p161">What Is a Window?</a></li>
<li><a href="#ch9_6">Basic Tasks</a></li>
</ul></li>
<li><a href="#ch10_0">6 What Is the Internet?</a><ul>
<li><a href="#ch10_1">Internet Elevator Pitch</a></li>
<li><a href="#ch10_2">Internet Access</a></li>
<li><a href="#p180">What Is Our Internet?</a></li>
<li><a href="#ch10_4">A Few Common Myths about the Internet</a></li>
<li><a href="#ch10_5">The Web</a></li>
<li><a href="#ch10_6">Google, The</a></li>
</ul></li>
<li><a href="#ch11_0">7 Email Is Everything</a><ul>
<li><a href="#ch11_1">Break It Down—What Is Email Really?</a></li>
<li><a href="#p211" id="p10">So, You Need Email?</a></li>
<li><a href="#ch11_3">Email Parts</a></li>
<li><a href="#ch11_4">Email Attachments</a></li>
<li><a href="#ch11_5">Advanced Email—Tips to Improve the Experience</a></li>
<li><a href="#ch11_6">Non-web-based Email</a></li>
<li><a href="#ch11_7">Bad People and Email</a></li>
</ul></li>
<li><a href="#ch12_0">8 Office Software, Databases, and Social Software</a><ul>
<li><a href="#ch12_1">Do You Know Word?</a></li>
<li><a href="#ch12_2">Bibliographic Instruction—Teaching Our Tools</a></li>
<li><a href="#ch12_3">Social Software and Syndicated Sites</a></li>
</ul></li>
<li><a href="#ch13_0">9 When Things Go Wrong, or Right</a><ul>
<li><a href="#ch13_1">Troubleshooting and Supporting Your Systems</a></li>
<li><a href="#ch13_2">Feedback and Assessment</a></li>
</ul></li>
<li><a href="#ch14_0">10 Things That Work—Examples from the field</a><ul>
<li><a href="#ch14_1">Informal Consortia in the Green Mountains and Elsewhere</a></li>
<li><a href="#ch14_2">MyKLOW—Consortial Blogging</a></li>
<li><a href="#ch14_3">Technology Petting Zoo—Up Close and Personal</a></li>
<li><a href="#ch14_4">23 Things</a></li>
<li><a href="#ch14_5">five Weeks to a Social Library—Collaborative Learning</a></li>
</ul></li>
<li><a href="#ch15_0">11 Why This Matters and What to Do</a></li>
<li><a href="#ch16_0">Appendix and Bibliography</a></li>
<li><a href="#ch17_0">Notes</a></li>
<li><a href="#ch18_0">Index</a></li>
</ul><div style="page-break-before:always;"></div>
<hr/>
<a id="p11"></a>
<h2><a id="p12"></a><a href="#p8">Preface</a></h2>
<div class="quote">
<p>We are stuck with technology when what we really want is just stuff that works.</p>
<p class="source">—Douglas Adams, The Salmon of Doubt </p></div>
<h3><a href="#p8">Why I Am Writing This Book</a></h3>
<p>I’m writing this book because it doesn’t already exist. The digital divide is real; the need to engage it is pressing. Libraries are one of the few institutions with national presence and digital infrastructure that are taking on this large project. And they could use help.</p>
<p>I have been doing basic technology instruction since I began library school in 1993, and rural technology instruction since 2002.</p>
<p>If you want to get nitpicky about it, I’ve done technology instruction since I showed my mom how to get the VCR to stop blinking 12:00. This would have been in about 1979. And the classic struggle is exactly the same. My mom knows how to push a button, how to tell time, and how to follow instructions. But somewhere along the line, the combination of steps required to do simple tasks—tasks with a technological aspect—started to seem impossible to her.</p>
<p>There’s a whole body of work surrounding the idea of technostress and how it affects us and why, for example, people don’t set their VCR clocks when they’ll set every other clock in the house.</p>
<p>Why inserting a computer into the steps involved in performing a task can sometimes cause people to not do the task at all. Until six months ago, I was driving around in a car with a clock that was an hour and seventeen minutes off because I couldn’t figure out how it worked. I am no stranger to either side of this issue.</p>
<p><a id="p13"></a>However, this isn’t a psychology text, for the most part. This book gives you practical data for both technology instruction and general education. That said, part of technology instruction is not just being able to tell someone how to get their email or run a virus scan, it’s how to make technology exploration and learning something that people are motivated to do. At least part of this motivation comes from within, ideally. For most people, part of this motivation is also external. People have to get online to apply for jobs, to interact with their government, to receive social services. And they might want to get online to interact with friends and family, read the news, watch current or vintage television shows, or just look at photos of puppies. Being online is not merely an available option, for most people in the United States it’s now part of their daily lives.</p>
<p>finding the right combination of personal motivators is key to helping people learn, more so than individual intelligence or technical background. The library setting is integral to this: a public setting, available to everyone, with computers and internet access and at least the occasional staff member to help out. While many people regularly use computers at work, school, and home, some people lack this access for a variety of reasons. Some studies claim the number of “offline” people in America is as high as one-fifth of all adults. When those people need to use technology, they’re often at the public library. We need to be responding to these people appropriately and effectively. We are one of the integral bridges across the digital divide.</p>
<h3 id="ch2_2">Where I Came From</h3>
<p>I’m one of those people who grew up with computers, even though I’m slightly older than most people in this category. My father was an early technologist and worked with computers starting in the late seventies. While he didn’t bring his work home with him, I did grow up in a culture where computers were part of the normal environment and they were something manageable and masterable. We had the normal video games at home (Atari 2600!) and when I was in high school we had a VAX computer in our school’s lab, a lucky side benefit to being up the road from Digital Equipment Corporation. My informal high school yearbook photo shows me in the computer lab.</p>
<p>That said, I’m not a programmer. I can write HTML and CSS and even edit a little bit of javascript and PHP, but I can’t write <a id="p14"></a></p>
<p>my own computer programs. I think this is important to state at the outset. All of the work I’ve done and the examples I am giving in this book come from a sophisticated end-user perspective. I went to library school at the University of Washington beginning in 1993, before the graphical web. I took a year off between my first and second year of school and went to Romania with my partner who had gotten a one-year professorship there. I got a job working with the Freedom Forum Library in Bucharest Romania, helping them set up their library. Since the library was run pretty much by the Gannett Company, this mostly involved taking books about journalism and USA Today founder Al Neuharth out of boxes and putting them on shelves. However, they also had an internet connection.</p>
<p>In 1994, an internet connection in Romania was something that you paid Sprint dollars-per-minute for. And the internet didn’t have any pictures. With my high school VAX background and UW experience using the Pine email client, I was the de facto technology expert. I began teaching classes for journalists in how to use Gopher for research and how to use Pine for email. My students didn’t know anyone else with email addresses, so we practiced sending email to other people in the same classroom. I like to think of those students now impressing their friends “I was sending email in the mid-nineties!” And yet, I still sign people up for their first email accounts even now.</p>
<p>I came back to Seattle and finished library school and found myself in a crazy wonderland where having any tech skills at all meant that you could get a high paid job doing pretty much anything.</p>
<p>I was a VISTA volunteer at Seattle Public Library where I started the Wired for Learning program. I worked with the City of Seattle’s family centers to get them set up with computers and donated internet connections. I took a tech support job with Speakeasy where I learned the ins and outs and nitty-gritty details of the DSL business. I did freelance computer support on the side—realistically anyone who is at all good with computers does this, either for free or for pay—and plotted a return to smalltown New England where I’d come from.</p>
<h3 id="ch2_3">Where I Am</h3>
<p>I currently live in rural Vermont in a town about the size of the one where I grew up (3,500 people). I’ve lived here or nearby for about ten years. I’ve done a variety of jobs here, both library-related <a id="p15"></a>and non-. I’ve been an outreach librarian at a large public library; I’ve worked on several automation projects. I’m active in the Vermont Library Association and help run their website. While my jobs are varied and interesting, at some level most of them come down to helping novice technology users make sense of their systems.</p>
<p>I started my current job as an AmeriCorps volunteer at the local vocational high school. My library contract had run its course and I was looking forward to taking some time off. I told people I would not be taking another job that summer unless I opened the paper and saw a job involving “teaching email to old people,” which was and is my favorite thing to do. Amusingly, that’s exactly what happened. The local school was looking for an AmeriCorps volunteer to start an outreach program enabling them to share their technology offerings with people in the community. The Randolph Technical Career Center is a regional school, serving students in seven towns in Central Vermont. When the kids go home at 2:30, there’s an empty building filled with computers and high-speed internet in the middle of a very tech-poor section of the state. RTCC saw that as an opportunity.</p>
<p>The Adult Education coordinator and I worked to design a combination of adult education classes, drop-in time, and public library visits to serve the tech education needs of the community.</p>
<p>The original idea was that the school served seven small towns and yet was mostly a presence in Randolph, the town where the school was located. We wanted to reach further into the communities and offer more for people who were not high school age.</p>
<p>I became a roving librarian, giving computer assistance and instruction at many of the libraries belonging to what we called the “sending towns.” Many of these libraries did not yet have broadband and were struggling with aging Gates Foundation computers and local populations clamoring for access. I showed up once or twice a month and ran virus scans and software updates and occasionally taught librarians or library patrons about their systems. I did some local internet safety classes and mostly helped people check their email, make flyers, and surf the web.</p>
<p>I also taught evening classes a few times a week with titles like “Getting Started with Email” or “What Is a Web Page?” And, because we found that some potential students didn’t even have the skills to begin taking a class, we started drop-in time which is just what it sounds like. After school lets out, I hang around one <a id="p16"></a></p>
<p>of the classrooms for a few hours. People can drop-in and I’ll help them with their computer questions. I’ve been doing this for over five years now. My experience forms the basis of much of the practical advice in this book.</p>
<p>The job has evolved somewhat over the time that I’ve been there. I’m on staff and no longer an AmeriCorps volunteer, though I still work part-time. I no longer do library visits. Most of the libraries in the region now have broadband and wireless. Drop-in time shrank to one day per week and has recently expanded back to two days. I have some students who have been coming in for the full five years, but most are local folks who saw the ad in the paper—we’ve found it’s our best recruitment tool—and stop by with a question or two. I work a few hours per week doing computer fix-it work for the teachers and staff at the school in addition to my community technology work.</p>
<h3 id="ch2_4">What We Have</h3>
<p>The computers in the classroom serve the students mainly, though I’ve been able to get a few software programs installed for the general public. There is an IT company that does the high-level maintenance of the school’s network and administers the mandatory web and content filters that we must have. Most web browsing is okay. All chat is blocked and Skype is unavailable. We had to lobby hard to get access to YouTube and other video sites.</p>
<p>There are mostly PCs in the classrooms, although people can bring in their own laptops and get on our wireless network which is an ad-hoc network created by me sharing the internet connection from my own laptop. The computers are desktop machines running Windows XP with flatscreen monitors which are a few years old.</p>
<p>They have a small assortment of software on them including both new and old versions of MS Office, a typing tutor, some career chooser software, Internet Explorer and firefox, and Photoshop Elements. Ninety-five percent of the time people are just there to use the web, unless they’re working on their reśumeór messing with mailing labels for holiday cards.</p>
<p>Working out of a student computer lab is not ideal. I do not have the level of control over the system that I would prefer. However, while it may not be ideal, it is certainly realistic. In many technology situations, novice users will not be able to have complete control over their computers. They’ll either share with a family <a id="p17"></a>member, use a work computer, use a public PC at the library, or otherwise gain temporary access to a computer and/or the internet. At least, our internet access is consistent. We have a regular broadband connection to the internet that, aside from the filtering, works well and consistently. And for many people in my region, this is what they are lacking. They may have dial-up at home or know someone who does, but what you can access on the internet in 2010 is quite limited if you’re still using dial-up.</p>
<p>Most importantly, we have a can-do attitude. The school believes that it is their responsibility to help the people in our region across the digital divide. This helps our neighbors find jobs, interact with their government, save money, and generally do more with less. As the person leading this initiative, I can say that I would not be able to do it without the full support and backing of the institution where I work. While I still think that there are a lot of things that can be done with limited support, either financial or professional, this is often the key to turning a regular job like mine into something with the potential for more influence. I don’t work as much in public libraries lately, but I spend a lot of time sharing my technology knowledge and instruction tactics with librarians.</p>
<h3 id="ch2_5">Where We’re Going</h3>
<p>One of the more poignant parts of my job is the extent to which I’ve been teaching “basic computer classes” for upwards of fifteen years now. I’m not sure how I thought this was going to go, maybe I thought everyone would at some point (how?) learn the basics and we could move on to more complex topics like usability and design. But there are always people who need to learn the basics. I’ll get into some of the reasons why this is the case in Chapter One.</p>
<p>This is what the digital divide is all about—some people lacking the skills that other people consider basic, starter, or remedial, and not having a peer group or an educational system that can teach you. It’s also about people assuming “Oh, everyone knows that.” and moving right on by. The digital divide isn’t about not having a computer, though that can be part of it. The digital divide isn’t really about not knowing how to use a computer, though many people I work with can’t. The digital divide is about not knowing anyone who knows how to use a computer well enough <a id="p18"></a></p>
<p>to teach you. It’s about not being part of a tech-literate culture and not knowing a way out of that setting.</p>
<p>Slowly, this is changing—both the ability to access technology as well as the populations who are trying to access it. I have seen broadband access come to many of the local communities in the time that I have lived here. I have seen the phone companies put up hand-painted signs saying “DSL IS HERE” because it was the best way to let people know it was available. I’ve seen students at my drop-in times start coming less frequently when they finally could get broadband at home (now they email me). I’ve seen more public places than just the library start offering free wireless, and I’ve seen people using it.</p>
<p>The amount of tech literacy one can pick up through osmosis— from television, newspapers, other print media, seeing people use it in public, talking to people—is increasing. This is a difference between the rural and urban digital divides as I see it. In rural America, people who didn’t or don’t have jobs with computers may have missed a learning opportunity, but anyone with children or family that includes younger people will be interacting with people with steady access to technology. As our rural populations age, they are replaced by a tech-savvier younger population. The same is not as true for urban underserved populations where immigrant populations come from other countries as adults and may or may not settle into an area with tech-literate people. Often they settle into urban areas with other immigrants, areas that are traditionally tech-poor. As they acquire skills and cultural literacy and fluency, they often move out of these areas, to be replaced by other new immigrants. This means that there’s a geographical area where the tech literacy rate stays very low over time, even as the general tech literacy rate of the nation as a whole is increasing. This is a different sort of problem. At the same time, areas of urban poverty often have tech infrastructure—available internet access, strong cell phone signal, availability of free or low cost wireless—that are not available in rural areas. Both rural and urban tech literacy are pervasive and pernicious, but are addressed using different tactics and strategies.</p>
<p>Part of my skill in this area is both being able to use a computer fairly well and also being able to explain what I know to people who are just getting started. I have basic metaphors and simple explanations at the ready. I use them all the time. People know I am quite familiar with technology, but they also know I can remember being unfamiliar, or fake it well. I’m unusually “plugged in” for <a id="p19"></a>someone in my community, a community where people are just starting to use Facebook, where my neighbors are more likely to make a phone call than email, and where Twitter is something you read about in the newspaper. For those of us who grew up with technology, it can be difficult to remember what it was like before you knew what a URL was, or the first time you used a search engine. I am fortunate enough usually to get to show someone the miracle that is Google almost every single month. I’d be lying if I said that the light-bulb moment, the hyperspace consciousness jump when people suddenly realize that the internet world is vast and available to them, wasn’t a bit of a kick for me as well. I hope to share what I know here so that you too can help other people solve their own problems with technology. Join me.</p>
<h3 id="ch2_6">Caveats</h3>
<p>This is not a manual. If there were a recipe for how to solve the digital divide, we would not have a digital divide. Addressing the problem head-on involves a combination of skills, knowledge, and personality, optimally among many different motivated people in a community. This book addresses itself towards public librarians and the things they can do. However, saying “Teach classes like this.” or “Install this software.” is actually only a small part of addressing the overall systemic problems occurring with technology and novice patrons. Accordingly, I try to address some of the root causes of the digital divide, and the environment it has created at the same time as I try to offer concrete “do this” types of suggestions.</p>
<p>I have strong opinions. They are not reflective of any of my employers; they are mine and mine alone. While I’ve gotten better at not saying that things suck over the past few years (preferring the term “sub-optimal”), I think we do ourselves no favors by pretending there are no qualitative differences between types of hardware, software programs, and the ways we use them to help information have-nots. We need to look at outcomes. We also need to look at who is studying what, and why. We are librarians. We are hired to make judgments about information to assist our communities in solving their own problems. We should be bringing these skills to the world of technology in the same way that we have brought it to the world of books for centuries.</p>
<p><a id="p20"></a></p>
<p>This book is also very American-centric. Even though digital literacy and technology access are issues that are even more pressing and dire in other parts of the world, our particular technological situation and public library institutions in the United States are the focus of my attention and research. I strongly encourage librarians and educators in other parts of the world who are reading this to use what they can, and give feedback to the library community where other approaches would be useful.</p>
<p>And finally, a word about nomenclature. I specifically asked my editor before I began this project, if I could use the words that people in the tech world actually use when they talk about technology, if I could apply my own style guide. This meant using words like email and website which are often copyedited—wrongly, in my opinion—to e-mail and Web site. She said that was okay. I’d like to assure everyone that any errors in spelling or style are also mine and mine alone. I’ve tried to avoid jargon, but I will be stopping short of providing a glossary or spelling out every acronym that I use. As people interested in information, libraries, and technology, I trust you can seek definitions if you require them. Unless I am referring specifically to myself, all example URLs are intended to be fictional. If you want to use a domain name for the purposes of instruction that is not a real domain name, please use <a href="http://www.example.com">www.example.com </a>which was created specifically for this purpo<a href="#p288">se.1</a></p>
<p>All brand names should be presumed to be trademarks or service marks of the companies that own them. Thank you for reading.</p>
<h2 id="ch3_0"><a id="p21"></a> <br/> <a id="p22"></a>Acknowledgments</h2>
<p>Many people have given me support, encouragement and various pieces of crucial advice over the years. In addition to local and distant friends, family, my boyfriend and all the Boxboro librarians, I’d like to extend special thanks to a few people from my library past who were influential to me.</p>
<p>David Remington was the earliest advocate for rural libraries who I knew, he helped set me on the right path. Randy Hensley taught me how to talk so that other people would listen. Peter Hiatt and Ed Mignon gave me great advice and sincere encouragement.</p>
<p>Phil Agre’s examples of how to write plainly and intelligently about technology have been models for my own writing. The folks at the Randolph Technical Career Center, including my boss Ruth Durkee and the principal Bill Sugarman, believed in my work and found a way to make it happen. My five years there have been transformative.</p>
<p>The community at Metafilter gave me a great place to try out ideas; having a job there meant that I didn’t have to go broke while writing a book. Sharyn November gave me mature and sensible advice. The crew at Computers in Libraries gave me a forum to try out some of my ideas for a librarian audience. Amy Ranger made me a blanket out of rabbit fur that I sat on while I was writing this.</p>
<p>All my students, all my teachers, all my audience members and all my readers have helped make this book what it is. Thank you each and every one.</p>
<h2 id="ch4_0"><a id="p23"></a> <br/> <a id="p24"></a>Introduction</h2>
<p>Information. What’s wrong with dope and women? Is it any wonder the world’s gone insane, with information come to be the only real medium of exchange?</p>
<p>—Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow </p><p><a href="#p8">Why Our Work Is Important—Defining the Digital Divide</a></p>
<p>The digital divide is unsexy. It doesn’t make good television.</p>
<p>It can’t be fixed with a grant-funded website. It may not be able to be fixed, period. However, it can be mitigated, and its effects can be lessened. People can learn, and they can share what they know.</p>
<p>For every person who has that “Aha!” moment when sending their first email, there are ten more people who don’t know what questions to ask, or who lack some fundamental skill that is keeping them from interacting with the online world. We see many of these people at the public library.</p>
<p>In order to move beyond simply giving beginner ’s email classes forever, it’s my opinion that we need to understand the forces that keep people from getting comfortable with technology, from learning, and from being able to solve their own problems.</p>
<p>Some of these forces are societal, some are political, some are personal, some are situational and some are of course, technological.</p>
<p>I feel that the technology is the least difficult to address of all of these solutions, so I’ll be talking quite a lot about the other forces that have gone into creating the digital underclass that we see in the United States. Those of you wanting to get straight to the <a id="p25"></a> “how to do it” stuff can jump ahead to Chapter One. Those of you who are looking for a background in digital divide issues, keep reading.</p>
<p>The digital divide is a simplistic phrase used to explain the gap between people who can easily use and access technology, and those who cannot. The term digital divide has been in common use to refer to this sense of technological haves and have-nots for over a decade. It’s not a term that anyone owns and it’s not a term that, to the best of my knowledge, any one person has taken credit for coining.</p>
<p>Carrie Bickner, who was at the time a librarian at New York Public Library, wrote a cautionary tale about the Children’s Internet Protection Act for the website A List Apart<a href="#p288">1 </a>in 2001. She explains that the phrase digital divide: . . . initially referred to PC ownership. It was a term used to point out the fact that while computer ownership was generally increasing, this increase was limited to certain ethnic groups with particular economic means in limited geographic areas.</p>
<p>As the use of the term evolves, a better definition begins to include those who are more generally cut off from information.</p>
<p>A more up-to-date definition would include the idea that lack of access and lack of training are barriers to information wealth.</p>
<p>Bickner was being polite, but what she was describing was the fact that computer ownership was on the rise, but mostly among middle-and upper-class urban white people. This is different from the more generalized statement “Hey, more people are getting computers!” which was how it was often represented. Nowadays, when we read the news stories that say “Hey, more people are getting online!” we should remember that these increases do not happen proportionally among all segments of society, and we can point out and predict where people are getting online in greater numbers, and where they are hardly getting online at all.</p>
<p>At the beginning of this century, the digital divide was more about access to computers and less about access to the internet. A computer cost a few thousand dollars in 2001; many people couldn’t afford one. The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation was a major player in a national campaign to assist libraries in obtaining and maintaining public access computers with internet access, office software, and games for kids. Many of the libraries in my <a id="p26"></a> </p>
<p>area still use the computers they purchased with Gates Foundation grant money. People now have free access to computers with internet access via public libraries in most places in the United States.</p>
<p>So, why is there still a digital divide?</p>
<p>It turns out the problem is more complicated than simply having computers available. People who can physically sit down in front of a computer still don’t necessarily know how to use one.</p>
<p>In fact, many times they don’t even know how to turn one on.</p>
<p>And who is responsible for teaching them? Even as more businesses and government agencies are interacting with customers and constituents online, there is still no national program for helping people with basic technology skills, no safety net to ensure that people can access the services and programs that have been provided for them digitally. That job has become the task, some say the unfunded mandate, of America’s public libraries.</p>
<h3 id="ch4_2">Computers, We Have Them</h3>
<p>I’m happy to be writing this at a time when we no longer have to argue if computers have a place in the public library. For the first half-decade of my career in librarianship, this was still an open question. Some libraries had computers available for the public, some didn’t. Some offered OPACs but not internet browsing. Or you could use the internet, but not type up a reśumeón a word processor. On the other hand, some libraries still offered coin-operated typewriters. It was a mixed-up time to be a public library.</p>
<p>Living in a large city on the west coast meant that access to technology was practically a given, but the form it would take was still up in the air. When I first started working at Seattle Public Library, the DYNIX terminals did double-duty as web surfing machines via the miracle of Hytelnet, if I recall correctly.</p>
<p>And you know, I probably don’t remember correctly. While we all like to swap tales about our early tech experiences, they’re more of a secret handshake sort of thing among people who do understand technology and not at all interesting to people who don’t. In fact, telling people who have never used email that you’ve had an account since 1985 does nothing to assuage their concerns of being dreadfully behind the times. It just makes things worse.</p>
<p>I’m assuming since you’ve read this far, you’re someone who is interested in technology, and/or pedagogy, and/or the <a id="p27"></a> intersection of these two things in and around the public library.</p>
<p>You may or may not be “good with computers” and you may or may not be in a position to do anything about it. My hope is that you’re curious enough to want to do something. What I’m hoping to do is give you a combination of some good data about the general digital divide, an explanation of why we (still) have it, and some techniques and skills for helping people manage it, both from a library perspective as well as an educator perspective.</p>
<h3 id="ch4_3">People Are Offline for a Reason</h3>
<p>When we think about people in difficult situations, it’s often a knee-jerk but human reaction to try to examine what they may have done to get themselves there. While this is a problematic approach in many respects, it’s important to understand what aspects of people’s situations are within their control and which are not, and work on fixing the things that can be addressed and remedied or fixed. I live in a rural part of Vermont, by choice.</p>
<p>When I assess the good parts and bad parts of living where I live, I am aware of what choices I’ve made to get here. I know that if I decided that I no longer enjoyed living someplace without a nightlife, for example, I could move. Many people live in Vermont for various reasons of their own choosing. Many other people live in Vermont because they were born here and lack the resources to make a location change even if they wanted or needed one.</p>
<p>My experience has led me to believe the same is true for people who are offline. People are offline for a reason. It may be by choice or it may not be, but uncovering people’s reasons for being offline is part of the journey towards solving people’s individual problems with getting online.</p>
<p>This seems somewhat counterintuitive. You have to have a reason to be offline? To not participate? Isn’t it the other way around?</p>
<p>While this may not have been true a decade ago, in 2010 being at least somewhat online is the norm in America. This is a fact. In fact, being online with broadband is now the norm in America according to the numbers. This creates a set of situations larger than just people’s access to online tools. Here’s how I see the progression occurring: 1. Businesses start to provide goods and services online to reach additional markets. <a id="p28"></a> </p>
<p>2. Governments and other institutions use online methods to provide goods and services to people to take advantage of economies of scale and save money and time.</p>
<p>3. Business and governments start to make decisions about these multiple delivery methods over time, which ones to keep and which ones to discontinue.</p>
<p>4. Costly methods may get discontinued or not optimized for.</p>
<p>This could mean no longer offering phone-based tech support, or it could mean no longer designing websites for people with dial-up in the same way that we no longer design websites for people using Netscape. As a recent example, Seattle Public Library is no longer sending overdue notices by mail. <a href="#p288">2 </a>This is great news for them, saves money. Patrons’</p>
<p>choices for now are email or automated phone message.</p>
<p>How long until the TeleCirc gets discontinued?</p>
<p>5. People who are not online, therefore, lack access to online goods, services, and communication. If offline delivery methods are discontinued, their only options are to find a way to get online or lose access to these things.</p>
<p>So, getting people online becomes, for non-profit do-gooders like ourselves, a bit of a race against time. It would be nice to get people online more at their speed and comfort level and less because they had to get online to perform a necessary task or interact with their government. More and more places every year are requiring people to apply for jobs online—even places that do not require computer skills in order to perform the job tasks, such as Home Depot or McDonald’s—either via the web or in-store kiosks that are only sort of computer-like. Lately, I’ve been seeing people come to my drop-in time needing to fill out their weekly unemployment claim online.</p>
<p>The Vermont Department of Labor is mandating that all people filing unemployment do so online. If you don’t fill out the forms, you don’t get paid. This is a real struggle for some people.</p>
<p>When Katrina slammed the Gulf Coast leaving people without shelter and in dire need of financial assistance, most were presented with two options: call the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) via a telephone number that was perpetually busy or use an online form to apply for disaster relief funds. Not a great time to learn to use a computer. Not a great time to teach someone to use a computer. When I explain the work I do, it is this sort of thing that I give presentations about.</p>
<h3 id="ch4_4"> <a id="p29"></a> Moral Imperatives and Technological Definitions</h3>
<p>Before we continue, I’d like to say that generally speaking, I don’t believe that getting online is a moral issue. I am not a technology booster. I enjoy using technology and it works for me in my life. If you decide that you don’t want to spend the majority of your time interacting with a computer, that’s a fine choice. However, like other choices to keep up with the Joneses (or not), there is a cost to taking a different path. I think of the gentleman in my town who never learned to drive. This is a valid choice. It worked well for him in New York City, but now he’s at the mercy of other people to drive him places. He doesn’t mind and they don’t mind, but it limits his options for doing many things and reduces his independence somewhat. Similarly, being unable to swim is fine right up until the time your boat capsizes. And, of course, you don’t have to swim anywhere to pay your taxes.</p>
<p>I believe that having a basic understanding of how to operate a computer and interact with a web page is a skill that is required in American society. Whether you decide to go on beyond that is up to you. I’d prefer that people who were not using technology were doing so because they had made an affirmative decision not to, not because they were lacking information or resources to understand their technology options.</p>
<p>You’ll see me using some terms interchangeably here. While the terms broadband and high speed have different nuances of meaning, they’re both used here to mean access to the internet that is always on and faster than dial-up. The FCC on their Broadband.gov website defines broadband as “high-speed internet access that is always on and faster than the traditional dial-up access.”</p>
<p>Similarly, while my general focus here will be discussing public library computing and I’ll use the shorthand PC, I intend to refer to a sort of brand-neutral computer or computing device unless otherwise specified. One of the things that working in rural technology has taught me is that you can’t really be too much of a brand partisan. While I think it’s important to be able to make qualitative assessments about different flavors of operating systems or computer hardware, I often don’t have the luxury of only troubleshooting my operating system of choice.</p>
<p>Assisting people with their technology—if you’re doing it well—doesn’t involve telling people that the choices they’ve made up to this point have been bad ones. Unfortunately, that is the <a id="p30"></a> </p>
<p>stereotype of the techie or IT person. When you have a problem, you’re concerned that they’ll tell you that you brought it all on yourself. I felt this way when I’d go in to get a haircut after I’d trimmed my own bangs; my stylist flipped out. I dreaded haircuts for a while afterwards. Remembering that feeling, I can bring some of it to my technology instruction in order to try not to make people feel that way. If a good deal of people’s reasoning for remaining off-line is in some capacity emotional, it’s important that we learn to respond to their concerns and questions while understanding this component of their decision-making process.</p>
<h3 id="ch4_5">Who Is Offline, and Why? </h3>
<p>Getting online is often an affirmative decision adults must make. While younger people are often online by default at work or school, or through owning smart phones, people who live in a home without technology have to decide to seek out technology access and technology instruction. A computer will not magically install itself in their home or if it does—the gift of a well-meaning friend or relative—it will not be self-instructing. I was initially surprised, when talking to my adult education students, how many of them had computers at home that they never used. In some cases they were even paying for internet service, but “something happened” and the computer was not functioning properly and they were stuck waiting for a friend or relative to return and take a look at it. I had decided early in my tech support career that the one thing I would not do was take care of people’s computers in their homes, too much risk of owning a bad problem, and these stories always tugged at my heartstrings. And yet, who were these people that didn’t know a single person who could help them with technical problems? And what motivated them?</p>
<p>The year 2007 was the year that broadband saturation reached 50%, where over half of Americans had broadband at home. This was nine years from the time broadband became widely available.</p>
<p>Can you remember when you first used broadband? Can you remember when you first got it at home? Citing a short report from the Pew Internet & American Life Project, “[T]o put this in context, it took 10 years for the compact disc player to reach 50% of consumers, 15 years for cell phones, and 18 years for color TV.” <a href="#p288">3 </a>As new technology adoption goes, the adoption of broadband has been speedy.</p>
<p> <a id="p31"></a> People’s main impediments to getting online are social and also financial. There are many people living without home broadband in the United States. Thirty-five percent of adults have no broadband at home; twenty-two percent do not use the internet at all. And yet, like adults who are unable to read, their lack of computer skills is largely invisible to those around them. The good news is that people recently have been concerned about underserved populations in America. This is for a few reasons—more on these reasons in Chapter Three of this book—but generally speaking, similar to the rural electrification program, getting people with the program means you can sell them things. And getting Americans up to some basic level standards means that you can use technology to create economies of scale saving money and time in the process. And when the government saves time and makes fewer errors with, say, processing people’s income tax forms online, we all save money.</p>
<p>So, people have been studying offline populations in a variety of ways. There have been many surveys undertaken in the past half decade to try to figure out who is offline, why they’re offline, and what role the library plays in helping these people do the things they want to do with technology. I’ll summarize a few major reports here and others are mentioned in Chapter Three. These are primarily people looking at the digital divide in general, not the overlap of the digital divide and library services. There are certainly more than these reports. Please feel free to read them yourself; the links are in the Bibliography at the end of this book.</p>
<p>The Pew Research Center The Pew Research Center is a nonpartisan group that frequently produces reports and surveys about Americans and internet use. In the Center’s own words, the topics they cover are “the issues, attitudes and trends shaping America and the world.” One of the interesting things about their reports is how they trace trends over time, with very similar surveys being given over several years with results that are then comparable. Lee Rainie, the director of the Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project, frequently does presentations at library conferences. The Center also doesn’t have much of a dog in this particular fight. Unlike other reports that are partially funded by organizations that I would consider closely tied <a id="p32"></a><img class="calibre2" src="index-32_1.jpg"/>to library vendors, the Center maintains a nonpartisan stance that makes their numbers, to me, more authoritative.</p>
<p>The Pew Research Center has a digital divide section on their website which specifically addresses populations who are not online. According to them, 2005 was the year in which broadband overtook dial-up as the most popular form of home internet access.</p>
<p>Since then, the numbers of people using dial-up has been on a pre-cipitous decline. In their report on home broadband usage in 2008, they gave us some data about who, specifically, is offline and online among adult Americans. They report that 55% of adult Americans had broadband internet connections at home, up from 47% in March 2007. This number drops modestly to half when they look at the 50 to 64 age group and then drops-off sharply to only 19%</p>
<p>of those 65 and older.</p>
<p>They show similar trend lines related to home income level with households at most income levels showing an increase in home broadband adoption between 2007 and 2008. In fact the only income level showing a negative trend, where people are actually losing broadband, are households with incomes under 20K.</p>
<p>Pew reports that only 25% of people in households at this income level have broadband access at home. While this stands to Chart from page 13 of Pew’s Broadband 2008 report <a id="p33"></a> reason, if money’s tight high speed access may be a luxury, it’s also distressing since it results in people who are historically underserved continuing to have less access. We also see a racial divide in people’s broadband adoption rates. African Americans had home broadband at lower overall percentages (43% in 2008) from the national average and also a slower adoption rate.</p>
<p>What’s most interesting about these Pew Research Center surveys is that they ask people their reasons for not adopting broadband technology. This can be one of those loaded-sounding “Why DON’T you keep up with the trends?” but it’s clear from their results that people are not responding from a position of defensiveness. The Center seems to be able to ask questions that elicit truthful-seeming answers.</p>
<p>The FCC</p>
<p>The FCC recently came out with their National Broadband Plan with its big outline for how to get all of America connected. That plan was preceded by an in-depth phone survey looking at the reasons that people were not online. The FCC has a real problem to solve. They can’t just start doing business online and decide that if they lose the 10% to 20% of people who don’t interact online, they’ll just lose their business. They actually have to solve the problem of getting the rest of the people online. They’re the government, for everyone and it’s a huge task. So in order to do that, the FCC has to figure out what their reasons are to begin with. I’ll summarize a few of their major points, but I strongly suggest reading the entire study. It’s fifty pages long, but full of useful data and very easy to read.</p>
<p>A chart on the next page summarizes this information graphically.</p>
<p>The FCC separates offline people into four categories; percentages are out of the overall U.S. population. I’ve noted who is in the groups that they delineate: 1. Digitally distant (10%)—people who see no point in being online</p>
<p>Who is in this group? older and retired people 2. Digital hopefuls (8%)—people who like the idea of being online but lack the resources, often financial, for getting online</p>
<p>Who is in this group? low income folks, heavily Hispanic and African-American <a id="p34"></a><img class="calibre2" src="index-34_1.jpg"/>Chart from page 13 of Broadband Adoption and Use in America.</p>
<p>3. Digitally uncomfortable (7%)—people who have resources but lack interest Who is in this group? no specific demographic 4. Near converts (10%)—people who often use broadband internet elsewhere but haven’t yet paid to have it at home Who is in this group? younger folks, who often have internet access at work People who are especially offline, according to the FCC study, include </p><ul>
<li>Seniors—only 65% have broadband at home </li>
<li>Disabled people (self-reported)—are online two-thirds less than non-disabled, also do less online even if they do have broadband, fewer different activities, less activity online overall </li>
</ul>Less educated people—there is an extra multiplier if they are disabled or poor or Hispanic At the very bottom of the list, you find Spanish-speaking Hispanic communities where less than 20% of the population has broadband at home. This is a huge gap from the national average <a id="p35"></a> of 65%. When we start asking who is offline, we should be looking at these numbers.<p></p>
<p>The IRS (and Other Government Agencies) Government agencies that serve the entire U.S. population have an obligation to provide services in a way that all citizens can access. This means that if they want to move to online tools they have to figure out a way to either make people use services online, or find alternatives for people who can’t or won’t get online. I was surprised to find that the Internal Revenue Service has been studying the digital divide problem from their own perspective of “How can we get people to see paying their taxes online as a solution to a problem?” This section has a little more narrative to it because I have a bit of a personal librarian perspective with this issue as well.</p>
<p>When the IRS sent my rural library a letter saying they were discontinuing their delivery of paper tax forms to our library, it created a problem for us. This was a few years ago, when the library had a dial-up internet connection shared among four computers, and downloading and printing tax forms was time-consuming and costly to the patron. Making photocopies from the big IRS binder was additionally costly to the patron or to the library depending on who was paying for paper. The librarian was not very good at finding tax forms on the IRS’s website, though she tried. People without a computer at home were disproportionately affected by the IRS’s decision to discontinue paper forms. If you didn’t get a form mailed to you, what were your options? I was peeved because I felt that the IRS wasn’t paying attention to users who lacked technology skills.</p>
<p>The “What should the IRS be doing?” question is a great exercise in untangling the tricky lines between social problems and technology problems especially among people who are new to technology. The IRS is, at some level, the American government.</p>
<p>When they save money and do a better job, it benefits the American people (ignoring sociopolitical tax arguments). The IRS is also an organization that almost every American needs to interact with in the course of a given year, as opposed to social services that are primarily directed towards people who are poor, sick, or in trouble.</p>
<p>So, decisions the IRS makes concerning how to implement technology or design their web content affect every American and need to <a id="p36"></a> </p>
<p>be tailored towards everyone. People who have difficulties with their use and understanding of technology wind up at a societal disadvantage when the IRS makes bad choices. That said, I was very surprised at how much research went into the IRS’s decisions about paper versus online filing options.</p>
<p>Until the late nineties, the IRS was processing most tax forms using sixties-era mainframe computers. Currently, most paper tax form processing happens automatically with only the problematic forms being touched by humans. In 1990, the IRS decided to try to get people to file their taxes online, at a time when less than 1% of people in the United States had internet access. As of this year, twenty years later, 66% of all tax forms are filed electronically. The Cleveland Plain Dealer<a href="#p288">4 </a>wrote an article on the IRS’s shift to e-filing, explaining both the pros and cons of the plan, and the sticky issues of making online tax preparation a genuine option for Americans. The article states: “It costs nearly $3 to process a paper return, but processing an electronic return costs only about 35 cents. The error rate on paper returns is 20 percent, which consumers must compute and workers must enter into IRS computers, compared with 1 percent for e-filed returns.” To put it another way: the United States saves money when taxpayers file online, up to several dollars per taxpayer.</p>
<p>And why do people still fill out paper returns? And how can we get them to stop? The IRS did a study in 2008, the Advancing E-file Study Phase 1 Report, in which they compiled all the information they had been gathering. They call the report “a major effort to collect, synthesize, and analyze all substantial data in one document on the IRS e-file program . . . to help the IRS validate and launch future studies, research, and other activities to meet the congressionally-set goal of an 80% e-file rate.” It’s 248-pages-long and gives a close look at technology adoption trends and what to do about non-adopters. The IRS found that the trendline for e-filing mirrored the trendline for online bill-pay and technology adoption generally. This consisted of some early adopters, a lot of people getting on board in the middle, and a group that one of their cited sources refers to as “laggards,” people who will not adopt a new method until other methods become unavailable.</p>
<p>The IRS places roughly 32% of taxpayers into this last category for e-filing.</p>
<p>Non-adopters for a similar technology, bill-pay, were split into named groups according to their responses to questions about <a id="p37"></a> whether they used online bill paying in a survey done by Forrester Research.</p>
<p>Holdouts—71% agreed with the statement “No, and I do not intend to pay bills online in the future.”</p>
<p>Fence-sitters—23% agreed with the statement “No, but I plan to in the future.”</p>
<p>Quitters—6% agreed with the statement “No, but I used to.”</p>
<p>It’s the IRS’s job to figure out how to manage, nudge, and cajole all the different sorts of people they call “laggards” into being e-file adopters. They’re in a somewhat different position from banks because as they state “The IRS by law is precluded from directing or mandating e-filing behavior of taxpayers.” If your bank moves to online banking and you refuse to use it, you can find another bank.</p>
<p>If the IRS does it (and they’re not going to), you’re stuck. So, they have to find ways to encourage people to e-file without having the ability to legally mandate them to do so, at least under current laws.</p>
<p>The IRS split non-e-filers into three categories of their own:
</p><ul>
<li>people with no access to a computer or ability to use a computer </li>
<li>people who don’t want to spend the money to file online </li>
<li>people who don’t want to put their personal information “in cyberspace”</li>
</ul>
<p></p>
<p>The IRS is trying to manage the latter two categories through incentive plans like free online tax filing and public awareness campaigns about the security of e-filed returns stating that they’ve “never had a security breach affecting e-filed returns.” They engage in PR campaigns about online safety generally. However, people in the first category who have lack of access or lack of skills training fall solely into our ballpark.</p>
<p>Offline Populations Here’s a little summary at this point. The stereotype of an off-line user is someone who is elderly and isn’t “getting with the times,” and who is resisting upgrading from dial-up to broadband, but this is somewhat misleading. Older adults, especially wealthier, educated, white adults, are online more than middle-aged adults without a high school education. I bring a little bit of personal bias to this since I’ve been working with offline populations for a <a id="p38"></a> </p>
<p>decade and I can outline the people whom I see who don’t have, for example, enough technology experience to fill out a job application online. Here are some people I see:
</p><ul>
<li><p>Anyone over the age of about 30, who didn’t go to high school with computers and then didn’t go into the white-collar work force where they needed to use a computer.</p>
<p>I know many people younger than me in similar situations, in rural areas especially.</p></li>
<li>People who lived with someone who was “the computer person” who then died or moved on or out. The FCC survey is notable in that it shows a 2% difference between percentage of households with broadband (67%) and percentage of people with broadband (65%). They explain it this way: “Some survey respondents are non-broadband users but live with someone who, at home, is.” That person, who may be a spouse, a child, or a roommate, is the one who does the computer work. If that person is no longer there, the person remaining may not opt to get a computer.</li>
<li>People with mild or severe disabilities. I had a student at my drop-in time for a while who had severe epilepsy and very little long-term memory ability. Learning things on the computer was very difficult for him because he needed a list of steps to follow in most situations. Moving from the library’s computers to the computer lab’s computers threw him off. People who are managing mental illnesses also may have extremely high levels of anxiety, risk-aversion, or self-esteem issues that make them feel that they are poor candidates for learning technology.</li>
<li><p>People with strong emotional aversions to change or a stub-born perspective that I can only call “not letting people tell me what to do.” I see a large number of people who have trouble with technology who seem to feel that they have been betrayed by technological promises, in the media, or by educators or relatives, that were made and not kept.</p>
<p>I do not lump this in with people with disabilities, but I do feel that it’s a certain type of personality that I see co-presenting frequently with the people who have no technological experience in 2010.</p></li></ul><p></p>
<p>So, the situation is not as clear-cut as it might seem if we were only looking at the numbers. Offline populations can be urban or <a id="p39"></a> rural, young or old. They tend to be less educated and less wealthy than their online counterparts. They may have reasons for being offline, or they may have simply never found a reason to affirmatively be online. In some cases, they may have the desire to be online but lack either the technology itself, or someone to teach it to them in a way that is relevant to them and their learning style. Historically, technology educators were more concerned that people did not have physical access to computers and the internet.</p>
<p>Nowadays, we’re more concerned that this access exists and is fairly quickly propagating through areas where it does not exist.</p>
<p>We’re now dealing with both the technology and the people that provide the most formidable challenges: places and people that are difficult to get online.</p>
<h3 id="ch4_6">What Libraries Can Do</h3>
<p>With the exception of schools and possibly post offices, libraries are uniquely positioned to reach most of the U.S. population.</p>
<p>They have public space, computers, internet access, and they have staff. People already go to libraries with their questions and information needs. According to the Institute for Museum and Library Services (IMLS) most recent Public Libraries Survey for fiscal year 2007, there were 9214 public libraries, serving 97% of the population of the United States. From that same survey, “Internet terminals available for public use in public libraries nationwide numbered 208,000, or 3.6 per 5,000 people.” This is 12,000 more internet terminals than IMLS reported in the same report a year earlier. I like knowing just exactly how many publicly accessible computers there are where the public can gain internet access. I like to think, in fact a lot of us like to think, that the library is just one of many places where people can use a free internet-connected computer. We are finding that this is not the case.</p>
<p>In New York City, for example, the city did a survey of public access internet facilities in 2008 as part of their Broadband Landscape and Recommendations report and identified 310 public access points, <i class="calibre3">i.e.</i> places where someone could go to get free internet access. Of these, 212 were library locations. Not only is this the largest provider of internet access in one of the largest cities in the United States, but ninety of these are run by one organization: New York Public Library. So if NYPL makes a policy decision about public internet access, it affects 30% of the public internet in <a id="p40"></a> </p>
<p>New York City. When NYPL surveyed their public access computing users, 67% of the those without broadband at home reported that they were using the services at the library “. . . because they cannot access the internet anywhere else.”</p>
<p>In fact, according to the American Library Association, 71% of libraries report that they are the only source of free access to computers and the internet in their communities. In my region (Vermont), this is definitely the case. In New York City, this number drops to the 33% range according to this same broadband report.</p>
<p>That said, this is in a city where cable service is available to 98%</p>
<p>of all addresses and DSL is available to 87% of addresses. And yet this same survey reports that no New York City borough reported more than a 58% broadband adoption rate in a phone survey given in 2006–2007. Most importantly, only one quarter of New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA) households had broadband and this drops to 5% of NYCHA residents over 65 years of age. This is public housing that is run by the city, meaning that broadband could be made available there if it was deemed to be a necessary service, the same way I’m sure all people in NYCHA have electricity, even if they possibly can’t pay for it. To be fair, while many NYCHA residents reported wanting to acquire skills in internet and office software, few took advantage of NYCHA training programs. While one of the recommendations of the NYC Broadband Landscape report was to “encourage provision of broadband service in afford-able housing” in order to make sure that New York City becomes a “leading edge Digital City,” these steps have still not been taken at this time.</p>
<p>People still go to the library to use computers. And they go there because it’s often the only place they can go. Knowing what is motivating people to go to the library and being realistic about what they’re likely to find when they get there, can help us optimize and tailor our offerings to have the most effective and longest-lasting impact.</p>
<h3 id="ch4_7">About This Book</h3>
<p>As I’ve traveled and spoken to librarians in the United States and around the world, I’ve found that my personal combination of tech savviness and extensive experience with offline populations is somewhat unusual. That is, there are many people in the library profession who teach people to use computers. There are also many <a id="p41"></a> people in the library profession with extensive technology backgrounds. However, I haven’t seen as much overlap in these groups as I thought I would. Add the third category “people with enough time to write all this stuff down” and you have a rare combination.</p>
<p>I wanted to centralize a place for analysis of the technology and library statistics I carry around with me, the course materials, and “how to do it” information I’ve collected, as well as the observations that come from nearly twenty years of technology instruction with primarily novice users.</p>
<p>I don’t intend to be fatalistic or doomsaying when I predict that some form of the digital divide may always be with us. There will always be a bottom 10% of users in whatever setting we look at. Since we work in libraries, we have an obligation to provide service to all of our patrons and provide them with tools that they can use, or at least learn to use. For some librarians who may not be tech-savvy themselves, this can be challenging. Even tech-savvy librarians may find it difficult to get traction within their institutions, or may understand the how but not the why of the technology.</p>
<p>It is my hope that this book spurs real conversations about how we provide and improve technology instruction for all of our staff and patrons. Thank you for joining me.</p>
<h2 id="ch5_0"><a id="p42"></a><span class="chapnum">1</span> People in the Library</h2>
<p>I love the internet. I love that libraries are one of the few places in the world that provide free internet access. But when we talk about electronic resources and the wonders of the web and putting the world at people’s fingertips, I think it’s good to remember that for a significant number of people, we’re giving them an hour of that world at a time, quite probably on Internet Explorer 6.</p>
<p>—Laura Crossett, Adult Services Coordinator at the Coralville Public Library There are many stakeholders in the process of making people aware of technology, getting them online, and enabling them to solve their own problems using the computer as one of many available tools.</p>
<p>Each individual set of people has a different role to play in this process and should be aware of the roles, motivations, and experiences of the people in the other groups. It’s easy to be dismissive of people whose actions and approaches seem to be antithetical to helping people bridge the digital divide. However, it’s important to understand the motivations of all the differing stakeholders so that we can best learn how to work together.</p>
<p>Here is a collection of groups who all affect the systems we have in place for assisting novice users in learning technology. Each section ends with a tl;dr (too long, didn’t read) summary for people who want to skip ahead to the actual techniques sections.</p>
<h3 id="ch5_1"><a id="p43"></a> Library Staff—You Are Here</h3>
<p>While this book is written primarily as a how to guide for all of the people who work in libraries, these people are also sometimes the target user demographic. In any location where there is a large percentage of digitally divided folks, some of the people negatively affected by the divide will be working at the library.</p>
<p>In rural areas this can be a bit of a coin flip; the librarian you get may be tech savvy or a tech novice and that can determine the entire tech vibe of the institution for years to come. In larger areas, you often wind up with tech novices on the job in ratios somewhat proportionally to the general population. This doesn’t seem to make sense; libraries should be hiring people who are comfortable with and excited about technology, right? Shouldn’t the average librarian have more tech knowledge than the average local patron? Not necessarily. In populations where there isn’t a lot of tech saturation, two things happen. first, people with tech skills often move to places where their skills are worth more money in the job marketplace, and don’t stay around to have low-paying jobs in non-tech fields.</p>
<p>Second, even ascertaining who does and does not have tech skills is a muddled process. People without tech skills frequently do not know how to hire people who have tech skills or even ascertain if people have those skills in the first place.</p>
<p>I’m of the opinion that librarianship is a profession that requires people to have a higher-than-average amount of computer literacy.</p>
<p>That said, my opinions are not fact. There are many public library jobs that seemingly don’t require advanced computer skills. This can go two ways. first, in a larger library system, you may find a lot of job specialization. This means that library staff hired into jobs that are not directly computer-related, such as tech services positions, may not get as much of a chance to work on their skills or use the skills they do have on the job. Second, in rural libraries, there may not be a call for technological know-how as much other tasks a librarian must perform in the limited amount of time they have to work on the job.</p>
<p>If a public library has to choose between fundraising and computer skills for their part-time library director, the choice is fairly obvious.</p>
<p>What We Ask For Here are some excerpts from recent job descriptions from the Vermont Library Association’s job list. I’m sure the follow-up <a id="p44"></a></p>
<p>interviews fill in a lot of the blanks here, but these seem to be fairly open-ended requirements.</p>
<ul>
<li>For a Vermont college circulation position: “[Must] be proficient with common office computer applications.”</li>
<li>For a tech services position at a Vermont college: “Proficiency in basic office software and database software such as Microsoft Access.”</li>
<li>For a librarian position at a Vermont college: “Experience teaching groups using a variety of instructional technologies.”</li>
<li>For an “embedded librarian” position at a Vermont college: “Ability to produce instructional and outreach materials, both in print and digital formats.”</li>
<li>For a children’s librarian position in a large public library: “Demonstrated ability to use computers and library-related software and applications.”</li></ul>
<p>Now, I may be incorrect in my assumptions, but I suspect that many of these jobs require quite a lot of computer interaction. And that the job descriptions don’t seem to make technology experience or ability a necessary part of the job description. Or perhaps this sort of experience is just a foregone conclusion in most workplaces nowadays.</p>
<p>What Do We Expect?</p>
<p>These assumptions bring me to a larger question of expectations, another meta-topic. The expectations we have or should have about a person’s technological skills for library work can be a contentious issue. If a job, such as a delivery person, requires frequent driving, that requirement is in the job description. However, if a job requires occasional travel to remote sites, access to a car or even having a driver’s license may not be a specific job requirement.</p>
<p>Lacking driving skills might make someone problematic for the job even though they might get hired for it. It might even be discrimina-tory to not hire someone who was unable to drive. On the other end of the spectrum, we don’t require basic reading and writing skills for most jobs because there’s an unstated expectation (sometimes incorrect) that people applying for jobs in the United States will have these skills. figuring out what is a generally expected job requirement versus what needs to be specifically outlined as a skill <a id="p45"></a> necessary for a particular job is something which many libraries still seem to have difficulty with.</p>
<p>And yet, it’s difficult to explain a job requirement that is essentially “Must not be on the other end of the digital divide.” In the adult education program where I work in my town, we teach a lot of starter classes such as “Getting Started with Excel” or “My first Email Account.” (You’ll find more on these classes in Chapter Three, the Techniques section of this book.) We see people coming into these classes without even the basic skills necessary to take a computer class, mostly tech vocabulary and mouse skills. More importantly, while vocabulary and mouse techniques can be easily taught, the larger problem is that people in these classes often arrive with an attitude that the classes are going to be difficult, if not impossible, and that they are going to be unable to learn the topics that are taught. In fact, the attitude is more difficult to cir-cumvent than the lack of actual hands-on skills. And yet, for classes on basic technology topics to be effective, the attitude as well as the “point here, click here” aspect needs to be addressed.</p>
<p>Although I see this with both staff and with patron populations, I bring this up in the staff section because visible attitudes towards technology are important for creating an environment conducive to learning or at least to understanding. I don’t want to seem too pollyanna-ish about this, but having an institutional “You can do it!” attitude is one of the best usability tools out there for public technology. The institution should be not only encouraging this with affirmative hiring practices and opportunities for on-the-job training and continuing education, but it must also take this to all parts of the organization, from the board to the vendors we work with to the patrons we interact with daily. While technology isn’t always going to be a ray of sunshine that beams into every day on the job, it can at least be seen to be a tool that helps us do our jobs more effectively, a tool that ultimately we have some measure of control over.</p>
<p>A Word about Technostress Technostress is a somewhat hand-wavey term that people use to describe a particular reaction to technological change and expectations. John Kupersmith, whose work I discuss more in Chapter five, has done research into technostress and has created this definition: <a id="p46"></a></p>
<p>(computer-related stress), a common problem for reference librarians in the 1990s, a combination of performance anxiety, information overload, role conflicts, and organiza-tional factor<a href="#p288">s.1</a></p>
<p>This is a clearly identified problem among library staff who are balancing expectations of both patrons and management in their work lives. Staffers often feel “stuck in the middle” of technology policies set by management and services desired by patrons, with the ability to change neither. They receive the frustration from both sides and can’t often make the necessary changes in order to make the system work more smoothly. Library staff feel that people have expectations about their technological abilities that are unreasonable or unrealistic which makes it difficult for them to do their jobs. This causes them on-the-job stress, job dissatisfaction, and general anxiety. It’s bad to have an employee who is stressed out. If you’re a patron, it’s bad to try to interact with a stressed-out librarian.</p>
<p>What takes this sort of thing out of the realm of normal “computers are difficult” complaints and into technostress is the combination of computers plus people. It is the combination of the technology itself (which may be vexing for any number of obvious and less-obvious reasons) with the other people applying pressure either directly or indirectly to doing something with the computer that seems difficult or impossible given the system constraints. In short, it’s a mismatch of expectations and abilities with the added weight of this being a necessary job skill tossed into the mix. I’ve written a chapter on technostress for Rachel Singer Gordon’s book Information Tomorrow where I’ve reviewed the available literature. Kupersmith lists what he feels are contributory factors to a technostressful environment. I have added two of my items to the end of this list: Performance anxiety—Being concerned that you are being judged by your ability to use technology, especially when trying to demonstrate it to someone else. As Kupersmith says “It is hard—and stressful—to suppress one’s anger at clumsy design when teaching a user how to get around in a frustrating system, yet we know that we must do this and project a positive attitude for the user’s sake.”</p>
<p>Information overload—This involves not just learning about an ever-expanding set of new resources and tools, but also quickly achieving a level of competency enough so that you can explain them to new, or experienced users.</p>
<p><a id="p47"></a> Role conflicts—Librarians feel that they are shifting from highly skilled reference work to doing more general tech support for everyone, which seems like a “deprofessionalization” of their position as well as a demotion of sorts.</p>
<p>Organizational factors—The larger organization makes choices about how many people are needed to address a certain task, or how much technology is needed to assist a certain number of patrons. When these numbers are off, or the perception is that they are off, people feel overworked, or that they are not being supplied with technology they feel that they need.</p>
<p>Burnout—When day-to-day stresses build up, staff and sometimes patrons can become exhausted. A technological hurdle can be the last straw.</p>
<p>Money—In today’s lean budgetary times, technology is still expensive. Trying to determine how to budget for technology in the present and future when there are already budget shortages is a real challenge, and the proper balance of tech to non-tech expenditures is often contested by patrons and staff alike.</p>
<p>Middleman syndrome and powerlessness—Vendors and their products make up a larger part of the library budget than they did ten years ago. Many technology products come in barely-customizable forms with uncertain pricing structures and pricey support agreements. More libraries are members of consortia that make technology decisions in a one-size-fits-all fashion. The librarians work with technology not of their choosing and not customizable by them.</p>
<p>These are all formidable challenges to address in a work environment, but they do provide a framework for topics to examine. It might be worth noting that Kupersmith did his initial work in this area in 1992, back when library technology was an entirely different animal. I’m sometimes surprised at how timeless this list seems.</p>
<p>On Boosterism Along these same lines, we must be careful to not make staff or patrons feel that they’re playing a game of perpetual technology catch-up that they will never win. There has been a trend in library technology discourse lately, and I think in technology reporting more generally, where new technology is presented as not just <a id="p48"></a></p>
<p>useful and possibly enjoyable, but as literally essential. Older technologies are explained away as “dead technology” and newer technologies are embraced before our usual methodical evaluations. Of course, if some people weren’t using the technology we would never get to the point of our careful evaluations. In the talks I’ve given, I’ve discussed the difference between communities in which the library’s job seems to be to follow the tech trends rippling both through a community, and communities in which the library is actually the tech leader in the community, the place where patrons go to learn about new technology. The differing role of the library in these situations leads to very different approaches to technology, neither of which is better or worse than the other, merely community appropriate.</p>
<p>As an example, when our libraries in Central Vermont started offering downloadable audiobooks via OverDrive, many people in town took that as an incentive to consider an MP3 player purchase, a gadget they would not have gotten themselves without some sort of good reason. And yet, in libraries serving more wired populations, patrons can search their catalogs via mobile devices and even get shelf status of items via SMS.</p>
<p>In my communities, I know there is some level of anxiety about being able to keep up with technology that seems to grow and change at a rapidly expanding pace. And at the same time, if their communities are happy, who cares that the library doesn’t have a blog? Again, this is a situation where setting decent expectations and having a good level of transparency about how the library makes decisions is integral to helping an entire community understand what the library’s position is regarding technology.</p>
<p>On Planning Part of creating a library with staff who are prepared to patiently and capably assist patrons involves having staff themselves feel comfortable and supported in their own personal technological explorations and experiences. Staff must not only feel valued for the skills and abilities that they have, but also that they will be supported with professional training and development opportunities for the things that they do not yet know. Of course, this is a two-way street. As much as many of the things that are part of the library’s technology environment were not things that were available to learn in library school—my program started before <a id="p49"></a> the graphical web existed, as an example, and I’m solidly in Generation X—the reality is that staff are expected to learn new things, whether it’s the new Windows operating system or the new patron address validation scheme. There are better and worse ways to get this information across to staff.</p>
<p>At the same time, changes in a technology environment need to be made with the understanding that many people, both staff and patrons, need time to adjust to new technology environments.</p>
<p>Upgrading the public computing operating systems? Make sure you give staff time to learn the basics of navigating and interacting with the new environment. Changing the patron PC sign-up process? Give staff useful documentation that explains not just how to use the software, but how to troubleshoot it and who to contact if something doesn’t go as planned. Too frequently we see “documentation” that is nothing more than marketing materials telling you how easy and intuitive a piece of software is. This is worse than no documentation if the software isn’t working as you would expect it to work. Make sure staff have not just access to vendor documents, but also clear troubleshooting steps—including when to give up and call in the pros—so that they can approach problems with confidence and some level of authority. Novice users assume, rightly or wrongly, that library staff are the ones who know how the computers work. If solving a technological problem is impossible, or portrayed as impossible by library staff, patrons will assume it must also be impossible for them.</p>
<p>At one library I worked at, we had a systems librarian who was not very capable with computers. Often tech problems would be referred to her, she would try some things, and if she couldn’t fix the problem she’d refer it to the library’s IT consultant. She would also tell the patrons, “Oh, this computer has issues, sometimes computers just don’t work.” which was, to my mind, exactly the wrong message to be sending about technology. While it’s possible that problems with computers are complex, and sometimes more complex than we may be able to untangle in the time we have available, it is incredibly rare that they behave in a random fashion.</p>
<p>The occasional hardware failure may occasionally produce erratic results, but for the most part if a computer is doing something hinky, there is a reason. If you don’t know what it is, that’s fine. If you can’t solve a problem, that’s fine. Telling patrons that the computer is behaving in a random emotional fashion is doing a disservice to the patron’s understanding of technology.</p>
<p><a id="p50"></a></p>
<p>The best response to the computer mysteries in a work environment is not to pretend that you have any idea what is happening (if you don’t), but that it’s possible for people to figure these things out. There’s a huge difference between flatly saying “I don’t know.” and saying “I don’t know, but I can find out.” Optimally then, go to find out and report back to whomever needs a report.</p>
<p>The information storage and retrieval concept that I learned about in graduate school has been surprisingly useful to me in a 2.0 world where being transparent and providing feedback is considered an essential part of managing expectations and providing good service. Problem-solving doesn’t stop once the problem has been resolved, the solution becomes part of a larger system where the answers to the problem are rolled into the problem-solving system for next time.</p>
<p>tl;dr</p>
<p>Staff should be deputized to increase their technological knowledge, troubleshoot to the best of their abilities, and interact with patrons and technology in an environment that is conducive to learning and exploring for both them and the patrons. Whatever is getting in the way of this needs to be addressed from a systemic standpoint and, with any luck at all, rectified. My secret hope is that librarians will read this book trying to assist their patrons and wind up learning a thing or two themselves.</p>
<h3 id="ch5_2">Library Patrons—What They Need, What They Receive</h3>
<p>The patrons, the people who come into our library, are why we do our jobs. The easiest thing to do is to cater instruction directly to the individuals with whom we work with every day—sort of a tri-age mentality, “Take the people who walk in the door, get them what they need.” In a tiny library with few patrons, this may work.</p>
<p>However, we also have to look at who we’re not currently serving, and how to reach them. This is the library’s outreach challenge.</p>
<p>Specifically with digital divide issues, people have come this far without understanding technology and there’s likely a reason for that. If the reason is one that we can address, maybe by making our technology offerings more accessible, palatable, usable, etc., we should be moving in that direction.</p>
<p><a id="p51"></a> The technostress discussion from the previous section applies here as well. Instead of being trapped between a work obligation and a perceived lack of knowledge, patrons often feel pushed into interacting with technology by someone or something else outside of their comfort zone. Many of them are frustrated and anxious.</p>
<p>They may have not made much use of the library before. To many of them, their emotions about technology become their set of feelings about the library generally. We have some control over this, so we should tread carefully. In our dream world, or in my dream world, we could do a technological intake interview or something, where we could assess what skills the patron had and did not have, to try to figure out if they needed a class, a PC to use, or maybe a referral to a workplace readiness office or something similar. Of course, we rarely have the time that something like this requires.</p>
<p>You don’t have to play armchair psychologist for patrons every time you lean over their computer monitor, but it can help to put yourself in their shoes to determine the best way to frame your approach to them and their technological challenges.</p>
<p>Assessment and Intake The other thing to remember is that patrons often misreport their own technological abilities either because they really don’t understand what their abilities are, or because they don’t understand the overall technology environment. In my experience, there are as many people reporting that they are less skilled than they actually appear to be as there are people over-reporting their own abilities. Being able to make this assessment, of course, requires its own level of tech skill. I usually ask patrons a quick set of questions as a way of seeing what they know: </p>
<ul>
<li>“Can you use a mouse?” While patrons may not understand the nuances of right-clicking, if they’re reporting that they don’t know how to use a mouse, my advice is always “Go straight to Mousercise, do not pass go.”</li>
<li>“Do you have a computer at home or work that you use?” This can open the door to “Mac/PC?” questions and also give you an opener for additional open-ended questions.</li>
<li>“What do you do with the computer?” General open-ended questions will give you an idea about patron vocabulary and how they talk about their technology.<a id="p52"></a><img class="calibre2" src="index-52_1.jpg"/></li>
<li>“Do you have an email address? What is it?” You can know a lot about a person by what their email address is such as who they use for their ISP, whether they have webmail and maybe, how knowledgeable they are with email.</li>
<li>“Do you have a website?” I’ve found that sometimes people can have small websites set up for them by other people and no idea how to access or change them. This is not as unusual a situation as you might think.</li>
</ul>
<p>The answers to these questions are important, but so is the way in which patrons talk about technology, and what it reveals about their own tech perspectives. Similar to any reference-type interview, knowing what a patron thinks they want is important, as is knowing what they really want.</p>
<p>Tech Planning for People in Your Community I’ve found that it’s helpful to model “sample patrons” when thinking about planning technology delivery. I think about grouping patrons into four main types like this: Viewing generic types of patrons on a grid.</p>
<p><a id="p53"></a> Libraries in any location will have patrons with a wide range of previous computer experience. They will also have patrons with varying degrees of expectations. In a perfect world, people would be able to accurately assess their own abilities and set their own expectations, but ours is not a perfect world. Accordingly, librarians need to be able to determine these things and make suggestions, recommendations, and assessments. A patron with low technical abilities who wants to take an advanced technology class may have to be gently directed towards a more basic class.</p>
<p>A patron who wants to use library computers to manage the donor database for her non-profit may need to be told that staff can’t assist her with advanced formatting questions. So in this situation, when considering a new technology environment, or new handouts, or thinking about service delivery, you can ask “How would this new system work for Colin?” or “Would Esther be able to understand this signage?” For management teams, this same sort of approach can be useful for staff.</p>
<p>You can personalize this sort of image by creating sample patrons instead of generic images and populate the user groups somewhat. Jesse James Garrett discusses this approach in his book The Elements of User Experience (Peachpit Press, 2002). Have a few index cards that model general types of patrons you have (not individual patrons that you know in real life), so that you can use them in discussions about technology offerings. These are intended to be more like real people and less like generic “types.” Give these sample patrons names and personalities and keep them in mind when you are creating library technology services.</p>
<p>This is a better idea than having one or two actual real-life patrons monopolize your decision-making just because they may be very vocal in their likes and dislikes. Individual patrons’ opinions are, of course, important, but they need to be folded into the desires of the library community as a whole. It is often simpler to design and respond to the most vocal users and this, not to put too fine a point on it, is one of the ways that underserved patrons become underserved. They don’t make a fuss and you stop noticing that they’re there.</p>
<p>You can even go a step further and have a tech advisory panel.</p>
<p>This idea, which we see implemented quite a lot in teen services divi-sions, involves getting stakeholders together to discuss not just what the library is offering, but the manner in which they are offering it <a id="p54"></a><img class="calibre2" src="index-54_1.jpg"/></p>
<p>Use sample patrons for your tech planning.</p>
<p>and assisting the library in planning for future offerings and directions. Having a combination of tech-savvy and tech-novice patrons on such an advisory panel can be helpful. This is not just so those groups may get to know people in other groups, but also so that staff who may lean towards one side or the other get to understand the breadth of technological understanding that may be present in their patron base. This is especially useful if you have a staff that is not very sophisticated technologically, yet are also used to being the “experts” on library topics relative to the patron base.</p>
<p>Setting expectations is one of the meta-lessons here. Your library certainly can’t be everything to everyone. Being a good public servant does sometimes entail saying “no” to people, but finding a way to have that conversation sound like “No, but I’ll find out how you can do that some other way” not “No, get lost.” Rightly or wrongly, many people who have technological issues and come to the library feel that we are saying “No, get lost.” to them when they may just have unrealistic expectations about what they can receive from the library or from technology generally. They may have gone to another library in the past that offered different services. Or they may have been told by a social service worker that they could come to the library to apply for a job or put a reśumeónline and were <a id="p55"></a> dismayed to find that it wasn’t quite that simple. While their misunderstandings may not be our fault, they can be our responsibility to help solve the problem and also do a little outreach.</p>
<p>Who May Need Help? Tech as a Genuine Option In many cases, we see people at the library who have a tech problem that needs solving. William James gave a talk that he later published around the turn of the last century called The Will to Believe. <a href="#p288">2 </a>He discussed how people make decisions and how they approach their own personal philosophies. He outlined what he called the “genuine option” where people making decisions see a path as one that will possibly help them out. For an option that is being considered to be seen as genuine, the option needs to be three things: 1. Living, as opposed to dead; meaning that both choices are real and valid options personally, 2. Forced, as opposed to avoidable; where not choosing is not possible, 3. Momentous, as opposed to trivial; where the result matters.</p>
<p>For people who are in the position of trying to convince others to do things—take public transportation, recycle, go vegan—the trick is often figuring out what makes the option that you are pushing into a genuine option for the person you’re trying to convince.</p>
<p>So, while I’m not saying you need to necessarily delve into the rest of James’ oeuvre, it’s a good idea to understand how people get encouraged into actually making a decision as opposed to just mul-ling one over. In this case, the decision to show up at the library and say “I need help using a computer.”</p>
<p>Often it’s difficult to tell just who is being underserved at our libraries. I know there are many people in my profession who expect a tech novice to be an older person or a person with low income or an obvious disability; and they don’t quite get it when they get asked by a thirty-year-old man if they can help him set up an email account for the first time. My definition of a novice user in most of these cases is anyone who does not have the technological toolkit to solve their own tech problems, whatever those problems are.</p>
<p>As I mentioned in the introduction, there are many groups of people who are offline and they may need different approaches or <a id="p56"></a></p>
<p>assistance. I’m going to outline a few use cases to get the ball rolling.</p>
<p>Some examples from my particular work life include:
</p><ul>
<li>A 50-something woman who was recently told she needed to apply for unemployment benefits online, not with paper forms</li>
<li>A 30-something man who was using online dating for the first time </li>
<li>A 50-something man who wanted to apply for a job at Home Depot </li>
<li>A 60-something woman, recently widowed, whose children got her a laptop for a gift </li>
<li>A 50-something woman who was looking for a new job and needed a word-processed reśumeánd customized cover letters </li>
<li>A 50-something man who was in vocational rehabilitation after an injury forced him out of his job </li>
<li>An 80-something woman who wanted to buy a book she’d heard about on the radio Each of these people have different motivations for getting online, different skills, different needs, and different long-range goals.</li>
</ul><p></p>
<p>For someone who needs to get online just to fill out a form, they’re going to approach their tasks differently than someone who is looking for a tech solution to a personal problem, or someone who sees a tech angle to an offline hobby they may have, for example.</p>
<p>Special Needs Patrons The FCC National Broadband Report highlighted the different major groups who are offline and looked at ways to reach them from a policy level. One note they made was that broadband adoption is 23% lower than the national average for people with disabilities, 41% lower for people who lack a high school degree, and 30%</p>
<p>lower for people 65 years or older. In a general sense, these are all people who have barriers to access that may be more straightforward than some other patrons’ barriers. They may have physical barriers such as mobility or fine motor skills limitations; they may have intellectual barriers such as low vocabularies or difficulty reading; or they likely have combinations of these which have a multiplier effect and make learning new skills extra difficult. It’s <a id="p57"></a> important to keep these groups in mind as you think of your technology offerings. This is both because these patron groups can be invisible if they’re not coming into the library and also because it’s easy to casually address these issues in the standard ways— have lots of older patrons, use larger type!—without reality-testing to see if these usability improvement attempts actually do improve usability. Do people understand your handouts? Can they adapt the technology to their circumstances? Do they know who to ask if they need help?</p>
<p>This sort of situation is sometimes the showcase for our inability to think outside the box. We assume people will tell us what they need when, in fact, they may not know what is available to them. Patrons who have trouble using a mouse because they can’t stabilize the mouse while they double-click (a very common problem) would have this problem vanish if they could use a trackball.</p>
<p>How would a novice patron know what a trackball is when they’ve never used a mouse? Patrons with poor fine motor skill coordination could use a large trackball such as a BIGTrack and have a much easier time navigating through a windows environment.</p>
<p>Patrons with visual disabilities could have accessibility features enabled which would allow menus to be read aloud to them.</p>
<p>Many larger libraries have accessibility programs for people who need adaptive technologies; Seattle Public Library offers the LEAP (Library Equal Access Program), for example. However, smaller libraries that can’t fund or staff a new department can still increase the usability of their technology in small ways in order to be the most accommodating to patrons who are least likely to have experience with the technology in the first place. As another example, any library with a Gates Foundation PC has a ‘big print’ login option available in addition to the standard child and adult logins. These patrons often will not know what accessibility features are available to them, so it’s up to us to make their availability known. I’ll be discussing this topic more in Chapter Four, the Accessibility section, but I wanted to stress that it’s the library’s job to proactively reach these patrons in the interests of bridging the digital divide.</p>
<p>Non-Tech Interactions One of the things that is difficult for library staff or frequent library users to understand is how mystifying the library can seem to a non-user. While many people can adapt easily to new situations <a id="p58"></a></p>
<p>and suss out the implicit and explicit rules and roles in a new setting, others can’t. Since one of the things we know about people who are offline is that they are often afraid of technological risks or uninterested in trying new things, we can extrapolate that if they are non-library users, they may encounter some of the same challenges in just getting in the door. Accordingly, sometimes we need to shift our approach from simply being available to being actually welcoming to our patrons.</p>
<p>I spend a lot of time telling patrons at my library jobs “These are YOUR computers, I’m just here to help you use them. You can’t really use them wrong.” and other pleasantries that make it clear that I’m not trying to be some sort of information gatekeeper, standing between them and the resources that they want to access.</p>
<p>Librarianship has a bit of a PR problem in my opinion. I love most of the librarians I live near and work with, but I know that when I go to a new library location it’s often hit or miss whether I have a decent user experience in a library. Often, I can’t figure out how to use the system, and find that my only way to get more information is to talk to someone. Not a problem necessarily, but I’ve found staff in libraries to sometimes be terse, confusing, or downright rude.</p>
<p>I roll with this as everyone has a bad day sometimes, because I know how library systems work overall, and I’m not easily dissuaded.</p>
<p>For someone unclear on the “We are here to help YOU” concept, it may be more difficult to get over this hurdle. Chelmsford, Massachusetts public librarian Brian Herzog came up with the idea of Work Like a Patron Day, an annual one-day exercise where librarians took themselves out from behind the desk and tried to see their workplaces through the eyes of the people who used the library services. So, you use the public restrooms, follow all library policies, and use only the public computers to do your work. It’s harder than you might think, using patron restrooms and waiting in line to look up a book in a pokey online catalog.</p>
<p>While the library often excels at personalized service for the people who always come into the library, we can forget that even in the smallest communities, there will be people coming into the library for the first time. When I moved to Central Vermont and first went to the public library in my town, the librarian there said “Welcome to town, we’re glad you’re here.” when I filled out a form to get a library card. That may be setting the bar somewhat high for all new patron interactions, but I know that I never forgot this welcome. So, making the rules of the library clear can help make <a id="p59"></a> the place seem more explicable for people who might not otherwise be willing to try something new. Clear signs using straightforward language and no confusing colors, along with available brochures and printed (not just online) policies can go a long way towards making a system that is commonplace to you be understandable to everyone.</p>
<p>tl;dr</p>
<p>Adults who have never used a computer often have circumstances in their lives that helped create this situation. Effectively assisting them in technology usage involves understanding these circumstances.</p>
<p>Anxiety and frustration are real hurdles for some people and can’t be addressed simply through better handouts and websites. Breaking through this frustration often means starting before a patron even approaches a computer.</p>
<h2 id="ch6_0"><a id="p60"></a><span class="chapnum">2</span> The Bigger Picture—Who Makes the Tools We Use</h2>
<p>The problem is that the divide is not digital alone—it is profoundly embedded in society in the U.S. and in many other countries globally. Those who are comfortable do not want to think about what it means to be uncomfortable or discomfitted never mind have an awareness of what it would mean to change this societally.</p>
<p>—Kat Deiss, Content Strategist for the Association of College & Research Libraries One of the awkward parts of being a librarian working with technology is that in many cases, really almost all of them, we don’t make our own stuff. We don’t build our own furniture, we don’t design our own buildings, we didn’t even write most of the books in the buildings. We mostly don’t code our own software and we don’t build the different delivery mechanisms for a lot of the digital content that we offer. We mostly operate other people’s programs and devices. We rely on third parties to provide these “solutions” and we pay them for that. This is fine as this is true for most people in most jobs. However, the blurry line between the content we provide and the way it’s provided has become problematic as devices and delivery mechanisms get more complicated and sophisticated. We need to keep up. Keeping up becomes an additional part of our job.</p>
<p><a id="p61"></a> We are also in the sometimes awkward position of explaining and apologizing for these systems even though we didn’t create them. I sometimes liken this to a patron complaining that a book had a terrible ending and me telling them “Well, I didn’t write the book.” While I feel that this particular fact is clear, the extent to which we can and do determine the features and functions of the various hardware and software that we use in our library is less clear to everyone, patrons and librarians alike.</p>
<p>There are many different companies which provide the services that we use in the public library world. I’ll discuss a few of them and break them down into a few categories that are linked thematically to the companies in some way. Please keep in mind that these are my subjective opinions based on almost two decades of experience, but I am not an expert in most of these topics. While I’ve tried to be factual, I also have strong opinions about many of these companies and their approaches to novice users and digital divide issues. I’ll try to be clear when I’m stating facts and when I’m opining.</p>
<p>Of all the subsections of this chapter, this one is the most important specifically because it doesn’t seem like it has much to do with novice technology users. What does the telephone company or a PC manufacturer have to do with teaching email to older adults? Lots, especially in the case of software. Every item that is mass-produced from chairs to software to coffee is designed to a set of standards. (See the book The Measure of Man & Woman in the bibliography if this is your special interest area.) Chairs must be this high. Coffee must be this hot. Software must . . . must have certain features turned on by default, others adjustable by the user and others not adjustable at all. Who makes these decisions?</p>
<h3 id="ch6_1">What Is a Default and Who Decides? </h3>
<p>The concept of defaults is often a tricky one for novice users to grasp, and the application of defaults is not at all clear. Part of helping novice users eventually master technology is helping them to be able to examine an interactive environment and to be able to ask these questions and think about their possible answers.</p>
<ul>
<li>What elements make up this environment? (colors, buttons, menus, functions) </li>
<li>Which elements are fixed and which are changeable?</li>
<li>Which elements are changeable by me and do I want to change them?<a id="p62"></a></li>
<li>Which elements are changeable by an administrator and do I want to change them?</li>
<li>Which elements are not changeable that I might want changed anyway?</li>
</ul>
<p>Many users have difficulty with software and just think that computers are supposed to be hard. They don’t know they can change things, especially things that might make the software easier to use. Put another way, it’s one thing to keep the little Clippy character (remember Clippy?) popping up on your desktop because you find the feature helpful. It’s entirely another thing to have it continually pop up because you can’t turn it off or don’t even know that it can be turned off. Many people suffer through the default settings in software programs because they literally do not know that there are options. When Microsoft Word introduced Clippy in 1997, it was likely trying to help users solve a problem, not introduce an annoying character that bothered people. And yet, some people were bothered. Sometimes with a large user base, you can’t make design choices that make everyone happy. At the same time, sometimes you make a design choice that more people dislike than like.</p>
<p>Undoing a design choice in a later software version is tricky because people have already learned to adjust to it. A more cynical approach to design is that, similar to the new car models, a lot of design is simply brand differentiation and making the consumer believe they need to upgrade when their existing product works just fine. I don’t think it’s conspiracy-minded to say that businesses want to sell us things, retain our business, and stay in business themselves. This is a good thing to remember as you ask yourself why companies make the decisions that they do and try to explain these things to patrons. Understanding the concept of default settings is the first step to technological mastery after learning the basics.</p>
<p>Microsoft (and The Gates Foundation) Microsoft may be the tech company that libraries are most familiar with. The Windows operating system has over 90% market share worldwide. Thanks to the Gates Foundation (now the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, hereafter TGF), many libraries in the United States have computers with basic productivity software and children’s games and staff have received training in how to use these things. The legacy of TGF lives on in many small libraries <a id="p63"></a> that are still using their Gates computers from several years ago.</p>
<p>I often say that TGF is both the best and the worst thing that has happened to Vermont’s public libraries. Best because many of these libraries might not have otherwise decided to get technology without the nudging of TGF or might have made do with donated only-sort-of-working machines. Worst because while these grants were technically for money-for-technology, the reality of the granting program meant that you’d only get supported hardware and software if you purchased PCs as opposed to Macs or some combination of hardware and operating systems. The “support” end of this agreement lives on in the WebJunction community, now partly funded through the Online Computer Library Center (OCLC).</p>
<p>Certainly, some libraries bought Macs with their Gates grants.</p>
<p>However, most libraries bought PCs, with Microsoft operating systems and software and did this without making much of a conscious choice or needs-based assessment as to whether this was the best solution for their communities. Again, I think many of these libraries might not have bought this technology at all if left to their own devices and budgets. That said, this made a technology choice moving forward for these libraries that became a decision made externally, not internally. So while any operating system is likely to have its ups and downs, high points and low points, the fact that the TGF machines were granted by an external agency can give people a convenient scapegoat to point to when things go wrong, instead of taking on personal responsibility for fixing problems. Folks at TGF with whom I’ve spoken to over the years are always surprised that there are some libraries even still using these machines. Most of the small libraries in my region still have their TGF machines actively working as public access computers.</p>
<p>Some of the TGF machines had features that were sub-optimal. They required updates that took half a day on dial-up lines; they had complicated security procedures. Internet Explorer was not the best browser for some situations and occasionally led to security exploits in improperly secured systems when operated by novice users. That said, there’s the basic adage that life’s all about choices and if something isn’t working for you, it’s worthwhile to figure out if you can change things. Obviously, some things are difficult to change and require a lot of money, time, or effort that people might not have. People who want a longer look at the operating systems wars can examine Neal Stephenson’s book In the Beginning Was the Command Line. It’s a fascinating read.</p>
<p><a id="p64"></a></p>
<p>The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation still runs library grant programs, but as a much smaller subset of its overall activities which include global development and health projects. They’ve partnered with WebJunction to provide the “learning and training” aspects of their granting program. WebJunction.org is, according to their website, “an online learning and training portal that provides assistance to library staff in all states—especially small and rural libraries who lack training resources.” It’s full of useful resources but requires a somewhat sophisticated understanding of technology to navigate and get the most out of. WebJunction also sells “branded portals” to states who then have a customized version of the WJ content to offer to their libraries. Vermont did this for a few years and found that it did not solve a technology problem for us, and took money away from local programs and projects.</p>
<p>The most important thing, from my perspective, about Microsoft’s operating systems and their popular applications is that the use case they’re designed for is much more geared towards a business environment. That is, their operating systems work better when they’re regularly maintained and administered by people who have a fairly complex and nuanced understanding of all the aspects of managing a computer network. When managed properly, a Windows network can be secure, functional, and devoid of viruses and other “malware,” software that causes problems. However, there are many ways to run a Windows network insecurely so that it’s vulnerable to malware, and gets filled with lots of what we call cruft, obsolete or unneeded bits of code or software.</p>
<p>To put it another way, the operating system environment is so customizable it can be customized into being almost unusable.</p>
<p>Microsoft has attempted to address this in almost every operating system update they’ve done, inserting additional “Are you SURE?” warnings and “Your computer might be at risk!” alerts and adding a user-customized firewall and virus-checking software. Internet Explorer also went through several versions where their default settings would allow various exploits to a user’s operating systems if a user visited certain nefarious websites. If configured correctly, the browser functioned just fine. If configured incorrectly, it could be the doorway to Trojans and viruses. People who did not even know that they were using a browser learned to be afraid of cookies and Javascript without even knowing what these tools did.</p>
<p>Microsoft’s operating systems are still quite difficult for novice users who are timid and somewhat hesitant and alarmed by the <a id="p65"></a> preponderance of alert messages and inscrutable dialog boxes.</p>
<p>I have a Windows machine at home and I like it just fine. However, I am an expert user. Many expert users I know love the power and flexibility of Microsoft’s operating systems. I think we do ourselves a disservice when we deliver confusing operating systems to our users without explaining both that they are customizable to be less confusing, but also that some of this stuff is vexing even to an experienced user. It’s a subtle line between “Windows sucks!” and “Yes, they made some design choices that do make this process a bit complicated . . . ,” but I feel that the latter explanation is a) closer to the truth and b) a better way to get users to accept something that they don’t have too many choices about in the first place. It’s possible to go through your technological life in constant battle with your operating system, but this is neither optimal nor necessary.</p>
<p>Apple (and DRM) Apple is known as the expensive more “design-y” brand of operating system. Apple and Microsoft produce the two major operating systems that are in use in the United States with various flavors of Linux coming in third. Apple is different from Microsoft because they not only build the operating systems, they also manufacture the hardware for those operating systems. So when you’re using a machine that is running the Apple operating system, OSX, you are also using a machine that was built by the company that made the operating system. This means they have more knowledge of and control over the way the software and hardware interact and many people argue this leads to a better user experience. They also are fairly rigid in terms of design specifications<a href="#p289">1 </a>for software that will run on their hardware so there is a more consistent “look and feel” to the Mac universe than there is to the Windows universe.</p>
<p>Most people, however, know Apple as being the company that created the most popular MP3 player in the world: the iPod.</p>
<p>They also created the most popular smart phone: the iPhone. As of this writing (2010), it was still unclear what the iPad would turn into. Apple also pioneered selling music in such a way that the use of this music could be restricted using Digital Rights Management.</p>
<p>If you buy a song from the iTunes music store you have two choices. You can buy a song that is in AAC format for $.99 which will only allow you to copy it to a certain number of approved devices, and burn it in playlists a certain number of times. Or you can <a id="p66"></a></p>
<p>pay a little bit more ($1.29 last time I checked) and get an MP3 file with no usage restrictions. Many people still opt for the cheaper file with the restrictions.</p>
<p>This brings up another larger topic in technology work: dealing with Digital Rights Management. It’s hard to talk about this topic from a purely objective viewpoint because even the term itself is somewhat loaded, it’s like saying “peace officer” instead of “police officer.” However, DRM is the term I use and you can read more about it on Wikipedia if you’d like. Apple created DRM that people could live with, for better or worse.</p>
<p>The reason I even bring it up at all is because, in my opinion, DRM is actually at the root of a lot of the tech problems we have in the public library world once we’re beyond the “how do I use a mouse” stage. Many things that you can’t do with a computer are things you can’t do because there’s a limitation built into the software. Often this limitation is built in because being able to do the thing you want to do—usually some variants of making a copy of a file—will eat into the revenue stream of whoever created the content in the first place. How you feel about this often depends on how you feel about the marketplace in general, but you’ll see it as a recurring theme in the technology world, while you very rarely see it as an up-front topic in technology instruction. I’m usually fairly value neutral about it, to the extent that I can be, but I also try to be honest: “The reason that you can’t make a copy of a DVD easily with your computer is because the people who created the DVD technology do not want you to be able to do this, so they built non-copying technology into the DVD itself. There are also legal reasons why you might not want to copy a DVD.” This is usually enough explanation for most people. We do our patrons a disservice when we do not explain the why behind technology’s failure to do certain things.</p>
<p>Back to Apple . . . Unlike Microsoft and the Gates Foundation, Apple doesn’t really position itself towards the library market.</p>
<p>They made inroads in the educational market a decade or two ago, and now they’re more or less selling personal computers and portable devices to individuals and some businesses. If you spend a lot of time on the internet, you’ll probably hear people saying “Get a Mac!” when people complain about viruses and malware.</p>
<p>One of the upsides to owning a more boutique-y computer is that it’s seldom a target for viruses. There are almost no viruses created for Macs and owning a Mac means never having to run antivirus software, at least at the current time.</p>
<p><a id="p67"></a> From the internet you may also know that Apple has sort of pioneered what people call the “walled garden” approach to hardware devices. They make things that are attractive and fun and not too difficult to use; and in exchange they have an exclusive right to sell applications for this device. This started with the iTunes music store and has continued via the app store with the iPhone and the iPad. Again, this is generally not a basic technology topic, but we are seeing people getting iPhones and iPads who don’t even really use computers yet, and the paradigm shift between a computer where you can buy and install software built by many companies and a mobile device where you can only buy applications vetted by one company, are somewhat different environments. That said, the average American will know about Apple because they have, or know someone who has, an iPod. This leads me to one of my favorite vendor topics, digital audiobooks.</p>
<p>OverDrive and Ebooks (and Whether the Customer Is Always Right) Most libraries that I know of that provide digital audiobooks to their patrons do so via a company named OverDrive, though there are other companies who offer this service as well. OverDrive provides downloadable audiobooks in a variety of formats using a “checkout” mechanism that is similar to how books get checked out from a library. While this checkout mechanism is simple to implement in a library with physical materials, it’s much more complex when applying it to digital materials. People who have experience working with digital files know that when you have a digital file you can, with almost no additional effort, make an exact copy of that file. Now you have two copies. This is good news for people who like to share files and bad news for people who would like to make money selling you access to digital files, which is what OverDrive and audiobook publishers would like to be able to do.</p>
<p>So, instead of just sending people to a website where they can download audiobook files, OverDrive has created this checkout mechanism. If you ask them, and I have, they say that they do this to both serve the needs of publishers who are concerned about their revenue stream and librarians who are concerned about having digital content with “checkoutability.” So, instead of clicking a link and downloading a file, patrons need to log in to the system, install <a id="p68"></a></p>
<p>additional software on their machine or upgrade the software that they have already, and download the audiobook, which comes as multiple separate files. Then, the files can be listened to on a laptop or moved to a variety of audio players. This system is so complicated and fraught with pitfalls that it has become something of a running joke in library cir<a href="#p289">cles.2</a></p>
<p>However, this service has also been evolving. When it was first created, the audiobooks were only available in WMA (Windows Media Audio) format that was only playable on non-iPods.</p>
<p>Depending on who you asked, this was either the fault of Apple or OverDrive, but the result was the same: libraries were offering digital content that was only available to people using some brands of computers. OverDrive responded by saying that the only way to get digital media files that “expired,” which allowed for the checkoutability feature that librarians were clamoring for, was to offer digital files in this format. And publishers would not allow them to offer files in a more open format because they didn’t want them to be copied and shared.</p>
<p>Over time, and after lots of patron and librarian input, OverDrive has made more of their digital content available in MP3 format and created ways for people using iPods and Macs, as well as smartphones to listen to digital audiobooks. Libraries still have the WMA files that they had already purchased, however; and in order to offer these titles in MP3 format, they need to purchase the title a second time in the second format. This leads to a confusing situation in the catalog where different files are marked with a complicated series of icons indicating which titles can be accessed via which operating system and music player. And some titles can be officially burned to CD and others can not. Going to the online help files nets this not-very-useful pair of FAQ answers.</p>
<p>What Is an OverDrive WMA Audiobook?</p>
<p>An OverDrive WMA Audiobook title is a digitally-protected audiobook that has been optimized for download. OverDrive WMA Audiobook titles are built using the Microsoft Windows Media Audio format, which greatly enhances the sound quality for desktop listening, play of CD copies (where permitted by the publisher), and portable device use.</p>
<p><a id="p69"></a> What Is an OverDrive MP3 Audiobook?</p>
<p>An OverDrive MP3 Audiobook title is an audiobook that has been optimized for download. OverDrive MP3 Audiobook titles are com-patible with many different devices including most cell phones, PDAs, and MP3 pl<a href="#p289">ayers.3</a></p>
<p>How much of that do you think makes sense to a novice technology user? How much is marketing disguised as help? To be fair, most patrons, once they’ve learned how to use this system, are fine with it and go on their merry way listening to downloaded books and are happy for the service. However, for novice patrons, teaching them this complicated hokey-pokey system involves crash courses in
</p><ul>
<li>digital files and digital rights management </li>
<li>downloading and installing software </li>
<li>selecting and using an MP3 player </li>
<li>upgrading software on their computer </li>
<li>explaining the difference between how OverDrive files behave and how most digital files behave</li>
</ul> In my experience, there is really no way to explain this complicated system, and I say this as someone who actually understands how and why it all works, without advancing a “computers are hard” perspective. In fact, patrons can actually take our books on CD home and rip them to their computer ’s hard drive (and/or move them to the music player of their choosing) much more easily.<p></p>
<p>I explain that this action may be considered illegal. So this is a genuine conundrum. If we want to solve the patron’s problem, it’s easier done by not using the solution that we as libraries are offering up generally. And while I believe that software generally is getting easier to use and a “rising tide lifts all boats” and I have been happy to see OverDrive responding to critique, I am still left wondering why, in 2010, we are paying money for systems like this?</p>
<p>OCLC/WebJunction (and the Idea of a Worldwide Library) OCLC is the acronym for the Online Computer Library Center.</p>
<p>They are one of the few places that libraries get their MARC records nowadays. They work with many regional consortia who contract <a id="p70"></a></p>
<p>with them to provide records to participating libraries. Aside from having a nice set of websites and a very strong digital presence, they are well known for both their massive OPAC called WorldCat, thought to be “the world’s largest online public access catalog,” and their large-scale research projects and white papers which they publish frequently. They have a somewhat entangled relationship with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and WebJunction, which is a little complicated to go into here.</p>
<p>The short version of the story is that after the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation’s library program had put computers into most U.S. public libraries, there was still a strong need for support and learning opportunities among public librarians. OCLC led a partnership with a few other organizations to create WebJunction, which bills itself as “online community for public libraries.” WebJunction supports itself with grants and partnerships with states (who receive a branded version of WebJunction and an online location for their own content) and selling low-cost continuing education materials.</p>
<p>OCLC, nominally a non-profit organization, primarily supports itself through memberships by organizations, receiving grants and the sale of reports and continuing education materials. If you are online and moderately tech savvy, they have many attractive options for you.</p>
<p>However, OCLC is also a business which means that if you are not online, or not tech savvy, it’s not really their place to get you there. While their WorldCat catalog is amazingly full-featured, easy on the eyes, and really the closest thing to a union catalog out there, it also only has records for member libraries while using language that implies otherwise “find items in libraries near you” which is a very different statement than “find items in MEMBER libraries near you.”</p>
<p>In OCLC’s dream world, this would be every library. And at the same time they don’t have a plan for bringing smaller and poorer libraries into the fold. And again, I point back to the lack of national/</p>
<p>international library organizations that could take this role. The Library of Congress isn’t really a national library, it’s the library for Congress and the American people, but it’s not the national coordinator of library services. ALA is an advocacy organization. And OCLC has the best tools out there, but despite their non-profit status they have a business-based approach as to how they offer products and services. This makes sense and at the same time, we wind up seeing this approach reinforcing the digital divide, not assuaging it. Their business model works better in a world where everyone is already at least decently competent online.</p>
<p>That’s not quite the world we live in yet.</p>
<p><a id="p71"></a> Google/Yahoo (and “Hey, Use It, It’s Free!”) I had yet another student come to drop-in time this week because she’d read an ad in the paper for a job she wanted to apply for. The ad had a URL and a job number and she wanted to figure out how to apply for that job. She knew how to use a mouse, but not how to go to a URL. We found the website and started clicking through the steps to figure out how to apply for the job. The steps went like this:
</p><ol>
<li> Type job number into search box and search </li>
<li> Get job up on web page, scroll down to read it </li>
<li> Click “apply for this job” link </li>
<li> Get sent to job application website which involves creating a profile before you can apply for the job </li>
<li> Start to set-up profile, realize it requires an email address</li>
</ol>
At this point the student looks at me and says “I don’t have an email address.” and I look back at her and say “Well, it looks like you’re going to have to get one to apply for this job.” I give her a 50/50 chance that she’ll decide to do this and I think about how much has changed. I just changed health insurance companies and went to the website of my new company to get some information about my benefits. In order to access the website, which is not strictly 100% necessary in order for me to be insured, but fairly important, I needed to have an email address and agree to have documents sent to it. And this requires not just having an email address, but also checking it. The sign-up form is shown on the next page.<p></p>
<p>Notice how the “I’d like to get marketing information” box is pre-checked. Who is this convenient for? This is a recurring theme in the world of free tools online. People get something they want in exchange for giving up some of their personal information or agreeing to be marketed to. Savvy technology users can make these decisions from an educated perspective, but unsavvy users don’t necessarily know enough to uncheck the box, or possibly even how to do it.</p>
<p>fifteen years ago, you were unlikely to see jobs that required email addresses because email addresses weren’t free. Ten years ago you weren’t likely to see email addresses required because getting online to access email wasn’t free. five years ago, almost anyone in the United States could get online and get a free email address. Nowadays, they’re telling us that email is only for old people and the kids today are texting, facebooking, or SMSing.</p>
<p><a id="p72"></a><img class="calibre2" src="index-72_1.jpg"/></p>
<p>While there’s a sense in which this is true—I use email much less for “Hey, how’s it going?” communicating than I used to— email or a phone is still necessary for most interactions involving the workplace. In some workplaces, sending you your work schedule via email is considered a courtesy, which keeps you from having to come in on your off-days. And yet, for people without email or ready internet access, this isn’t very convenient at all.</p>
<p>The first free large-scale web-based email program was argu-ably Hotmail, which launched in mid-1996. At the moment, the three major web-based email services in the United States are Hotmail, Gmail, and Yahoo Mail. All of them offer free web-based email that is accessible from any computer with an internet connection and a web browser. “Free” in this case means advertiser-supported and all three email services come plastered with advertising. This is to <a id="p73"></a> be expected but, at the same time, it can be both distracting and sometimes confusing to novice users. You’ll find more about signing up for one of these accounts in Chapter Seven, the email chapter of this book. The important things to know about free services from a novice user perspective are these: </p><ul>
<li>These services come with no warranty, no guarantee, and very little support. Most support comes in the form of user forums where users help each other with minor help issues.</li>
<li>These services may change at any time, and often do. While Gmail is okay at offering experimental features via Google Labs, Yahoo is currently supporting two slightly different email versions, Yahoo Classic and whatever the current version is called. People who accidentally click “OK” to try the new version may have difficulty getting back to the interface they were familiar with.</li>
<li>These services are free because of advertising, and also because the data harvesting that goes on behind the scenes is valuable to the companies who create the services. I could fill a whole book just talking about the implications of the amount of data that is able to be collected from someone who is using free web-based services, but this is the reality of how companies do business now.</li>
<li>There are downsides and upsides to this sort of environment, but there may be no better alternative for novice users just getting online. Many people with broadband at home also have some sort of free email that came with their internet service.</li>
</ul><p></p>
<p>I often mention to them that while this email is technically free, it will also go away if they change internet service providers.</p>
<p>These three big companies have a suite of services available to users with an email login that allows people to write documents, get travel directions, share photos, recommend products and services, and keep their calendar and contact lists. This is an awful lot of personal information. And just to be clear: I also use all of the above tools. I figure people can bore themselves to death with my life, but for the people who the FCC describes as the “digitally uncomfortable,” being asked for this amount of personal information isn’t helping them at all. There are many free products that are available online and for download that solve various technological problems. Again, our role as librarians is to make some decent selection decisions and give people an overview of their <a id="p74"></a></p>
<p>options and then, let them choose. At the same time, we must remind people that even though something is free, that doesn’t mean it’s either a “must have” or a “must avoid.” As always, the choices and options are more complicated.</p>
<p>Ebook Manufacturers (and the Walled Gardens) There is no ebook standard; anyone who tells you differently is trying to sell you something. In fact, there’s an important distinction to be understood between an ebook, a piece of digital content, and an ebook reader, which is the hardware tool that you use to access the ebook. As of now (2010), there are several competing ebook products, all of which would like to be the thing people think of when they think of “electronic books.” There is an international ebook standard, called ePub, but having a standard is different from people actually using that standard.</p>
<p>There are a few major big brand ebook reader products out right now including the Amazon Kindle, the Sony Reader, and Barnes & Noble’s NOOK. There are many other reader products available that read a variety of ebook formats. In addition, most phones with any screen area at all can run ebook reader software and can be used for book reading. As always, Wikipedia is the best go-to place for more information on this complicated and evolving topic.</p>
<p>The complicated part of this issue is that ebooks are different from books. In some ways ebooks offer a better user experience: you can keyword search them, leave non-damaging annotations, carry around 200 of them at once. In other ways, they’re less practical: they require a power source to function, the readers are expensive, and most importantly an ebook is legally a different thing from a paper book. This is very important for you to understand as a librarian, and somewhat less critical for our patrons to understand.</p>
<p>People who sell ebooks would like you to think that ebooks are just a different delivery mechanism for content. And to an extent this is true. However, because this delivery mechanism—digital files— allows for unlimited copying in its most basic form, no-copying systems need to be built into an ebook that is designed to be sold as a consumer product. This involves Digital Rights Management, a copy-protection and/or copy-distribution scheme that sets limits on what can and can’t be done with an ebook, limits that are different from those of a paper book and limits that are different from a typical digital file. Put another way, most ebook publishers use the language <a id="p75"></a> of licensing rather than ownership when talking about their digital content. This is legally supportable since the first-sale doctrine, allowing an item’s purchaser to sell or otherwise give away a copyrighted work, is not applicable to licensed items. These limits are put in place by the content producers, and in many cases have not been legally tested. For example, there is still some debate about whether the Kindle’s licensing terms allow it to be circulated in a public library. Despite this, some libraries circulate Kindles.</p>
<p>Most ebook distributors who sell ebooks to libraries in some form or another use this same model. NetLibrary specifically states in their marketing materials “The ownership model means that the library owns the eBook and NetLibrary provides access via a hosting fee that is either billed annually or as a one time fee charged at the time of purchase.” <a href="#p289">4 </a>While it’s fine for libraries to enter into whatever business agreements they feel will benefit their community, these licensing agreements are dramatically different from traditional library content purchasing models which are “We bought it, we own it.” This agreement not only restricts what the library can do with the digital material, it restricts what the patron can do with it as well. The effect on the novice user, aside from the extra technology necessary to access the library content that I do not see as a large concern, is that the hype differs from the reality and the patrons look to us to explain the difference.</p>
<p>Keep in mind that for people with very little hands-on experience with technology, much of what they may know about it comes from news articles (more on that in the next section of this chapter) and advertising. Advertising’s job is to make the product sound appealing and desirable; and one of the major ways to do this is by saying that a product is familiar—”It’s just like reading a book, only better.” or “One click to 1000 books.”—and the reality of the situation may not jibe with the marketing projection. This is true for many things in the real world and I don’t fault ebooks or publishers or vendors for this state of affairs. However, if we can’t explain why ebooks are different, if we don’t understand some of the nuances of copyright and licensing agreements and digital rights management ourselves, we may lose some of our credibility as the people who know all about content. Obviously, there are reasonable middle grounds here, but for many of us this is a time to start studying up, getting used to a playing field that is shifting, and learning to explain some of the differences between digital and non-digital content to curious patrons.</p>
<p><a id="p76"></a></p>
<p>Antivirus Software (and What Is the Real Virus) Virus threats and antivirus responses need to be seen as part of a symbiotic system and one that does not benefit the end user as much as it claims. This area is one case where I don’t have as much first-person experience as in some of the others. However, the threats of viruses, people’s misunderstandings about viruses, and companies’ responses to these misunderstandings have created a vicious cycle that actually winds up with more people being afraid, and likely not any safer.</p>
<p>The first two things I ask people who ask me about viruses are:
</p><ol>
<li> Do you connect to the internet at all, or only use dial-up? If so, you are at a very low risk for virus threats. If you never connect to the internet and don’t put files from other machines on your computer, you are at zero risk of viruses.<br/>Zero.</li>
<li> Do you use a Mac? If so, you are at a very low risk from virus threats and mostly need to employ good computer hygiene like not opening email attachments from strangers.</li>
</ol>
<p></p>
<p>If people are in either of these categories, I usually just explain to them how to stay safe—use firefox, don’t open mystery attachments, stay away from porn/gambling/warez sites—and tell them to maybe run a free antivirus program if it makes them feel better (see suggestions in the webliography at the end of this book). For people who are dealing with virus threats or, more likely, virus threat warnings, it’s useful to explain the general system that has grown over the past decade. I try to whittle it down to its essential parts, but the basic upshot is this sort of brinksmanship situation:
</p><ul>
<li>Viruses are usually malicious pieces of code that get on to your computer via infected email attachments, security exploits, or file-sharing. Some behavior leaves one more open to virus problems than others.</li>
<li>There are ways to make a computer mostly secure from viruses, but most computers don’t come this way “out of the box” because it can inhibit usability.</li>
<li>Many companies, including operating system manufacturers, have created antivirus software to address this problem.</li>
<li>Virus makers responded to improvements in antivirus software by, among other things, creating viruses that resembled virus warnings.<a id="p77"></a> </li>
<li>Antivirus software makers got more serious about making sure that computer users could not avoid installing and updating virus software.</li>
<li>At the same time, low end laptop manufacturers sold laptops with trial versions of popular antivirus software which then expired and left all sorts of dire warnings on the user’s computer.</li>
</ul><p></p>
<p>If you’ve read Dr. Seuss’s Butter Battle Book, you’ll know what I’m talking about.</p>
<p>Needless to say, novice users find this all talk about viruses to be baffling. Add to this the media attention given to “computer viruses” generally with very little in the way of specifics (that, for example, a virus they were reporting about only infects computers running the Windows operating system) and you have a large number of people who are not sure who to believe. Additionally, since the actions viruses actually take vary widely, and as such are ill-defined, people tend to blame all computer slowdowns and erratic behavior on viruses. And there are always people available to take your money to try to clear the viruses off of your computer.</p>
<p>In many cases, the best solution to a totally intractable virus problem—reinstalling the operating system—is unavailable to people because they don’t have the system software or have a laptop where the software came pre-loaded.</p>
<p>Honestly, someone should write an entire book on dealing with viruses for novice users, but this isn’t that book. The important thing for you as a librarian to know is that while the threats are real, novice users have as much or more to worry about trying to understand the system warnings telling them that they are at risk (despite there potentially being no risk at all, for an offline computer) than dealing with viruses themselves. Fear of viruses has kept many people in the “digitally uncomfortable” zone for too long and we need to find a way to talk sensibly about the situation and offer explanations and suggestions.</p>
<p>Again, we are not turning the reference desk into a computer repair center. However, if one of our missions is to help people enter the information age and we’ve identified this issue as one of the larger impediments to computer or internet usage, we should try to meet that head-on. Some of this is just social engineering, not having staff pass on “Oh, it’s probably a virus” comments when someone is having a tech support issue. More of it is leading <a id="p78"></a></p>
<p>by example with public access computers running competent and invisible antivirus software, and showing that it is possible to use a computer, access the internet, and interact with other people online without falling prey to various hazards.</p>
<p>Where Open Source fits In (and Where It Doesn’t) In recent years, Open Source has become something that is more of a genuine option for libraries. There are many good Open Source operating systems and software products that people can use for free on PCs, Macs, and GNU/Linux machines. I’ll talk about FOSS (free and open source software) because it’s an easy acronym.</p>
<p>People who want to dig into the nuances between free software and open source software and GNU versus Linux should read up on these topics on Wikipedia; it’s a fascinating world out there. There are many web tools that are free to use, but not FOSS-types of tools.</p>
<p>I’ll primarily be talking about the standard FOSS tools, though I have an interest in web-based FOSS tools in a general sense.</p>
<p>So, there is a small but growing group of advocates who recommend many FOSS solutions for libraries. This has become even more pronounced lately as two large FOSS ILS products are being implemented in many large and small library systems worldwide.</p>
<p>From the State of Georgia who created and uses the PINES system with the underlying software called Evergreen to my local Green Mountain Library Consortium, which has grown to encompass 30 member libraries all implementing a local version of a FOSS ILS called Koha, the shift is on. And much of this is happening without a concerted marketing effort by FOSS companies. In fact, many FOSS products are still being made by a devoted team of volunteers, and there is no “FOSS company” to speak of. Sure, when you go to ALA or other big conferences, the support companies for major FOSS tools will be out in earnest, companies such as ByWater and Equinox, but generally speaking this is software made by groups of people without official corporate structures, which often means no marketing, but also no support.</p>
<p>In fact, one of the constant complaints about FOSS is the lack of documentation for all but the most polished software. The help files for firefox rival those of any commercial product, but those for other products like Audacity leave a lot to be desired. The benefits of FOSS are obvious. It’s low cost, has easy-to-understand licensing and if you’re handy with software generally, can be <a id="p79"></a> tinkered with to great effect. However, for many people who do not enjoy tinkering and DO enjoy tech support, FOSS is still not quite there as a genuine option. IT departments sometimes refuse to install and maintain it. Other people spread rumors about FOSS’s vulnerabilities, rumors that do not get dispelled easily since there’s rarely a PR department charged with maintaining the image or the brand. And, like many life choices that come with an attached philosophy, there are a small set of “true believers” who can sometimes be aggressive about other people’s choices and can’t see any reason for them to continue using proprietary software. Anyone who moves within FOSS circles has met a few of these people.</p>
<p>I’ve seen libraries running nearly total-FOSS setups, with Ubuntu operating systems running firefox and OpenOffice and other tools such as Gimp for photo editing. I’ve also seen libraries who are a straight Windows shop, but have an Open Source ILS running on a machine in their basement which runs Debian Linux.</p>
<p>In my opinion, FOSS is getting to the point where the major software tools are a genuine option for people both because the tools themselves have become easier to use and install, but also because we’re seeing services companies fill the support gap of concern to people contemplating an ILS or operating system migration. There are still a vanishingly small set of libraries who are using primarily FOSS tools for their public access computers. I am hoping to see more libraries attempting this sort of setup moving forward.</p>
<p>tl;dr</p>
<p>Understanding why hardware and software are created the way they are can help us understand what we need to do to make it better.</p>
<p>While there is not necessarily a perfect hardware or software solution, there are definitely sub-optimal choices. It’s okay to decide not to use software because it is difficult for patrons or staff to use. Software is sometimes hard to use by design. It is easier to work with vendors if you understand what motivates them and what they are trying to do.</p>
<h3 id="ch6_2">The Media, the Decision Makers, and How They Interact</h3>
<p>How many times have you been reading a newspaper or listening to the radio and you hear someone talk about the library?</p>
<p>If this is a mainstream media outlet, you’ll usually have to suffer <a id="p80"></a></p>
<p>through a few library jokes before you get to the meat of whatever they’re discussing. And the stories you read about libraries in the media often take fairly predictable turns. Usually, they’re in response to a library event either locally or nationally. If we’re lucky, this is something nice like a librarian getting an award. If we’re unlucky, this is something much less nice like an arrest at a library or a lawsuit against a library district. At a national level, a lot of library stories seem to be the result of press releases or announcements by library advocacy groups. This is fine, it’s good to get publicity, but again the stories are often similar: Celebrating the freedom to read. National Library Card Week. Libraries are still important even in economic slowdowns. And then there’s my favorite, paraphrased: Hey, librarians can even use computers now!</p>
<p>While I’m thrilled that the “cybrarian” moniker died off quickly, I’m a little dismayed that library workers using technology seems novel enough that you’d want to write a newspaper article about it. The larger point, however, is that I don’t get the idea that a lot of reporters go to libraries. Or if they do, they don’t find a “hook” that they can write something about. I can imagine it’s difficult to find something new to say about an institution that’s been around in this country for centuries. And yet, our image is important because the public still pays attention to the news and what people are saying, and also because of the close linkage between the media and the decision makers and how they influence one another.</p>
<p>Old Media Say what you will about old media and/or the longevity of it, but people still listen to the radio and read the newspaper. Both types of media are ubiquitous enough that they can reach any American who can read. The same can not be considered true for online media despite how ubiquitous it may seem to us. When I was working at a large public library in Vermont, the best outreach tools we had outside of direct mailings were putting something in the newspaper and putting something in the window of a store-front downtown, which we did for Library Card Sign-Up Month.</p>
<p>Another incredibly effective outreach tool was the local cable access channel. I did a presentation where I took a PowerPoint talk about our genealogy database along with a bunch of screenshots and narrated alongside them, explaining how to do census research <a id="p81"></a> using Heritage Quest. It was totally low tech, but it got people interested in the idea in a safe and familiar environment.</p>
<p>For better or worse, many people who are used to older media also place a large amount of faith in this media and the things they read or hear there. This is a double-edged sword for many of us, because it becomes difficult to shift this trust into the online world even though the sources may be identical, and also because reporting by old media about new media can be full of misinformation.</p>
<p>This is not always true, of course. However, I’ve personally found that newspapers seem to loathe calling a computer virus a “Windows virus” even if it’s true that the virus only affects people using one operating system. As a result, people read articles about the latest virus and worry about being at risk, even if they don’t even have a Windows machine at home. And reading about media trends such as Twitter or even the less-new Facebook provides such a small window into how the technology works that people with little tech knowledge often wind up more confused than enlight-ened. And older generations especially are used to making lifestyle decisions in part based on what they see and read in the paper, for better or worse.</p>
<p>When the New York Times technology section comes out on Thursday, I’m frequently approached by people asking for my take on whatever the topic of the week is. It’s sometimes an awkward conversation because if I find fault with the reporting or say “Well, that’s not exactly what’s going on there . . .” I feel that I’m contributing to people’s overall tech unease At the same time, if I agree with what I think is an incomplete explanation of something technical, I feel that I’m dumbing down technology. And at some level, the things we read in the newspaper are attempting to answer the “Why should I care?” question for people; the answer to that question is very different if you’re dealing with someone who has a basic tech background as opposed to someone who has never used a computer. That said, whenever there is a news story in the paper, we can guarantee that many people will read about it and know about it, which is good for business. My drop-in time classes get advertised primarily via quarterly advertisements in the town paper and flyers I put up at the library.</p>
<p>And many reporters are end users, even tech reporters. They are not IT people. They are not programmers. They are not web designers. You are more likely, in my experience, to find a librarian who has created a website than a reporter who has built one. No <a id="p82"></a></p>
<p>big deal in any case, but it’s important to keep this sort of thing in perspective when you are reading old media reporting on new media. It’s a rapidly changing playing field with a lot of nuance.</p>
<p>Many of these things are tough to explain in few words without hyperlinks nowadays.</p>
<p>The Blogerati I was an “official blogger” at the 2004 Democratic National Convention in Boston, when blogging seemed like a new thing and no one really knew what bloggers would do at a convention, but they wanted to have them there. At the time, my blog was already five years old. I was there to hear what people had to say about libraries, and to talk about libraries to people who would listen. As you might expect, there wasn’t a lot of library discussion. In fact only two speakers mentioned them: the Democratic nominee John Kerry and a state senator few people had heard of named Barack Obama. <a href="#p289">5</a></p>
<p>The most interesting thing about this blogger assignment was that having been chosen gave me this automatic position of authority and some sort of pundit label. Many more people started reading my blog. People asked my opinion about topics even though I was mostly just a librarian blogger who decided to go to the DNC because it was in my neighborhood. There is a sense that the blogging world has a high opinion about itself, that by benefit of deciding that what you write is worthy of putting online, you are somehow saying that people should care about you, or about your opinions. I found that early in my blogging career, I heard this a lot: “You have a blog?” people would ask “Why does someone care about what you think?” I would usually respond that I wasn’t sure, but that people read it and even if my readers were made up of my mom and two other people, I was okay with that. The cost of having a blog is small, compared to traditional media, and the advantages can be huge. I am sure that a lot of my professional library accomplishments—being on ALA Council, getting to be the webmaster of the Vermont Library Association website, being chosen to blog at the DNC—were a result of my having a blog.</p>
<p>For people who don’t blog or who don’t have a blog, their opinions are all over the map about blogging. Blogs are more commonplace now. They’re owned and run by individuals and media companies and academics. People can be professional bloggers as a job, and there are blogging media networks such at <a id="p83"></a> Gawker, Gothamist, and the amusingly named Cheezburger Network. They offer some sort of participation that is a little more rich than letters to the editor, usually a comments section or sometimes a forum. They produce content round-the-clock. Bloggers may or may not be reporters, either in their own estimation or in the eyes of the law.</p>
<p>And yet, we still have the ongoing stereotype of the blogger as someone who tells the whole world what they had for breakfast and the world responds “Who cares?” I find this stereotype as tired as the bun and the shushing and am quick to point out the blogs of major media companies and start a conversation about whether Time magazine’s blog is as reputable as Time magazine. It’s an interesting exercise. The thing that we all agree about blogging, however, is that it’s a heavily hyperlinked activity, i.e., part of the mechanism of blogging is the cross-linking to other online content, and it’s nearly entirely occurring online. This, of course, means that it’s invisible to people who are not online and who may not even conceptually understand the idea of linking, which is the main thing, to me, that differentiates old and new media. Even if someone doesn’t have a television, for example, if they are in the United States, they certainly understand the idea of television. I’m not so certain the same can be said for online media.</p>
<p>And, from a personal perspective, I’ve seen this play out in my own life, occasionally in the comments section of my blog. There was a very popular post<a href="#p289">6 </a>I made that discussed whether then-VP candidate Sarah Palin had actually tried to ban books from her local library when she was the mayor of Wasila, Alaska. I linked to a Time magazine article. In the course of the comments, someone made a post saying “This is the list of books Palin tried to have banned.” and it took off around the internet like wildfire. Of course, neither I nor anyone else knew the provenance of the list. I had slightly more information to go on, including the email address of the person who’d posted it and I did what I considered to be due diligence and wrote him an email. The upshot, whether I believed it or not, was that his roommate had posted the list as some sort of prank and no such list actually existed. I posted a follow-up comment to that effect and later added a note to the original blog post, but that didn’t stop people from citing my blog as the “source” of this information, or reading that comment and not my follow-up comments or even my original post.</p>
<p><a id="p84"></a></p>
<p>And then, like any political dispute, people started getting angry with each other and angry with me for not handling the issue in what they deemed the correct way; usually what was suggested was taking the post down. And those debating this issue were a range of tech-literate and not-so-literate people who were often talking past each other. I got a lot of angry email. The post still remains on my site, however. Sarah Palin did not get elected for other reasons. At the core of this debate, I felt, was the role of bloggers, people who can edit their posts at will and delete or edit comments. People were debating what a blogger’s responsibility is to those who may not understand the difference between a blog and a newspaper, or a blog comment and the blog itself. All quite interesting to me as someone who is often looking at these websites with novice users and noting what they understand and don’t understand. The difference between “I read it in Time magazine.” and “I read it in a comment on Time magazine’s website.” is not as clear for as many people as you might think.</p>
<p>Biblioblogosphere For librarians who may be just entering this field, there are a lot of concerns and considerations with putting your voice “out there.” A lot depends on whether librarians are blogging for themselves, as I am, or for their institution, or for the library press. Each role comes with differing expectations of polish, professionalism, and formality. And there are people who feel like a lot of this stuff is already decided, that the etiquette rules of blogging are fixed and unyielding, and many more people who feel that it’s still the Wild West in some ways with no rules at all. There is a pleasant group of library bloggers online overall and we’ve been quite fortunate to have a lot of collegiality among library bloggers.</p>
<p>We’re also quite fortunate to have our own statistics junkies who compile numbers about the library blogging experience. This can be simultaneously an exercise in navel gazing, and also in giving us a view of our own professional online presence. Walt Craw-ford has written two books11 about the landscape of blogging librarians, and how it has changed over time, both of which are well worth reading. The importance of the library bloggers to our profession generally is that it elevates our voice into the online realm and makes us a part of this conversation that we’re always hearing about, that is happening online. I see a lot of librarians on <a id="p85"></a> Facebook and Twitter and even on Foursquare, and to me it always feels like a symbiotic meshing of a traditional profession with new technologies in order to continue to provide access to information and resources.</p>
<p>This group of library bloggers is also around and available and discussing library issues online through community sites such as FriendFeed, LISNews, and Unshelved Answers, as well as being a presence on other social sites and in local blogs. This means that library and technology issues get discussed in the larger world and don’t just become internal topics at one’s own place of business. This can be good news for skill-sharing and policy discussions, but bad news when people are trying to micromanage your institutions’ issues from across the internet. I think this discussion is a good thing generally, but it’s taken a lot of getting used to for many people. This whole idea of the online hive mind is commonplace in some workplaces and totally mysterious in others.</p>
<p>I assume this is a matter of time, but it’s another digital divide that I see occurring in our profession: librarians who make use of social resources online to help solve problems and answer questions, and those who don’t.</p>
<p>Political Promise Makers Politicking is too large and volatile a topic for me to spend much time with here, but I want to mention three things about people in the political arena, in addition to what I’ve written above.</p>
<ol>
<li>Politics is a profession of persuasion and deal-brokering, and most people who are in politics at a national level are partly there because they work well or can work well in the spotlight. They are there because they have social skills in addition to legal or economic skills. I firmly believe that some of the changes we want to see happening such as changes that will have a substantive effect on the digital divide, are going to have to come from politicians—such as mandates to provide internet connectivity or training services. We ignore this avenue at our peril. We need to approach people in positions of power with the awareness that just doing something because it’s a good thing for society does not always solve a problem for someone who has a career in politics.<a id="p86"></a></li>
<li>Politicians read the same newspapers as you and I, and are not necessarily any more tech-savvy than any of us. In fact, if they have been in their careers for a few decades and have employees who do most of their communicating for them, it’s entirely possible that they know less about technology than the average librarian. It’s almost certain that they spend less time in the library than the average person in your city or town. So, they may know more about the library from what they’ve read, rather than from what they’ve experienced. When you are trying to make a point to a politician or listen to them talking about libraries and/or technology, it’s worth remembering that they may be suffering from some of the same tech misinformation as many of our patrons, with the added caveat that they’re not even coming into the library for a reality check. Keeping our politicians updated in terms of what they can do about our needs is critical to the larger issue of the digital landscape in our country and our place within it.</li>
<li>Non-profits have certain restrictions about what they can say about some politicians and about politics generally. This was a huge deal when I was on the ALA Council and there were people who worked for the American Library Association who frequently reminded us that since ALA was a 501c3, using their resources, such as their mailing list, for political speech was potentially problematic and/or illegal. While it’s possible that using the listserv for such discussions would be acceptable, the association felt it was a legal issue best left untested. This is why ALA has a Washington office with different funding lines and infrastructure that is not bound by the same restrictions. This restriction was exceptionally frustrating since we had, at the time, an administration that was sometimes actively hostile to libraries (such as the Environmental Protection Agency’s libraries) and library associations weren’t supposed to say much about it. This may or may not be true for your local library so it’s essential that you understand the rules governing political speech and where the lines should be appropriately drawn.</li>
</ol>
<p>There are many other wonderful resources online for learning about the political landscape as far as technology issues go in this country and I’d encourage people who want to explore more in this <a id="p87"></a> direction to get involved. We could use more librarians in the legis-lature generally.</p>
<p>Boosters and Hypesters Also added to this list of people with influence are the people who sell us things, but who are not our vendors. I’m talking about advertisers of various stripes and even technology boosters who behave with a vested interest in making us either love technology or feel like we’re abnormal if we don’t. I wasn’t even going to talk about this except that these voices are such a pervasive part of what I hear from people learning technology such as “I thought computers were supposed to be easy!” While we’d laugh if someone made a similar statement about their car such as “I thought this was supposed to give me sex appeal!” we hear the previous statement a lot when dealing with novice technology users. They’ve had their expectations set by what they’ve read and seen on television, much more so than people who have learned about technology from other people who were already conversant in technology.</p>
<p>This problem with unmet expectations can also happen with professional development in the library world, where people ask their librarian friends, “Why doesn’t the library use technology in a more sensible way, like I do?” and then we shrug and say we don’t know either. Or when we see a particularly motivated speaker talking about some new technology being met with crossed-arm “That will never work at my library.” responses, I’m never sure where the breakdown is. I agree that we have to be sensible in our approach to technology, and that we should be able to make a good argument for making radical changes in our infrastructure, but at the same time I don’t see technology adoption generally as a major step. Moving from a newsletter to a blog should not be a big step and yet with the push-pull attitude we find within our own profession, you’d think it was. So, from the inside we need to not only be reasonable ourselves but call for reason in a larger sense, and remember that whatever our personal feelings about technology are, we serve all the users, both the technophilic and the technophobic.</p>
<p>Novice computer users can be cynical or naive. They see someone using a computer on television and think “Huh, maybe it is that easy?” And again, this isn’t all novice technology users, but it is a recurring theme. They’ll ask a question about how to <a id="p88"></a></p>
<p>use a particular tool that seems to come right from the marketing brochure for that tool. And I don’t just mean patrons, though obviously they’re most of the people I interact with, but also librarians.</p>
<p>I often hear from them “I thought this software was supposed to be simple to install?” Technology is a difficult field to set proper expectations for because unlike many other environments a great deal depends on the context that you bring to the table. So, software that may in fact be easy for me to install is not simple for someone to install who hasn’t installed software before. The idea of “easy” in general is contrasted with the idea of “easy” for someone with a small background in doing this sort of thing. In fact, I try to never say that something is easy, preferring to say that something is straightforward, or perhaps is uncomplicated. If you say that something is easy, to me, it’s subtly disrespecting people who can’t figure it out. Saying that something is uncomplicated is a direct measure of the steps you need to take to do the thing or something else that’s quantifiable. The combination of knowing your audience and setting their expectations, along with using compassionate and considerate language allows you to have the most useful impact assisting people in setting their own pace with technology.</p>
<p>There’s only so much you can do about the world of advertising and boosterism that surrounds us, but you can be a hype-free oasis in the complicated world of technology and offer sensible brand-free advice that is focused on problem-solving, rather than being driven by kickbacks or affiliate relationships. You can also speak to vendors and other people who are offering these “feel-good” narratives about the world that includes their products, and give them constructive feedback and real-world examples of how their products do or do not work in your library environment. While I know that not everyone can go to national library conferences, it is a good opportunity to talk to people who work for the companies that create many of the tools that we use and give a human perspective on how their products fit into your real world. And for the people who approach technology with a bit of a sneer or approach technology within our profession as if we were blindly following trends, I generally just smile and encourage people to get used to it. If there’s one thing that’s constant in the technological world, it’s change, and rapid change at that. It’s not for everyone, but it’s what we’ve got.</p>
<p><a id="p89"></a> tl;dr</p>
<p>As Led Zeppelin says “lots of people talking—few of them know.” Just because someone is in a position of power or in the media does not mean they are always correct. That said, sometimes wielding influence is the only way to solve an intractable problem and political and media influence is still a force to be reckoned with. It’s worth understanding that the relationship between old media, with formal publishers and content editors, and new media with live reporting, responsiveness, editability, and interactivity are two parts to people’s large personal information systems.</p>
<h3 id="ch6_3">Synthesis—How It All Works Together</h3>
<p>Unlike most other national American institutions, there is no centralized coordination among libraries. We have all the parts, as I’ve mentioned in this chapter, but there’s no nationwide department of libraries boss who says, “All libraries must offer email classes and yoga DVDs.” The good news is that this gives libraries the flexibility to serve their local communities in the most appropriate ways possible. The bad news is that with a few exceptions, it’s difficult to coor-dinate things that benefit from economies of scale such as automation projects, bulk buying of database products, and any sort of standardization of what people see when they enter a library. This is good news for vendors and bad news for all but the largest libraries. It’s interesting to go to other countries where they have more national-level coordination and see how the libraries differ, mostly running the same hardware and software, with more standardization of tech offerings.</p>
<p>There are certainly generalizations you can make about what a library offers, but even the laws about what you have to provide in order to even be a public library vary by state. And these sorts of guidelines change over time too, and we don’t always make a big announcement “Now in the library . . . computers!”. While we often hear the refrain of people missing the old days of quiet libraries and no computers, these days are not so distant for many rural libraries. Newer libraries with more progressive policies and approaches to library services—I’m thinking of teen services and programming, but it could just as easily be knitting classes and Playaway books— have to sometimes struggle to be thought of as traditional libraries.</p>
<p>So, there are often minimum library standards, but they’re often invisible to patrons. As a result, a patron who hasn’t been to <a id="p90"></a></p>
<p>the library in a while may walk into the building not knowing if the library offers internet access for the public, or wireless access, or places to plug in laptops, or digital content to supplement the print offerings. People walking into a public library for the first time, whether they’re new in town or just passing through, often have to work to make sense of whatever the library has technologically.</p>
<p>Print offerings are all out there on the shelves for everyone to see, but how do we demonstrate all of our technology offerings?</p>
<p>Patrons sometimes don’t know what’s going on at the library, and they’re not even sure what goes into a library being a library. In some ways, this is great as we have a timeless institution that for many people has simply always been there. In some ways, it’s not so great because people read about libraries in the newspaper or see them on television and think “Why isn’t my library like that?” or, alternatively “Why isn’t that library like mine?” And the answers are complicated.</p>
<p>A lot of these people that I’ve mentioned in the previous sections of this chapter work together in ways that are, again, invisible to the patron. And our patrons don’t read the studies that we read as librarians. In fact, many patrons don’t even know that there are other rooms in the library besides the places that are available to the public such as the staff offices, or the frequently-captivating basement rooms.</p>
<p>A lot has been said recently in the library community about marketing and branding ourselves and while I hesitate to take on the terms of corporate America, it’s important to note that the promotion and advancement of home-grown solutions that work is something available to us with the advent of technology that may have been difficult historically. I’d like to see more librarians giving each other good ideas and answering each other’s questions in an effort to serve patrons better and more responsively. You’ll find some of my ideas in the following chapters. Please share these ideas freely.</p>
<h2 id="ch7_0"><a id="p91"></a> <br/> <a id="p92"></a><span class="chapnum">3</span> Planning—Strategies, Techniques, and Tools</h2>
<p>Librarians should understand that what they do is create space, cognitive space in the environment. It can look like a public library, a web site . . . or whatever. Librarians need to make sure that they provide a rich space, where human beings can gather, interact, and become more than themselves. If librarians can do that, and do it well, they will be a part of the future.</p>
<p>—John Perry Barlow As I stated in the Introduction of this book, this is not a manual.</p>
<p>While you’ll find links to both syllabi and handouts in this book, the goal is to further understanding of how to assist people who have little or no technological experience. There is a small set of tools that I consider indispensable for getting started with technology that technology users, present and future, should become familiar with.</p>
<p>As I tell people in my talks and classes “You don’t need to remember everything I’ve told you, but I hope the next time you encounter this particular technology, you will remember having heard about it and maybe a thing or two about how to use it.” Novice computer users have a particular set of learning needs and a context in which they operate. One of the more surprising things that I hear from people who come to my drop-in time is that <a id="p93"></a> they’ve often been to several classes or read manuals before, and they seem to be having a hard time making their learning “stick.”</p>
<p>I can empathize as I have a terrible time with world geography and I don’t quite know my left from my right, or east from west. I can only imagine how dispirited I’d be if I had to use either of these skills on a day-to-day basis, or felt a lot of societal pressure to use these skills.</p>
<p>The goal here is learning, not mastery and possibly not even speedy competency, but being further along the path than before.</p>
<p>Outside of the library, in my region, a lot of the funding for stuff like this comes from programs like AmeriCorps or other national service-type programs or job readiness programs. These programs do a great job working with populations affected by poverty and facing great challenges. However, my experience as a two-time VISTA/</p>
<p>AmeriCorps volunteer is that sometimes the outcomes these projects require are unrealistic. For example, in my AmeriCorps position, we were specifically funded at one point both to train novice computer users and also to supposedly train them up into future tech educators in a sort of “train the trainer” style.</p>
<p>As much as I am a huge fan of my students and think that they were and are capable of great things, the difference between learning a technology well enough to solve your own problems with it, and learning it well enough so that you can solve someone else’s problems is fairly vast. Believing that novice users can turn into tech educators over a few months may be unrealistic. Put another way, would you want someone who had just learned to drive teaching a Driver’s Education course? Teaching Driver’s Education involves a lot more than just being able to operate a motor vehicle.</p>
<p>While I see a lot of benefit to having tech novices learning in proximity to one another so that they are encouraged to ask each other for help, I also feel that being a technology instructor involves much more than just knowing how to be an end-user of the technology. This is especially true when working with people on the other side of the digital divide. Put another way, this is a problem that does not scale. That is, many believe that if there were a way to make a technology instruction website that was somehow self-directed, people could just teach themselves how to use a computer, and then pass on the URL and others would learn. Unfortunately, as I’ve stated before, many people with low technology skills are often facing a myriad of other challenges and one-size-fits-all solutions do not work for them. I’ve seen various things that do work well, or work better than other things, and I’ve compiled a lot of them <a id="p94"></a></p>
<p>together here with links, examples, testimonials, and additional reading at the end of this book.</p>
<p>I hope that the extensive information presented and explicated here helps to bridge some of this knowledge gap for potential educators and get this information to the people who really need it.</p>
<h3 id="ch7_1">Library Policies</h3>
<p>The library has a mission to offer access to information. We’ve moved to a world where a lot of that information is available electronically. Libraries need to be clear how providing access to the internet serves the library mission. This means not only having a clear technology mission at a library level, but making sure that staff understand the library’s role in providing publicly accessible technology. Front line staff then can pass this message on to patrons. This is not to say that the library must be a static entity with regards to their public access offerings, just that the world of computer and internet access is vast and having a clear sense of the library’s specific purpose can make everyone more secure that they will know when it’s being done right and when the situation could use improvements.</p>
<p>So, the easiest way to start this process right is to have policies.</p>
<p>If you have policies, now is the time to examine them. If you do not have policies, consider this an incentive to get them. Almost all libraries that I have been to have policies about materials, library space usage, and policies about what to do if there’s trouble (ranging from natural disasters to unruly patrons) in addition to the usual personnel policies and meeting room policies. There is also usually a set of technology policies that a library should have in place to ensure that staff and patrons understand the library’s technology environment. The good news about a set of technology policies is that they can be used as a positive marketing tool for the library’s technology offerings, as well as a more dry “this is what we offer, this is what we don’t offer” statement of facts.</p>
<p>If written well and enforced consistently and fairly, the library’s technology policies can support a positive and engaging technology atmosphere that is welcoming to both experienced and novice users.</p>
<p>The Policy Gamut It’s important that you make sure that users are aware of your policies in a contextually appropriate way. While each library will <a id="p95"></a> have some specific circumstances that are built into their policies, generally speaking many policies are fairly cookie-cutter. Policies need to be appropriate to the library, reflective of the library’s mission and above all, plainly stated and generally linguistically accessible. Let me restate, because this part is important: if patrons agree to your policy but do not understand your policy, that’s not really having a policy. The fact that other people do this does not make it okay.</p>
<p>Let’s be honest, for the most part you do not have policies to protect you if you are involved in a complicated legal battle. In most cases, you have policies so that patrons and library management and library staff will have a shared set of expectations about how the library technology is supposed to be managed and used. For policies that do actually involve legal situations—filtering policies if you are covered by CIPA, to name one example—I strongly suggest that you have legal counsel assist you with verbiage. For the rest, just get started, if you don’t already have them. It’s better to have a so-so policy than have no policy at all.</p>
<p>In most cases your library is not starting from scratch. You have established patterns of technology use and you may have policies in place for the systems that you have. I’ll outline a short list of policies that the library should have, with some guidelines for each one. Note that not all of these policies are patron-facing.</p>
<p>It’s a good idea to have staff internet use policies and guidelines as well, if only to satisfy your board and/or human resources.</p>
<p>I tend towards the permissive end of most usage policies so I won’t tell you what your policies should say, but rather what areas they should generally cover and maybe what questions they should be asking. For a small library some of these policies may be grouped together. No matter what your library does, these policies should be part of any technology class, even if just given out as handouts.</p>
<p>Remember that your policy is not an end user license agreement (EULA) and it is not really supposed to substitute for a legal contract, so keep the language understandable and the tone-friendly. Also, keep track of the places your policy is located, so that if you have a printed internet use policy and a policy listed on your website, both of them are updated when changes are made. Having a revision date on an internet use policy may seem like a silly addition, but it can be very useful in figuring out if the policy you are looking at is the most recent version.</p>
<p><a id="p96"></a></p>
<p>Computer Use Policy Many libraries have this policy and the internet use policy wrapped together since nearly all libraries offer computers with internet access. However, it’s possible that your library has standalone PCs that are available for people to word process or play games without getting online. If this is the case, it’s still important to have a policy to indicate acceptable uses and the level of support and maintenance that the PCs receive. A basic computer use policy usually explains what the PCs are available for, how patrons need to save their work (On to portable media? Does the library provide it?) and what the time and space limitations are (Can people share a PC? Can people bring in their coffee?). The largest concern for non-internet PCs appears to be space. Some libraries offer laptop loan-ing programs in lieu of workstation-type PCs.</p>
<p>Internet Use Policy Most libraries with public access to the internet have some sort of policy, but it’s always a good idea to look at it with a fresh pair of eyes and make sure that the policy is keeping in line with your patrons’ usage and staff’s expectations and abilities to monitor and moderate PAC uses. Even in the most smoothly running technology systems, policies can use some adjustment and possibly mid-course corrections, so be sure whatever your policies are, they are revisited on a regular basis, even if this happens infrequently. A good policy contains a few sections that can be elaborated on as necessary for the library. Here’s an outline in no particular order: </p><ol>
<li> The library’s mission </li>
<li> The library’s policy on internet use, short form </li>
<li> Elaboration on the policy (use cases, interpretations, specif-ics, etc.) </li>
<li> Patrons’ rights and responsibilities (what is okay, what is not okay, what happens if they break the rules) </li>
<li> The library’s rights and responsibilities (what we try to offer, what we guarantee) </li>
<li> Special notes about
<ul>
<li>minors/parents </li>
<li>filtering/censorship </li>
<li>how and when the policy gets changed <a id="p97"></a></li>
</ul> </li>
<li> Places to go or people to talk to for more information or questions or complaints or a printable/web version if one is desired </li>
<li> Other related policies as appropriate </li>
</ol>
Wireless Policy If your library offers wireless to the public, there is a good chance that you already have a wireless policy. Is this policy made available to patrons before they log on to your wireless? Do you have what is known as a “captive portal” where users have to click-through a policy page before actually getting online? This is usually the easiest way to get users to affirmatively acknowledge your wireless policies. Larger libraries such as Boston Public Library use this method to allow patrons to choose whether they would like their internet access filtered or unfiltered. When a patron first connects to the BPL’s wireless network, they arrive at a page that asks them if they want filtered access, which is available to anyone, or unfiltered access which is available to authenticated adult card holders. This sort of thing can be set up using freely available software and is worth building in to any library system that offers free wireless.<p></p>
<p>While wireless seems like it might be a bit high tech for novice users, many new laptop owners find wireless internet to be one of the first things they wind up using on their computer. Here are some questions your library should consider with your wireless policy:
</p><ul>
<li>Is the wireless accessible from inside and outside the building?</li>
<li>Is the wireless available 24/7?</li>
<li>Is the wireless access filtered or unfiltered?</li>
<li>If filtered is there a mechanism for a patron to get unfiltered access if they ask for it?</li>
<li>Is the wireless access limited in any way (i.e., bandwidth caps or downloading caps)?</li>
</ul><p></p>
<p>Social Software Policy If the library is active in social networking sites, it may be making contacts and connections with patrons and non-patrons via other websites not owned by or controlled by the library.</p>
<p>It’s worthwhile delineating how the library will be using these tools and what constitutes appropriate use of these sites by staff members <a id="p98"></a></p>
<p>acting on the library’s behalf. One of the more difficult things with libraries using social software is that often there’s a blurring of the personal/professional lines; it’s important to indicate the extent to which the library’s other policies do or do not apply to its interactions on social media sites. For example, if your library has a Facebook page, it may be impossible to keep the names of the library’s fans private. And if patrons use the library’s Facebook page to ask reference questions, those questions may be much more public than patrons’ questions asked at the library.</p>
<p>Savvy patrons will likely understand this, but for novice users who are just learning about social software, the library’s use of these sites may indicate to them that there is some sort of seal of approval or extension of trust that applies to these sites. Be as clear as you can be what the level of your library’s interaction is on these sites, and what level of control it has over patron data on these sites. Here are a few questions you can ask or answer:
</p><ul>
<li>Which social software sites does the library use in an official capacity?</li>
<li>What is the library’s policy concerning interactions with patrons on these sites?</li>
<li>What does the library share on these sites?</li>
<li>Does the library have a policy about who they “friend” on these sites?</li>
</ul><p></p>
<p>Privacy Policy Your library probably already has a privacy policy that concerns the sharing of patron information, reading records and other similar information. In the digital age, this should be expanded to include information about patrons’ internet usage and trackable data from the public access computers, if they use them. Generally speaking, it’s good computer hygiene to make sure that personally identifying information is wiped from computers on a regular basis in any case (browsers should keep no passwords, history files, cookies, or download histories). Sometimes, people don’t know all the places where patron data can hide in a large and complex system.</p>
<p>We’re used to the idea of patron privacy when it comes to personal information and transactional information (i.e., who checked out what), but we’re less clear on the line when it comes to things like behavioral data, who was on our website when, or who left a <a id="p99"></a> comment on our blog from what IP address. As people interact with the library digitally, they leave a digital trail that should be paid attention to and considered when thinking about patron privacy. While it may not be something that is taken into account in privacy legislation, it’s definitely information about our patrons, people whose privacy we claim to uphold and protect.</p>
<p>Consider doing a “privacy audit” to make sure staff are aware of all the ways in which patron data is handled and retained.</p>
<p>Michael Matis from SUNY Albany has written about privacy audits<a href="#p289">1 </a>and describes them this way: A privacy audit is a systematic review of the data-collection practices of an organization to determine if the practices are consistent with the privacy policies of the organization. It helps to ascertain what the life-cycle of patron data should be, i.e., how data with PII about patrons is collected, how it is used, how long it is stored, and when it should be deleted.</p>
<p>A privacy audit does not mandate the disposal of records. . . . It is an opportunity for librarians to discuss the role of data in the library.</p>
<p>Thinking about functions like email or chat reference, or patron interactions at outreach activities, or computer sign-up lists and what happens to the patron data after it has served its purpose are worthwhile exercises for a library. In many cases, the patrons may not even know or care that their personal data exists on a sign-up list somewhere in a drawer, but if the library has policies about retaining patron data, this should apply to all data, not just patrons’ reading lists. Once the library completes an audit, there should be some sort of policy-style document that comes out of it that explains the library’s legal and ethical commitments to patron privacy.</p>
<p>Staff Internet Use Policy Many libraries that have internet use policies for patrons do not have a similar policy for staff. While I’m personally of the opinion that it’s useful for library workers to have as unfettered access to the internet as possible, limits may have to be placed in the interests of sharing a community resource. At the very least, it’s good to make sure that all staff are on the same page in terms of what amounts of internet use are acceptable in the workplace and what sorts of behavior would possibly pose a problem. As I’ve mentioned before, I think <a id="p100"></a></p>
<p>it’s worthwhile for all staff to have their own logins to shared computers and to not monitor staff internet usage, but having a policy just to outline the outer limits of acceptable behavior can be good groundwork for dealing with potential problem areas.</p>
<p>Policy on Technology Donations In brief, donated technology is almost always more trouble than it is worth. If your library is in a region where people may have cast-off computers and other gadgetry, it may be appealing to try to cut some corners by reusing others’ machines. Frequently, however, the library lacks the resources or staffing to accurately assess whether donated technology fits into the library’s overall tech plan, or whether the material is in good working order. The library should have a policy in place for what donations they will accept and under what terms. My rule of thumb at the libraries that I work for is more or less like this: </p><ul>
<li>Monitors—Don’t accept any monitor that is older than a few years. Don’t accept any non-flat-screen monitors.</li>
<li>Computers—Don’t accept any computers that are older than the ones the library currently has. Don’t accept computers without cables.</li>
<li>Laptops—can sometimes be useful as additional wifi access points in the library. If a laptop is in good working order and has functional wireless, I will often take these as they’re easy to store and can be used by patrons if the public access computers are full.</li>
<li>Peripherals such as scanners and extra drives—rarely worth the trouble unless the library has a digitization project going that is in need of scanners.</li>
<li>USB drives—always useful for patrons who may need a last-minute way to save work. Make sure patrons erase them before donating them to the library.</li>
<li>Software—rarely useful though possibly okay for a library book sale.</li>
<li>Computer books—treat as you would treat any other book donations.</li>
</ul><p></p>
<p>Lastly, if your library has donated technology sitting in a storeroom somewhere, get rid of it. Take it to an approved disposal center or donate it to a local computer rehab place. Often having <a id="p101"></a> “backup” computers in closets or basements can give us a bad estimation of what our tech situation really is. My best advice is to clean house.</p>
<h3 id="ch7_2">Leading versus Following—Tech Assessments</h3>
<p>One of the larger divides that isn’t mentioned much in the library literature is whether the library is dealing with a community that is generally tech savvy with some users who are not, or whether the library’s community is generally not tech savvy. I see this in my work often represented as a rural/urban divide, but it isn’t always.</p>
<p>Sometimes it can be very dependent on just a few people in the community, particularly the librarian, setting the tone. So, while it may go without saying that every community will have some very savvy and some non-savvy users, having a realistic assessment of the general tech profile of the community relative to the library is important.</p>
<p>Because if the library is an island of tech knowledge in a sea of tech ignorance, it needs to develop services and programs that position itself appropriately. The same is true for a library that may be trying to keep up with its community’s tech needs.</p>
<p>I call this the “Tech Leader versus Tech Follower” problem. Is your library leading the community in tech adoption and interaction, or following the path the community has already set? Your library may be in a position where it needs to keep up with the tech desires of its community. We see this scenario played out over and over again by tech boosters, the “Hey, if your library isn’t offering video on demand, it’s going to fall behind the curve and become less relevant to its patrons!” I’d like to go on the record as saying that I personally don’t feel that this is true, though I’d definitely consider non-anecdotal evidence that I am mistaken about this. I call these libraries the Tech Followers; they are providing technological services primarily in response to patron demand. This can sometimes mean letting the patrons choose what services are implemented.</p>
<p>Frequently, we see this in terms of low-level policy issues as well as larger programming decisions. I’m thinking of examples like: </p><ul>
<li>allowing patrons to use USB drives to move documents back and forth </li>
<li>allowing pop-ups or the ability to enable pop-ups so that patrons can print boarding passes </li>
<li>offering firefox as a web browser option <a id="p102"></a></li>
</ul><p></p>
<p>Alternately, we have libraries whose patron base isn’t requesting tech services and the staff may not be tech-savvy themselves.</p>
<p>They often decide to offer tech services based on a few different things: </p><ul>
<li>offering what their consortia or state offers or requires </li>
<li>offering what the library staff are personally using or are comfortable with </li>
<li>offering services that they perceive of as baseline-normal even if they may not be normative in the library’s geographical location </li></ul>
In these cases, the libraries are the Tech Leaders in their communities, driving technological adoption and awareness. We see this a lot at my location in Vermont. We have databases available at a state level through the Vermont Online Library program <a href="http://www.vtonlinelib.org/"><http://www.vtonlinelib.org/> </a>and many libraries have signed up for the Listen Up!<p></p>
<p>Vermont program <a href="http://listenupvermont.org"><http://listenupvermont.org>, </a>which provides digital audiobooks to libraries via OverDrive. In many cases, we’re seeing patrons who are brand-new to the whole idea of digital media, purchasing MP3 players, and learning to download MP3 books simply because we’ve made the program available and appealing to them.</p>
<p>Both of these situations, the Tech Leader and the Tech Follower, are fine, but it’s important to be aware of what sort of library you are.</p>
<p>The library’s relationship to its patron base is slightly different depending on whether your average patron is more tech savvy or less savvy than the library environment generally.</p>
<p>Community Analysis A part of any real outreach program is doing a community analysis. You figure out what the makeup of your community is and then try to figure out how to provide services to the entire community, not just the people who are already coming to the library.</p>
<p>This is somewhat different than just interacting with the patrons you already have, because often there are people in the community who are not coming to the library for whatever reason; effective outreach programs will often be directed towards engaging and attracting them. In many cases, these community analyses find people from different cultures or non-English language-speakers who do not see the library as having materials for them in the library. In a best-case scenario, your library can begin collection <a id="p103"></a> development in the languages spoken by the community, and hey, you have a bunch of new patrons!</p>
<p>Outreach is a little weird because it often focuses on people who we perceive as needing library services and not necessarily the people who just feel that they have no use for the library. This is important in a tech environment, because we do ourselves a disservice when we assume that people who have computers and broadband at home don’t need the tech services the library has to offer. In fact, I think this is often a sign we need to step up our game and find ways to offer tech services to patrons who may already be set with broadband and computer ownership.</p>
<p>Having technology available that meets your patrons’ needs is an essential part of providing technology to a community. However, if most of your community already has computers and broadband at home, you may need to position yourself differently. The first step is figuring out the tech make-up of your community. This can often be difficult because data such as “Who has broadband?” or “Who has a computer?” is often not available on a town-by-town basis, or it’s data that is owned by the local ISPs who may be loathe to provide it. Widening the scope of the data to a level where this information might be collected, i.e., county or state, might make it worthless as an indicator of your particular community. This is not a solution with an easy answer, but it’s worth trying to look into it so that you know the make-up of your entire community, not just the patrons you see in the library.</p>
<p>The Numbers While I don’t have the answers to these things specifically, here are some metrics below that you can look at, or try to look at, in your community. This is generally not the sort of data that you can find in the U.S. Census, but I’ve included some links in the webliography that give you some good places to get started.</p>
<p></p><ul>
<li>Computer ownership </li>
<li>Computer use at home </li>
<li>Computer use at work </li>
<li>Laptop usage for these same locations </li>
<li>Broadband use at home </li>
<li>Broadband use at work </li>
<li>Broadband availability in the community, i.e., What options are available?<a id="p104"></a></li>
<li>Dial-up use </li>
<li>Cell phone use </li>
<li>Cell phone availability (many rural areas have limited cell phone availability) </li>
<li>Wireless access points and/or internet cafeś </li>
</ul>You can also do a separate survey to see what people are using at the library itself. This is different from a community analysis, but can net useful data. I’ve framed this in terms of questions below that you can ask your patrons. Usability testing and other more qualitative questions will be covered later in the chapter. Obviously, you need to make all survey responses confidential.<p></p>
<ol>
<li>Why did you come to use a library computer today?</li>
<li>Were you able to complete the task you came here to do?</li>
<li>Why or why not?</li>
<li>Which software programs do you use at the library? Are there other programs you feel we should offer?</li>
<li>What are your favorite things about the library’s technology offerings?</li>
<li>What do you like least about the library’s technology offerings?</li>
<li>Have you been to the library’s website?</li>
</ol>
<p>The Library as Tech Follower In this scenario, the library is in a tech savvy community overall. This does not mean that you are not working with people affected by the digital divide, but it means that they may be in more of a minority position relative to their community than in a tech leading community. Your community is likely more affluent and more educated than in a tech leading community. People are more likely to have the option of broadband at home, whether or not they decide to avail themselves of it.</p>
<p>This was a point that was brought up when I gave my South by Southwest talk<a href="#p289">2 </a>with Jenny Lish from New York Public Library.</p>
<p>She works with people who have little or no tech knowledge and yet they are living in places where they could, if they chose (and could afford it) have computers and broadband at home. Where I live, people could have computers at home, but broadband is literally not an option, or the only option is costly satellite. In the areas where broadband is available, it is often low-cost because that seems to be the only way that broadband ISPs can coax users into <a id="p105"></a> adopting it. People in these communities often have multiple ways of accessing the internet for free or for a low cost.</p>
<p>Libraries in tech savvy communities may also find that there is a disconnect between the tech savviness of their patrons and the tech savviness of their employees. This varies from place to place.</p>
<p>However, since tech savvy communities tend to be more affluent communities and since many, if not most, library jobs pay at the low end of the scale for people who are technologically proficient, you may find yourself with a savvy community and a not-so-savvy staff. While this should be addressed with future hires, you have to play the cards that you are dealt and find ways to set expectations for staff interactions with technology and train people up to competencies they may not already have.</p>
<p>It also makes sense to have people from your community, people who are tech savvy, serve as some sort of an advisory group (formal or informal) to help the library determine what they should offer and support technologically. The needs of individual communities vary greatly; and knowing that the community may be technologically advanced still does not necessarily open a clear path of best practices.</p>
<p>Additionally, a tech-savvy patron base may mean a lot of donated labor and materials for various tech projects. If you have patrons who are upgrading their technology frequently, their cast-offs may be better than your stock equipment. As noted previously, it’s important to not just blindly accept technology donations, but having a policy and procedure for what is on your tech wish list and what you do accept can give people a way to assist and possibly, help the library with bottom-line budgeting and tech planning.</p>
<p>Library as Tech Leader In many locations, especially rural and remote locations, the library is the sole public provider of internet access and may be the only place that many people from the community ever go online. This means (more so than in tech following communities) that the setup of the computers and the way the internet is accessed is more likely to be perceived as “normal” because people have no other baseline from which to assess their technological landscape.</p>
<p>This also means that the decisions that the library makes regarding technology are less likely to be challenged by the patron base, who may not know there’s another way to interact with technology.</p>
<p><a id="p106"></a></p>
<p>In this situation, we’re in a position where we’re actually “setting the tone” for people’s attitudes about technology, even though we may not be aware of it. Tech novices will often look to people in positions of authority or community reputation to gauge their emotional reaction to situations that they’re not sure how to take. So, if the librarian is frequently flustered and flummoxed by technology, and if she’s the only person they see who is interacting with it, they’ll think that this is a normative reaction. A lot rests on what the patrons perceive as attitude. Even library staff who may not be very tech experienced can set a “you can do it” tone, and present computers that are functional, clean, and properly configured.</p>
<p>The important thing is not to overwhelm staff or patrons with too much technology that is poorly understood, but rather to accept that technology is going to be part of the library’s mission moving forward and that everyone has a lot to learn. I’ve seen library projects, such as small-scale digitization programs or oral history recordings, really go a long way towards easing people into interacting with various sorts of tech machinery that they might not otherwise think they were capable of. Obviously, you don’t want to toss everyone into the deep end of the pool with this stuff, but you can look at small-scale projects and online ventures as a way of educating people about the things people can do online and make it seem less like something that only other people are doing. For example, in response to a patron’s question, you can say “What’s Twitter? Let me show you the library’s Twitter account. . . . ”</p>
<p>What Libraries Offer Technological offerings aren’t uniform across libraries in the United States. While people have a general idea that you can get internet or wireless internet access at a library, many don’t understand that the hyper-local aspect of libraries means that services frequently vary from town to town, to say nothing of state-to-state variations. This book assumes that you work in a library that has broadband access to the internet and at least one public access computer, but it’s possible that even that isn’t the case. I’d just like to outline a normative approach to library technology offerings and toss in a few statistics from the various studies that I’ve read.</p>
<p>Internet access at libraries is a huge deal. According to the report Opportunity for All: How the American Public Benefits from Internet Access at U.S. Libraries, <a href="#p289">3 </a>a report conducted by the University of <a id="p107"></a> Washington Information School and funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS), one-third of the U.S. population over the age of 14 used library computers to get online. This represents nearly half of all public library visits. The most revealing statistic in all of this is that three-quarters of these people also had internet access elsewhere.</p>
<p>This survey is interesting, but also needs to be properly contex-tualized. It contains the result of a phone survey of library users and non-users, a web based survey of only library users, and case studies at four U.S. libraries, none of which had a service population of fewer than 30,000 people despite the fact that over 75% of all public libraries have service populations of fewer than 25,000. So, I have mixed feelings about it in a general sense, but I think it’s useful for some of the statistics. Likewise, the most recent as of this writing IMLS Public Library Survey <a href="http://harvester.census.gov/imls/publib.asp"><http://harvester.census.gov/imls/publib.asp> </a>is a little out of date (data from 2007, published in mid-2009), but gives us a good idea of what libraries actually have.</p>
<p>The IMLS report outlines the average number of public-use internet computers per building and per 5,000 population (defined as living in the legal service area of the library). The state with the highest number of public access computers per capita is Vermont with 7.2 PACs for every 5,000 users. Amusingly, Vermont is also nearly at the bottom of the list of average number of computers per building with 4.7 which is not that surprising for a rural state with many small libraries and no large libraries. The thing to keep an eye on is the averages. The average number of PACs per building in the U.S. is 12.5 with the range going from a high of 24.36 in Florida to a low of 4.49 in New Hampshire. The average number of PACs per 5,000 population is 3.55 with a range from Vermont’s high of 7.2 to Nevada’s low of 1.92 (with Hawaii just one-hundredth of a computer higher). How does your library compare to this or to other libraries in your state?</p>
<p>There’s a little more data on electronic offerings in this survey, but not things that I’d be curious about—such as what programs library computers run, or whether the library’s website offers chat reference—and more of just what sort of digital offerings the libraries have. In fact, even though the average number of “Electronic Books” for all libraries nationwide is a nice big-number sounding 1,428.1, the median number of electronic books among public libraries in the United States is zero. The same is true for “Current Electronic Serial Subscriptions” where the average is 17 and the median <a id="p108"></a></p>
<p>is zero. The average number of serials subscriptions in libraries with populations of over one million in their legal service area is, however, 1512.2. So, I’m not sure what we can take away from those numbers.</p>
<p>ALA is the best go-to reference for this sort of information, even though their advocacy angle is obvious, and expected. Their State of America’s Libraries<a href="#p289">4 </a>reports, published in 2009 and 2010 are great capsule looks at what libraries are doing, alongside the data to back up these evaluations. In terms of more normative data about what people are going to their libraries for and what they are getting, here are some more interesting statistics from that report: </p><ul>
<li>Eighty-two percent of public libraries offer wireless access </li>
<li>Thirty-five percent of libraries offer technology training classes (urban: 52.5%, rural: 24%) </li>
<li>fifty-three percent provide point-of-use assistance, i.e., helping people use computers in the library one-on-one </li>
<li>Two-thirds of public libraries help patrons complete online job applications </li>
<li>Seventy-nine percent of public libraries helped patrons apply for or access e-government services (up 23% from last year)</li>
<li>Twenty percent of libraries report partnering with other agencies to provide e-government services </li>
</ul>
This ALA report also has some of the social statistics that I’d been hoping the IMLS report would have contained, including data on what virtual reference services a library provides—62% offer email reference, 31% offer chat reference, and 19.5% offer IM reference. I’m curious about these statistics since I’m not certain what differentiates chat and IM reference, but I’m pleased to see that someone is collecting data for questions such as “Does your library have a web page?” and “Does your library filter its internet access?” More in-depth looks at these statistics are available via PLA’s Public Library Data Service report available for purchase, but ALA has reprinted some of the statistics in their report.<p></p>
<p>It’s not necessary to “keep up with the Joneses” in a general sense, but it’s useful and important to know what libraries in your general region are providing as well as what libraries are providing nationwide. I expect ALA’s ongoing State of America’s Libraries reports to have more information on social tools in the coming <a id="p109"></a> years, but even now you can take a look at this report and the others I mentioned and draw some normative conclusions. Some libraries do technology training while others don’t. There’s a 50/50 chance that a patron in an urban public library will be able to take a technology training class, or be able to have a staff person help them when they are using a computer. This number shifts slightly (and confusingly) when people are using library computers in order to access e-government services. So, while wireless internet offerings are fairly widespread at this point, the same is not true for tech instruction.</p>
<p>Is this an unmet need in your community?</p>
<h2 id="ch8_0"><a id="p110"></a><span class="chapnum">4</span> Planning for Pedagogy</h2>
<p>We need to make sure new graduates comprehend the importance of providing service and access to all populations: techno-novices, the techno-elite, everyone in between, various age groups, the haves, the have-nots and everyone in between. The library should be first and foremost in the community a leveler.</p>
<p>There all are welcome and access is open and free. The playing field for creativity, exploration and learning should be flat.</p>
<p>—Michael Stephens, Assistant Professor, GSLIS, Dominican University As librarians who are used to having the library’s resources at our disposal, we can sometimes forget that we have many tools to assist patrons with technology besides the technology itself. The most important thing on this list I think is clout. People look to us as experts, rightly or wrongly, about the things within our walls. So the things we tell people about technology are taken seriously and given attention. This is generally true provided that the information that we’re giving out passes the “reality check” steps and people find the information we give them to be basically credible and useful to them.</p>
<p>This issue of having “cred” on tech topics is one of the main reasons that, while I personally have very strong opinions about certain technology topics, I try to turn off the evangelism when <a id="p111"></a> I’m trying to explain things. If people want my personal opinion, and they often do, they will ask for it. Otherwise, I need to put my librarian hat on and try to give them information and access to resources that will solve their problems, not recruit another person for my sick-of-popups army.</p>
<h3 id="ch8_1">Our Toolbox</h3>
<p>This section is a non-tech list of some of the resources we have that may be more powerful than we think when assisting tech novices. One of the things about people who don’t use technology is that you can’t actually reach them effectively using technology.</p>
<p>This may sound like common sense, but I don’t think many of us totally take it to heart. If you’re recruiting for a basic technology class, putting a link on your website may not be reaching the people you’re looking for. Obviously a link on the website is still quite worthwhile, since people can tell other people, it’s good for outreach and as a reference point; but if you want to address your offline patrons, you need to go offline to reach them.</p>
<p>Bibliographies and Booklists A good booklist or bibliography can serve a useful function.</p>
<p>Similar to a great book display, it can highlight parts of the collection that you feel could use some more attention. For every tech class that I teach, I have a short bookmark-sized booklist to hand out to people on their way out. This shows two things:
</p><ol>
<li>That the library is still committed to print-based resources on technology topics (sometimes a source of stress or concern for offline patrons).</li>
<li>That the library is a go-to place for tech information in multiple formats.</li>
</ol>
<p></p>
<p>Sometimes, this is also a good professional exercise because maybe the library doesn’t have as much information on tech topics as it could. You’ll find some suggestions in the Bibliography section at the end of this book, but yes, this can be a difficult area to do collection development for. The reason this is true is because as technology becomes more ubiquitous and the cost for delivering content in print expands, many content providers turn to the web for lower-cost publishing. This, in turn, means fewer print resources available for <a id="p112"></a><img class="calibre2" src="index-112_1.jpg"/></p>
<p>Page ten of the Mousercise tutorial.</p>
<p>people who need them the most, people who can’t make good use of web-based content formats, yet.</p>
<p>So, in addition to the bibliography suggestion, you’ll also find suggested links to a few carefully selected skill-building websites or even printouts of particularly useful tutorials that people could read along with. When someone comes into my drop-in time for the first time, and if they can’t use a mouse, the first thing we do is sit them down at a computer, give them a quick “this is what the buttons do” pep talk and start them clicking away through the Mousercise tutorial created by the Palm Beach County Library.</p>
<p>The tutorial is a very simple series of steps each of which involves clicking somewhere on the page which reveals the next page. Students can usually proceed through it in a self-directed fashion and at the end there are some skill-building games for further practice. It’s straightforward and no-nonsense, takes about twenty minutes, and seems to be fairly simple to understand for most people. It’s also a decent litmus test to see how students do in a self-directed learning environment. Some people enjoy this sort of thing, other people feel like you’ve tossed them into the deep end of the pool without a life preserver. Gauging people’s reactions will give you a good idea how to move forward.</p>
<p>Once people know the library website can be a go-to place for well-selected tutorials and skill-building resources, perhaps they’ll click around and see that the web has other interesting things to offer?</p>
<p><a id="p113"></a> Skills Checklists Another print resource is the skills checklist. Patrons may often not know what they don’t know. If you have a ready set of handouts that give them basic information, they may be able to, in conjunction with that, tell you what they most need to learn. I often get people in my drop-in time saying “Well, I just need to learn about computers.” when in fact, what they’d like to do is look something up online, which requires certain computer skills and not others. Having checklists of skill sets can help people not just self-evaluate to see what sort of class they might fit into, but also give them an idea of what there is to learn generally.</p>
<p>Try giving a patron a list like the one on the next page and let them know that it’s fine if they don’t know things on the list, but we’d like to make sure we have as accurate an idea of their abilities as possible.</p>
<p>You can add to or subtract from this list based on the offerings in your classes or what you have available in your library, but the general idea is using print resources in order to gauge a good starting point for introducing a novice user to technology resources.</p>
<p>Partway Technology and Attitude This could, I suppose, also be known as “gateway technology,” but not everyone finds gateway drug jokes funny. As most people who use technology regularly know, the idea of “What is and is not technology?” is on a bit of a continuum. That is, most people realize that a computer is a piece of technology, but what about an iPod? A VCR? A CD? How about a microfilm reader? Letting people know, slowly and politely, that they’re already using technology in small ways and that in fact the library is full of it, may ease what people perceive as the huge leap from where they are to where they’re going.</p>
<p>I try to get this across in other ways as well. Patrons have many competencies and having competency with a computer is just one other skill to learn. It’s useful for solving problems, staying in touch or maybe for entertainment, but it’s not an end-all or be-all on its own. I’ve had students tell me frequently that they’re “stupid” because they have difficulty remembering a complicated set of steps.</p>
<p>I assure them that they’re not stupid and that they have many skills that someone who is computer-smart may not have, and sometimes it’s a good excuse to take a break and talk about all the things that <a id="p114"></a>I Know How to Basics</p>
<p>& turn a computer on & label the individual parts of a computer & start a program on the computer & use a mouse to point and click & use a mouse to drag and drop & right click to open a context menu Internet & open a web browser & go to a website of my choice & use a search engine & send and receive email files and Folders & open a file & save a file & rename a file & save a file to a USB drive Word Processing & start a new line & change the font size & print preview & center a line of text Spreadsheets & type a number into a cell & change the number formatting in the cell & change the text formatting in the cell & use a formula to do a calculation Photos</p>
<p>& get photos off my camera & rotate a photo & crop a photo & burn a photo to CD</p>
<p>Questions & use a help file & change my preferences & contact tech support & CTRL-ALT-DEL <a id="p115"></a> they can do. Living in a rural area, I’m constantly amazed and impressed by the skills and abilities of the people who come into my classes feeling stupid. Part of being an effective instructor is about putting technology use into perspective for people and helping them find a place for it in their own lives as something other than an insurmountable obstacle.</p>
<p>Setting Standards Although this is discussed in more detail in the Maintenance and Ergonomics section, it bears noting here that one of the things that we provide for novice technology users is an idea of how computers can work, that may be different from their experiences with computers elsewhere. Many people come to the library after their experiences at work or school or home have frustrated them, and made them skeptical about technology. Coming to the library where they can use a computer free of viruses and pop-ups and visual clutter (They can do this at your library, right?), where they can sit in a decently comfortable chair and have the keyboard and mouse be accessible and reachable by them, with a monitor that is not in the direct sunlight and not covered in cat hair can make people understand that there are ways to configure and use technology so it is not a daily maddening struggle.</p>
<p>Add to this description our general expectations of “Yes, this is something you can do. People do this sort of thing all the time.</p>
<p>Let me show you how to do this.” and people who might otherwise be digitally distant or digitally uncomfortable can become digital hopefuls.</p>
<p>The Cheeseburger in the Library I have a generalized notion that I call the “cheeseburger in the library” problem. As libraries have expanded to fill more niches that have been created by the dwindling amount of public space in this country, there’s a sense in which we’ve undergone mission creep. Please note that I am fully in favor of libraries doing pretty much anything that is positively supporting their missions and their communities’ access to information. That said, sometimes the expanding roles don’t come with clear guidelines. So when you add a cafe´ to your library, what does that do to the existing food policy? When you have gaming night at your library, do you <a id="p116"></a></p>
<p>have to adjust the children’s PC filters to allow games during the daytime? And, to my original point, if people want the library to be a place where they can eat cheeseburgers and watch television, is it the library’s role to meet those expectations?</p>
<p>As usual, I have more questions than answers and my usual response is “That depends.” However, just because something is desired by the community does not mean it is the library’s job to provide it. We must be mindful of our mission, our limitations, and the community context in which we operate. Public computing offerings have typically had more demand than supply. Not a bad problem to have, but it means that we need to try to be equitable about providing access to this scarce resource. Having sensible policies that you can fairly enforce is a good start and can lead to less trouble down the line when disputes enter the picture.</p>
<p>The Library’s Computer Is My Computer One of the more important things to keep in mind about providing public computing access for novice technology users is that while you may understand that the library computers have their own quirks and foibles, someone without access to other computers does not. If your library computers have a complicated login procedure, or if they have a restrictive firewall or filter, or if you can’t plug in USB drives, a novice user will think this is how all computers work. Keep this in mind when deciding how to configure public access to technology at your library. Every step the library takes that makes the computers not work like a normal computer will be skewing the novice user ’s ideas about computing generally. And while there is no normal or average computing environment per se, we should strive for keeping people’s technology experiences as hassle-free as possible (which I guess in some sense is abnormal for many of us), if we want to help people not only use the technology but fold it into their lives.</p>
<p>This involves, and yes this is a recurring theme, setting standards of what you think a library computer should be able to do, and letting people know this. This may also involve accepting feedback that your ideas are incorrect, outdated or confusing, and working this feedback into a new set of standards.</p>
<p>So think of this as a start to a conversation. I always liked how my health insurance company gave me not just a list of responsibilities when I became a customer, but also a set of rights. While I <a id="p117"></a> think you have to be careful with words like “rights,” it was nice to know that my health insurance company felt that I had a right to a second opinion, for example. This indicated not just the legal issues involved concerning what they’d pay for, but also their general attitude towards my health care. I’ll talk more about what a list of specifics might look like in the next section.</p>
<p>Think of these policies both in terms of responsibilities—how you require technology users to act and what your expectations are—but also rights—what offerings you expect to have and what assistance you will provide. In the “helpful but not necessary” category try to provide options for people when the library’s offerings couldn’t meet their needs. One library I worked at had 45-minute time limits at the computers for patrons, and these were pretty strictly enforced because we were a busy library. This was not enough for some patrons and while we’d offer some workarounds such as giving them more time if the library was less crowded, we also gave them a list of other places with public internet access where they could have more time on a public computer. This was in keeping with our other library goals of providing access to resources and it seemed to be an appreciated service.</p>
<p>A Cautionary Tale I once worked at a library that had policies about email access on public access computers. They had few computers and high demand, and wanted to make sure people were using the computers for library-related tasks, mostly. So we had about twelve public access computers.</p>
<p>Some were catalog-only, some were patron-only (i.e., you had to be a library patron with an active card to use them) and some were available to everyone who came to the library. Slightly complicated policies, but manageable.</p>
<p>However, the library board had decided, before I began working there, that they wanted to make email access at the library a perk for card-holding patrons. The library served a lot of tourists and seasonal workers and the board wanted to try to “convert” some of those library visitors into patrons with library cards. The idea was that people would see email access as valuable enough so they would pay a fee to obtain a card, thus raising money for the library. So, the patron PCs had email access. The non-patron PCs were divided into two categories: one quick-check computer with email access but a shorter time <a id="p118"></a>limit, and three PCs with internet access but no email. When I say “no email,” what I mean is that our systems librarian blocked email access on those PCs by blocking the URLs of the most popular email clients. This library was near a popular vacation area and this system was complicated to explain, difficult to administer, and generated a lot of ill will not just among library users, but among the reference staff who were also in charge of granting PC access. This was in 2005</p>
<p>and we didn’t have automated sign-ups yet.</p>
<p>When someone came to the reference desk to use a PC, we had to ask them a series of questions, the worst of which was “Do you want to use the internet or do you want to check email?” This was a confusing question for the tech-savvy as well as the tech novices and made me feel ridiculous asking it. We did away with the system over the next two years. I’d like to say I had something to do with it, but I’m not sure that I did. The reason that I bring it up now, five years later, is because I think sometimes the library winds up having totally reasonable positions they are trying to advance (in this case “Encourage people to get library cards by making the PC offerings for card holders more attractive than those for non-card holders”), by using technological means in ways that break technology. While we technically could filter all known webmail URLs, this resulted in PCs that could only access some of the internet, a de facto filtering system that wasn’t really above board, and a lot of confused patrons and staff. Additionally, it meant that staff had to be on the lookout for people accessing webmail on the non-patron PCs and give the webmail URL to the systems librarian. A webmail address that might work for a patron one week would be blocked the next week.</p>
<p>For board members or staff who are not tech savvy themselves, this whole path is fraught with pitfalls. The board members weren’t really aware that they were creating internet options that were confusing and counterintuitive, they just wanted to find creative ways to solve revenue problems. The systems librarian was tasked with solving the email “problem” without having input into the decision-making process. And the staff had to make the best of a bad situation and explain this system to patrons. Novice users felt like “internet” and “email” were separate things a computer could do and our policies seemed to confirm this. This made people’s technological understanding worse, not better. So, think of policies as one way to not just regulate technology use, but also to publicize it. The more sensible your policies are, the more users can take what they learned in the library’s computing environment and bring it with them into the larger world.</p>
<h3 id="ch8_2"><a id="p119"></a> Setting Up the Classroom</h3>
<p>Not everything we do is formalized instruction. It’s a good idea to have delineations between the different levels of tech services we offer to patrons. Some things we need to offer to all patrons while some more specialized offerings make sense to provide in a classroom setting. My general approach is to try to have the classroom be a place where students can succeed at the things they attempt, if not the first time, then at least before they walk out the door. Here are some suggestions and tips for trying to make the classroom a place where students can have a good user experience:
</p><ol>
<li> <p>Have example documents for students to work on.</p><p>Novice users are often slow typists. If I need to teach people to format a document, waiting for them to type it is going to use up valuable class time. Have a sample document ready (I often take something from the Internet Archive that is freely available to use, Gift of the Magi for instance.) so that students can spend time actually working on a document, not creating it. Have this document already on the hard drive for them to open, edit, and save.</p></li>
<li><p>Have a plan for saving work.</p><p>Lately, we’ve been giving students small USB drives to take work home with them because learning how to name, save, and transfer documents is useful. In any case, make sure you have a plan for students to keep their document, even if they won’t need it later. Options are saving to a local My Documents folder, saving to a USB drive, burning to CD, saving to a floppy, or emailing the document to themselves.</p><p>Each option has pluses and minuses. figure out which you’d like to do before you get to the end of class.</p></li>
<li><p>Be prepared to adjust.</p><p>You might have a whole class scheduled on clip art and formatting and then you figure out that a few of your students don’t know how to click-drag. Make sure you have some alternative plans in case students are generally faster or slower than you were anticipating. When you’re teaching a small class, a few slow students can really alter the pace you set. Along with this, feel free to set expectations and pre-requisites for the classes so that one student who can’t do a basic task doesn’t keep the whole class at their level.<a id="p120"></a></p></li>
<li><p>Repeat, repeat, repeat.</p><p>Weekly classes can be tough because adult students have lives and forget a lot in-between classes. Each class that I teach starts with a quick vocabulary lesson, which is also a good time to check how much from the last class sunk in. We talk about the words we learned last week, talk about what we’re going to do in today’s class, and spend a little bit of time wrapping up at the end of each class with a review. I have handouts that not only cover what we’ll be doing, but also have illustrations sometimes of what exactly I’m talking about: “This is a bulleted list,” “This is a numbered list,” <i class="calibre3">etc.</i></p></li>
<li><p>Specialize.</p><p>MS Word and Excel have multiple ways of doing the same, or similar, things. Unlike your automobile or other physical machine where only one thing turns on the headlights, there are a lot of ways to do each thing with these programs. So, for example you can print a document by going to the file menu and selecting Print, typing Control or Option P, or clicking the Print button on the toolbar (which is more of a quick print, really). Sometimes people have taken classes before that stressed one type of action over another. So people learned the menus, but not the key commands. I usually talk about the options and then use one and stick to one. Be consistent. If you’re teaching the toolbar buttons for Save and Print, also teach them the toolbar buttons for Copy and Paste. And know your audience. If students are finding mouse control challenging, then key commands may be better for them in the long run.</p></li>
<li><p>Have a final exam.</p><p>I don’t mean for this to be something scary, but it can be tough in a class to figure out if students on their own can actually do the work. We want them to do well and they want to do well so it’s easy to see successes in areas that may not be quite so far along. For both my Word and my Excel classes, I have sort of a documentas-final that I give to students. The Excel document is a five-page worksheet and each page of the worksheet has a small set of tasks to do on it, ranging from formatting text to adding clip art to doing simple calculations. The Word document is a lot of text that gives the students problems to solve: “Make this <a id="p121"></a> line bold.” and “Put these words in a table and put a box around it.” Usually during the last class (I usually teach Word or Excel as a series of 3–4 two-hour classes), we spend the last class doing 30 minutes of review, the students work on the final for an hour, and then we do a wrap-up. It’s not graded so the trick is to know if they remember how to do the different things we’ve learned and especially, if they have mastered some of the basic topics.</p></li>
<li><p>This is what you know.</p><p>Part of the final class also involves a troubleshooting step because I firmly believe that in order to be good technology users, people must be problem-solvers, at least to a small degree. So we learn how to solve problems as we go. When I’m working on a document and showing students how to select text, I’ll make the common mistake of hitting a key on the keyboard when I have several paragraphs selected.</p><p>Everything is gone, replaced by a single lower-case k! What to do? I show students how to use the Undo Command (on the menu, on the toolbar, and especially CTRL+Z) and we learn how to rescue victory from the jaws of defeat. It’s empowering and straightforward and teaches students what to look out for. Here is a list from one of my handouts about problems we can solve:
</p><ul><li><p>My document was replaced with the letter k!</p></li>
<li><p>Why can’t I move my cursor there?</p></li>
<li><p>Why is there all this white space in my document?</p></li>
<li><p>Why is it changing the words that I type?</p></li>
<li><p>Why is it making my words capitalized?</p></li>
<li><p>I typed a whole sentence with caps lock on!</p></li>
<li><p>The picture I put in my document is too big!</p></li>
<li><p>I want to see/not see the rulers and the margins of my page.</p></li>
<li><p>If you don’t know how to do any of these things, a quick F1 should be able to straighten it out for you.</p></li>
</ul>
<p></p></li>
</ol><p></p>
<p>Structure and Pacing The big difference between teaching adults and teaching younger people in a school-like setting is that adults usually have a choice, they can be somewhere else. So while I don’t totally subscribe to the “customer is always right” philosophy, I do try to <a id="p122"></a> understand that my students’ time is valuable and that even though the class is covering basic topics, it is serious. Accordingly, we start on time, we have a break partway through, we review at the beginning and at the end, and we don’t give homework. I don’t see a point in giving students more work to do outside of class and, to be perfectly honest, some of the students don’t have computers at home anyhow, so we have to be realistic.</p>
<p>I do try to explain what is different between the computers at the school and the computers they might have at home. Specifically, just because they’re using office software does not mean that there are not online aspects to how Word and Excel operate in this day and age, with clip art, templates, and additional help available online. People who use a modem to access the internet might be confused when they are looking at clip art and suddenly their computer makes a phone call!</p>
<p>The big challenge is having tasks that are interesting enough for adults and yet simple enough for people with very low computer literacy. Especially when I was teaching Excel classes, students would get really zoned out if I started talking about random numbers, and yet they weren’t sophisticated enough to start their own projects. I’d do projects that I thought might mirror small-scale projects people might try: keeping track of who had donated to an organization, keeping track of personal finances in a simple checkbook program, and keeping track of an exercise routine and tabulating results. Otherwise, the math part of the spreadsheet program would overwhelm the other very important functions and people would tune out.</p>
<h3 id="ch8_3">Instruction Happens</h3>
<p>I hope that by now I’ve made it clear that library instruction is more of a process and less of a specific “give this sort of class in this sort of way” situation. Libraries need to model sensible approaches to technology and ownership of library technology environments and issues overall. However, formal instruction is familiar to people and can be a great way to get information across that is either frequently requested—email classes, word processing classes—or very specific to your library environment—library databases, getting the most out of an OPAC. It’s good practice for staff and often a good option for patrons who need a little more handholding than the average library staff person can provide them.</p>
<p><a id="p123"></a> When I was working at a large public library in Vermont, I taught many one-off “getting started with email” classes, really just classes about email terminology more than using specific software.</p>
<p>The classes were well-attended and we got good feedback on them.</p>
<p>I would see some students taking this same class over and over again. At one point I asked one of the students, an older woman who was frequently in using the library computers, why she was a repeat student. She said that she didn’t use email yet, but that she enjoyed the classes and said “Every time I come back I learn a little more.” For her, the classes were partly an excuse to be social and get out of the house, and partly a very slow-motion doorway into interacting with technology in a way she wasn’t fully ready for.</p>
<p>When my outreach contract was over at the library, the class offerings declined in frequency until they were giving one computer class a month.</p>
<p>The good thing about classes is that they present a situation that involves the least “reinventing the wheel.” You can create a syllabus and some teaching materials and have a class that is repeatable. With technology classes particularly, the most important part is students being able to ask questions and learning skills that they can actually apply in the library environment. So, while it’s good to talk about “computers in general,” your students will appreciate knowing how to use the computers in the library specifically. Additionally, it’s good to draw a useful line between what the library is set up to help you with—computers in our library—and what is not within the scope of library services which may be people’s home computers, laptop configurations, <i class="calibre3">etc.</i></p>
<p>Basic Class Setup Many libraries do not have a specific lab or area for teaching classes. This isn’t optimal, but it’s what we’ve got. We’ve done a few things to get creative with technology instruction in my rural library settings as shown below </p><ol>
<li>Used the local school computer labs when we have a one-off class or set of classes. Often the schools will make their classrooms freely available once school gets out. This requires a bit of familiarization with the school’s lab environment and some networking skills (the human kind, not the computer kind), but is often win/win for everyone involved.<a id="p124"></a></li>
<li><p>Used the few public computers when the library is closed.</p></li>
<li><p>Sometimes we’d have class in the hour before the library is technically open. This can be a little hard to finesse with the community, but it can get you some quiet time on the computers.</p></li>
<li><p>Taught without a computer. For novice users, you can often dispense with the computer altogether. I’ve taught email classes with handouts and had people do exercises with pen and pencil and it works fine. Sending people home with handouts that they feel that they actually understand can be better than memories of interacting on-screen that are less clear.</p></li>
</ol><p></p>
<p>Some people do not enjoy learning technology topics on the actual technology itself. Many of my students bemoan the fact that their new computers do not come with an owner ’s manual and really prefer to have something with a print index where they can look things up. While I do have a bit of a “kick the bird out of the nest” feeling about this—I think people putting off actual computer interaction indefinitely are doing themselves no favors—it’s good to also have print materials available. I’ve linked to some good books on basic technology topics in the Bibliography at the end of this book, but you’ll need to see which ones are still current by the time you read this.</p>
<p>My general shorthand feeling is that the For Dummies guides, once you get beyond the name and help your patrons get beyond the name, are good for novice users; and the books from O’Reilly Media are good for more advanced topics. The Visual Steps guides are often well-liked by older students or people who prefer a more pictorial approach to learning; they have a set of companion websites that include teacher’s guides for the books as well as a site called Computer Certificate for Seniors which will test information given in their guides. The guides and the certificate tests are available whether or not you’ve purchased the books. Note: the certificate tests will automatically sign up the test taker for the Visual Steps newsletter.</p>
<p>So, have these books nearby where you are doing the instruction, optimally available for checkout. If your library offers other regular classes, have the schedules and/or sign-up sheets available.</p>
<p>Have other library promotional materials available in case people coming to your technology classes are not regular library users.</p>
<p><a id="p125"></a> Giving an Overview Even though we have limited time for instruction, it’s still worthwhile to spend a little of this time getting to know students and going over the objectives of the course. Start your classes with a brief introduction of who you are and then go around the room asking people’s names and what they are hoping to get out of the class. Then, ask them to tell everyone “something you like to do on the computer” or something similarly innocuous. This is not just a fact-finding mission, but also a way to gauge people’s interest or disinterest in technology generally and to get a feel for people’s skill and ability levels before you start talking. It is also a good time to re-set expectations, in case people were expecting something that the class wasn’t going to offer. This does take up some time, so encourage people to keep it snappy, but it’s worth it to have a slightly more cohesive class and some personal knowledge about the students.</p>
<p>You can also start classes with some brief vocabulary, again not just to make sure people know the words, but also to restate the traditional patter that if you do use a word later in the class that people don’t know, to tell you so that you can make sure everyone knows it. I try to write things down as often as I can because some people just aren’t auditory learners. And if I’ve got enough advance planning time, I try to have a handout or two that will have some of the topics I’ve covered in addition to contact information and hours for the library and maybe a web address or two.</p>
<p>The big deal with classes of novices is that you have to teach towards the middle, which is often unsatisfactory for many people.</p>
<p>In a class with students who already have some technology skills, people will know how much they know and be okay with it; they can tell if they’re a little ahead of or behind the class and can adjust.</p>
<p>Often tech novices don’t even really realize the scope of the playing field and may think that they’ve got a decent understanding of the topic, if only the teacher wasn’t going so danged fast. Again, set expectations appropriately and try to leave time after class so that students who are truly struggling can get some advice after class. At the same time, make sure that after-class time is limited somewhat so that you don’t get people trying to explain their tech support woes to you in the hopes that possibly you can fix them. This is really no different than most of our public interactions. Most people are normal, a few <a id="p126"></a></p>
<p>people are not, they are all our patrons and we need to find ways to most effectively serve them.</p>
<h3 id="ch8_4">The Technology Itself</h3>
<p>We also send out a meta-message with our technological setups and approaches. People are absorbing lessons even when we’re not actively teaching them. How we create our technology learning environments and how we interact with the machines ourselves sends out signals and cues about the technology environment. So it pays to be mindful of how you structure these environments and what messages you’re sending when you talk about technology.</p>
<p>Often computer systems are set up in the space available, with the materials that are available, without much thought being given to whether that set-up is the optimal one for how the computers are supposed to be used. Here are some things to think about when making choices about the technological context that is created at the library. Think about them when setting up systems for novice users, as well as communicating to other people who are interacting with those systems.</p>
<p>Maintenance and Ergonomics If you are in a situation where you’re using a computer eight hours a day and it’s the primary thing you do for work, you need to be concerned with ergonomics. Ergonomics, as defined by the International Ergonomics Association, is “the scientific discipline concerned with the understanding of interactions among humans and other elements of a system, and the profession that applies theory, principles, data and methods to design in order to optimize human well-being and overall system performance.” <a href="#p289">1 </a>In short, it’s making sure that you and your tools can interact smoothly for better productivity and injury avoidance.</p>
<p>In practical terms, this means not just making sure you’ve got a workspace that is conducive to working in a non-injurious manner, but also that you establish good patterns for taking breaks, stretching, and resting your eyes. For most of our students, this is not something they necessarily have to worry about, but it’s good to establish healthy patterns early. Here are a few things to keep an eye on as you’re setting up computer workstations in the library and talking to patrons about how to set up their own systems.</p>
<p><a id="p127"></a> Mice and Mousepads Older computer mice have moving parts in them including a rubber ball that requires a certain amount of friction in order to be able to operate. Newer mice operate with LEDs and sensors and not only don’t require mousepads, but can behave erratically on shiny or glossy surfaces. Often when computer systems are upgraded, a new mouse is placed on the same old mousepad without reflection on whether it is actually needed. Since mousepads do present a small limitation for novice users who can get confused when they reach the end of the mousepad and their mouse isn’t all the way across the screen, they should be removed if not necessary.</p>
<p>And students should be instructed in how to pick the mouse up and reposition it on the desktop or tabletop in order to continue the movement of the mouse in the direction it was going.</p>
<p>Chairs and Keyboards In an ideal world, chairs would be adjustable so that they would fit a wide variety of patrons. If this is not the case at your library, at a bare minimum position chairs to be at an average height that allows an adult to sit at the computer with feet on the floor and legs under the desk. Children’s area chairs should be appropriate to the size of the desk the computer is on. Chairs shouldn’t tilt too much and they shouldn’t roll too much. Having a footrest for shorter patrons is a great idea, though certainly not required.</p>
<p>Keyboards should be somewhere where they stay stable. If they’re on a pullout tray, that tray should be able to be fixed in place.</p>
<p>If they’re on a table or desk, there should be rubber feet or something to keep the keyboard from sliding too much. If the keyboard has little feet on the bottom to angle it, flip them up!</p>
<p>Screens and Privacy Different libraries have different approaches to the privacy screen idea, where a patron can see their computer screen well but others cannot. Some libraries employ privacy screens so that you have to get right up behind a patron to help them with a computer issue. Others are so dim that it makes the entire browsing experience sub-optimal. That said, if public access computers are in a public place, sometimes employing privacy screens is a better <a id="p128"></a></p>
<p>solution than having librarians or patrons constantly having to be looking at things they might prefer not to look at.</p>
<p>If you do employ privacy screens, make sure they are removable. If at all possible, there should be some indication that they’re even being used in the first place so that patrons can know to remove them. Be sure that clean-up crews understand special considerations for cleaning privacy screens and replace them if they become uncleanable. (There are also ways to ensure that patron’s data is cleaned after they use the computer, which is covered in Chapter Six, the Google section of this book and I think that should be a considered a part of general computer privacy considerations.) Scunge and Schmutz Nothing decreases user confidence than a grubby-looking work area. I’m not saying that reference librarians need to be taking the time to clean all the finger grease and lint out of the computer mouse, but someone has to at some point. Eventually the mouse will stop working well, and this is a bad first impression for patrons who don’t have a clear idea of how well mice should be working in the first place. Have some sort of regular clean and tidy routine for the PC areas which includes: </p><ul>
<li>cleaning the scunge out of the mice </li>
<li>getting the schmutz off of the keyboards </li>
<li>cleaning the fingerprints off of the monitor </li>
<li>wiping down the desktop area and removing random paper, crumbs, and stickiness Less frequent maintenance can include making sure the keyboards are in working order and giving the monitor and/or PC a once-over with a paper towel and some cleaning fluid to keep the grunge at bay. </li>
</ul>Forward-thinking librarians may note that buying black peripherals instead of white ones will decrease the need for frequent cleaning.<p></p>
<p>Software and Upkeep A lot of software maintenance should be relatively transparent to the end user of our PCs in a library setting. The general rule of thumb is to have some sort of process whereby your PCs upgrade themselves at an off-hour time on a regular schedule, say weekly.</p>
<p><a id="p129"></a><img class="calibre2" src="index-129_1.jpg"/></p>
<p> This should take care of browser updates, operating system updates, Java and Flash updates, antivirus software updates, and whatever else needs updating. It may not be possible to do all of this entirely unattended, but there should be a system in place so that it doesn’t happen while patrons are expecting to be using the PCs. I worked somewhere once where the system would do all crucial updates starting at 5:00 PM on a weekday which was fine if everyone went home at this time. But for someone who had to work even five or ten minutes late, they’d find the network brought entirely to its knees by all the concurrent updating. It was a subop-timal system.</p>
<p>Viruses and Updates While it’s somewhat outside the scope of this book, I also want to briefly discuss the issue of viruses. Thanks to bad software, malicious people (usually) in other countries, and a lot of misinformation spread through marketing channels and tech reporting, many people know how to blame computer viruses for their computer woes, but not how to address the issues that they think the viruses create.</p>
<p>When a computer isn’t behaving properly, people blame “viruses”; this somehow lessens their responsibility for getting the computer working properly again. Viruses and our protection from them com-prise a large degree of the “helpful” alerts that computers give you.</p>
<p>It is our job as maintainers of public computers, to not only minimize or eliminate viruses on public computers, but also to minimize the appearance of something not working right. To a user A common error message that is more scary than helpful.</p>
<p><a id="p130"></a></p>
<p>who doesn’t have a good understanding of a Windows environment, constant pop-ups or “helpful” reminders can interfere with their ability to use the PC in the limited time they have available.</p>
<p>It also reduces their confidence in our systems and our ability to maintain them.</p>
<p>People also come into the library or computer lab with their laptops concerned about an error message they are getting. This message may be from antivirus software, from a virus masquerad-ing as antivirus software, from the operating system warning the patron about the lack of antivirus software, or from some combination of these. While it is not our responsibility to clean up a patron’s hard drive, it is nice if we can give them advice on what they might do besides “Take it to an expert.” which they often interpret as “Spend a lot of money on this.” Sometimes that’s what needs to happen, but often there are simple ways to at least do a first pass check for problems. The usual troubleshooting steps that I might do—Googling error messages, checking software forums, and the like—are not necessarily tactics available to someone with low-tech literacy.</p>
<p>By the time this book appears in print, whatever is the current reigning antivirus software—I think right now people are suggesting Malwarebytes and AVG, both of which have free versions available for individual users—may have been supplanted, but it’s worth knowing that antivirus software tends to work when used correctly, and is often free. Many low-cost laptops come loaded with “free” trials for subscription-based antivirus software, such as Norton or McAfee Antivirus programs. These products work, but they also toss up a ton of error messages once the free trial is over and they can be difficult to uninstall and replace with something that is actually free.</p>
<p>There are some basic things that can be done to troubleshoot oddly-working PCs: </p><ul>
<li><p>Start the PC in Safe Mode by holding down F8 when you start up the computer; use “Safe Mode with networking” if you need an internet connection</p> </li>
<li>Do Windows/Microsoft Updates first if these haven’t been done</li>
<li>Install antivirus software—often the easiest way to do this is have the latest version on a USB drive since viruses can sometimes interfere with internet connections <a id="p131"></a> </li>
<li>Make sure antivirus software is updated before running it </li>
<li>Run antivirus software in safe mode; this may take time </li>
<li>Follow instructions given by antivirus software for removing or quarantining infected files </li>
<li>Start computer normally; see if the performance problems still exist </li>
<li>If the virus can’t be eradicated, try other antivirus software; Google the virus name, reinstall the operating system, or take the computer to professionals </li>
<li>If all else fails, back up the user data and reinstall the operating system Obviously, these are generic steps for treating a generic problem. However, most virus eradication really is a lot of trial and error.</li></ul>
<p>This can be frustrating to people who see antivirus software as something that they are paying to eliminate this problem. It can also be frustrating to people trying to solve the problem, since there are a lot of dead ends and re-assessment involved, nearly impossible to do when someone is looking over your shoulder. If you have a patron who seems to have regular trouble with viruses, it may be worth making one of your early web literacy projects teaching them to Google the error messages they are getting. There are a lot of people who are smart about computer viruses and will help you for free, but they hang out online and have to be interacted with there.</p>
<p>One of my favorite places for this sort of assistance was the Hijack This forum where you could run a piece of software on your infected PC which would spit out a bunch of gobbledygook, to be copied and pasted into the forums so that people who were experts in reading these logs could give you advice. This forum lives on as part of the general Malwarebytes Forum <a href="http://forums.malwarebytes.org/"><http://forums.malwarebytes.org/> </a></p>
<p>and is an incredibly useful place to go for malware removal advice.</p>
<p>Here are some preventative steps computer users can take before they have problems. Note: this list is somewhat PC-centric, as are most viruses.</p>
<ul>
<li>Make sure their operating systems and antivirus software are regularly updated </li>
<li>Use the firefox web browser and be cautious when visiting adult and/or file-sharing websites </li>
<li>Make sure the primary account on the computer is not an administrator; this can be a bit of a hassle for software installs, but worth it in the long run <a id="p132"></a></li>
<li>Run the firewall supplied by Microsoft </li>
<li>Do not open email attachments from strangers</li>
</ul> In short, if the public PC is throwing up frequent error or alert messages, see if you can either fix the problem or alter the settings to receive fewer warnings. Error or alert messages tend to rattle patrons, and as much as the best advice is often “Oh, ignore them.”<p></p>
<p>I don’t think that it’s always such a great idea to encourage people to not heed warnings. I’d rather try to ensure that they were only seeing warnings that were, indeed, important.</p>
<p>Touching the Patron’s Computer If a patron comes to you with their own computer and a question about it, remember that the instant you touch it, you become responsible for it—or might. This is important to know since for a lot of us the natural inclination would be to take a look, and say “What’s the problem?” and then click around a try a few things to help out the patron. However, for people who don’t understand the interrelatedness of all of the systems that make up a functioning (or partially functioning) laptop, they may not be too clear on the cause and effect relationships that occur with it. So, if you touch the laptop in an attempt to fix one problem (“Why can’t I get the wireless working?”) and try some things (“Oh, it looks like your firewall settings are too high.”), you may find yourself responsible, in the patron’s eyes, for whatever wacky stuff happens next (“Hey, ever since you fixed my firewall settings the sound doesn’t work.”). It is a good idea to use caution before touching a patron’s computer.</p>
<p>This reaction is not necessarily a bad thing and doesn’t necessarily mean that patrons are ignorant, <i class="calibre3">etc.</i> In the oversimplified understanding they often have with technology, it often seems logical that the last person to change things around on the computer, who wasn’t them, might be responsible for whatever problem it is having now. I have also found this to be the case in my non-library tech support work. If you install someone’s DSL, they will call you whenever it goes down. If you set up a spreadsheet for someone, they will call you with Excel questions. If you fix the sound on their laptop, they will call you when they can’t figure out how to play a DVD. Unless you have unlimited free time, my best advice on the topic of touching patron computers is: don’t.</p>