Privacy and free browsers and e-mail providers

I've been reflecting on the Google case.  Anybody who thinks about the matter should conclude pretty quickly that you have to "pay" for the browser and e-mail some how or other.  And in the case of Google, you are paying by letting them suss out for their 3rd party advertisers what your interests are likely to be.  So Google wants to check your browsing habits to see what sites you are visiting.

Anybody who has looked up a question and suddenly noticed ads on the side bar that mirror the question matter has seen the results of the Google snooping ability.  This is especially weird for librarians, who are often looking up things we have no personal interest in. 

The same is apparently happening when you use their "free" Gmail e-mail service.  Again, they never announced this was the program, but I think a lot of users sort of figured there had to be some quid pro quo involved, and it had to do with the ads that make Google so rich.  The thing that is most unnerving about the revelations about Gmail is the depth of the "scanning." 

Alert readers may notice that the Blogger system on which this little blog appears is also powered by good ol' Google.  Can't say I'm feeling totally comfortable right now.  But I'm relying on the essential boring nature of my communications. 

Librarian camouflage?

The camouflage wedding dress above (wow!), is courtesy of a temporarily unavailable website, http://plus.simplyformal.com/media/catalog/product/cache/7/small_image/5e06319eda06f020e43594a9c230972d/t/9/t9050_s8892_mossy_fullview_001_3.jpg

How to collect those pesky overdues - the Grim Book Reaper

From http://imgur.com/gallery/hclcXXp , where "maddymooster" posted this with the header: Ever year my school's librarian dresses up as a book reaper to collect overdue books.

Tip of the OOTJ hat to Eli Senesh, who kindly passed this along!

A Librarian's Double Life

Last Thursday, the Turner Classic Movies cable channel devoted all of its programming to the films of Jean Gabin, perhaps France's greatest film actor. Jean Gabin starred in nearly one hundred films, including The Grand Illusion, La Bete Humaine, and Pepe Le Moko, the film that made him an international star. Some have called him the American Spencer Tracy, but that doesn't do Jean Gabin justice, for he was a much better actor than Spencer Tracy. Not to mention the fact that he had more sex appeal in his little finger than Spencer Tracy did in his whole body! Jean Gabin is also beloved in France as a war hero; he was a member of the Free French Forces under Charles de Gaulle, and received the Croix de Guerre. Jean Gabin played a variety of characters during his long career, but perhaps his greatest portrayals were of world-weary outsiders with a streak of fatalism. What does Jean Gabin have to do with librarianship, you ask?

One of the films that TCM showed last Thursday was Leur Derniere Nuit (Their Last Night), a film made in 1953 that starred Jean Gabin with the somewhat wooden Madeleine Robinson as his love interest. It was certainly not a great film, but it was interesting because Jean Gabin played a librarian who is secretly the ruthless head of a ring of criminals. In the early part of the film, we see Jean Gabin going quietly about his business, living in a boarding house, working at his local library where he seems to know the contents of every single book in the collection, being promoted to head librarian, and generally living an exemplary life. The scenes in the library were fascinating as there wasn't a female librarian anywhere in sight; all the library personnel were men. As the film continues, however, we learn that all is not as it seems with the mild-mannered librarian. It turns out that Jean Gabin needs a lot of money in order to buy property for his aged parents back in his hometown of Angouleme, and we must assume that his librarian's salary doesn't make this possible. So he has turned to a life of crime. There are interesting scenes of a gritty postwar Paris and some good action scenes throughout. The film suffers from an unfortunate lack of chemistry between Jean Gabin and Madeleine Robinson, the teacher who puts herself in jeopardy trying to help him. In addition, we never really understand her motivation. Backstories for the two leads are provided late in the film and don't really help to flesh out the charcters much. Nonetheless, the film never failed to hold my interest. As my husband summed up, "What a library director has to do to make ends meet!"

A Poetry Break

My husband, who is a librarian at a public library, recently gave me a poem to read. Entitled "Library Days," it is part of Philip Levine's new collection, News of the World. The poem is copyrighted, but the most of the text, including this poem, is available at Google Books. The poem is set in Detroit during the Korean War, and the narrator is a beer delivery truck driver who plays hooky from his job to "sit for hours with the sunlight streaming in the high windows" of the library. The library is treated with the same reverence as a house of worship. Some of the narrator's favorite authors are Melville, Balzac, and Walt Whitman, "my old hero." The books have "the aura of used tea bags." He also favors the great Russian writers--Dostoyevsky, Turgenev, Chekhov, Tolstoy; reading The Idiot confirms that "life was irrational." What particularly caught my attention was the depiction of the librarian, one of the most negative I have ever seen. The librarian has "gone gray though young," and sits "by the phone that never rang, assembling the frown reserved exclusively for me ..." Her voice was full of "pure malice" when a patron made the mistake of asking for Jane's Fighting Ships instead of literature. She never exchanges a smile with the narrator despite his tentative attempts at engaging her. Ultimately, however, the librarian is just an annoyance, if a malignant one. Reading is the narrator's real job, and his actual job takes a back seat to it. It did not matter to him that the beer he was supposed to deliver "could sit for ages in the boiling van slowly morphing into shampoo ..." The poem concludes, "it mattered not at all to me, I had work to do."

Book Recommended

One of my faculty colleagues recently presented me with a personally-inscribed copy of a new book written by a friend of his, who happens to live in the same county where I live. The book (the publisher's blurb is linked to from the title of this post) is entitled This Book is Overdue! How Librarians and Cybrarians Can Save Us All, and the author is Marilyn Johnson, whose previous book explored the writing of obituaries. She is clearly a quirky and vibrant person whose interests are broad and deep. The book celebrates libraries and librarians, and Johnson's profiles of librarians who deviate profoundly from the stereotyped image of our profession make for entertaining reading. The book has been favorably reviewed in The New York Times and elsewhere. I have a couple of criticisms. The author's enthusiasm for her subject sometimes gets the better of her, and when it does, the book tends to lose its way and become rambling. In addition, it is definitely written with more of a public-library focus; there is not much here that relates specifically to academic librarianship. It is nonetheless engaging.

Some of the chapters I particularly enjoyed concerned the Connecticut librarians who stood up to the FBI and fought to keep library records private; members of Radical Reference, who, "armed with iPhones, provided online support to protesters at the 2008 Republican National Convention in Minneapolis/St. Paul; librarians who participate in Second Life (I don't see the point of Second Life, but it makes for a good read); the upgrading of the Westchester Library System's online catalog, which revealed the differences between the librarians and the IT staff; the opening of the new Darien Public Library, which is known for the high quality of its patron services; and several profiles of librarians who work at the New York Public Library. The portrait of librarians that emerges is very positive--as a profession, we care deeply about making information available to all regardless of ability to pay; we value our patrons' privacy; freedom of speech is paramount--most librarians oppose censorship; we are dedicated to helping to tame information overload by working with people one on one or in groups to teach them how to manage information. This book is a quick, enjoyable read, and reminded me of why I chose to become a librarian.