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We’re finally getting to the end of the conference “silly season.” I’ve never quite understood why so many organizations and associations have to schedule their statewide and national events during the same period of time. Fortunately, the American Library Association doesn’t stick to the same idea.

Thus far, I’ve presented at four conferences and attended a fifth. This Saturday, I’ll give my last presentation — Lynchburg to Berlin: United States Policy and Nazi Ideology. I’m fairly excited about it because it gives me the opportunity to talk about the destruction of handicapped under Nazi Germany, which is one of my favorite (Holocaust) topics.

Fellow UNC-G alum Lauren Pressley recently published a book entitled So You Want To Be A Librarian. It’s an attempt to answer the questions librarians everywhere hear from those who think they might be interested in the profession. Even though I’m long past the point of being curious about what we do, I’m planning to buy a copy and loan it to those who (so very frequently) ask about the job.

While the early press for the Obama presidency has largely centered on his order to close Guantánamo Bay and his de-authorization of torture, his repeal of Executive Order 13233 created a minor celebratory stir with librarians, archivists, and historians. Bush enacted EO 13233 in 2001 in order to restrict access to presidential papers.

Even though it was seen by many as an attempt to remove the transparency of the White House, the real problem for our profession was the damage it did to academic inquiry. As a research librarian who routinely requests documents from the Truman Library, the Roosevelt Library, the North Carolina State Library (home to many of Andrew Jackson’s papers), and the National Archives, it came across as an overreaching executive order that was ultimately unnecessary.

John Wertman wrote an op-ed for the Washington Post back in 2006 about the trouble this EO caused, and quoted former President Ford, who said:

“I firmly believe that after X period of time, presidential papers, except for the most highly sensitive documents involving our national security, should be made available to the public,” he said, “and the sooner the better.” He also told me that the researchers he’s talked to at his presidential library have been grateful that most of his documents were made available.

I would certainly echo those feelings of gratitude, as I’ve created entire sections of exhibits from presidential library documents. Needless to say, I’m rather pleased that Obama revoked this EO on his first day in office.

While I tend to support the Web 2.0 movement, I’ve not hidden my dissatisfaction with the majority of sites, and particularly the amount of redundant (and unnecessary) overlap of products. I do, however, occasionally come across a site that melds interesting bits-and-pieces into a usable, creative application. My latest discovery:

Umbrella Today?

This single page app asks for your zip code and then tells you with a definitive “Yes” or “No” whether you should take an umbrella. If you’d rather, you can enter your cell phone number and the service will send you a text message on the days you’ll need an umbrella. That’s it.

Having spent the better part of the last two months working on a program for Banned Books Week, I couldn’t help but notice the buzz about Vice Presidential Candidate Sarah Palin, which surfaced during a recent Time article:

Stein says that as mayor, Palin continued to inject religious beliefs into her policy at times. “She asked the library how she could go about banning books,” he says, because some voters thought they had inappropriate language in them. “The librarian was aghast.” That woman, Mary Ellen Baker, couldn’t be reached for comment, but news reports from the time show that Palin had threatened to fire Baker for not giving “full support” to the mayor.

While people often dismiss attempts to challenge (and remove) certain books from public and school libraries as “over-reacting parents,” it’s slightly more disturbing when it comes from an elected official. Even if they’re doing it on behalf of complaints from some of their constituents, it shows a lack of understanding for the ramifications censorship embodies.

The New York Times ran an article last week on the changing face of literacy in the digital age. The column focuses primarily on the habits of teenagers, college-bound students, and how the Internet is impacting their reading.

Clearly students are developing a different set of skills than they would by reading novels, but it seems odd to hear some arguing for a new assessment of abilities when you consider the material. While a typical high school book (Candid, for example) might have an average readability level of 12.8 (with some chapters spiking at 15.3), this article’s primary subject — Nadia Konyk — comments on her love of reading sites like fanfiction.net, which boasts a 6.3 Flesch-Kincaid Grade (about the same as a TV Guide).

What I find even more troubling is the fallout from the lack of challenging contextualization that comes with reading Internet sites, which results in a lack of critical thinking even when attempting to distinguish the validity of discreet pieces of information.

Web readers are persistently weak at judging whether information is trustworthy. In one study, Donald J. Leu, who researches literacy and technology at the University of Connecticut, asked 48 students to look at a spoof Web site (http://zapatopi.net/treeoctopus/) about a mythical species known as the “Pacific Northwest tree octopus.” Nearly 90 percent of them missed the joke and deemed the site a reliable source.

Despite my profession’s attempts to teach students how to judge authoritative from non-authoritative sites, the majority of students are still unable to distinguish between the two. The worst example I’ve seen recently came when a young college graduate submitted a writing sample (for a job) that included a citation from a White Supremacists’ website.†

Obviously, this is a single anecdote, though it’s something I saw regularly when I was still working as an academic librarian. In essence, the problem isn’t that students don’t read at all, it’s what and how they read that’s creating an impact on other factors, such as how they reason, think, and evaluate information.

Thanks to Kristen for pointing me to said article.

† Now couple that with “where” I work.

I’m sorry to say that not long ago, my personal life hit a Web 2.0 saturation point. Not because I’ve ceased to find interesting applications, but because there’s a finite limit to the number of things you can effectively maintain.

This seems to be the hidden cost that underlies Web 2.0 technology. As Dion Hinchcliffe pointed out two years ago, truly useful apps are few and far between:

Tons of new Web 2.0 startups are being released every day, I can’t even keep track of the social bookmarking sites alone (I came across three new ones yesterday, seriously). And some of the better Web 2.0 apps that are coming out are for laughably obscure vertical markets.

The biggest problem of course is that these services don’t actually talk to each other, which is kind of ironic considering that much of it is called “social” software. Even those companies who design apps to integrate with other 2.0 platforms, have yet to truly make the disparate parts communicate with one another.

For example, if you want to track you’re reading and share that with your friends, you might choose to join Goodreads. If you’re on Facebook, you could then add the Goodreads app that will pull your list of books into your profile. But if your friends are using LibraryThing, iRead, or Shelfari, then the only problem you’ve solved is displaying the results in a specific location. Facebook doesn’t allow any of these services to talk to one another, nor do any of them support a seamless interface with any of the other applications.

As Michael Hirschorn theorized last April, “the third rail of social media may ultimately come down to that most old-media of issues: ownership.” For users though, it comes down to a question of manageability: how many services can you reasonably manage before they become a liability on your time?

My profession has been grappling with this problem for years. While all of us are attempting to plug our collections into various applications in order to get the most out of our libraries, if we’re asking our patrons to join (yet another) service, how likely are they to take the offer? And at what point does every user wind up hitting their saturation point?