Phil Bradley's weblog

A 'Friends of' library response.

I have been chatting with the chair of one of the many 'Friends of ' library groups, and one email was so powerful that I asked permission to share it. The person who wrote it very kindly agreed, but said that since they had to work with their Council, would I make sure that I redacted any mention of who, what or where. I'm very happy to comply. Anyway, here it is:

As the Chair of one of the [place] libraries which are to become community-run this year, I can tell you first-hand that even those of us who have elected to take on our libraries rather than lose them altogether are under no illusions that this is anything but a very bad deal all round.

 

The only minute consolation is that, despite the difficulties, having a profit-making commercial company taking over would be even worse.

 

Needless to say, there was no real consultation, any proposed scheme to make the same level of savings which did not conform to their pre-decided scheme was summarily dismissed and County Councillors were overwhelmed with reports to ensure they did not appreciate the arguments.

 

We are under no illusion that we shall be able to provide anything like as good a service as our village has enjoyed in the past.   When the next round of cost-savings arrives, we shall watch with sadness the inevitable closures or community takeovers of those libraries currently reprieved. 

 

The Council expects us to hold a celebration on the day we take over in [named library] and will be surprised when we'd rather hold a wake as they seem to think they are doing us a favour in promoting "community-managed" libraries.   Have they been talking to the Arts Council, I wonder?

Google makes it easier for kids to find porn

Not what you expect is it? However, it happens to be true. Google recently revamped the way in which they display images on the screen to make it easy and quicker to view them. Selecting an image now brings it centre stage so that it can be seen more easily, and you can flip through them just using the keyboard. They talk about it in more depth in their blog. However, what they're also doing is ironically trying to make it harder to view adult images. Mashable has a good story on the background to this, and got a quote from Google:

"We are not censoring any adult content, and want to show users exactly what they are looking for. But we aim not to show sexually-explicit results unless a user is specifically searching for them. We use algorithms to select the most relevant results for a given query. If you're looking for adult content, you can find it without having to change the default setting — you just may need to be more explicit in your query if your search terms are potentially ambiguous. The image search settings now work the same way as in Web search."

So basically what they've done is put an automatic filter on images which defaults to safe search, irrespective of what you may choose to search for. The way that they have chosen to implement this on blocking words. So if I run a search for 'blue tits' this is the result that I get IF I have the safe search filter on:

Basically, there's lots of blue, and no tits, if you'll excuse my language. The word 'tits' has been filtered out of my search. So in order for a child to be able to do a search for the bird, the safe search filter has to be turned OFF. When that happens - plenty of images of birds and no naked flesh to be seen anywhere. So Google is perfectly capable of working out that my 'blue tits' search is looking for the bird, and not any adult content, rendering the initial filtering of the word absolutely pointless. If I do want to look at something salacious I have to add in more terms, so blue tits porn does bring up images of naked female torsos, but also explicit sexual acts.

Let's look at another example. If I search for 'breasts' with the filter turned on I get a lot of images of women in underwear, but it's perfectly fine, and what I'd expect. Turning the filter off gives me almost exactly the same set of results however. As Google says, I need to be more explicit in my search terms, but I also have to guess what those terms are! Without wishing to get into the whole schoolboy 'dirty words in the dictionary' saga, a search for breasts tits didn't bring up anything particularly naughty, neither did breasts adult, but breasts porn did. Now, you could agree that if someone wants to look for porn that's entirely up to them and why is this an issue? Simply because Google is making decisions for me once again. Any search engine which makes me have to think how IT wants me to think isn't doing its job correctly.

Futhermore, I have my doubts as to the functionality in the first place. A safe search for 'melons' produces 2 images in the first three where topless women are hiding their breasts behind the fruits. Now yes I know, this is all very juvenile, but it's making a very specific association, and one that children may well not have considered. The 'joke' is continued several times as I scroll down the list of results.

The ability to search images is further compromised because of the range and type of words that Google has deemed unsuitable for safe searching, such as 'naked', 'nude', (but 'unclothed' is ok apparently), boobs (but not Bristols), jugs is acceptable, despite returning some images that I wouldn't consider appropriate for safe search. 'Penis' is acceptable, and the third image in shows a sexual act! (Your results may well differ from mine, should you decide that you need to take a look for yourself.) Various terms for female genitalia also produce very explicit results (often of a medical nature showing things that only a medical person should be looking at I reckon!) I could continue, but quite frankly I was getting bored thinking up words to go off and check. The main point is Google has now fundamentally broken image searching.  In order to find entirely innocent images safe search has to be turned off. When safe search is turned off, I have to guess what terms Google will regard as triggering a pornographic search. Since I don't know what these terms are, it's possible I'll trigger a 'porn term' entirely by accident.

Of course, it doesn't have to be this way at all. Image searching over at Bing is a far more sane and civilised approach. It has three levels of moderation - strict safesearch, moderate (which is the default) and none. My blue tits search on strict works perfectly, giving me exactly what I would have expected. Moderate safesearch - same thing, and it's only when I turn it off completely that I get adult images. That's exactly how a moderation system should work in my opinion, and Google has got it hopelessly wrong. Furthermore, this is going to be replicated right across search engines, because many of the children's search engines use a version of Google custom search, and those results are going to be broken as well.

HiveMindMap

I've seen a few Twitter visualisation tools, and the HiveMindMap is one of the most attractive. Just take a look:
You can search for particular words or tags, but it's not (meant to be) comprehensive, so you'll only get the recent stuff. You will see links between terms, with the thicker the line, the more important the connection. You can drill down into the words, getting information on a phrase, related terms, key users and so on. It's not just pretty, it's quite useful as well.

Children's search engines; 13 reviewed and assessed

Safer Internet Day is taking place on February 5th this year, and the details are all on their website. I thought that I'd take a look at a few children's search engines as a result, just to see if there are that are worth using. I did a few searches designed to trip them up, and came up with some startling conclusions - mainly that most of them either return no results or incorrect ones - one or two disasterously so. I really wasn't taken with any of them to be honest - my conclusion is that I think the best way to search the internet with a child is to do it with them, assess the value of their search and the sites that they find, and reassure them if they find material that's not very nice. I particularly think that it's worth getting librarians, and in particular school librarians involved if you possibly can.

National Libraries Day

Just a reminder that National Libraries Day will be taking place on February 9th 2013. It's the culmination of a week’s worth of celebrations in school, college, university, workplace and public libraries across the UK. The website is a great resource, listing events that are taking place near you, ways to get involved, things to download, Flickr links, YouTube videos and plenty of other links. It's worth making the point (often lost by some authorities) that this is a series of events to tell people what fantastic things happen in local libraries, and to show how much they are valued by local communities.

I've still got my collection of Library Propaganda Posters available, and there's just under 50 of them. They're all Creative Commons, so if you'd like to take any/some/all of them to turn into posters, put on flyers, include on any materials that you'd like to - as long as they promote libraries, please simply use them. You don't need to ask permission at all - though it's great to see photographs of how they are used! There are also a few items in my Zazzle store that use them and you'll see the posters on badges, mugs, bags and so on. Any money that I get for these (which isn't much) goes straight to charity, so you can help libraries AND charity at the same time.

Still think Google+ can be ignored? Think again...

If you are still hoping that Google+ is going to go away sometime soon, then I'm afraid that you're going to have to think again. It's now moved up into second place in the rankings for the number of active users, still way behind Facebook, but in front of Twitter, as this graph from Zdnet shows:

Google+, which many people have written off time and time again actually grew in 2012 27% to 343m users. I can only see this increasing, with the use of the Communities function, which is where I'm getting most of my really good quality conversations now. There's no doubt that Google is going to be pushing the social network even more in 2013 than it did last year.

 

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Forget premium rate phone numbers

Dislike paying through the nose for premium rate numbers in order to get support, or to complain about something? Want to use a 'normal' landline number instead? These can be quite hard to find but NumberFetch allows you to search for landline & freephone numbers that you can call, intead of those expensive premium rate numbers that many companies have today.

This is a nice little search resource - just type in the name of the company that you're interested in, and NumberFetch will try and find a landline number for you. It's nice and simple, very straightforward and easy to use. The domain owner also generously told me about his competitor, SayNoto0870 which I also went and had a look at, but I was instantly turned off by the insane number of adverts on the site - it took me three attempts before I was able to find the search option (it's a link on the top left hand side) and I wasn't that impressed with it - but try both, and see what you think.

via numberfetch.com

When is a volunteer not a volunteer?

There's a very depressing article in The Bookseller which should be read: Lewisham library volunteers on workfare scheme. This is wrong on so many levels I really don't know where to start. The idea of a volunteer is rather in the word itself I would have thought. But apparently not. The “workfare” scheme will cancel peoples benefit payments unless they undertake the work. This is doublespeak that even George Orwell never even considered. Either a job is there - in which case it should be made available to a properly qualified person to apply for, or it's not there, in which case you shouldn't be able to force someone to do it. At a time when an increasingly number of information professionals are losing their jobs this bunch of idiots seem to think that it's a good idea to reduce the opportunities for them to get one. How does that ever make any kind of financial sense, unless you've got such a twisted mind that your fiscal policy works best if you have people out of work, and force them to do jobs that otherwise they'd get paid for. Either that, or you're a supporter of the insane mob we've currently got in power. But apparently, they're not volunteering as such “These placement are young people who have no or little experience, and this is not just work experience, it is also training" says Darren Taylor, c.e.o. Of Eco, the company who have taken control of Sydenham Library, when it was taken out of local authority control. So we've now got a private company making money - the money that the tax payers are paying for a service that they're not actually getting any longer - out of people who are being given no option but to work or starve. How is this right? How is this proper? How is this just?

Moreover - who is training thse people, and what exactly are they being trained to do? I have absolutely no idea, and I suspect that no-one else does either - including the poor souls caught up in this Orwellian nightmare of doublethink. I don't know about you - but if I was being forced into doing a job, I probably wouldn't be too keen on continuing it later on. Most people that I know work in libraries because they want to work in a library - they enjoy dealing with people, helping and assisting them. You can't force or train people into that attitude. This isn't going to help anyone - not the young people themselves, the library members, the taxpayers - the only people that it's going to help are the companies that are making the money.

This has been an entirely insane week in the world of librarianship, with this nonsense following on hard from the ridiculous 'report' produced by the Arts Council, which is a total disgrace. Not for one moment does their report think to question the concept of 'community' run libraries. More double speak as well... any public library is *already* a community library - because it is in a community and for a community. These apologies for libraries either neither 'community' or 'library'. They are a second rate, second grade step towards the obliteration of the library service itself. I would describe the report as a 'joke' but there's really nothing even vaguely humourous in it. It's been designed for one thing, and one thing only as far as I can see - an opportunity for politicians (both local and national) to say 'See? Told you so.' This report will do nothing to propogate libraries - it will do the exact opposite. It is shameful and a disgrace.

WolframAlpha addes more Facebook data

I've previously mentioned that you can let WolframAlpha take a look at your Facebook account and provide you with lots of factual stuff - it's now added a bunch more options so that you can find out:
Who is your most popular friend from college?
What was your most liked status update?
Are all your married friends clustered in one part of your network?
What are the most common words on your wall?
Are all your friends from your hometown the same age?

It's a fascinating tour through your own account, and something of an eyeopener.

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TweetsBetween

Tweetsbetween.com is a simple to use tool. Just put in the name of the two people that you're interested in, and you'll be able to see tweeted conversations between them, going back (according to them) about a week. You can then also link to the conversations for future posterity.