A local library system was considering shutting down several lesser-used libraries to save money, and replace it with a kiosk from which books can be ordered. One town decided to remove themselves from the system, stop paying into the system, and use that money to keep their own library open. One administrator in the system said of the townsfolk that use the physical library and were fighting to save it that they’re living in the past and we’re ready for Library 3.0.

Thanks for prodding me, because now I can also say that the ALA itself, the so-called Office for Intellectual Freedom [OIF], similarly censored out online comments. For one thing, it actually removed the comments of many from its own OIF Blog.

Also, my comments were removed from the OIF’s BannedBooksWeek YouTube channel. A comment of mine was published at this particular video: http://youtu.be/Llr6segTOaY but later it was removed, apparently by the OIF.

In an AL post about Twopointopians use of social media, misuse incidents are entirely relevant, especially where the party doing the censoring is the OIF or public libraries. Now here is the comment that the OIF censored out from YouTube:

I really admire Amy Sonnie. I spoke with her for a half hour at a New Jersey Library Association meeting and saw her speak there.

That said, her book has not been banned and the ALA admitted to her that in truth her book was not the 9th most challenged of 2010. See “Is Library Association’s ‘Banned Book Week’ Really ‘Gay’ Promotion?; Critic Calls Event a ‘Hoax Perpetrated on the American Public Since 1982,’” by Dave Tombers, WorldNetDaily, 25 September 2011.

So the ALA top 10 list is faked.

Likely as a result, the library’s Twitter account (@BrooklynPublic) has apparently permanently blocked my account (@SafeLibraries) so that I may not see its tweets in my timeline nor send it any tweets, etc.

You have to love when there’s fraud and a First Amendment right to porn in the Brooklyn Public Library, but there is no First Amendment right to provide evidence of fraud, to show how the library is misleading the public on porn, nor even to subscribe to the Twitter feed of a PUBLIC library. It’s just another double standard from the supposed free speech people.

I’d love to hear more about what you’re doing at your new gig. I might also be able to offer some ideas about how to integrate all these new-fangled tools into an efficient, cohesive syndication channel that ‘gets the word out’ and helps increase your community’s engagement with its library.

Feel free to message me through http://www.radicalpatron.com.

Jean

If seen as just another possible way to get the word out – in addition to our own website, and perhaps newspaper announcements, I think it is a perfectly useful tool for public libraries. (See my other comments on this thread.) We don’t know how many people are reading the local papers, but we continue to have weekly announcements in them, because we know SOME people get their news that way. And we have evidence that others get their information from Facebook. It’s not the holy grail of marketing, but really, it takes virtually no time to update it, so if we know some people do find it to be useful, why not take the 5 or fewer minutes a day to update it?