 Good morning and welcome to this week's edition of Encompass Live. Just like last week, I am not Krista Burns. I am your guest host this week, Michael Sowers, the Technology Innovation Librarian here at the Nebraska Library Commission. Encompass Live is our weekly online webinar in which we talk about things of interest to Nebraska librarians and to anyone else who is welcome to sign on in and take a listen with us. We talk about topics from technology to fundraising to programming to whatever we can come up with and any and all suggestions for future episodes are completely welcome. Once a month, I do a tech talk here on Encompass Live and try to get people who I think are very interesting and doing interesting things in the world of librarianship in the realm of technology. So we tend to get a little more geeky in this particular episode. And lately we've been having some presentations and things like that. And I wanted to try to get back to the interview format a little more. So this month, this week, today, we have on the line Sarah Houghton. Sarah, are you there? I am here. Yay. All right. I'm going to pull up your website in just a minute here. But what I think I'd like to do, just so I make sure I don't put any words in your mouth, why don't you tell us a little bit about yourself, your background, how you got into libraries, and where you are now. Wow. Okay. That's a lot. So right now I am the acting director at the San Rafael Public Library. I was assistant director and then my director kind of jettisoned a while ago. So it's been about three weeks of me and the director's chair. And my reaction at the time was, are you sure you guys want to put me in charge of the library? But it's been fun. It's been an experience. And before that, I've had technology positions all over the San Francisco Bay Area, working in libraries. I've run this website, the Library in Black Blog, for eight years this month, which is a little bit frightening and it makes me feel really old because it doesn't seem like it's been that long. Every now and again I'll get somebody saying that they studied my blog in library school and that really makes me feel old. Let's see, how did I get into libraries? I was pursuing a master's degree in ancient Irish mythology and literature, which has all of like four jobs in the world available to people with that degree. And I liked the topics, but I didn't really like working in academia. I felt like what I was doing wasn't really making a big difference every day. I wasn't really helping people with my work, but as many of us had been, working in libraries to put myself through school and realize that was what I did like doing was I felt like in the library setting I was actually helping people. And so I decided to go to library school, but again, I didn't really go toward the techie side of things. I was focusing on rare books and digitization. And that kind of accidentally led to this whole techie existence. So that's it. Great. Well, I've got to say at a conference a year or so ago, I think I not intentionally figured out your age and you made me feel old. So we all have our stages where we start to figure that one out. So, okay, let's ask the question, why librarian in black? Just for people who don't know you, who haven't met you, why? I just wear black. That's the easy question. That's the easy answer. That's it. I mean, nothing but black for quite a long time now. And looking for a blog title, this is what people always referred to me at the reference desk. Patrons would come in and say, where's that librarian in black? Where's that tall librarian girl who always wears black? And so I just thought that was a fitting title. Hey, no, that works. And that's the part of the story I didn't know was the reference desk. That's great. Okay, the reason I kind of have you on the line here is you have opinions for anybody who has read your blog and that. But before we get into some of those opinions, one of the things I like to ask people that I know that are very big in social media as you are is your kind of thoughts and views on the question about separating your personal life from your work life. I know your blog is not completely work-related, but it's not completely personal either. It's kind of a mix. How do you see that sort of issue and where do you come down on it? Yeah, I think it's kind of been a journey for me. I think I started in one place and have ended up somewhere else. The blog is like, I would say like 99% work-related. So the blog really does pretty much stay focused on libraries for the most part, or I at least pretend that I can tie something back to libraries. I've been doing gadget posts and a lot of what I'm writing about could be used in a library, except for the kitchen stuff. I try to keep that work focused, but my existence everywhere else, whether it's Twitter, Facebook, or Google Class, or gosh, back in the day, the good old MySpace, I think I've journeyed from somewhere where I tried to keep it solely work-oriented to a completely and entirely blended existence. In my head, I can't separate who I am as librarian, Sarah, from who I am during every other hour of the day. It's just one person, and I think to try to draw a line between the two would be pretty false. That being said, there are quite a few things that I find myself writing down and typing out to tweet, and then I catch myself and I'm like, wait, okay, remember, everybody sees this. Okay, maybe not so much, so then I'll just take it back. But I definitely write about both, and I think the few people I know who have tried to draw that line between personal and professional, and to create either two separate existences in social media or just one or the other, they've all given up. So that's a good sign to me that maybe that just can't work, really, or at least it can't work very well. Yeah, that's been my experience too that, again, the few people who have tried just, it's almost sometimes more work than it's worth, but you do have to be aware of what you say, what you do, and put it out there. I've had the conversation with folks that say, well, you know, a future employer might look at this, and I'm cognizant of that, but to a certain extent, and it's easier to say maybe than to actually have happened, but if they don't want to hire me because of what I put on my blog, I probably don't want to work there. Exactly, I agree. This last job is assistant director. I think I got in large part because of my blogging, and because the person who hired me had both worked with me, but he knew exactly what he was getting, and I said, you know, I'm going to write about stuff that's probably going to make you mad, and it might get me in trouble, and you know that's happening, right? And he said, of course, that's why I want you to work here, so that's the kind of job you want. Yeah, now they want you to run the place. Well, we'll see. Well, I didn't say you want to run the place. It sounds like at least temporarily they want you to run the place. Yeah, temporarily I am. I am doing my best. So, okay, let's dive right into it. You seem to be taking some umbrage or having some issues with the states of eBooks and libraries. This is a whole ball of wax here, so I want to see if we can maybe focus the conversation a little bit, but let's ignore vendors for a moment. What sort of issues do you have with eBooks as they are in general? As they are in general, I think, like many people I'm concerned about standard formats and the lack of cross-compatibility between formats and between devices, and a lot of that with the formats goes back to digital rights management, which is I think my biggest concern as a librarian and as a reader, as a book consumer. It bothers me that we've got all of this content that we're paying for that is locked down with keys that we don't own. Someone else has the key, and they just give us temporary use of it from time to time to unlock something, and I think looking at the library's role as a long-term preservation entity of the cultural record of our community's interests of information that is extraordinarily damaged by having content that's locked down with digital rights management. I'm very concerned, and I think that either the role of libraries is going to completely shift away from being this preserver of information in the cultural record, and I think that is one possible future, one possible outcome. Or we're basically backing ourselves into a corner where we're still saying, yes, that's our role. But as we put more and more resources into digital information and more and more resources are released solely as digital information, we won't be able to fulfill that role. And then we become in some ways, at least in that role in our community, obsolete, and that is very concerning to me. And I think we have not been very cautious about this or mindful of it as we've delved into the world of digital information. Yeah, I think you touched on the thing with the keys there. I think it's now known as a doctor's first law after Corey Doctorow, something along the lines of anytime somebody puts a lock on something of yours and doesn't give you the key is not doing it in your interest. Correct, right, right. Something to that effect. And I just had another question and I completely lost it, so maybe... Well, that's all right. Something you said... Okay, well, I lost it. All right. So, what do you make of... There was Google attempting to kind of scan everything. There's now... Is it the Internet Archive that's doing the you send us a book, we'll scan it, but then we'll keep the book and you'll have access to it. What do you think of that sort of arrangement? With what they're trying to do. I mean, I'm obviously not asking for a legal opinion here, but it is a different take on it. It is. I mean, I think one of the things I'm most interested in with what the Internet Archive is doing is that they're really pushing those legal boundaries of taking a physical entity, taking a physical book that's been donated or discarded from a library, scanning a copy in, and granted these are all things that are orphan works or out of copywriter in some gray area, and then they're making that digital copy available to all member libraries, and so because they're transitioning from one medium to the other, that could be viewed very easily as a violation of copyright if you want to read straight by the letter of the law. So I'm really interested to see if that takes us in a good direction. What I like about what they're doing is that it's all completely open. Everything's open source. You can basically make a copy of their entire database with all the books in it and the technology that runs it on the back end and run one of your own if you really want to. And I think that that open approach is the future to preserving and sharing information, at least from a librarian's perspective, I think that's really essential. I have forgotten to mention, I'll say this here to anybody listening. If you have any questions for Sarah about anything we're talking about, just go ahead and type them into the questions area in the GoToWebinar interface. I'll see those and happily pass those questions along. So, okay, let's get a little more specific. When Kindle books... Oh, I remember my other question. Okay. And this is one of those... It almost sounds like a library school exam question. What is the responsibility to the patrons from the library when it comes to these issues? You kind of mentioned... Your impression was kind of we're rushing in to this content which is locked and maybe we won't have it long term, things like that. But it's something the patrons want. You can't argue there isn't a demand. So, what is it to the library's responsibility... What level of responsibility does the library have to either on one hand offer it because that's what they want or maybe on the other end of the scale saying, we're not going to give you this to you because the deal's no good and we're looking out for your interest. Well, I think there's maybe somewhere in between those two. I think what we're struggling with is... Patrons are saying, we want this, we want this, we want this. And we say, okay, you want this whole world of e-books, all the e-books out there, we'd love to give that to you. So, we're going to try. And we can't because they're, as you know, our companies and publishers that won't even sell to libraries. So, we can't even get Simon & Schuster or McMillan e-books at all. Period. I mean nothing. And so, we can't even give people what they want in truth. We can give them a limited subset of what they want. You've also got the question of, is it a good investment of money? Are you getting a good return on investment for these titles? And I think that's a question we don't really have an answer to yet. I know that doing my own cost comparisons on a cost per circulation basis, e-books are a better deal than print books in most cases. However, and that's a big however, with print books, you actually own the thing. You get to keep it. And with all of our digital content, we're only licensing access to it. That's it. We don't own this stuff. We're licensing access. And whether or not that affects your overall view of return on investment, I think it should. And so, that's a question. Are you really expending your taxpayer dollars or your student dollars as well as you could be when you're purchasing digital content or licensing digital content, I should say. Paying money for digital content. And then you're really stuck with this whole thing of how does the system work and does it really match up with the ethics that we hold dear in libraries, which is free and open access to information, no discrimination based on age or based on proficiency, making sure that this information is accessible long term. And I think that's an area where it's a little sketchy. We've got in my mind some severe changes to the way that user data is handled with particularly the Kindle books in Overdrive. And that makes it very tricky for us because we can either say, well, we think this is a bad deal, so we're not going to offer it. Or here it is, just take it. We're not even going to bother. We know you people don't care and you're not going to read anything we write anyway. Or you can take kind of the middle ground and actually inform your users about what they're getting themselves into. So, for example, the Wisconsin libraries had that lovely little pop-up warning in Overdrive where if you're trying to check out a Kindle book, you get this little pop-up that says, oh, by the way, you're leaving the library site. Amazon might track what you're reading on Kindle, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And we just put that in our catalog as well, the same pop-up. And I think that that's the kind of thing that's responsible for us to do as library professionals is to let people make an informed choice to give them the information. And if they want to decide, it doesn't matter to me. This is fine. It's a trade-off I'm willing to make. At least we helped them make an educated choice rather than not giving them that information. Sure. Let me just, just for fun, push back a little bit on that. Haven't we kind of, though, already had the ownership versus licensing argument when we moved all of our... a good portion of our reference materials to licensed databases? What makes this any different? Well, I think that's a good question. And I think I could argue either side. What makes it different in my head is that with the reference titles or the periodicals that we moved away from owning physical copies up to licensing annual access to, for the most part, those titles were a periodically issued thing. They rotated in and out. You'd get an addition, and then you'd buy a new addition a few years later, or periodicals. Most libraries, with the exception of really large universities, didn't keep all the back issues forever and ever and ever. You just kept a certain amount of stuff, and you really didn't have it anyway. I guess what I'm saying, there was no long-term preservation issue. With books in all types of libraries, public, school, academic special, we tend to hold on to those more. We tend to actually keep those for a much, much longer time than we did with reference works or with periodicals. For me, now there is an issue of long-term preservation because that is something that we have been doing for a long time, and then in many cases, the community has come to expect from us. To me, that's the difference, but I can see arguing both sides of that. Actually, that's probably the best answer to the difference I've ever heard, actually. Yay! Well, to be honest, it was one of those issues where I was sitting in the back of my mind, but I hadn't really sat back and thought about it yet. Actually, it is one of those issues where if you understand the issues, you can probably argue both sides of it, but ultimately, you do have to make... You need to come down in one direction or the other, ultimately. When I first thought that I thought you would make a really great guess is when the e-books for Kindle finally happened back in... That was about October, wasn't it? Yay! Glory, hallelujah! Everybody who owns a Kindle who then walked into the library and said, I just got a Kindle for my birthday. Can I get library books? We all had to say no. We can now say, yes, you can, and everybody was happy. And then I started reading some blog posts where not everybody was happy, and you were one of them. What was the deal there? What aren't you happy about when it comes to Kindle via overdrive in library books? Well, I think there's two primary things that make me upset, and I'll start with the little one. The little one is that users are pushed to buy the book twice when they decide to check something out. So when the book is doing a couple of days, they get a little email saying, you know, your book is going to expire soon from the library. Why don't you buy a copy? And it's very not so. And then it's like, or you can check it out again from the library. It's almost like this little footnote, like, oh yeah, you can still get it for free, but don't you want to buy it from us? And that commercialism really bothers me. And they get the same email again when the book does expire. I know in our library, we're not allowed to endorse or promote any particular company or business or product. It's very, very, very strict. And I feel like this email really walks that line of, it kind of seems like we are. You know, we're offering a service that generates an email that encourages people to buy something from Amazon. And that makes me uncomfortable because it puts the library at risk. And I just don't. I don't think that libraries as civic institutions should be engaged in that kind of behavior. And the fact that that happens and that it wasn't something that, you know, libraries were able to say, yes, we're fine with that. Thank you for warning us that this was going to happen. We can choose to either do it or not. Great. It just kind of started. And then we all discovered the stuff after the launch. And that bothered me. The second and bigger thing for me, though, is what I touched on earlier, which is the way that this works with Kindle, with Amazon, is different than the way that eBooks through Overdrive or any other vendor work with any other device. And so for the first time, you're not just downloading it through Overdrive. You're getting punted off to Amazon's site. And Amazon is now keeping a record of any of the Kindle format books that you check out from your library through your Amazon account because you have to tie the Amazon account to the library account. And that distresses me because as far as I can figure, and if someone knows otherwise, please tell me, it seems like this is the first time in the history of libraries where a corporation is tracking a user's borrowing history just kind of like out of the gate. They know exactly what's going on. They're tracking it. They won't talk to us. They won't tell us exactly what they are or aren't tracking. And so we don't really have really good information to give to people about what's being checked. I think people expect libraries to be a place where they can borrow things, look at things, read things without being tracked. I think that's the expectation. If they decide to give that up to trade that away, so some people will turn on a reading history feature or something in their account, then they can make that choice actively. But I think the default is people still expect this to be an anonymous and non-tracked experience. And it really irks me that the way that this was done was really, truly without any honest discussion with libraries ahead of time, without warning us ahead of time, without preparing us or giving us talking points or even giving us clear explanations of what was being done. It was just like, look, Kindlebooks, maybe if we distract you with this awesome shiny thing that you guys have been asking for, you won't notice all this crap we had to trade away like your ethics and your values and whatnot. And that bothers me as a corporate practice. I really hope that other companies and publishers don't follow suit. Okay. As you were talking, if people see you watching me move off-screen here, I'm making little notes, I don't forget my questions. So what is now pending the any sort of rules or regulations against promoting a particular product? It's a completely legitimate issue, I would say. What if we were able to, for example, be an Amazon associate at the library and get a cut of those sales? How would you feel about that? If they were able to set that up and assuming your municipality would allow you to do that, what would you think of something like that? Our municipality would not allow us to do that, but let's see. How would I feel about that? Well, it would be better than nothing. I still don't like it as much. And I think if it was going to be presented that way, you would definitely want to emphasize you can still get this for free through the library. This is the way you initially chose to interact with this content. Here's a way to keep doing that. If you don't want to wait in the hold list again or whatever, then here's a way to buy it and the library will get a little something-something. I guess I'd much rather kind of flip the order of what's being presented. Yeah, flip the emphasis, but I still don't think that it would sit well with me personally, but that's just me. Fair enough. And then on the tracking issue, aren't theoretically the kind of going back to that database vendors thing, aren't those vendors able to track what articles I've gone through and what searches I've done through EBSCO, Wilson, whoever. I'm not picking on any vendor in particular. Are they able to? Or are they? Well, they say they're not. They say all the data is being examined in aggregate and I take them at their word. That's what they say they're doing. Could they? Yeah, they could. But your argument is that we have no statement from Amazon saying they're not. No, and in fact, we kind of realize that they are. If you start looking at the information that's being sent to them. There's a lot going on in the background between overdrive and Amazon that's just not public information and not information that we as customers are legally or rightfully privy to, but I'm hopeful that we'll get a little bit more transparency if we keep pushing. I just feel like overdrive passes the buck on Amazon and says we'll ask them, but Amazon won't talk to us at all. We're left with nothing. We're left not knowing what the privacy violations are or are not with the products that we're pushing to patrons. To me, that's an unacceptable professional sacrifice. I'm not willing to do that. Sure. And you just said the magic word that I also wrote down. It sounds like ultimately one of your largest issues is an issue of transparency. Yeah, definitely. I mean, I think I understand all of these companies are trying to make money. That's great. And if they can make money providing us with services that work with our users, better yet, you know, fully for them for working with libraries and with all of us. That's wonderful. But doing so with secret deals behind closed doors that they can't reveal the terms of puts us in an awkward position where we're being asked to trust. And there's no real basis for that trust. Again, I feel very uncomfortable promoting things to customers when I don't really understand what it is I'm promoting and what I might be training away of their privacy or their data or their level of service with any product. And really, I truly do not mean to pick on overdrive. This is something that I think we need to watch with our Facebook vendors on all of our digital content providers on period. And just because probably a question I should have asked before we started this line. Does your library offer overdrive content? Are you a subscriber to overdrive? We are. We're a subscriber through our consortium. And I'll just put it this way. If we weren't part of a consortium and we were just Santa Fe Public Library, what we would be 100% different than what we're offering right now. Fair enough. Well, okay, let me what would what do you envision you would be offering? I would not be offering any eBooks that I could not buy the rights to outright. I wouldn't be offering anything I had to subscribe to. I wouldn't be offering anything I had to pay an annual platform fee to keep the privilege for accessing. I would only be offering as much as I could free open access titles, open things in formats that will work on anybody's device so that we're not privileging devices one over the other. Basically, probably I wouldn't be subscribing to any of the popular eBook content that's out there right now. I'd be promoting what's out there for free and I'd be explaining to people why we were doing that. But I know that's like a hardcore stance and it would be very difficult. I do know libraries that are doing this though. I think it would be something I'd have to be very comfortable defending publicly. I would be, but again, we are part of this larger countywide consortium and we're one vote out of seven so we do what we can. In hardcore stances, that's why I've got you on the call. Staying with the eBooks for just a little longer, there was a kind of second brew, haha, a little more recently which as far as I could tell you sort of broke in a journalistic term dealing with overdrive and what material was available to which libraries. So I was wondering if you just kind of fill us in on what got your ire up there. Yeah, well actually, Ryan Clearing bull broke the story and I just noticed that he's actually on today, he's on the attendee list. So hi Ryan. Ryan, if you got something to say raise your hand and I can turn on your microphone but we'll give Sarah a chance here to go from there. If you want to clarify anything, just let me know. Yeah, I'd love to hear from Ryan. So basically, Ryan popped me an e-mail that basically said you know, I'm noticing something weird in our catalog of materials that we can order from overdrive and it seems like we have a subset of materials because the nearby libraries have books that we don't even see as an option for us to pay for. So I'm confused and he said something like oh, you probably know all about this and it's just tell me what's going on, I'm really confused. And my first thought was oh, it's probably just a glitch in the overdrive catalog today or there's some weird thing going on with their database of materials for selection. I don't know, I don't know, but that's weird and I said I really don't know about this and I don't think anybody knows about this and so Ryan and I started spot checking titles between his catalog and mine and then also between other libraries that I was able to rope in anonymously because they were all scared to come out publicly but just looking at what he had versus what we had and it really became clear that his library was not given the same catalog of materials to select from through overdrive as my library was or other libraries were and there was a reason for that in the contract. If you really look carefully at the contract language he had a clause in his libraries that mine did not in ours but overdrive was not up front about that with their library, did not say oh, because you happen to provide library cards to people outside of your technical, political jurisdiction you're going to get a substandard crappy catalog of stuff to select from haha, all the best sellers, no you don't get to have those that was never told to them and so I think again this lack of transparency and this kind of, well let's see what we can get away with and hopefully nobody will notice and that bothers me a lot and I just again big props to Ryan for noticing and big props to Ryan for reaching out and trying to figure out what was going on. Ryan I was just talking to him in the chat his microphone is broken at the moment so he will be joining us via audio but if it was hmm trying to figure out how to phrase my question and again just to kind of push back a little bit, if it was in the contract that, and I have not read the contracts but if it was in the contract that this was the case is that not enough notice? I guess what more do you want from Overdrive I guess I'm hesitant to assign some malice or you know the evil laugh sort of thing we're going to get away with this well if you want to scroll down on my website you can actually go to the post in the contract language which is in the post yeah if you just scroll down a little bit more a little further down he's got the contract language pulled out there it is the access to application services blah blah blah blah blah that is the clause that basically states they could do what they did now when I read that I don't read that and see anywhere in there it's saying oh yeah and by the by we're going to be giving you a standard catalog of materials to select from and I definitely think that the fact that Overdrive gets to decide what a quote unquote library service area is which they don't define in the contract but they get to just decide what it means the library doesn't decide what your service area is they do that's distressing to me if you know the issue and you go back to the contract trying to find a reason why they could do what they said this is it but if you're just reading the contract there's no way that you would read this and then assume that what happened to that library is what was going to happen and I assume you're not going to like this but as I recall Overdrive's response was and Ryan has commented that it was the yeah they don't define what library service area is in the contract so that was unclear Overdrive's response was that if you provide outside of what is defined as the service area so just to clarify for example for those listening if you're not familiar with this for example I don't live in Omaha but I do have borrowing privileges in Omaha so that might be a case in which they would say I'm outside Omaha's traditional service area now I'm not saying this actually happens in Omaha versus Lincoln but that would be a sort of example we're talking about correct me if I'm wrong but that their response was is that that's actually determined by the publishers are saying if you're outside of the service area you're not allowed to have access to our content that wasn't Overdrive saying if you fall under this case we are not going to give you access to that content is that relevant to you is that what is your response to that two things one Overdrive agreed to the publishers terms instead of arguing with it or instead of involving libraries in the discussion and saying hey library customer people this is what the publishers are saying let's try to find a solution that works for everybody Overdrive just did what they did but again what really really bothers me is that they put that into place without being open about it without saying hey these publishers have said that if you authenticate patrons such in such a way you're not going to have access to their materials so if you're one of those people or libraries that authenticates that way you want to be really careful to decide do you want to change how you authenticates you can have access to everything or do you want to stay authenticating the way that you do and then have access to this subset of materials there was no discussion no openness whatsoever that's what bothers me okay so again kind of a for you it's an ultimately transparency and honesty because to me this was them trying to pull the wool over our eyes and I know obviously companies do this they're trying to make money but I don't want to reward that type of behavior with my money okay all right um is there anything else you want to say about ebooks no you're getting me all riled up my heart rate's all up dude I gotta go to a staff meeting after this I'm gonna be all rare apologize I apologize to your staff and I think I might be able to calm you down a little bit with a couple of questions and get you ready for your staff meeting um so scrolling back up here on your blog your latest post is what Sarah said you what is this what is this what Sarah said here people can read that post on the screen but I'd like to hear the genesis of it from you what's going on here well a couple of things one is that I'm spending a ton of time every day answering questions from people mostly sent by emails sometimes comments on the site sometimes just you know twitter messages but people asking me very specific questions about their library situation or about copyright or whatever I mean anything and everything and I'm spending so much time doing that and I never don't answer a question because I feel like people are asking for help and it's I'm a librarian I have to give them help and so all of that time that's been something to that is really taken away from all of that's really taken away from the time that I've been able to dedicate to blogging and I'm just not blogging as much because I'm trying to help all these individuals and so I'm trying to take all those questions now that I'm getting from individual one-on-one questions and just turn them into either blog posts or short video answers or whatever as a way to not only keep being able to post and help those people as well but also as a way to share that information because I think a lot of what people are asking me is stuff that other people are wondering about too and I wanted to start a video cast for a long time and I recorded some test sessions of a few different formats and wasn't real happy with them and I think this is going to work I think this will be a good way to combine those things together so send in your questions, anything and everything preferably library or technology related but I'll tackle anything there you go feel free to post this video or audio afterwards it could be an inaugural episode or something for you well and I noticed you've been you know you're blogging you've been somebody I've been following and known for several years now through conferences and blogging and various other things but I've started to notice you popping up in lots of other places you've been on some Twitch shows lately I the video that I wanted to ask you about is I actually saw a video you were hosting Tom Merritt as an author instead of as a tech journalist on the most intriguing sofa I've ever seen in my life what is that show I found just the one video like it was a regular thing no it's not a regular thing okay so Tom Merritt is a tech journalist that works for TWIT and hosts a few different shows on that network but he's also a San Rafael resident and he and his wife live like five minutes away from me and we had started talking and he had just put out his second book and I said dude do you want to do a reading a book reading through the library and he's like oh nobody will come I don't know but he agreed and so there's this beautiful mansion just up the hill from the library called the Fall Kirk Mansion and it's a beautiful 130-year-old gorgeous building with original furniture like the most intriguing sofa that you've ever seen and that sofa was so uncomfortable but he decided to bring some TWIT folks with him and they live streamed the reading and I thought that was awesome we had something like 70 people watching the live stream about 20 people at the live event so for an author reading that was killer that worked out really well for us and he had a good time and yeah I hope to do more stuff like that where we're able to stream out events from the library yeah no I thoroughly enjoyed it I kind of sat ahead playing on one of my other screens the other day and I was like oh wow is this regular it should be alright I will make the attempt sorry the sofa is not very comfortable no I believe all the springs died about 40 years ago it was like sitting on a big puff of air with some metal jumping up into your back end okay gotcha and the other question I had and I don't remember where I saw this but I have a little note here that says library and book club oh yeah what is this we've not met in a couple of months there's a little group of us here in the San Francisco Bay Area that are kind of like more nerdy type library and folk and so we've been reading non-library but sort of library related non-fiction and then meeting up and having a little book club and just meeting at somebody's house and talking about what we read in abstract and then talking about how it might relate to our work in libraries and it's been totally fun, totally useful and I'm reading books that normally I would see on the show and go yeah I should read that and then I never do so it's been a good motivation to keep my horizons open you should see the large pile that's just off to my right here of those books I need to be reading we all have the pile and that's just at work, forget home that's a now I'm going to kind of put you on the spot here any chance it sounds like a great idea any chance of taking it virtual? I don't know I didn't start it so I don't owe rights to this book club but it would be fun to do that that would be easy enough to do through Goodreads or something or library thing could be done I think what I like about the live event and I miss virtual so this says a lot but I like actually being face-to-face and socializing with people from time to time all the time but occasionally I want that face-to-face interaction plus there's snacks and you can't really do the snack thing virtually when I suggest taking a virtual I don't by any means mean to suggest you should stop meeting in person too you can just kind of expand the group and you all can solve your little core group it sounds like a good idea and I don't have the time to set it up I was just going to say there should be little local chapters of this that would work alright and then my kind of last question for you this will kind of put you on the spot because I did not mention this at the time I thought of it as I was setting this up is there any cool service tool website something that you found recently that you think everybody else should know about that now is kind of your opportunity to say yeah I've been playing with X and it's really cool let me see if I can find it there is something I found this as a comment on someone else's Facebook status and so it was this person was saying that he was having writer's block and was having a hard time motivating himself to write and I gave some very stupid practical suggestions just try writing something anything and get up and take a walk and move around and then you'll feel better someone else suggested this website called written kitten so it's writtenkitten.net and what's neat is that you can set a parameter of words and every time you write X number of words it shows you a new picture of a kitten and so you're so you're rewarded by cuteness the more you write and I've tried it a couple of times now and I'm so sad to say it actually works for me it's actually a motivator to keep writing and I feel very shallow and stupid and the gamification of seeing a little pussy cat just because I wrote a few words shouldn't make me as happy as it does but this was my new favorite thing I think and I just pasted in some text I pulled up off of a web page that happened to be in my other browser and yeah it works now look at that little baby doesn't make you happy and then you write some more and then you get another one oh jeez I have two book projects going I'm not sure this would completely help me but alright that's wow hey I asked the answer wow alright is there anything else while I've got you on the line you'd like to share or tell us or do we end on kittens I usually have a couple of links I like to share with folks once the conversation is over and for those of you looking at the video I'm sorry the sun is coming through my window in a weird way at the moment no I think ending on kittens is the exact right way to do a library interview that works especially knowing you ok I'm just going to stop Sarah I want to thank you so much this has been wonderful this is one of those situations where I ask somebody to do this and they're like what are we going to talk about for an hour and we've pretty much filled the hour without even trying very hard thanks Michael so always wonderful to talk to you you're welcome to stay on the line I'm going to just put you back on mute and for regular listeners here as you know I try to sneak in just a couple of things at the end it's the end of the year it's really slow there's not a lot going on but I am going to just pull up a couple of links I will add written kitten to the bookmarks for this archive session here but I just again want to share just a couple of other things one is speaking of copyright issues something you may want to be aware of if you are one of those folks who uses something called BitTorrent there is this service out here called HaveYouDownloaded.com and if you're downloading material online that may not be something completely legal to download it may not be as difficult as you think to figure out that you're actually downloading that and what this site does is look at the IP address that you are currently using and it will tell you if this particular site has any records of you downloading any of that content now doesn't mean what you're doing is illegal doesn't mean what you're doing is legal if it doesn't find you that doesn't mean somebody else couldn't I just find it as somebody who does use BitTorrent for downloading certain things Linux distributions for example it is kind of an intriguing site privacy copyright issues that sort of thing you might want to take a look at that if you are a BitTorrent user the next one I want to show you is this is a twitter account realtime wwii or live tweets from World War 2 this is somebody who is kind of tweeting as if it was today but in 1939 and then for the next six years they plan on continuing this so the idea is that you follow this twitter stream and you can be a twitter kind of relive the experience of World War 2 and the history of that kind of as it happened or now as it happens so if nothing else if your history buff an interesting feed World War 2 buff or if you're just looking for kind of non-standard but very intriguing and dare I say educational uses for twitter this might be an account you would want to check out and to follow and then the last one here this one I've marked quite a while ago I don't remember what it actually does post post this is a way where you can search for content from your social feeds but it's going to be a little more organized by kind of multimedia content so instead of just following text you can see just show me the pictures from the different services I follow or just show me the videos from the different services I follow from the people that I follow and in this case I would need to sign in to actually get some results here but considering that some of those folks that I follow probably don't necessarily want to make the content public I will just talk about it and not actually show all of that material for the recording the last thing I'm just going to throw this in here because we've got the time excuse me I'm going to go off camera for just a second we just got to do toy at the commission to start with here is my phone so if this gives you an idea here it is a droid bionic then I show you this little box here which is actually a little thicker but actually smaller than my phone this is what's called a pico pocket projector this is actually something you can plug into your laptop or your phone and it actually will project the screen onto the wall we literally just got this thing yesterday they list for about 300 we found a refurbished unit for only 110 bucks so something that I'll be playing with in upcoming presentations and what not but I mean this thing is small it's a little taller and not much thicker than I would say a box of cigarettes and seems to work very well on very early tests so if you're looking for kind of an ultra portable lightweight projector this might be something you want to take a look at they're called pico projectors this what happens to me from a company called Optima so just a little bit of hardware to show you there in fact you can see it better over on this side with the white board there so that's pretty much it for Tech Talk this week and this month I want to thank Sarah once again for attending or well for participating and for all of you for attending Krista will be back next week with our regular Encompass lives and we've got some interesting shows coming up I will say we already have kind of a plan for Tech Talk for January we're going to have a couple of guests on and we're going to be talking about technology and things dealing with giving presentations you know how to hook up your laptop to a projector speaking of projectors might bring up the pico projector again that time some advice for dealing with tech when it comes to presentations that sort of thing so I encourage all of you to attend we have recorded this session audio and video recordings will be available usually within about 24 to 48 hours of the actual recording and so I'm going to say thank you to everybody for attending thank you once again to Sarah for participating and we'll see you next week bye bye