Editorial: The MySpace Gap
The very libraries that need E-rate money also need to stay current
Rebecca Miller, Executive Editor -- Library Journal, 9/15/2006
The House of Representatives inspired me finally to put up a MySpace page when it passed the misguided Deleting Online Predators Act (DOPA) this summer. I'd meant to do it before, but that bill, to tie E-rate funding to blocking patrons from social networking sites like MySpace, Facebook, and others, is an affront to the library's mission (see News, LJ 9/1/06, p. 18). All libraries should be places to go to participate in culture in its myriad physical and virtual forms. Yet if the Senate agrees with the House on this one, libraries will be faced with a real check on their ability to do that. The libraries that will be hardest hit are the very libraries that serve users who need public access computers most, the ones that depend on E-rate funding. Many libraries, those that could afford to, already gave up E-rate money to avoid filtering net access because of CIPA (Children's Internet Protection Act). With DOPA, some libraries that can barely afford to boot up will be forced to shut their patrons out of the online frontier. Let's not sit back and watch the digital divide expand even further.
With this decision, of course, populist Congressmen are fear-mongering about the bad apples who might abuse social networking sites. At the most benign, they could sell us more stuff we don't want, but, at the most malignant, they could stalk the vulnerable. Librarians are used to combating this sort of noise to guide patrons to our culture in all its expressions. So librarians need to be on MySpace just as much as library users want to be on MySpace. If libraries are going to be places where patrons can come to get up-to-date on these new sites, librarians have to get over any anxiety they feel about them.
If more of us in Libraryland, and I mean everyone from students to directors, considered MySpace and the like our places, we'd use them to influence the public's perception of libraries, pick up trends, sense the needs of patrons, and participate in communities beyond our walls in yet another way. We'd see these sites not as dangerous places but as the growing part of our lives that they have become. That insight could help us nut out how to take great advantage of these online spaces, as Brooklyn College's Beth Evans has (see “Google Is Not the Net,” p. 32). She put her library on MySpace, leading patrons to discover it where they hang out online.
If all of us saw this potential, we would put up an even bigger fight against federal regulators. Those that need E-rate money should not be coerced into saying “no” to innovations, or, worse, becoming hired guns who, in exchange for needed tech funding, shoot down new ideas after resistance from a few vocal people.
We already accept what in reality is a digital divide in our libraries, where flush libraries can offer tech savvy at levels that far outpace those that are strapped. But, if DOPA gets through the Senate, the pressure on our less funded libraries will get more intense. Every dime is critical for libraries on the edge of connectivity. Wayne Hanway, of the Southeastern Public Library System in Oklahoma, refers to “the huge burden that has been put on small public libraries by the continually rising bar of computer technology and public demand for” related services (see Feedback, p. 11). He pleads for support for what he calls “these unfunded mandates.”
No library should be forced to give up on offering the best, fastest, most informed access to the people it serves. We must make sure our libraries can be current and help our patrons stay current as new online developments influence our culture. We must make funding that work a priority, starting now with the DOPA decision as it goes to the Senate.
