New Year, New Library: New Library (kind of)

It's been quiet here for the last month as we train new staff and bombard the campus with information literacy one-shots. In addition, much of my free time has been taken by volunteering for a local charter school that, like many schools in Washington, DC, lacks a school librarian or school media specialist.
To wit, for the 2012-13 academic calendar there are approximately sixty (60, 6-0) schools in DC that lack a librarian or school media specialist, covering between 16,000 to 17,000 students. There's plenty of blame to go around, starting with the Mayor, Vincent Gray (sample inflammatory statement from the mayor, "[W]e decided we would leave education to educators"), the Schools Chancellor Kaya Henderson, and individual principals, who decide whether or not to staff a school library. There is more sadness this way:

The results of a Freedom of Information Act request show that in FY11 and FY12, the money appropriated to DCPS [DC Public Schools] for library and media services was overwhelmingly used for other things. It paid for other things like building repairs, maintenance to HVAC systems. More than $400,000 was used for testing. DCPS used $80,000 of these funds to pay for a San Francisco-based consultant to develop a strategic plan for its Office of Family and Community Engagement.

This school, which one of my children attends, moved into a new facility last year, and this year finally has space for a library. But no librarian or school media specialist, and that's where parents like me come in. I suddenly find myself a Chinese-language cataloger (it's a Chinese-immersion school), blindly fumbling around, guided by ISBNs that may or may not lead me to a record, relying on Library of Congress Subject Headings that may or may not exist, and eyeballing the height of books to make a cataloging judgement. I've cataloged in Cyrillic before, with the help of a cheat sheet, and in Japanese, which I used to speak, but Chinese is a whole different animal.

On the plus side, the school has selected Follet's Destiny as an integrated library system, and it's easy to use. Within about fifteen minutes I felt comfortable with it, and this ease of use will allow teachers to check out materials to students. Double plus, some other parents are also librarians, and we've all taken active interests in the new school library.

In addition, the school is going to experiment with giving students raspberry pi (not pie, though that would be good, too), so I may be talking a bit (more) about programming in this space.

In the meantime, if you'd like to help DC's schools, please sign this petition. Thanks.

On Payola and Libertarianism, On Beer and the End User

Last month, I wrote a blog post for DCBeer on payola on the DC beer market. It was well-received, with thousands of page views and kudos, and I'm thankful that many people read it. One of those people is the man behind Beer in Baltimore, who writes this

In a general philosophical sense, the concept of currying favor with retailers of your product via such "payola" is no different from a mega-retailer offering you a discount-club card membership, or Amazon's retailers offering free shipping, or McDonald's offering a toy with a Happy Meal, or even a bar offering a Happy Hour or Ladies' Night.  Or even the occasional complementary drink from a bartender at your regular pub.  The above practices, in a sense, are just as unethical and immoral as the practices being discussed in the article in DCBeer.  The fact that such "payola" is downright prevalent in the alcohol business bespeaks much more the profit margins and revenues involved in the alcohol business and the return on marketing from such practices (occasionally qualifying for the term "obscene").

I disagree. I am the "end user" of beer. I am also the end user of a discount-club card membership, hypothetically. In order for the above analogy to work, the retailer of beer would have to be the end user. But retailers are not. I am. You are, maybe. Oh, and that discount-club card membership, it's not free. It may not cost you any money, but it will cost you some privacy. 

Now we will add some more nuance.

They [both brewing companies and grocery stores] want your trade.  They're offering you incentives to do business with them.  You don't have to take them.  But you'd be a fool not to take advantage of such offers, if they are of use to you.  (As opposed to, say, the Turnip Twaddler that comes with the Ronco Tomato Musher.)

So one is illegal, the other is not, and there is an equality of opportunity here in that anyone may sign up for a discount-club card, and that even a craft brewer has the right to "sellout," to become popular and play with the big boys, Budweiser and MillerCoors. However, let's play the libertarian thought experiment and eliminate the government, or at least get it to the size where it can be drowned in a bathtub. Here, the equality of opportunity to sellout wouldn't matter. Rather, the larger brewing companies would simply "capture" the state, and use state apparati for their own purposes. To me, this is a central flaw in libertarian thought: the state won't wither away, it will be propped up and used by those who seek to use its power, or vestiges of power. Don't believe me? 

One more thing, of the craft brewing companies he mentions by name in his write-up, at least one of them was implicated by a distributor I spoke to when researching the DCBeer article. 

Payola in the Washington, DC Beer Market

If you've ever been to a bar or restaurant and complained, or thought to complain, about the selection of beer there, there's sometimes a nefarious reason for that, as opposed to a lazy one. I put on my journalism hat and delve into the word of payola, the quid pro quo that goes on between the people who make beer, distribute it, and sell it to us. I'll have more to say on this later, as there's going to be some fallout from this post over at DCBeer, especially since it went national. Some of that fallout is already in the comments, where a former Flying Dog employee, this brewery being the alleged victim of payola that got the ball rolling on this piece, adds some nuance to the proceedings in the comments section. In short, craft brewers and their distributors engage in this kind of behavior, too. Everyone does, and it's often hard to tell the difference between an illegal activity and building a business relationship. I'm not sure where the line is on this kind of behavior, and neither are the authorities who are supposed to enforce the law. Give it a read.