A couple of months ago, I bought a domain, cpl.to, and set it up as a bitly Pro account, because I like the idea of having a special “shortlink” domain that I can use for tweets about CPL. However, I haven’t shared them anywhere but on Twitter and you might find these interesting or useful, so here are a bunch of useful links I’ve created so far.

Please note: Some resources will require you to log in using your Chicago Public Library card and ZIP code. They are marked with an asterisk*.

Basic Info

1. cpl.to/my-cpl*: Log into your CPL account from this shortlink, check the status of your holds, renew books and more.
2. cpl.to/pcres: Reserve a computer at your nearby branch right from the Web!
3. cpl.to/museumpass: Thanks to the wonderful folks at Kraft Foods, you can sign out passes at your local CPL branch that will get you and a few friends into many of the amazing museums we have here in Chicago…for free.
4. cpl.to/jobsearchers: Let’s be honest: it sucks to be looking for a job right now. CPL recently updated and relaunched its “Especially for Job Searchers” section, where you can get research careers, learn new skills, find out what goes into a winning résumé, find places in the city where professionals can help you and more. Hang in there!
5. cpl.to/reciprocalcard: If you live in one of Chicago’s many beautiful suburbs, you can still use CPL! All you need is a valid ID (or a recent piece of mail) and your suburban library card and you’ll be able to check out books, movies, music, museum passes and access all of our “members only” resources like our online research databases and downloadable audiobooks and ebooks!
6. cpl.to/teacherinthelibrary: If your kids need homework help after school, or if they just want a refresher on what they’re learning, CPL has fully-qualified teachers available after school at many branches.

From Our Catalog

1. cpl.to/whattoread: Looking for something good to read? Why not browse the many lists we’ve compiled of some of the best books in our collections?
2. cpl.to/chicagofiction: Chicago is a beautiful city, so it’s natural that authors would want to set their novels here. Take a look at this list of books set right here in the Windy City.
3. cpl.to/thehungergames: Are you a member of Team Peeta or Team Gale? CPL has Suzanne Collins’ amazing Hunger Games trilogy for teens…and that’s definitely real.
4. cpl.to/photographybooks: Looking to learn photography? CPL has tons of books that will help you release your inner shutterbug!
5. cpl.to/potterholics: Are you in Dumbledore’s Army? Do you wish you could go to Hogwarts? Wondering what Harry Potter stuff Chicago Public Library has? Look no further.

Research… like a Boss!

1. cpl.to/onlineresearch*: The main page for CPL’s online research tools. We’ve got newspapers going back to 1849, collections of scholarly journals, investment research, encyclopediae, science, history, biographies, genealogy and more!
2. cpl.to/chiltonlibrary*: Strapped for cash to give your car a badly-needed tune-up? Check out Chilton Library! Just select your car’s year, make and model and find out how to repair and service your car, check for recalls and more.
3. cpl.to/morningstar-db*: If you’re an investor, it’s important to have the best information at hand about the stocks and mutual funds in which you’re interested. Learn more about where to put your money with their incredible tools.
4. cpl.to/referenceusa*: Reference USA is a huge directory with more than 14 million US businesses and 89 million US residents listed. Great for stalking that high school crush who ditched you at prom!

Have You Visited a Branch Lately?

1. cpl.to/hallbranch: CPL’s classic George Cleveland Hall Branch (located at the intersection of 48th and Michigan) was a common meeting place for some of America’s greatest African-American writers, such as Arna Bontemps, Gwendolyn Brooks, Lorraine Hansberry, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Claude McKay and Richard Wright.
2. cpl.to/waterworks: CPL’s new Water Works location, located at the Chicago Visitor Information Center on Michigan Avenue (and within walking distance of the John Hancock Center and the Drake Hotel) is a great place to pick up your book requests if you live or work between River North and the Gold Coast. It also has a small selection of popular works available for check-out.

That’s all I’ve got right now, but there are more coming and when I create one, I’ll be sure to post it on this blog.

iPhone. Android. Flickr. YouTube. Delicious. Goodreads. Meetup. Formspring. WordPress. Bit.ly. Github. Dropbox. QR Codes. Creative Commons. Twitter. Facebook.

All of these things have something in common: they are all technologies that Chicago Public Library (as well as countless other libraries across the country) should be embracing.

I’ve gotten a ton of work done in the last couple of days on what’s going into the social media presentation I’m working on, for which there will be both patron and staff versions. I am particularly excited about the one for library staff, which will focus on how libraries can and should use these technologies to go where their patrons are and to innovate quickly and cheaply.

However, it has not escaped my attention that the City of Chicago has some fairly draconian policies regarding the use by staff of many of these very same technologies. That flavor of irony is particularly bitter.

Folks, when the Library of Congress has a Flickr account I think it should be understood that librarians should be allowed use social media. Because we have to special collections. The curated selections.

And one of our major raisons d’être is to catalog every single item in them to within an inch of its life.

Because that’s how librarians roll.

The worst part of it all is that “www.” was never really necessary in the first place. Back in the early- to mid-1990s, when the Web was just starting to take off, we were all using relatively simple web browsers. Even so, I remember that the first browser I used heavily, Netscape 1.1, would automatically fill in the “http://” protocol if you didn’t specify it. That was an obvious call, because hey, you were using a web browser, so the odds were pretty good that you were going to a web site if you didn’t tell the browser otherwise, so the of course the browser should go ahead and fill in the protocol.

The “www.” part of a web address is actually a subdomain of the main domain, which was supposed to help separate the web server (the part of the server accessible via HTTP) from other protocols, like Gopher, FTP, email and the like. However, if you tried to connect to servers using HTTP, the servers were almost entirely capable of noticing what protocol or port was being used and answering correctly. Unfortunately, no one at the time had any idea that the Web would become one of the most transcendent ways of sharing information, ever, so sysadmins everywhere just gave the Web server a subdomain (e.g., www.somesite.com) as they did with, say, mail servers (e.g., mail.somesite.com).

Fast forward fifteen years and the Web is not only still around, but it’s going strong and still growing…which is more than anyone can say for poor old Gopher. However, we’ve been stuck with “www.” add-on, even though web servers are smart enough to perform a simple forward if it’s been set up.

It’s time to drop the “www.” from our domains. Don’t worry, though; your sysadmin can set up a simple forward so that if people still type in the “www.”, they’ll just get shown to the right URL.

There are several reasons I’m advocating this:

1. There’s no need for the “www.” part. As I said above, it’s completely vestigial in terms of the Internet. There’s virtually no chance any more that someone’s coming to your site with Gopher.
2. Less is more. Leaving off the “www.” gives you four characters back and these days—with social networking sites like Twitter being as popular as they are—the shorter your URL is, the easier it is for people to remember it and pass it along.
3. It looks better. Okay, this is a personal reason, but I happen to think that a shorter, more readable URL looks a lot better on an advertisement than one with the “www.” included. Whenever I see an ad with it still included, I feel like the company behind it doesn’t quite get the Internet. (Embarassingly, when Chicago Public Library started their “Not What You Think” ad campaign and had ads all over the city referring people to “chipublib.org”, they discovered that their web server was not set up to handle automatic redirects from chipublib.org to www.chipublib.org.)
4. It’ll do better in search engines. Google, for example, ranks http://somesite.com/ slightly higher than http://www.somesite.com/.

So brush up on your .htaccess terminology and drop the useless “www.” from your domains.

Now, if you follow that link and read the first two Excel spreadsheets (curse you, OECD, for not providing PDF or HTML versions of this data!) you’ll see that it isn’t quite as bad as it sounds: first, the US has the highest number of overall broadband subscribers of any country; second, most of the countries with higher adoption percentages are countries far smaller than the US (Britain, France, Netherlands, Denmark, Belgium, S. Korea, etc.). Naturally, it’s a lot easier to wire up the entirety of small countries than it is a continent-spanning nation that’s quite spread out, as much of the US west of the Mississippi River is.

Still, if you want to get broadband Internet service in the US, your options—even in a major metro area like New York or Chicago—are limited. In most Chicago neighborhoods, you’re limited to Comcast cable service and either Verizon or AT&T DSL service. That’s it; there are virtually no broadband alternatives. (Clear’s WiMax service has only recently appeared in Chicago, so we’ll have to see how that goes.) Now, I could editorialize for quite a long time about competition in the Internet, TV and phone service markets, but I won’t bore you with that, as it’s only my opinion, it’s often debated by people far smarter than I and it tends to spark political flame wars.

There have been some interesting developments in broadband lately, though. Google, for example, spent a lot of money after the dot-com bubble burst buying up unused fiber and they recently announced a fiber-to-the-home (FTTH) service that they are looking to set up in test markets and that they may later roll out elsewhere. The chief feature of this service is astonishing: Google plans to give users of this service one gigabit/second connections, straight to their house, which would make a user’s Internet connection almost as fast as the hard drive on her computer (though, of course, the actual speed of any data transfer is limited to the slowest leg of the journey). Also interesting is the fact that they intend to license out this service to others, meaning we could actually see a resurgence of “boutique” ISPs—local service resellers—rather like the ones we had in the early 1990s (and that were killed off by mega-ISPs like AOL, cable companies and telephone companies in the late 1990s).

Google has stated in the past that the more people that use the Internet, the better it is for Google, so I’m not entirely surprised that they’re doing this (though I was surprised at the speeds they’re looking to achieve). Still, it gives me some hope that if they do roll out an ISP, it might present a real “third option” (or, if small companies can resell the service, even fourth, fifth and sixth options) and some much-needed competition in telecommunications for America, which can really only be a good thing for users. (Hooray for supply and demand!) I think a broadband price/service war is brewing in America. It may not have started yet, but if a few things fall into place, it could start as early as a year or two from now.

However, just giving everyone a fast Internet connection isn’t enough; The Internet can be a dangerous place for a novice and so there also needs to be a program of education about using the Internet effectively and safely…and, as a matter of fact, that is exactly the conclusion to which a recent FCC survey came. The New York Times recently ran an AP article that says as much:

The Federal Communications Commission’s first-ever survey on Internet usage and attitudes concludes that those who aren’t connected today need to be taught how to navigate the Web, find online information that is valuable to them and avoid hazards such as Internet scams.

Boy, do we ever need more of this! If I had a penny for every bogus offer and slimy con I’ve gotten in my email over the years, I could retire a wealthy man by now. Goodness knows how many people get suckered by these things every year and with the economy sucking as hard as it has for the last year, I’ve seen far too many library patrons willing to sign up for un-guaranteed loans from god-knows-who on the Internet. I even ran into a patron last year who bought into a scam—despite my warnings that it was such—that would, for a monthly fee, “put her on a list for whom their ‘thousands of members’” would pray. (Not that I’m against prayer, but I guarantee that just one look at this email she showed me would have told you it was an obvious scam, too.) Scams are like cockroaches: if I see one patron getting taken in, there are many more I haven’t seen who have, too.

Education about how to use the Internet—not just technically, but also practically and safely—is where I think we’re really hurting in the US. I am occasionally reminded that the Internet is still very much the Wild West: there may be lots of civilized places out there, but there’s also quite a lot of uncharted territory, too, and people need to be mindful of what they’re doing, who they’re giving their info to and what happens after they do. (It was only fifteen years ago that I first started using the Internet and I don’t mind telling you that as a naïve teen, I made some pretty stupid mistakes that I would scold my younger self for if I could.) Since then, the pace and sophistication of technology has only accelerated, to the point where today it is shockingly easy to get your identity stolen.

I don’t know how to get around this other than for teachers, librarians, writers of “how to use the Internet” books and the like to educate as many people as we can. Unlike other media that came before the Internet (such as radio and television), the Internet’s two-way nature offers great power to people and, as Peter Parker’s Uncle Ben once told him, “With great power comes great responsibility”. I fear that as the supply of broadband Internet service goes up and prices come down, there will be growing pains as people adjust to the full scope of this truly awesome medium. The big question is: will millions of people outgrow those pains or succumb to them?