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It's interesting to see jessamyn and Sarah Houghton both addressing a topic I posted here over a year ago, namely, the Distributed Library Project.

Despite my sentiments, the project is growing legs. In addition to the Bay Area effort (linked above), there's a wiki related to a British effort in developing the project. On the wiki, there's a Slashdot comment that I quoted which, to a degree, makes it seem like I am the "incensed librarian" being referenced. Not exactly, but it could have been me, if I had been clever enough to come up with a Distributed Lavatory Project.

Anyway, I think my initial reactions to the project still apply. So read 'em, if you're so inclined.

I was reading a fairly interesting New York Observer article about the culture of the Netflix queue, of which I am an active participant, when I came across the following passage (bold is mine):

"I hector people to use it, kind of embarrassingly," said Robert Levine, a former senior editor at Wired, now a freelance writer. "A friend of mine was complaining she was late in returning a DVD to Blockbuster, and I was like, 'Why would you want someone charging you a late fee?' It's not like the late fees are so financially onerous, but they send you a notice that it's late in the mail. And then you have to go in and pay. If they could just take the fucking late fee from my credit card, it'd be fine. But then you have to go into the store and wait in line again. I mean, it's like getting in trouble with the library. I don't understand why anyone puts up with it."

I'm sure I don't need to analyze the faults of Mr. Levine's analogy for you, but his comments raise a compelling point: why don't more libraries allow patrons to pay their fines online? Why, if we are going to maintain financial penalties, do we not provide all possible means to settle up? Isn't the burden of having to pay the fine taxing enough?

I know that no one reads this blog anymore, but if you happen to be here and haven't tried out Amazon Light yet, go do it right now. Basically, it's an alternate interface to Amazon, but most noteworthy in that it incorporates Jon Udell's Library Lookup functionality right into the search results page. That is to say, look up any book and (once you've selected your library in the Settings) on the book detail page there will be a button check for that item in your library's catalog. Sure, it's exactly the same as the bookmarklet, but I implore you to acknowledge the coolness of incorporating this application into a much broader suite of nifty features (including BlogThis, del.icio.us, Netflix and Gmail functionality). Trust me, just go check it out already.

Update: I see that Mr. Fagan and Mr. Cohen beat me to this one. I may as well point out that my source was the always entertaining kottke.org remaindered links weblog.