http://president.mlanet.org/mfunk/2008/01/send-me-you-success-and-failure-stories/
MLA president Mark Funk is asking folks, especially in health librarianship, to share their stories about access to social sites at work:
In an earlier post I presented some findings from the survey done by the Task Force on Social Networking Software. They found that many librarians are having access to various social networking web sites and applications blocked by their IT departments. I asked for some success stories on getting these sites unblocked, but I didn’t receive any. I’m asking again for you to send me not only success stories, but failure stories as well.
I’m working on an article that I hope to get published in a magazine that’s read by organization leaders. In it, I want to include examples or techniques that made TPTB unblock sites. If I could include horror stories of necessary access that was denied, that will also help. Please share.
Visit the link above to share your own story, and don’t miss his previous post about the topic of blocked sites:
http://president.mlanet.org/mfunk/2007/09/hospital-it-departments/
If you remember, last semester I asked the Dominican IT folks to put Firefox on our computers. Those conversations are ongoing…
Soooo glad I am the IT department
No site blocking.
This has nothing to do with libraries: I worked in industry, they had a Panda product that denied access to certain sites; this piece of junk manage to policy out a supplier of computer hardware called officeline, and the company’s own website. Weak. I found out that they had a specific category for “proxy avoidance”.
Brinxmat, I respectfully disagree. When you are in a hospital library and your instituion is running blocking software it makes it extremely difficult to do your job like finding quality images or things mentioning any taboo words such as sex, genitals, breast, etc.
YouTube is specifically blocked at our institution. There are some very good surgical videos from reputable institutions on YouTube. Our hospital’s residents, medical students, and others cannot view these videos at the hospital.
Michelle, sorry, my bad: the first line should read “This comment has nothing to do with libraries” and “manage” should read “managed”. In which case, we agree.
Blocking software assumes that we’re not doing our job, but searching the net for filth. I’m not sure that I like that assumption — and I won’t work at the kind of place that assumes this kind of thing.
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