Director of technology for the Shenendehowa Public Library in Clifton Park, New York.
kgs@bluehighways.com
Column for October 1999
To offer sound-based Internet resources, you need to commit time and energy to staying abreast of these quickly evolving formats—but it’s worth it. As Cynthia Hetherington, senior technology librarian at Englewood (N.J.) Public Library, told me, “I like looking over and seeing patrons relaxing in the lab, reading their e-mail, listening to their music. It reminds me of seeing someone stuffed into a comfortable chair reading a magazine.”
We radio junkies adore the Web; “Being able to listen to NPR radio all day has just about changed my life,” said Robin Hastings, customer service assistant at Missouri River Regional Library in Jefferson City, Missouri.
To provide this service, you need sound-capable computers connected to the Internet; a reasonably fast connection; sound players (which are currently free, while major companies duke it out over who gets to be the de facto standard); and either speakers in a soundproof area or headphones. If you are going to provide patrons with the capability to download audio files, you have a few more things to think about, as well; but first you’ll need to learn the jargon!
Streaming audio: This is what you used if you ever listened to a radio broadcast over the Web. The audio files aren’t downloaded to your hard drive; they are just “streamed” to a player, such as RealPlayer (formerly RealAudio), which can be downloaded for free from Real Networks. Microsoft, of course, had to get into the act with Windows Media, which plays both streaming and nonstreaming files, and there are other players as well.
Nonstreaming audio files can be downloaded to your computer, replayed indefinitely, and optionally stored on or written to another device, such as a CD-ROM or a player.
Now practice this sentence: “I’m going to rip an MP3 of Alanis Morissette.” I don’t need to explain who Morissette is—one of the Danielle Steels of the youthful-music world. MP3 is one of many audio standards and one of the most likely, at present, to achieve dominance. To rip an audio file means to copy it from another source, such as a compact disc, and then digitally encode it in a format such as MP3 (which also makes it possible to offer it via the Web). This is easy to do; RealJukebox can rip CDs, for example.
MP3 and other audio standards, such as Liquid Audio and QuickTime, are called codecs (for coder-decoder). These codecs—or audio standards—allow audio files to be streamed or downloaded faster than other types of Web data.
If you’re an Internet sound novice, start with two sites recommended by Elizabeth Thomsen, member services manager for NOBLE, the North of Boston Library Exchange: Jewish Torah Audio and Voices from the Dust Bowl. Then move up to Amazon.com’s free music downloads, and when you’re really ready, start exploring www.realaudio.com and www.mp3.com. Or try a local radio station. If all else fails, ask anyone under 12 for assistance!
If you’re thinking the ability to easily copy, encode, and upload files from CD-ROMs creates some interesting copyright issues, the music industry agrees with you. Every day tens of thousands of audio files are downloaded and uploaded to the Web—and quite a few of these are illegally ripped from copyrighted CDs. Not surprisingly, it is illegal to rip a copyrighted CD without the author’s permission.
Just as the Internet had a major impact on the marketing of other types of information, we can expect some major changes in how music is packaged, sold, and delivered. In the meantime, the best we can do is remind our patrons of the fair-use laws.
If you’re like most libraries, you never seem to have enough bandwidth—and this will become even more apparent with audio files. A recording of “Stormy Weather” by Billie Holiday takes up 3.17 megabytes on my hard drive—or more than two diskettes. Rhonda Fisher of the James V. Brown Library in Williamsport, Pennsylvania, said that on their ISDN line, supporting 20 computers, “patrons are already complaining that their files load painfully slow.” They plan to move up to cable service.
On a dedicated cable connection running beyond T1 speeds, I average about one minute per song download—lickety-split by audio download standards. That same song will take seven minutes on a dedicated 56K line—assuming that line isn’t shared by other computers, which in a library is a bad assumption to make—and could take up to 20 minutes on a 28.8 modem.
If you have a big library, you might have rooms where you can place networked computers with speakers and let your patrons bop away. The rest of us will have to use headphones—which may resolve the sound problem but raises some interesting but manageable sanitation issues.
Missi Matt from Calcasieu Parish (La.) Public Library, said “We provide antiseptic towelettes . . . in the keyboard drawers for patrons to decide if they want to use them.” If you go this route, for ease of cleaning avoid foam-rubber earpads, advised Gary E. Masters, automated services librarian at Texas A&M. Rhonda Fisher’s library provides jack extension cords so patrons can plug in their own headphones, and Leila Shapiro of the Bethesda (Md.) Regional Library, said they will soon be selling headphones at nominal cost.
Perhaps someday ALA members will be able to listen to conference programs and meetings on their own PCs, following events in real time or reviewing our organizational history long after the fact. We librarians tend to be the last out of the gate in adopting new formats for our own use—but it could happen!