A dear friend of mine is doing some research into the current situation of libraries that serve children, and particularly school libraries. I offered to help, so I’m posting her questions here.

Feel free to answer here or email me directly at Rettstatt (at) gmail (dot) com. Also, if you happen to know of any good online resources, please share.

If any of my readers work in the field and have a few minutes to answer three questions by tomorrow (Tuesday) evening, then I’ll owe you a big favor. At the very least, I’ll owe you a signed copy of The Sky Village for your library or personal collection, whichever you prefer.

(1) What is the biggest challenge facing your library specifically and libraries serving kids (especially schools) in general these days?

(2) What’s the best thing that’s happening with your library?

(3)  What do you see on the horizon–emerging trends, possible opportunities, potential obstacles to look out for?

Bonus (optional) questions:

(4)  Who does the buying for your library?  What is the process?  Is it effective?  Why or why not?

(5) What do you wish people knew about libraries and kids these days?  Or, if you prefer, anything else you’d like to say to someone who’s very interested?

So, Sony is paying $1 Million for violating the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Rule.

It wasn’t any sort of evil white-collar schemy crime. They didn’t launder money or engage in insider trading. Like a surprising lot of companies, they just didn’t bother to bother the experts. In this case, children’s online community experts. They demonstrated a profound lack of rigor.

The thing wasn’t that they collected email addresses. There are ways to do that legally without jumping through too many hoops. And it wasn’t that they pshawed the COPPA Commandments. The mistake, at the simplest level, was asking for date of birth. That tiny little drop-down doohickey provided the “actual knowledge” that did them in.

There’s more to it, of course. And a company like Sony should be just as invested in best practices as they are in the law, and best practices for them would start with the acknowledgment that kids are going to be visiting their music websites and they’d better face that fact head on.

I wouldn’t be surprised if they went out shortly and recruited themselves a Czar to wear the thinking cap on this sort of thing from now on.

This is a home video of my twin girls and not intended to be professional. I made it for friends and family who haven’t seen the twins in a while. And since it’s largely friends and family who read my blog, I thought I’d post it here. The footage is from a couple of weeks before and a couple of weeks after our epic journey from Chicago to Chongqing, China, for an extended visit with the in-laws. Work has brought me back to Chicago, so I’ve been away from them for a few weeks. Hence the choice of song.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=90sgVk4W8Ds]

Children’s book authors,

Do you have a website where you collect email addresses from kids?

Are you familiar with United States federal law regarding commercial websites that collect personal information from children? It’s called the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Rule, and a single violation can have a civil penalty of up to $11,000.

Even if you aren’t making money from your author website, it’s a commercial site if you are using it to promote your books. Because of this, you have to be careful how you collect personal information from children.

The best resource for learning about this is the FTC website, but it’s a lot of data and more than most of you need. And this is where I make it clear that I’m not a lawyer (IANAL). But I am familiar with the legislation and best practices that protect children online.

So here are a few basic tips.

The easiest thing is not to collect email addresses from kids at all, which means deleting them from your inbox, address book, and anywhere else they might be hiding.

But you wouldn’t be an author if you had any interest in the easy path. And you want to be able to collect those email addresses and send out announcements.

So, let’s take a look at what’s second easiest.

1. Post a privacy statement on your website, in a prominent place on the main page and on any page where you collect email addresses.  There are specific things you should include in the statement, so check them out:
   • Your name, address, telephone number and email address. You may want to use a P.O. Box and create a separate email address. Just be sure to check it regularly
   • The type of personal info you are collecting (in this case, names and email addresses), and how you are collecting it
   • How the info is going to be used (in this case, to send email announcements)
   • The fact that you won’t disclose this info to third parties
   • That the parent can review what info you’ve collected from their child and ask you to delete it
   • And that you aren’t allowed to condition a child’s participation in an activity on the disclosure of more information than is reasonably necessary to participate. That means you should only require email addresses for activities that need it, such as a newsletter or forum notifications.
2. Make sure your sign-up gizmo has an age-screening mechanism:
   • This is generally just a drop-down menu that asks for date of birth.
   • If the signer-upper is under 13, they should be prompted to include a parent’s email address as part of the sign-up process.
3. A notice should automatically be emailed to the parent’s email address. This notice should state the obvious:
   • that you have collected the child’s name and email address.
   • that the parent can respond to the email and tell you to delete the child’s info.
   • and that if the parent doesn’t respond, it means you have permission to use the child’s email address to send announcements.

   Note: this method is only good for collecting email address. If you are collecting home addresses and such, that will require additional steps, which we won’t get into here.

4. Don’t allow children to post freely on your site. If you have a blog or forum open to children, screen everything and remove any personal information, including email addresses.
5. And while it might not be required as part of this particular law, you should remove any other information, such as school or teacher names, that might help a predator track down the child. Best to be safe.
6. If you have a section to display fan mail, fan art, fan fiction, etc., be sure to strip away any personal information. First name and city should be sufficient to give credit.
7. Most importantly, don’t let this scare you into shutting down communication. These few steps will allow you to stay in direct contact with your fans, which is the steady breath of fresh air any children’s book author needs.

Neal Stephenson’s Hugo-award winning masterpiece The Diamond Age is being made into a SciFi Channel miniseries. The Diamond Age tells the story of a group of neo-Victorians who’ve embraced strait-laced ethics and craftsmanship as a response to the infinite possibilities of nanotechnology. It features a stupendously imaginative interactive storybook, moments of convulsive hilarity, and a lovely explanation of Turing-complete computing. It’s my second-favorite Stephenson novel (after Cryptonomicon), so don’t screw it up, SciFi!

SCI FI Channel unveiled a new slate of programs in development, which includes shows from executive producers George Clooney, Darren Star and Mark Burnett. SCI FI made the announcement Jan. 12 at the Television Critics Association’s winter press tour in Pasadena, Calif.

Diamond Age, based on Neal Stephenson’s best-selling novel The Diamond Age: Or a Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer, is a six-hour miniseries from Clooney and fellow executive producer Grant Heslov of Smokehouse Productions.

All I can say is please please please please please don’t mess this one up. It’s one of my all-time favorite books.

Update: I just read that Neal Stephenson is writing the screenplay, which gives me hope.

Two (free) papers have been published that I think are useful for those who work in the virtual community field.

First, from the Association of Virtual Worlds, The Blue Book: A Consumer’s Guide to Virtual Worlds. It’s basically a directory of social networks and virtual worlds, including some that are in development.

Next, Wave 3 of a report from Universal McCann on Social Media.

Some highlights:

• China has the largest blogging community in the world with 42 million bloggers, more than the US and Western Europe combined.
• While blog readership in the U.S. has decreased by 2% since September 2006, globally it has increased by 23%, with a 57% increase in the Philippines.
• Brazil leads in terms of frequency of reading blogs. 52% read them daily, compared to 23% in the U.S.
• Percentage-wise, South Korea is the top country for starting blogs, and Mexico is number 5 (and the U.S. is way the heck down on the list).
• 56% of Brazilians manage their social networking profiles daily, and France is at the bottom of the list for creating profiles.
• BRIC markets lead in adoption of RSS, all 50% plus adoption (BRIC = Brazil, Russia, India, China)

These days, the twins are speaking primarily in pterodactyl shrieks. I saw one of my neighbors the other day and she looked as if she hadn’t been getting much sleep. I should buy her some earplugs.

Or maybe I should lend the twins to George Lucas’ special effects studio.

I’m spreading the word about the March/April 2008 issue of Kelly H‘s wonderful children’s literature monthly, The Edge of the Forest.

Here’s what’s in store:

• An interview with Peter Cameron, by Barbara Shoup
• Spring Book Recommendations from the Editorial Board.
• Fairytale in the Forest: A Friendship, by Candice Ransom.
• A YA Review Bonus Section.
• Barrie Summy is this month’s Blogging Writer, interviewed by Becky Levine
• Sounds from the Forest is back.
• Reviews in all categories—from Picture book to Young Adult

Boss #2 has a problem. She’s addicted to standing.

She’s youngest of my twin girls, approaching 8 months of age. A couple of weeks ago she learned how to pull herself up and stand. She hasn’t quite mastered sitting back down, and she usually just topples over. Or she’ll stand there and cry until someone comes to the rescue.

I mean, you have to learn to stand before you can walk, and so on. The problem is that she’s utterly addicted to standing. She stands every chance she gets. As soon as you put her down, she’s assuming a standing position. As soon as she gets up in the morning, she’s standing in the crib. And in the middle of the night, if she wakes up because of a noise or a bad dream, she’s immediately standing, even before her eyes are completely open.

I sometimes find her standing in the crib, staring into the mirror, crying, her slap of hair sticking up as if she’s been electrified, part of her wanting to let go and go back to sleep, the other part determined to stand no matter what. Just for the audacious sake of it.

When a tree falls in the forest and no one is there, it’s a philosophical issue as to whether it makes a sound. But when a baby topples like a petrified oak, foam mattress or not, she makes a sound that would make the deadest of philosophers beg for earplugs. And you’d think she’d learn.

I imagine if I tried to make her stand, she’d be a lot less interested in it. As long as I keep rescuing her once in a while, and the other times letting her topple (safely on a foam mattress), it will seem like the coolest possible thing she could ever be doing. And any day now Boss #1 (the other twin) will decide she wants in on the action.

I’m not convinced that any of this standing business is in my best interest. After all, the more mobile they become, the more they’ll reach for the things I’m not ready for them to have. The stapler. My coffee cup. Their freedom.

I was pondering what this standing addiction portends about her character, and it got me remembering something from my own high school days.

I was a bit of a pain in the butt in high school. I was a nice kid, and smart, in mostly the advanced classes, but I had absolutely no inclination to respect authority.

I didn’t care for school assemblies, and the part where we all stood up for the star spangled banner song rubbed me the wrong way. I always made a distinction between loving my country (which I do) and being militaristically patriotic (which has always scared me).

But mostly I was just a pain in the butt.

So I asked to be pardoned from the assemblies, to go instead to the lunch room and do homework.

Request denied.

So, in the assembly, when everyone else stood up for the rocket’s red glare, I sat, infuriating the Assistant Principal (whose nickname was Sarge) and earning me a ticket to the Principal’s office (not my first by a long shot).

The Principal did not have Sarge’s fury, and I successfully argued my case. I was allowed to skip the next assembly and instead go to the lunch room and read.

So there I was, sitting alone at the table, reading a book, minding my own business, and suddenly a small horde of punks and goths come through the lunchroom door, sheepdogged by Sarge, who was nearly purple-faced.

They were ushered into seats and I learned soon about their crime. Inspired by my act of rebellion in the previous assembly, this time they’d all stayed in their seats during the bombs bursting in air. And their punishment was a time out in the lunchroom. No talking. No reading. No looking at anyone funny.

I continued reading. I mean, that was the deal. But Sarge ordered me to stop reading. Apparently I was now one of the accused. I tried to explain that I was an exception, but he was in no frame of mind to deal with that sort of subtlety.

So, I sat there a while, looking around at the punks, their primary-colored mohawks reaching for the fluorescent bulbs like sun-thirsty weeds, and the goths, their deflated expressions verging on annoyed. And Sarge, face still purplish, seething with the rage of someone who is confronted with the knowledge that whatever they may have sacrificed for our star-spangled banner, teenagers are born to push boundaries for the audacious sake of it.

So, being a teenager, my next move was to stand up. I stood there, next to the table. Sarge’s face looked like it was going to erupt. So I started whistling.

That earned me another trip to the Principal’s office. And detention. For a while.

Oh, and the song I whistled. I should have chosen something political, but I just whistled the first thing that came into my head that already included some whistling. It’s the song they’re all singing at the end of Life of Brian when they’re being crucified.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jHPOzQzk9Qo]