World Wide Web

Episode Transcript

Editorial note: BKLYN Reach was a program to help Brooklynites get online during the pandemic, and will be discontinued on December 31, 2023.

Adwoa Adusei Krissa, do you remember the first Zoom work meeting you had?

Krissa Corbett Cavouras Well not specifically which meeting, but I do remember that I had not heard of Zoom in March 2020 and then it became, you know, a verb, right?

Adwoa Adusei That’s really funny. I think my first Zoom work meeting was probably for the podcast. I hadn’t heard of it before that either. And actually I think we should let our listeners in on a secret ... ah, we’re still heavy on this Zoom for this podcast. We’re still recording virtually.

Krissa Corbett Cavouras I don’t even remember what it was like to record a podcast in person ...

Adwoa Adusei In person, I know! It was a big adjustment for many of us to transition everything online — but for many more, just accessing the internet was the biggest hurdle, even in a bustling place like New York City.

Krissa Corbett Cavouras Right. So, a State report conducted before the pandemic, in 2019, found that 16 percent of households in New York City lack access to high-speed internet.

Adwoa Adusei And, with school shifting online during the pandemic, a Pew Research Center study in 2021 found that about a quarter of students from lower income families had to use public WiFi to complete assignments or attend class.

Krissa Corbett Cavouras Finding public WiFi that’s reliable and free is not easy. During the pandemic, libraries across the country were some of the first institutions to make their WiFi available outside of their buildings. 

ABC 10 News The Peter White Public Library in Marquette repositioned their routers in order to provide WiFi access in their parking lot.

CBS Denver You can now connect to the Loveland Public Library’s WiFi while in the parking lot.

KTNV Las Vegas Free WiFi access, it’s available in all parking lots across their 25 library branches.

Krissa Corbett Cavouras Those were clips from news reports on ABC 10 News, CBS Denver, and KTNV Las Vegas. And, internet access is one of the most important resources that libraries provide to their patrons, but as little as 25 years ago, connecting libraries to the world wide web was revolutionary. Now, especially as we are acknowledging the two-year anniversary of the start of a pandemic — we truly cannot imagine the library without the internet.

Adwoa Adusei Today: libraries and the world wide web. Alook back at the beginnings of publicly-accessible internet. I’m Adwoa Adusei. 

Krissa Corbett Cavouras And I’m Krissa Corbett Cavouras. You’re listening to Borrowed: stories that start at the library!

[Old Internet start-up sound]

Krissa Corbett Cavouras Okay, we could not resist playing the sound of dial-up internet — which, depending how old you are, might bring you back in time to 1997, which was 25 years ago. At BPL, we were celebrating our 100th anniversary, and in honor of that, Central Library finally got rid of its card catalogs … and welcomed the world wide web.

Donald Kaplan When I started at Central Library, the main lobby was filled with these humongous wooden card catalogs and nothing had been put online or digitized yet.

Adwoa Adusei This is Donald Kaplan, who was Director of Marketing and Communications at Brooklyn Public Library in the 1990s. When we spoke to him a couple months ago, he talked about that day when Central Library got rid of its card catalogs.

Donald Kaplan I actually pitched an idea to to retain them and use them as places where computers could go into, but that was overruled, and probably wisely.

Krissa Corbett Cavouras Okay, I do think it would be pretty hilarious to have computer terminals inside the big wooden card catalogs! And if you think about it, it’s a pretty smart marketing idea. Many people in the 90s wouldn’t be interacting with computers or the internet on a daily basis, so putting the computers inside the old card catalogs is sending a message: This is the same thing! Use me to search for books and information!  

Adwoa Adusei Maybe we can bring the idea back for our 125th anniversary?

Krissa Corbett Cavouras First you’d have to find those card catalogs. They’re pretty expensive on Ebay… 

Adwoa Adusei That’s true. We should say that there were computers at the library in the late 80s and early 90s, but only for staff. We found an article published in the Canarsie Courier in 1988 about Jamaica Bay library going “on-line” when it came to patrons checking out books. The article announced the end of an “antiquated system based on several million slips of paper” to a “high-tech computerized circulation system.” So instead of stamping the checkout card in the back of a library book, librarians used a “light pen” to scan the book’s bar code and record the name of the patron, the book, and the due date electronically. And, because the record went to BPL’s central database, for the first time librarians were able to tell if a patron owed fines or had overdue books at a different branch that would prevent them from checking out a new book. 

Krissa Corbett Cavouras And of course, as of 2021, we no longer have fines at BPL. But at the time, this was a huge advancement! Not only could we track patrons’ books from branch to branch, but we could also help them find any book at all across our branches. We’ll put that article on our show notes page so you can see what a “light pen” is. 

Adwoa Adusei It wasn’t until 1996 that BPL made computers available for patrons to use, and that was thanks to a grant from Bill Gates, the co-founder of Microsoft and at the time the richest man in the world. So, it was a bit of a whirlwind when he came to Brooklyn in 1996 to announce the start of his “Libraries Online!” program. 

Krissa Corbett Cavouras We have some staff still at BPL who were there when Gates came to visit. They remember the flurry of activity surrounding the announcement. One of our librarians, Norman Eriksen, remembered being asked to find children to sit at the computers for the press conference and then scrambling to fill shelves with books so thateverything would look perfect for the pictures. 

Adwoa Adusei The “Libraries Online!” program was really monumental for the city. According to a press release, Brooklyn received two million of the total ten million Gates put into the effort. The program helped us install machines and internet access in several Brooklyn library branches. Other urban centers like San Francisco, Chicago, Boston, Pittsburgh and St Louis, as well as rural communities in Arkansas, Oklahoma, Washington State, Nebraska and more — also got funds from this same program. This program marked the first time that many public libraries had access to the internet.

Krissa Corbett Cavouras Here’s Gates in an interview with the Financial Times in 1997, where he talked about how important he thought the internet would be to future generations.

Bill Gates Certainly the internet is very much at the beginning of what it can achieve. We don’t have wireless devices, we dont have tablet devices. Most homes, if they’re connected at all, are using a phone dial-up which is a little bit slow. And so, we haven’t seen anything yet. People aren’t incorporating it into their lifestyle, but they will. 

Adwoa Adusei Pretty prescient of Mr. Gates — though he did have a lot of money on the internet being a raging success. Back in the late 90s, the internet for many people was a place to play stick figure games and chat.

Krissa Corbett Cavouras Oh the hours we used to spend on Instant Messenger … I can still remember my screen name! What we think of as the internet today — typing into a searchbox, getting millions of results instantly — that didn’t really exist. My whole job is managing patrons’ digital interactions with their library, but that would have been a totally futuristic idea in the late 90s. Here’s Donald Kaplan again, head of BPL’s Marketing team at the time.

Donald Kaplan There was a decision made that websites were happening and BPL needed one. There was some conflict as to who would actually take the helm of developing a website. Would it be the marketing division? Or would it be a technology people? Not only did we start the BPL website, but we were responsible for developing a website for the borough of Brooklyn and we worked with Borough Hall to do that. 

Norman Eriksen We maintained lists of websites because this was pre-Google, pre-search-engine days. So there were printed books of websites. We were laughing at that the other day, by the time it came into print, things were gone!

Adwoa Adusei That last voice was Norman Eriksen, a librarian who still works at BPL’s Central branch. He also remembered the excitement that the public computers created, and mentioned that staff had to be hired specifically to manage the sign-up system for computer use.

Krissa Corbett Cavouras And, it’s worth noting BPL’s connection to the world wide web was pretty unusual for public libraries at the time. Only 28 percent of libraries had access to the internet in 1996 — but then, just six years later in 2002, 95 percent of libraries had internet.

Adwoa Adusei Now, of course, the internet is essential to everyone. That’s why in 2020, when libraries were shutting down at the start of the pandemic, and with generous donations from many funders, BPL started on a program to extend the reach of public WiFi outside our buildings … and even down the block. That program is called BKLYN Reach.

Rawle Jackman There was a need to provide access to people in the community, right? Internet access. It started with just thirteen branches actually in the beginning, as a test. And it grew from that to 51 branches when it was all said and done.

Krissa Corbett Cavouras This is Rawle Jackman, the Manager of Technology Services at BPL.

Adwoa Adusei Rawle was in charge of the team that physically installed the tech in each of the branches to boost our WiFi signal. This was in Spring of 2020, the beginning of the pandemic for us in Brooklyn, when even going outside seemed risky.

Rawle Jackman We were meeting these strange men to do surveys of the building, to go up on the roofs of these buildings when everything is locked down, you know, so it was it was a little, you know, unnerving. But your best hope is that many people get to use it right. That's kind of how I looked at it. You know, hopefully a lot of folks get to use it that needed to use it. And, you know, just put it to good use.

Krissa Corbett Cavouras And, people are using it! Since BKLYN Reach started up in earnest, there have been between 18 and 24,000 WiFi sessions on our Reach network every month. 

Adwoa Adusei There is another cool project that we just launched: the Techmobile. It’s exactly like a book mobile — you know, a van with library books patrons can check out — except it’s just for tech. The idea is that the Techmobile will drive to harder-to-reach neighborhoods and broadcast a WiFi signal that anyone can tap into. There will also be laptops to use, and other tech equipment, like kits for podcasting. We’re modifying the van and hope to start taking it out on the streets soon. Because the truth is that New York City has a stark digital divide. As we mentioned earlier in the episode, there are many in this city who cannot get reliable high-speed internet at home. We talked to one person who’s part of an organization seeking to lessen the digital divide: Jeremy Ney, Executive Director of a non-profit called No One Left Offline.

Jeremy Ney As a incredibly well developed and hustling and bustling city, we really expect there to be much better connectivity than we see in certain parts of the city. A lot of the NYCHA housing buildings have have really struggled to connect to the internet. We also see in the city is sort of the disparate costs that we see for actually accessing internet. So, you know, you can maybe be expected to pay really high internet access bills.

Adwoa Adusei No One Left Offline, or NOLO, began in San Francisco at the start of the pandemic, when a lot of us started to take notice of internet-access inequality.

Krissa Corbett Cavouras Right, that’s something that we saw here in Brooklyn, too, and in particular within our Adult Basic Education programs. Jeremy, who is based in Brooklyn and is a former volunteer at the library, outlined a problem that instructors were seeing when Adult Education had to go online.

Jeremy Ney Many of the students going through this program were straight-A students three out of every four weeks of the month, and then for some reason in that final fourth week, basically started failing their courses and kind of couldn't really understand why. They found out that the vast majority of them were using their cell phones as hotspots. And in that final week, their cell phone plans were running out of data.

[Music]

Adwoa Adusei So, in the fall of 2021, NOLO partnered with BPL to provide a year’s worth of quality and reliable internet connectivity to 90 registered adult learners in various Adult Basic Education programs. The initiative was a collaboration with Devices for Students, a non profit that provided hotspots to participants. Because, as Jeremy describes it, the digital divide is about more than just providing one lane of access to the internet: it has to be a multi-pronged approach. 

Krissa Corbett Cavouras We also talked to Nicolas Simon, a literacy advisor at the New Lots Learning Center, who spoke of a shift in students’ needs within the last ten years when it comes to mitigating the digital divide here in Brooklyn.

Nicolas Simon When I first started, you know, nobody had internet access, or internet access with a much limited. You know, we only had four computers for the whole, for the whole program at that learning center. So, now we have 35 and there and they're in constant use. 

Krissa Corbett Cavouras Nicolas also noted that many of his students already have access to the internet at home, though they're probably paying more than they can afford for it. So, the cost of internet is an access issue, but also, the devices. He said that during the pandemic, some of his students who had internet access still had to borrow their kids’ laptops — which they likely got from their public school — in order to attend those basic education classes. So, for Nicolas, he saw adult learners checking out the program’s free chromebooks at a faster rate than they were checking out the WiFi hotspots. 

Adwoa Adusei The pandemic has certainly ushered in new ways of thinking about solutions to internet inequality. And, it got us thinking about what’s next in terms of making the internet more accessible to our patrons. As we’ve explored in this episode, an important part of access in all of this is reliability. When it comes to the content of the internet — the actual information that libraries help patrons access — we can describe it as the longevity/stability of the internet. Today’s internet is not your great-grandma’s internet, or even your great-grandma’s internet! I like to give a shoutout to Brian at Clinton Hill for taking me on a trip down memory lane. We started talking about what the early internet was like and we just kept going back and forth. You know, LiveJournal, Myspace, Friendster, GeoCities, dancing hampsters. I mean, if you don't know what this stuff is, you should definitely try to check it out. 

Krissa Corbett Cavouras Yeah, when you mention LiveJournal and Myspace, I think about how the earliest social networks on the web in the early aughts were people's blogs. They would have these right hand side bars where they would link to, you know, fifteen or twenty other blogs that they followed, and, you know, a lot of those blogs are gone now. We like to think that content on the internet lasts forever, but it is actually quite ephemeral. 

Adwoa Adusei Aesthetics of the mid-to-late 90s and early aughts are on trend right now, but if you really want to see what things looked like at the dawn of the internet, there is a portal that can get you there. It’s called the Wayback Machine. It’s not actually a machine at all, but a website running archival software that searches or "crawls" the internet in order to capture snapshots of a website’s code at different times. It was started by a non-profit called The Internet Archive in 1996. The Wayback Machine has saved over 625 million web pages for posterity.

Krissa Corbett Cavouras So, for instance, if you want to see what BPL’s first website was like in the time of Bill Gates’ Libraries Online Program, all you have to do is type in our very first web address, which was "www.brooklynpubliclibrary.org" into the Wayback Machine. We’ll put a link in our show notes. The Internet Archive works with other institutions and libraries, like BPL, through their "Community Webs" program to find important and hyper-local web pages and gather them in one place.

Diana Bowers-Smith So it's now not just public libraries, but lots of different types of libraries. It's now international, not just the US. And the reason that the Internet Archive started this program was to try and capture more local corners of the web that the Wayback Machine might not be capturing. 

Adwoa Adusei This is Diana Bowers Smith, known as Dee, the Center for Brooklyn History’s web archivist. We spoke with them about how web archiving broadens our understanding of what internet accessibility entails. Dee’s goal is to make sure that we can still literally access older, less stable parts of the web. 

Diana Bowers-Smith We've already had some websites that we've collected disappear from the live web. If we hadn't captured them in our web archive, that content would be gone forever. The average life of a web site is only 100 days. So even though the internet lets us create information at an unprecedented rate, we also lose information at an unprecedented rate.

Adwoa Adusei Dee has set up BPL’s web archive to crawl local blogs, community board posts and publications at scheduled times, roughly accumulating 512 GB of data a year. And, the program adds metadata to the crawls so that patrons can search in a more robust way than they can in the Wayback Machine site, and find more recent, digital parts of Brooklyn history at the library.

Diana Bowers-Smith What we try to preserve at the Center for Brooklyn history is the story of every Brooklynite. I know that sounds like a really big task, and it is, but that's really what we're trying to do. So, the more that people's stories and lives move online, the more that our collecting has to move online, too. So, we need to capture that if we want to preserve Brooklyn history going forward the way that we've been able to for the last century.

[Music]

Adwoa Adusei It wouldn’t be Borrowed without a Book Match! We checked in with YA Librarian Eric Horwitz for Science Fiction recommendations that have to do with into the internet, librarianship and archival loss. Take it away Eric!  

Eric Horwitz Yes, absolutely. This first one is a short story: "The Girl Who Was Plugged In,” and it's from a collection of short stories by James Tiptree Jr., that is the pseudonym of Alice Sheldon, who was a pretty prolific science fiction writer. The collection is called Her Smoke Rose Up Forever. “The Girl Who Was Plugged In” — it was written around the 70s, but I think it really does apply to a lot of issues of internet, of cyberspace, of identity. There's themes of influencer culture, there's themes of catfishing, of all things. It sort of predicted all of these things.

Adwoa Adusei That’s wild she predicted modern internet culture! So what’s your next book?

Eric Horwitz We have Station Eleven. That's by Emily St. John Mandel. So it's the apocalypse, right? But what Station Eleven is interested in is how do we keep our humanity? How do we keep our culture? The book literally sort of elides questions of like, you know, oh, there are raiders or there's violence or civilizational breakdown, in favor of, well, we've lost our culture. You lose your history when everybody dies, you lose something about yourself. All the characters reflect back on things that they enjoyed, things that they liked, music, art, you know, rock and roll, the jingle on a television set. And then they realize that the sinking feeling, oh, that's gone now. That's not here, ever. They find an abandoned airport and they say, we're going to make this a museum of the before, and we're going to archive stuff that we remember from before it all got destroyed. And any prosaic thing they could find, a rotary telephone or just a regular dial telephone, a stuffed Pikachu. The most basic little thing can remind you of a life you had before and needs to be preserved. [[And, you know they have questions of What is it exactly? We're preserving this. Why are we collecting this? Why are we lending this out in a way to people?]]

Adwoa Adusei You have one more book for us, right?

Eric Horwitz Yes, Amatka. Karin Tidbeck. So they're on a planet. And the key about this planet is that, you know, for efficiency sake literally everything, your food, your pencils, your furniture, your clothing. Everything is made out of the same identical gray goop. There's something about the chemical property of the goop: it's psycho-reactive. You have to will it into being. And every day, you have to do the identity ritual where you go up to things and go, "This is a coffee. This is a jacket. This is bread." And you have to touch things and say, "This is that." And as a result, everything is separated into categories. And the novel asks questions about, are these categories kind of limiting? And chaos ensues when they some people decide maybe they want to call things different things. 

Adwoa Adusei That was “The Girl Who Was Plugged In" from the collection Her Smoke Rose Up Forever by James Tiptree Jr, Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel, and Amatka by Karin Tidbeck. Thanks, Eric!

Eric Horwitz You’re welcome! 

Krissa Corbett Cavouras Eric hosts a monthly science fiction book club at Clinton Hill Library — we’ll put a link in our show notes!

[Music]

Adwoa Adusei Borrowed is brought to you by Brooklyn Public Library and is hosted by me, Adwoa Adusei and Krissa Corbett Cavouras. You can find a transcript of this episode as well as the full book match list on our website: BKLYN Library [dot] org [slash] podcasts.

Krissa Corbett Cavouras Borrowed is produced  by Virginia Marshall with help from Fritzi Bodenheimer, Jennifer Proffitt, and Robin Lester Kenton. This episode was written by Virginia Marshall and Adwoa Adusei. Our music composer is Billy Libby. Meryl Friedman designed our logo.

Adwoa Adusei Borrowed will be back next month. Until then, happy surfing!

Bklyn Reach: Expanding Wi-Fi Beyond the Branches is generously supported by The JPB Foundation, The Charles H. Revson Foundation, Robin Hood Foundation, Schmidt Futures, Goldman Sachs, Solomon Wilson Family Foundation, 1834 Project, Andrea Bozzo & John Martinez, Nancy & Chad Dickerson, Jodi Green & Mike Halperin, Karoly & Hank Gutman, Jill Simeone & Stephen Kitts in loving memory of Ruth Flynn, E. Wachs Family Foundation and Anonymous (2).