Community Anchor Institutions

The Schools, Health & Libraries Broadband Coalition released a new cost study and broadband strategy focused on rural broadband deployment. The cost study estimates that it will cost less than $20 billion to connect all unserved schools, libraries, health providers, community colleges, and other anchor institutions (outside of Alaska) to fiber.

The Federal Communications Commission's network neutrality decision could affect everyone using the internet and the public’s access to knowledge, education and connection. “The libraries, schools, the public...all could feel this in the same way,” said Doug Harkness, technology manager at the James V. Brown Library in Williamsport (PA).  For the public, that could mean paying higher fees for their everyday internet activities separately.

Tech industry critics spent a daylong event on Capitol Hill Feb 7 airing concerns that Facebook, Google, Apple and other major companies are peddling addictive products that damage young minds. Critics are seeking some sort of policy to address the problem. “Should there be some common sense regulation of the tech industry? Obviously,” said Jim Steyer, the head of Common Sense, the group that organized the conference. Franklin Foer, the author of a recent book critical of tech powerhouses, said that a “sense of shame” would shift norms in the industry.

The Aspen Institute Dialogue on Public Libraries is pleased to announce the publication of Libraries: Building Community Resilience in Colorado. This report is the result of a collaboration with the Colorado State Library. The report unveils a set of opportunities and recommendations for building public-private and public-public library partnerships statewide that include participation in new youth initiatives, workforce readiness, and libraries serving as civic hubs. 

Low-power nonprofit FM stations are the still, small voices of media. They whisper out from basements and attics, and from miniscule studios and on-the-fly live broadcasts. They have traditionally been rural and often run by churches; many date to the early 2000s, when the first surge of federal licenses were issued. But in the last year, a diverse new wave of stations has arrived in urban America, cranking up in cities from Miami to the Twin Cities in Minnesota, and especially in the Northwest, where six community stations began to broadcast in Seattle.

Libraries are a lynchpin for national, state, and local digital inclusion efforts—particularly our 16,500+ public library locations across the country.

[Commentary] In Nov it will be 50 years since the Public Broadcasting Act, steeped in the Great Society idealism of President Lyndon Johnson’s administration, became law. The act turned programming like “Sesame Street,” “Reading Rainbow” and “Mr. Rogers Neighborhood” into true public goods. Now, on the silver anniversary of the act, it’s completely plausible that the Trump Administration might celebrate by making good on their threats to defund as much of the public broadcasting apparatus as they can.

While it’s unlikely NPR and PBS want this to happen, they have been preparing for a future without government money for a long time. The biggest stations have figured out how to bring in money without sacrificing quality. Still, the shift away from public money in public broadcasting has caused significant collateral damage: Public media, maybe unintentionally, now strives to serve an elite audience instead of an expansive and inclusive vision of the “public.” The hope is that more affluent audiences can be counted on to add to their closet full of pledge drive tote bags when the time comes. This is the same audience commercial news organizations look for so they can buy things advertisers sell. These target consumers have more news than they need. Perversely, that means even the most thought-provoking public media is used more for entertainment that anything else.

I worry if we continue to ignore the information needs of news consumers representing a wide swath of economic and demographic realities, we will deserve any loss of relevance we experience.

[Sarah Alvarez is the founder of Outlier Media, a data journalism service delivering high value information to low income news consumers in Detroit via SMS.]

“” explores nuances of rurality, details challenges rural libraries face in maximizing their community impacts and describes how existing collaborative regional and statewide efforts help rural libraries and their communities. Authors Brian Real and Norman Rose combine data from the final Digital Inclusion Survey with Public Libraries Survey data from the Institute of Museum and Library Services to find:

• Rural library broadband capacity falls short of benchmarks set for US home access, which is 25 Mbps download and 4 Mbps upload speeds. By contrast, rural fringe libraries average 13/8.6 Mbps, rural distant is 7.7/2.2 Mbps and rural remote is 6.7/1 Mbps.
• Overall, one in 10 rural libraries report their internet speeds rarely meet patron needs.
• Rural libraries are on par with colleagues in larger communities in terms of public Wi-Fi access and providing patrons’ assistance with basic computer and internet training, but more specialized training and resources can lag.
• More than half of all rural libraries offer programs that help local residents apply for jobs and use job opportunity resources (e.g., online job listings, resume software), and rural libraries are comparable to their peers in providing work space for mobile workers.

The authors consider the roles of state and regional cooperation in adding capacity and resources for rural libraries, looking at examples from Maryland and Iowa.

The American Library Association says the Federal Communications Commission under Chairman Tom Wheeler got the reading of the law right when it imposed strong network neutrality rules under Title II (common carrier) authority.

It said 120,000 libraries and their customers would be seriously disadvantaged by getting rid of the rules banning blocking traffic and degrading (the FCC's terminology is actually "throttling") traffic, and says paid prioritization is inherently unfair, especially for libraries without the money to pay for such prioritization. But the ALA breaks with some Title II fans in arguing for capacity-based pricing and excluding private networks from net neutrality rules. On capacity-based pricing of broadband service, it says ISPs "may receive greater compensation for greater capacity chosen by the consumer or content, application, and service provider." And on private networks, it says: "[T]he Commission should decline to apply the Open Internet rules to premises operators, such as coffee shops and bookstores, and private end-user networks, such as those of libraries and universities."