From ALA’s Washington Office: Please contact your Senators and ask them to support the OPEN Government Act of 2007 (S. 849), and to urge Majority Leader Harry Reid or Minority Leader Mitch McConnell to support bringing the bill to the floor in early June. Unfortunately — and ironically, since this is an open government bill … Read more OPEN Government Act of 2007
SRRT Newsletter issue 158/159, June 2007, is published and on the web, and will be showing up in SRRT members’ (postal) mailboxes soon. Newsletter editor Erik Estep wishes to extend special thanks to former editor Jane Ingold for her help with this issue. The new issue includes: Info about SRRT’s activities at the ALA Conference … Read more New SRRT Newsletter
Library Juice Press has a number of book projects in the works. Four of them are far-enough along that I feel I can announce them at this point: Questioning Library Neutrality: Essays from Progressive Librarian, edited by Alison Lewis Information and Liberation: Writings on the Politics of Information and Librarianship, by Shiraz Durrani Information for … Read more Forthcoming books
Is our society gradually forgetting the value of privacy, in libraries and elsewhere? Michael Zimmer, who writes on media ecology, technology, and privacy, gives some attention to online privacy in libraries in a post from yesterday. He links to a blog entry from an anonymous blog called Chronicles of Dissent, comments, and links to some … Read more Some attention to library privacy
I’m thinking of planning some kind of party for Library Juice Press at ALA in Washington, DC, if there’s enough interest. I am thinking Saturday night (June 23rd). Comment or email me if you’re interested. I’m thinking it would be in the Dupont Circle area or just north of it. Aside from that though, if … Read more At ALA….
Tracy Nectoux, a library student at UIUC, is taking a class whose students were assigned to visit a bookstore and compare the atmosphere to a library’s atmosphere. This is what she wrote: The library’s purpose is different from that of bookstores And it always has been. Public libraries are set up so that anyone who … Read more Tracy Nectoux on Libraries versus Bookstores
This isn’t an analysis of a military action after the fact, as with last July’s reports of the destruction of a public documents archive in Nablus. What is happening now is that Israeli authorities have issued a warrant to the owner of the building housing an important Palestinian library in Jerusalem, ordering him to evacuate … Read more Israeli authorities planning to destroy a Palestinian library in Jerusalem
There’s a brief story in the current issue of The Progressive titled, “Vet Prosecuted for Opposing Recruitment in the Library. It doesn’t go into great detail and is essentially an interview with one person, Tim Coil, the guy who got busted for interfering with a military recruitment effort going on at the Stow-Munroe Falls Public … Read more Military recruitment in the library, and how you can get busted for interfering with it
Arch Conservative Bush advisor Grover Norquist has been pushing the “Starve the Beast” strategy for a long time. This is the strategy that says run up a huge budget debt and then a future Congress will be unable to support government spending. The “War on Terror” is obviously the great implementation of the starve the … Read more Savanna River Ecology Laboratory closing, thanks to Bush Administration small-esse
Bernadine Abbott Hoduski shared this information with ALA Council today… The ALA Washington Office and ALA Council’s Committee on Legislation have started a wiki on federal libraries. The wiki says: The purpose of this wiki is to share and track information on federal library threats, re-organizations, and closings. Based on discussions with members, the main … Read more Federal Libraries Wiki
Sherry Turkle, whose 1995 book Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet was much talked about when I was in library school, has an article in the current Forbes Magazine that updates her insights about human alienation in our technological culture. She has a notable ability to take us deep below … Read more Sherry Turkle on alienation in our technological society
Just an observation of interest to librarians, about Web 2.0 types of websites. Two examples of rich Web 2.0 sites are Last.fm and LibraryThing. We often think of Web 2.0 sites in terms of the idea of “tagging instead of cataloging.” In fact, rich 2.0 sites, the ones that do a lot of data processing … Read more Why Web 2.0 is leading back to full cataloging
Steven Bell has an article in the current Inside Higher Ed, entitled, “Good at Reviewing Books But Not Each Other,” about the major disfunctionality in LIS discourse: our excessive “niceness” toward each other and discomfort with open disagreement. In this article, Bell elucidates an uncomfortable contrast between us nice, non-confrontational librarians and academics in other … Read more Steven Bell tough on LIS discourse in Inside Higher Ed