After offering reference help to a student the other day and having it refused, I had what I can only call an evil thought. I’d like to share this evil thought with you now, at the risk having an evil influence on library discourse. Sometimes it takes a devil’s advocate, though, to inspire work on … Read more Are we the friendly produce consultants of the information age?
French historian Jean-Yves Mollier is happy with neither Google nor with Europe’s plans to counter Google’s anglo-american hegemony with digitized libraries of its own. Here is a translation of the start of an essay he wrote (French text available from the translated post) calling for language-based rather than nation-based digital libraries, out of an interest … Read more Jean-Yves Mollier on Google Print and Europe’s response
There will be a meeting of the Progressive Archivists on Friday, September 1, 2007, Noon – 1:00PM, at the Annual Society of American Archivists meeting, at the Fairmont Hotel, 200 N Columbus Dr, Chicago IL. For conference attendees, this is a brown bag meeting, so you may bring your lunch. Check your program or conference … Read more Progressive Archivists Meeting at SAA
Information, Society and Justice an inter-disciplinary electronic journal (website under construction) Information, Society and Justice is a peer-review, open-access electronic journal based in the Department of Applied Social Sciences (DASS) at the London Metropolitan University. The journal is governed by an Editorial Board drawn from UK and overseas. It seeks to provide a proactive space … Read more New journal: Information, Society and Justice
The Progressive Librarians Guild had representatives at the U.S. Social Forum in Atlanta in March, in partnership with representatives from Radical Reference. Elaine Harger and Kathleen de la Peña McCook wrote a report on their activities and their experience at the Forum. I think it’s a good restatement of how librarianship and the Left are … Read more PLG Report from the U.S. Social Forum
One nice thing about true open source software, especially when it’s running a huge website like Wikipedia, is that creative programmers can make useful add-ons to it. Wired Magazine (which I generally dislike) has an interesting article in the August issue about Virgil Griffith’s Wikipedia Scanner, which can tell you what organizations have edited what … Read more Wikipedia Scanner
First, two new ethnographic studies of undergraduate research habits, each offering a corrective to assumptions at the foundation of Library 2.0 thinking: Anthropologist Nancy Foster led a study at the University of Rochester, and presented her findings at the ACRL conference this year. The study will be part of a book published by ACRL soon. … Read more Two minor correctives and one broadside on Library 2.0 madness
Here’s some great library PR from regular San Francisco Chronicle columnist C.W. Nevius. It’s an example of the kind of newspaper coverage that I think we mostly want.
Kathleen de la Peña McCook just pointed me to a very interesting Master’s Thesis by Carla Valetich: The Response of Socially Aware Librarians to National Crisis: A Case Study of Selected Electronic Mail from the Social Responsibilities Round Table, September 2001 – July 2002. The abstract says: At the time of the attacks on September … Read more The Response of Socially Aware Librarians to National Crisis…
A short essay by Martha Yee titled “Will The Response Of The Library Profession To The Internet Be Self-Immolation?” has been circulating in the cataloging blogosphere. I found it rather late, when it hit the JESSE list, which is read by LIS educators. It’s a good example of a statement that is being dismissed by … Read more Martha Yee on abdication in cataloging