Here’s an interesting article from the July-August isssue of New Left Review relating the history of socialism to the history of print culture. It suggests, without quite stating it, that the decline of socialism is tied to the decline of print culture, and that by extension the future of socialism will be tied to a … Read more Socialism and print culture
A creative MIT student made a thing out of a circuit board and some LEDs and wore it on her shirt. She’s young, 19, so it’s understandable that she didn’t quite understand how things are in airports these days, and when she walked into Logan Airport she was surrounded at gunpoint by security men who … Read more I’m shocked and appalled that you’re shocked and appalled
The British Columbia Library Association’s Intellectual Freedom Committee has a new blog, which I will read regularly. It’s been going since late August, and in that time I’d say it’s shown that the BC IFC is a group that’s doing some interesting things relating to intellectual freedom and information policy and having fun while they’re … Read more British Columbia Library Association IFC blog
Kathleen de la Pe?±a McCook recommends some books on libraries and the public sphere. This list is a good prescription for getting reinspired as an ethically and politically grounded professional.
The Progressive Librarians Guild has endorsed the Iraq Moratorium, an organized method of protest for the third Friday of each month.
Library Juice Press has a number of book projects forthcoming in the Winter and Spring. Coming up soonest are these two: Mrs. Magavero: A History Based on the Career of an Academic Librarian, by Jane Brodsky Fitzpatrick Responsible Librarianship: Library Policies for Unreliable Systems, by David Bade Shortly following on those will be a compilation … Read more Coming up from Library Juice Press
The New York Tims has a story dated yesterday about a change dictated from the top in the libraries of U.S. Federal Prisons, called the “Standardized Chapel Library Project.” With the rationale of preventing violent religious extremism among prisoners, religious books in Federal prison libraries will now be a standardized collection – 150 books for … Read more No intellectual freedom in U.S. prison chapel libraries
The Chronicle of Higher Education has a brief news item today about a Reed-Elsevier web portal for oncologists called OncologySTAT, which provides free access to medical research in journals that are otherwise mainly accessed through library subscriptions, and pays for the service by showing ads to users. The kind of ad-based model in use here … Read more OncologySTAT: end run around objectivity
The new First Monday has an article by Terje Hillesund that’s worth reading if you’re interested in the question of the future of the book: Reading Books in the Digital Age after Amazon, Google and the long tail. Here is the abstract: Presenting a wide range of literature, this article explores the state of art … Read more Terje Hillesund on the future of books
Somebody just bought a “Kiss Me I’m a Librarian” thong out of my old Libr.org Cafe Press store, which reminded me that it exists. The shop has got t-shirts, coffee mugs, and other things advertising Libr.org and the old Library Juice, and advertising the fact that you are a librarian. I thought I’d mention it … Read more Libr.org Cafe Press
Don’t let the everyday name fool you, Edgardo Civallero and Sara Plaza’s blog, The Log of a Librarian, an English translation of their Spanish language blog from Argentina, is full of refreshing passion and idealism that shows how far from its reason for being mainstream librarianship has fallen.