We’ve put up a page linking to all of the Prefaces, Forewords, Introductions, and Chapters that we have made freely available from our books here at Library Juice Press. The goal of course is to inspire people to buy our books, but these items are good reads in themselves, too. So check out our free … Read more Introductions, Prefaces, Forewords, and Chapters online at the LJP site
From Salon: “Is the Internet melting our brains?” “No! The author of “A Better Pencil” explains why such hysterical hand-wringing is as old as communication itself.” By Vincent Rossmeier. From The Australian: “
“Exploring the Ethical Implications of Technological Change through the Thought of Walter Ong and Other Media Theorists” That’s the title of my paper for the conference coming up this weekend in Boston, Media in Transition 6: Stone and Papyrus, Storage and Transmission. The paper is not the greatest thing I’ve ever written, but it is … Read more Exploring the Ethical Implications of Media Technology Through the Thought of Walter Ong
Stephen L. Carter, a law professor who writes about democracy, has an article in The Daily Beast entitled, “Where’s the Bailout for the Publishing Industry?” It begins: Like a lot of writers, I am wondering when Congress and the administration will propose a bailout for the publishing industry. Carnage is everywhere. Advances slashed, editors fired, … Read more Stephen L. Carter – Where’s the Bailout for the Publishing Industry?
The new issue of Information for Social Change, issue #28, is now online. The topic of this issue is “lifelong learners.” Here is a list of the articles: Learning, Learning Communities and Globalisation (Dr Ray Shore) Back to the Future?- Lifelong learning in libraries (Andrew Hudson) Developing a NEETS Based Library Service (John Pateman) Policing … Read more Information for Social Change #28
Richard J. Cox‘s new book is Personal Archives and a New Archival Calling: Readings, Reflections and Ruminations, just out from Litwin Books this January. I searched around and found a fairly recent article by Dr. Cox that gets into some of the issues that he develops further in the book. If you’d like to get … Read more Machines in the Archives
Gathering at the Waters: Embracing Our Spirits, Telling Our Stories Proceedings of the First National Joint Conference of Librarians of Color (JCLC) October 11-15, 2006, Dallas, Texas Edited by Gladys Smiley Bell I made a bid to publish this in book form, but the preference was to do it online, and they have obviously done … Read more JCLC Conference Proceedings
I found these three items in Arts & Letters Daily…. In the New Yorker, a look back into the distant history of newspapers, “The Day the Newspaper Died,” by Jill Lepore. She puts the present newspaper crisis in perspective. In City Journal, Brendan Boyle reviews A Great Idea at the Time: The Rise, Fall, and … Read more Three from Arts & Letters Daily
Since the second half of last year I’ve been reading a lot of financial news, where the major theme of the financial crisis is the “crisis of trust” – banks not wanting to take the risk of extending credit to counterparties. But we’ve been living through a worsening crisis of trust in another sense for … Read more The Other Crisis of Trust (and a question about what it means for Info Lit)
There is a great article in today’s Chronicle of Higher Education about today’s students, how they think, and why: Wake Up and Smell the New Epistemology, by Tim Clydesdale. I think what it says has a lot of applicability to anyone working with students, and especially information literacy instructors.
New article by Lincoln Cushing: Privatizing the Commons: The Commodification of New Deal Public Art. Lincoln Cushing is an important person in the world of political graphic art, having put together books on Cuban poster art and Chinese propaganda posters, both very enjoyable and interesting books. Lincoln is a librarian who had an earlier career … Read more Privatizing the Commons: The Commodification of New Deal Public Art
Monika Antonelli has an important article in the new Electronic Green Journal called The Green Library Movement: An Overview and Beyond. Here is the abstract: The creation of green libraries is approaching a tipping point, generating a Green Library Movement, which is comprised of librarians, libraries, cities, towns, college and university campuses committed to greening … Read more The Green Library Movement
ALA’s Office for Information Technology Policy had its annual retreat this month. Barbara Fister, frequent poster to the ACRL blog and a librarian at Gustavus Adolphus College in Minnesota, presented a talk there called “Open Access and Books in a Digital World – What Role Should Libraries Play?” Her talk is an interesting exploration of … Read more Barbara Fister on Google and OA
Simson Garfinkel has an article in the new issue of MIT’s Technology Review about Wikipedia, arguing that it is creating troubling implications for the way we view reality: Wikipedia and the Meaning of Truth: Why the online encyclopedia’s epistemology should worry those who care about traditional notions of accuracy. In a sense this article is … Read more Wikipedia and what we mean by truth
MediaLens is a UK organization dedicated to raising awareness of the way the media system distorts reality as a result of the forces of free-market capitalism. Their analysis of things is along the lines of Chomsky and Herman’s propaganda model of media filtering. This month they have published a three-part analysis of current goings on … Read more MediaLens on journalism’s filtering system in action
Over time, Radical Reference moved from being simply an experimental virtual reference service for political radicals to being an activist organization sharing the same space as PLG and SRRT, but offering a different flavor and a different set of political ideas. Its primary activity, however, remains what it was when the group was originally formed … Read more A question for Radical Reference
A Marxist Analysis of the World Trade Organisation’s Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (PDF) Policy Futures in Education Volume 4 Number 4, 2006 RUTH RIKOWSKI London South Bank University, United Kingdom This article examines the World Trade Organisation’s (WTO) Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS). There are many WTO … Read more Ruth Rikowski on the WTO and intellectual property rights
Noting an article of interest: “Electronic Publication and the Narrowing of Science and Scholarship” Science 18 July 2008: Vol. 321. no. 5887, pp. 395 – 399 DOI: 10.1126/science.1150473 James Evans finds that scholars’ access to online journals tends to reduce the breadth of the citations to other articles in their work; that is, articles outside … Read more Electronic journal access found to reduce breadth of citations
A favorite debate of pessimistic sophomores, or perhaps sophomoric pessimists, is as to whether our society and its future is more like George Orwell’s 1984 or Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. It’s such a common juxtaposition and so simple to talk about it that I bring it up at the risk of terribly oversimplifying things. … Read more Intellectual Freedom advocacy in a Huxleyan world
Nicholas Carr writes in the Atlantic Monthly that “Google is Making Us Stupid,” focusing on the way a decade of web browsing has altered the way his mind works to the extent that he now struggles to read long texts. I pretty much know what he is talking about – I do find it harder … Read more Is Google Making Us Stupid?