Library Juice blogger Alan Mattlage has posted a review of Prophets of the Fourth Estate: Broadsides by Press Critics of the Progressive Era, on his own blog. His review provides a good description of what is offered by this book.
Arthur Brisbane is New York Times Public Editor, a position outside the regular editorial team that is supposed to act as the reader’s representative. Followers of this blog have probably already heard about his recent post, “Should the Times be a Truth Vigilante?, which many readers found maddeningly stupid. Brisbane was asking whether NYT reporters … Read more The New York Times, Compromise, and the Past
Robert Darnton, frequent contributor to the New York Review of Books on libraries and author of The Case for Books: Past, Present and Future, was interviewed prior to a talk at Cardiff University, by Cardiff grad student Rhys Tranter. The interview was posted to the blog of Cardiff University’s Centre for Editorial & Intertextual Research.
I ran across this essay by Karl Mannheim while looking into ideas on “styles of thought” in relation to philosophy and politics. Mannheim was one of the founders of the “sociology of knowledge,” which is an area of inquiry that some in LIS have said constitutes a good theoretical underpinning for what we do. The … Read more Karl Mannheim on “conservative thought”
Hello, this is Erik Sean Estep. I’m one of the new bloggers here. I’ve been a librarian for over ten years and I’m currently the Social Sciences Librarian at Southern Illinois-Edwardsville. I’m honored to be a contributor because I think that this is one of the most intellectually compelling blogs in our field. Many times, … Read more On the Pleasure of Libraries as a Place
Red in black and white: The New Left printing renaissance of the 1960s – and beyond Essay by Lincoln Cushing in Peace Press Graphics 1967-1987: Art in the Pursuit of Social Change, Catalog for a 2011 exhibition at the University Art Museum, California State University, Long Beach. Exhibition curated by Ilee Kaplan and Carol A. … Read more Lincoln Cushing writes on the printing renaissance of the 1960s
Caroline Nappo sent a link to this New York Times story to the Library History Round Table email list: What’s a Presidential Library to Do? SIMI VALLEY, Calif. — When Republicans gathered at the Ronald Reagan Library and Museum here for the presidential debate last week, the backdrop was an overhauled exhibition on the Reagan … Read more The Reagan Presidential Library and the Nixon Presidential Library
2nd Call for Papers Protest on the Page: Print Culture History in Opposition to Almost Anything* (*you can think of) Center for the History of Print and Digital Culture Madison, Wisconsin September 28-29, 2012 Protest has a long and varied tradition in America. The conference will feature papers focusing on authors, publishers and readers of … Read more Call for Papers: Protest on the Page: Print Culture History in Opposition to Almost Anything* (*you can think of)
Daniel Ellsberg spoke at the American Library Association Annual Conference in New Orleans this summer, about the current world situation and libraries. ALA’s Leonard Kniffel followed up with this on-camera interview.
The new issue of Libraries and the Cultural Record has a review of LJP publication The Great Depression: Its Impact on Forty-Six Large American Public Libraries, an Analysis of Published Writings of Their Directors, by Robert Scott Kramp. Arthur P. Young wrote the review. Libraries and the Cultural Record is the leading journal in the … Read more Review in Libraries and the Cultural Record
Press release: NEW YORK (JTA) — JTA [a Jewish newswire] has launched a digital archive containing 250,000 articles dating from 1923. The JTA Jewish News Archive, which is searchable and free for the public to use, was launched officially Tuesday evening with a celebration at the Center for Jewish History in New York. Highlights of … Read more JTA News Archive
Librarians doing bibliographic instruction in college settings will most likely find little in this study out of the citation project that they didn’t already know from first-hand experience, but it is very good to see it as a research finding: ATLANTA — An analysis of research papers written in first-year composition courses at 15 colleges … Read more Study finds college students not engaged in their research projects
This article feels like another nail in the coffin of what we thought we knew of the past: Modern art was CIA ‘weapon’. Or a ramping-ing up of the general weirdness of the times. Here is the start of the article in the Independent, by Frances Stonor Saunders: For decades in art circles it was … Read more Modern art was CIA ‘weapon’
As the more civic-minded among us have observed, the American Right has mostly rejected rational discourse in favor of strategic communication. There is a reason for it that has to do with more than a calculation of what will be most effective, or a fear that rational discourse will “prove them wrong,” though that is … Read more The underlying reason that the American Right will always be irrational, and a couple of ideas as to why the problem is presently so acute
I am not going to spend a lot of time on this, but I want to point out an inaccuracy in an article on the Adbuster’s website (and maybe in the magazine as well, I can’t tell) titled, “Google’s Flaw,” written by Micah White. I’m not unsympathetic with White’s point about Google, but I have … Read more Inaccuracy in Adbusters article
From an early pamphlet advertising a bibliographic database, found among the ephemera saved at the University of Virginia Libraries: “Why use a computer search? Consider the time it takes to search manually through the many issues of printed indexes. The computer searches these indexes in seconds; the search is faster, more comprehensive, and often … Read more Ephemera from UVa Library’s computing past
Chapter one of Vanishing Act: The Erosion of Online Footnotes and Implications for Scholarship in the Digital Age, by Michael Bugeja and Daniela V. Dimitrova, is now online: Extinct Citations, Missing Links and Other Bibliographical Wonders A decade ago, most research was done in the library rather than through its Web site, and scholars, editors, … Read more Extinct Citations, Missing Links and Other Bibliographical Wonders
By the end of the file one walks away with a profound respect for Zinn and a deep distaste for the buffoonish goons in the FBI who followed and monitored him. There is no reason, with the massive expansion of our internal security apparatus, to think that things have improved. There are today 1,271 government … Read more Chris Hedges on Howard Zinn’s FBI file
The Great Depression: Its Impact on Forty-Six Large American Public Libraries, an Analysis of Published Writings of Their Directors Author: Robert Scott Kramp Price: $18.00 Published: May 2010 ISBN: 978-1-936117-02-4 Printed on acid-free paper This 1975 dissertation used content analysis to study the impact of the Great Depression on large American public libraries from 1930 … Read more The Great Depression: Its Impact on Forty-Six Large American Public Libraries
We have posted the Introduction to Mark Abendroth’s Rebel Literacy: Cuba’s National Literacy Campaign and Critical Global Citizenship to the web. It’s a good read, a little lengthy for the web. Of interest to anyone who follows Cuba-related issues or radical pedagogy.