ALA has announced that they have chosen Barbara M. Jones to be the new head of the Office for Intellectual Freedom, replacing the long-serving Judith Krug, who passed away in April. The ALA Press Release quotes Jones describing the present day context of intellectual freedom in her letter of application: Twenty-first century IF issues are … Read more New OIF Director Announced
Anu Garg’s “A Word A Day” newsletter is the greatest thing in the world right now for (English) word lovers. He sends out an email each weekday that is all about a word. Each week his words are linked by some theme or characteristic. This week he is honoring Banned Books Weed with words about … Read more A.Word.A.Day this week
Just want to alert you to this article by John Buschman in Academe, the magazine of the AAUP (American Association of University Professors): “Who Defends Intellectual Freedom for Librarians? The ALA should defend librarians as the AAUP defends faculty members.”
ALA Council Report to SRRT, Chicago, July 2009 Before reporting on the business of the meetings, let me first honor the life of E.J. Josey, who died just before Annual Meeting. EJ was a founding member of SRRT and the founding father of the Black Caucus of ALA, the first black male President of ALA … Read more SRRT Councilor’s report
Alternative Media Reception at Annual Conference On Monday, July 13, from 7-10 pm, the Alternative Media Reception (ALA Annual, Chicago) will join forces with the SRRT 40th Anniversary Celebration in a not-to-be-missed event featuring great food, drink, and music as well as books, zines, and other materials from progressive publishers in Chicago and all over … Read more Alternative Media Reception at Annual Conference
It’s easy to think that politics has no place in the production of reference materials and that objective reference works are by nature apolitical. Yes, solid reference sources tend to work against ideologically and rhetorically-based thinking and in favor of fact-based reasoning and questioning, that is true, but one should not conclude from that than … Read more Group Storms Greek-Macedonian Dictionary Promotion
Attempted Censorship by U.S. Attorney — A Book to Watch! By Ann Sparanese On June 16, the paperback edition of Triple Cross: How Bin Laden’s Master Spy Penetrated the CIA, the Green Berets and the FBI by Peter Lance will be released by HarperCollins. This is happening despite a prominent U.S. Attorney’s best efforts to … Read more Attempted Censorship by U.S. Attorney
Judith Krug, head of ALA’s Office for Intellectual Freedom since 1967, has died of stomach cancer at age 69. Library Journal has published an obituary rapidly; I am sure we will see something more extensive soon. From what I have been told by people who have been a part of librarianship and active in ALA … Read more Judith Krug has passed on
The new issue of the SRRT Newsletter has a review of Shiraz Durrani’s book, Information and Liberation: Writings on the Politics of Information and Librarianship. Jenny Bossaller, an Assistant Professor of Library and Information Science at University of Southern Mississippi, wrote the review. It’s a thoughtful piece, which I always like to see. Thanks to … Read more Review of Shiraz Durrani’s Information and Liberation
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
Intellectual Freedom is a right that has a range of threats to it. Most obviously, governments have banned books and censored the internet. But there are other dimensions to the threats to intellectual freedom. Publishers have refused to publish books for fear of controversy. Criticism of corporations is squelched by pulling out of advertising contracts; … Read more Age Appropriateness and IF
You may have seen this already, but I have to share it: Bound to the Word: Guardians of truth and knowledge, librarians must be thanked for their role as champions of privacy, literacy, independent thinking, and most of all reading. “President -Elect Barack Obama keynoted the opening general session at the ALA Annual Conference in … Read more Barack Obama on libraries
Edited Clean Version: Technology and the Culture of Control, by Raiford Guins. This new book from University of Minnesota Press is about how media technologies are being built for consumers with features that allow them to do their own censorship. The author is talking about “TVs equipped with V-chips, Internet filters, editing DVD players, clean-version … Read more Book of note: technological censorship
From the site: The Izzy Award is named after legendary maverick journalist I. F. Stone, who launched I. F. Stone Weekly in 1953 and exposed government deception, McCarthyism, and racial bigotry. Presented annually for “special achievement in independent media,” the Izzy Award will go to an independent outlet, journalist, or producer for contributions to our … Read more The Izzy Award – Call for Nominations
Minerva Research Initiative: Searching for the Truth or Denying the Iraqis the Rights to Know the Truth? by Saad Eskander, Iraq National Library and Archives “What has prompted me to write this paper is the continuing refusal of the U.S. to pay serious attention to Iraqi calls for the repatriation of the Iraqi records illegally … Read more The Minerva Controversy (Saad Eskander, Iraq National Library)
For many years Byron Anderson has been producing a bibliography of tools for helping librarians attend to the alternative press. The new edition of his guide is out: Bibliographic and Web Tools for Alternative Media. Updates of this bibliography are regularly published in Counterpoise and posted to the web on the Alternative Media Task Force … Read more Bibliographic and Web Tools for Alternative Media
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
Marjorie Heins of the Free Expression Policy Project has some commentary published on the FEPP site about an interesting copyright case. It’s a Fair Use case that even copyright moderates ought to get riled up about. It concerns a play called Blanche Survives Katrina in a FEMA Trailer Named Desire, which uses the character of … Read more Blanche survives Katrina in a FEMA Trailer Named Desire, only to face off with the copyright police
Former ALA President Nancy Kranich has an editorial in the current issue of The Nation magazine, titled, “What’s Daddy’s Roommate Doing in Wasilla?” Kranich is writing about Sarah Palin’s attempt to censor books from the library in Wasilla when she was governor, and her subsequent attempt to have the library director, Mary Ellen Emmons, fired, … Read more Nancy Kranich on Sarah Palin, would-be censor
Amy Goodman and David Goodman (of Democracy Now) have an article in the current Mother Jones magazine about the great Windsor, Connecticut librarians’ defiance of the FBI and the PATRIOT Act and ultimate court victory for all of us on constitutional grounds.