Felipe Meneses of Mexico City has written a brief review of David Bade’s Responsible Librarianship: Library Policies for Unreliable Systems. It’s in Spanish, so you may or may not be able to read it without a friend to help. Thanks, Felipe!
Powell’s Books is the option for many people who want to buy a book online from a union shop, so I’m very happy that they are stocking books from Litwin Books and Library Juice Press. This note is to announce that they have added the latest book, Lara Moore’s Restoring Order: the Ecole des Chartes … Read more Lara Moore’s book now available from Powell’s
From Lara Moore’s Restoring Order: The Ecole des Chartes and the Organization of Archives and Libraries in France, 1820-1870 (pages 208-209): It … appears that the late Empire had strong political misgivings about the extension of libraries to the “popular” classes. In April 1864, Interior Minister Paul Boudet dispatched a circular marked “confidential” to department … Read more Napoleon III and public libraries
New from Litwin Books Author: Lara Jennifer Moore Price: $32.00 Published: March 2008 ISBN: 978-0-9778617-9-8 Printed on acid-free paper Buy from Amazon Buy from Barnes and Noble Between 1789 and 1793, the revolutionary French state nationalized thousands of libraries and archival depositories, thus becoming the proprietor of many millions of books and documents, ranging from … Read more Restoring Order: The Ecole des Chartes and the Organization of Archives and Libraries in France, 1820-1870
This is from today’s New York Times. Adam Liptak reports that the Treasury Department is shutting down websites that have to do with travel to Cuba, even if the websites belong to foreign travel agencies who are not offering services to U.S. citizens, but only to people in other countries who can travel to Cuba … Read more Treasury Dept.’s outrageous web censorship
ALA Council passed a resolution on the crisis in Kenya, focusing on the issue of press freedoms. The resolution is below. One thing that helped sway Council to pass the resolution was news of a request for international support from the Kenyan library community. It is worth reading the views of Esther Obachi, National Secretary … Read more Kenya
This is rather unbelievable. Two shipping containers of records from the Baath Party of Iraq – about seven million pages – are being transferred to the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, over the objections of Iraq’s archivist, the celebrated Saad Eskander. They have been in the possession of a non-profit run by Kanan Makiya, an … Read more Hoover Institution to Accession Looted Documents
Report on ALA Council to SRRT, Midwinter 2008, Philadelphia Although we did not get everything we advocated, SRRT‚Äôs initiatives and interventions in the work of ALA Council went quite well at Midwinter in Philadelphia. Our Resolution on the Confiscation of Iraqi Documents from the Iraq National Library and Archives was passed almost unanimously with very … Read more Al Kagan’s Council Report
CUPE 391, the union representing Vancouver, BC’s striking library workers, has posted a video of former ALA President Mitch Freedman’s supportive speech before them on October 24th. Mitch took a detour from a visit to Seattle and drove up to Vancouver to personally support these workers. The video is lengthy and interesting. The first part … Read more Mitch Freedman – video of speech before striking Vancouver librarians
The BCLA IFC blog has an interview with Toni Samek, who is a very progressive LIS professor at the University Alberta. Toni writes and teaches on topics in critical librarianship, and had a book published earlier this year from Chandos Press: Librarianship and Human Rights: A Twenty-First Century Guide. The interview at the BCLA IFC … Read more Interview with Toni Samek
I have long been aware that that Canadian postal service will stop delivery of materials it deems obscene or otherwise censorship-worthy. I was not aware that they published a list (actually it’s the Canadian Border Services Agency that does it) of all the materials that it stops. The British Columbia Library Association IFC blog has … Read more Censorship at the Canadian Border
The new issue of Information for Social Change, issue 25, is available online. It is another theme issue, this time dealing with libraries and information workers in conflict situations. Examples of what’s in it include articles in disinformation during wartime, truth commissions in Latin American countries and libraries in relation to them, women living under … Read more New issue of Information for Social Change
The Progressive Librarians Guild has endorsed the Iraq Moratorium, an organized method of protest for the third Friday of each month.
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.
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
I refer you to Kathleen de la Pe?±a McCook’s Union Librarian blog for the best ongoing coverage of the strike at the Vancouver Public Library (outside of the union’s own blog).
Readers who speak French, you probably already know you are favored here. So for your special benefit, here is a link to a very enjoyable podcast from the radio show “Le meilleur des mondes,” from Swiss station Espace 2. It is an interview with the literary historian Jean Marie Goulemot, about his love for libraries. … Read more French podcast on libraries
In many European countries, libraries pay a fee to copyright owners based on circulation statistics, in addition to buying the books outright. (And many European countries don’t do this.) This is called the “remuneration principle.” The new policies that come with the European Union are pressuring member states that don’t have this system to start … Read more Italian Library Association and the Public Lending Right
Terry Eagleton has a rather sad article in Saturday’s UK Guardian: Only Pinter remains: British literature’s long and rich tradition of politically engaged writers has come to an end. Eagleton tells how England’s major writers have moved to the right in recent years, and talks about the Left politics of its great writers of the … Read more Only Pinter remains
Elaine Harger, outgoing coordinator of the ALA Social Responsibilities Round Table, compiled a list of resolutions by ALA Council on the War on Terror, for distribution to congressional offices on Tuesday, which was a day of lobbying during the ALA Conference in Washington, DC. The list is online in PDF form, and also here: American … Read more American Library Association statements re: the “War on Terror”