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
Carol Kreck, a librarian, was arrested and removed from a public campaign event for John McCain in Denver yesterday. She was in front of the Denver Center for Performing Arts, and was charged with trespassing. Can you trespass on public property? Here’s the video and some more info…
Open letter from Saad Eskander, Director of the Iraq National Library and Archives, June 21, 2008 An Open Letter to the Director of Hoover Institute I have read Mr. Sousa’s letter to Mr. Mark Greene, President of the Society of American Archivists (dated 06-06-08), Mr. Al-Jaberi’s statement (dated 27-04-08) and the article published by Stanford … Read more Saad Eskander’s open letter to the Hoover Institution
John Ronald sent me a link to a review of a British pamphlet titled Rethinking Public Service Reform: The Public Value Alternative, from the Trade Union Congress (UK). The review is in the blog A Very Public Sociologist, which has the subtitle “Sociology with a Socialist Punch.” Sociology should have a socialist punch, shouldn’t it? … Read more Democratizing Public Services
Here’s a brief essay in the New York Times by Edward Rothstein that I am afraid I don’t have much to say about at the moment. I think I agree with it, at least partially, but I get the feeling that there is an important counterpoint that is not coming to mind. The editorial essay … Read more The problem with cultural property
CLOSED EPA LIBRARIES TO RETURN IN LAVATORY-SIZED SPACES; Political Appointee Asserts Control over All Libraries, Repeals 30-Year-Old Manual “Ordered by Congress to re-open its shuttered libraries, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is grudgingly allocating only minimal space and resources, according to agency documents released today by Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER).”… Thanks to Jonathan … Read more EPA libraries restored in miniature form
On this May Day I want to link you to a book (online) that I’m putting out there as a symbol of Library Juice’s opposition within librarianship and the blogosphere: Gustave Le Bon’s The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind. This book, originally published in 1896, was an important early work in social psychology, … Read more Crowds
I would like to propose that the current era in librarianship, which is normally characterized as a “period of rapid change,” is perhaps better described as a period of denial. It is a period in which librarians are scurrying to disassociate themselves from their own profession as it tends to be thought of, with a … Read more Librarian: Accept Yourself
I should have mentioned this conference when I first learned about it. Thinking Critically: Alternative Perspectives and Methods in Information Studies. It’s coming up next month at the Center for Information Policy Research at the School of Information Studies at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee. I’m planning to be there, so if you’re there and … Read more Thinking Critically: Alternative Perspectives and Methods in Information Studies
I just caught some of this on the radio and want to share it. The new episode of Wisconsin Public Radio’s “To the Best of Our Knowledge” is called Dumbing Down and Smartening Up, and features interviews with Susan Jacoby, author of The Age of American Unreason (mentioned here March 16th); George Saunders, author of … Read more An Hour of Good Listening
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
Popline, for those who aren’t familiar with it, is a government-funded public database for research on population issues and reproductive health. I’ve been aware of it as an excellent resource for some time. The news: Gloria Won, a medical librarian at the University of California, San Francisco, noticed on Monday that the word “abortion” has … Read more Popline blocking searches on “abortion”
Let’s start from the common premise that an important part of being a librarian in this time of rapid change is to keep a close eye on trends. How are things changing? We need to know so that we can keep up, so that we can modify our services to meet society’s changing needs, to … Read more Library trendspotting if you happen to like Susan Jacoby
The price we pay for the growth in egalitarianism offered by the Internet is the decentralised access to unedited stories. In this medium, contributions by intellectuals lose their power to create a focus. That’s Jürgen Habermas, originator of the concept of the public sphere, on Web 2.0, in his acceptance speech on winning the Bruno … Read more Habermas on Web 2.0
Okay, though it tends to bring in the trolls, here is another post about something that’s hotly discussed on general political blogs… I’ve been reading Al Gore’s new book, The Assault on Reason, and I have to admit that I had underestimated him, simply because he has been successful in politics without widely communicating even … Read more Pardon me for not realizing before now that Al Gore is really smart
There’s a good little article in the new issue of In These Times on privatization of core library services and functions: “Public Libraries for Profit,” by Akito Yoshikane. Though it’s brief it hits the essential points about privatization and libraries: private, for-profit businesses lack accountability to communities and lack the commitment to intellectual freedom and … Read more In These Times on library privatization
Peter Suber is a major leader in the Open Access movement. (His Open Access News is an indispensible source – extremely detailed and up to date.) Today Richard Poynder of the Open and Shut? blog gives us a nice biographical post on Suber followed by an interview (part of his Basement Interviews series). Thanks to … Read more All about Peter Suber
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
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 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