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
The Progressive Librarians Guild had representatives at the U.S. Social Forum in Atlanta in March, in partnership with representatives from Radical Reference. Elaine Harger and Kathleen de la Peña McCook wrote a report on their activities and their experience at the Forum. I think it’s a good restatement of how librarianship and the Left are … Read more PLG Report from the U.S. Social Forum
Tracy Nectoux, a library student at UIUC, is taking a class whose students were assigned to visit a bookstore and compare the atmosphere to a library’s atmosphere. This is what she wrote: The library’s purpose is different from that of bookstores And it always has been. Public libraries are set up so that anyone who … Read more Tracy Nectoux on Libraries versus Bookstores
Arch Conservative Bush advisor Grover Norquist has been pushing the “Starve the Beast” strategy for a long time. This is the strategy that says run up a huge budget debt and then a future Congress will be unable to support government spending. The “War on Terror” is obviously the great implementation of the starve the … Read more Savanna River Ecology Laboratory closing, thanks to Bush Administration small-esse
Bernadine Abbott Hoduski shared this information with ALA Council today… The ALA Washington Office and ALA Council’s Committee on Legislation have started a wiki on federal libraries. The wiki says: The purpose of this wiki is to share and track information on federal library threats, re-organizations, and closings. Based on discussions with members, the main … Read more Federal Libraries Wiki
Media critic and theorist Robert McChesney is spearheading the campaign against the postal rate hike, which has Time Warner and other major magazine publishers’ money behind it. This is from the campaign website: Postal regulators have accepted a proposal from media giant Time Warner that would stifle small and independent publishers in America. The plan … Read more Postal Rate Hike would hurt independent publishers
Tom Englehardt (Tomdispatch.com) has posted an article by Chip Ward about the homeless problem and libraries. Chip Ward is the retired director of the Salt Lake City Public Library. (Is it this article that I have already seen somewhere, or something similar from Mr. Ward? John G., please comment if you know the answer.) Chip … Read more Chip Ward on homeless people and libraries
Just briefly mentioning two important things that I have neglected to follow here. 1). The 9th Circuit Court’s rejection of Brewster Kahle’s constitutional challenge to copyright laws that prevent people from using orphan works. That link is to the Cyberlaw project at Stanford and will be updated with commentary and future developments. This couirt decision … Read more 9th Circuit rejects Kahle vs. Gonzales, AAP PR
Library Juice Concentrate Edited by Rory Litwin Preface by Kathleen de la Peña McCook Price: $25.00 ISBN-10: 0-9778617-3-2 ISBN-13: 978-0-9778617-3-6 6″ by 9″ Published: December 2006 Library Juice Concentrate is a compilation of the best of Library Juice, an e-zine published by Rory Litwin between 1998 and 2005 that dealt with foundational questions of librarianship … Read more New from LJP: Library Juice Concentrate
The new issue of Information for Social Change is out. It’s issue 24, and its theme is “Libraries & Information in the World Social Forum Context. There hasn’t been much participation in the World Social Forum by U.S. librarians, including the progressives and socialists, though there has certainly been awareness and enthusiasm about the WSF … Read more New – ISC #24 – World Social Forum
The founder of Craigslist went to an internet media conference where most of the discussion was about “monetizing pageviews,” and made people scratch their heads because his super-successful website has never been about making money and he has no plans to move it in that direction. These wall street types had trouble grasping the concept … Read more Craigslist meets the capitalists
As you may have noticed throughout the EPA library closure situation, the government’s big justification for closing the libraries has been that it is a digital age, meaning that physical libraries have lost their relevance. We know that that is hardly true, but aside from that, shouldn’t this argument mean that we will see EPA … Read more Reports disappearing from EPA library website
In the past few years, the New York Public Library has sold off important assets in order to raise money to continue operations. In the same period, compensation for their top administrators has increased dramatically. (The President and CEO now makes around $800,000.) The link is to an article in the New York Times dated … Read more NYPL executive pay
New from Library Juice Press: Barbarians at the Gates of the Public Library: How Postmodern Consumer Capitalism Threatens Democracy, Civil Education and the Public Good By Ed D’Angelo November 2006. 139. paperback. $18 ISBN 978-0-9778617-1-2 Barbarians at the Gates of the Public Library is a philosophical and historical analysis of how the rise of consumerism … Read more New from LJP: Barbarians at the Gates of the Public Library
Thoughtul article in the new Marginal Librarian, McGill’s library school student e-zine: Public libraries: who or what is “public”? This article has to do with Montréal’s new anti-homeless policies (that’s anti-homeless, not anti-homelessness), and ties the question of society’s attitudes toward poor people to library service and the way “the public” is operationally defined in … Read more Circumscribing the “public” in public libraries
The Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh District Services has sent an email to branch heads offering to distribute to interested branches 50 copies of the 2006 Voter Guide from the Pennsylvania Family Institute, which the email calls “a non-profit, non-partisan research and education organization that analyzes public policies and cultural trends for their impact on the … Read more Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh distributing right wing voter guides
The Federal Research Public Access Act of 2006 (FRPAA), if passed, would mandate that research by Federal government agencies (publicly funded research) automatically go into publicly accessible open access repositories. The library community and most of the academic community is in favor of this bill as a way of protecting the information commons. Scholarly publishers … Read more American Anthropological Association opposition to Open Access: a letter from the AnthroSource Steering Committee on FRPAA
Trenchant and insightful article in The Nation by Jeffrey Chester: The Google YouTube Tango. This article focuses on how corporate claims-staking such as Google’s buyout of YouTube and Rupert Murdoch’s takeover of Myspace in 2005 are part of the creation of an overall interactive environment whose main function is marketing (advertising and data collection) for … Read more The Nation on the YouTube/Google deal – leading edge of corporate takeover of the web
The Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC), which provides data on Federal “enforcement, staffing, and spending,” reported in March of this year that IRS data obtained through FOIA requests showed that audit rates for low income Americans were higher than the rates of tax audits for wealthy Americans, representing a significant change: Restricting the comparison to … Read more The IRS keeping audit statistics secret; covering up higher audit rates of the poor than the rich