This post is a compilation of web resources having to do with alternative literature and libraries. It replaces an out-of-date page on my personal site. By “alternative literature” I mean books, magazines, and other written media coming from any of a myriad Left perspectives (socialist, anarchist, green, feminist, queer, or specific-issue-based) and published independently of … Read more Alternative Lit and Libraries
This is a cute visual argument for the value of printed books. A friend at work sent it to me….
Why do I care so much about France? I don’t know, maybe just because it’s the traditional first stop for a semi-cosmopolitan anglophone and I am less culturally far-reaching than I would like to think. Or maybe it’s simply that I want America to be more like France. Anyway, I think this is a very … Read more Four top French book awards go to non-French authors
I think I neglected to emphasize this… Nancy Kranich’s preface to the 6th edition of Alternative Publishers of Books in North America is online. It’s good reading about the importance of alternative literature in libraries, from someone who has been studying the issue for years. Nancy Kranich is a past president of ALA and has … Read more On the importance of alternative literature in libraries
Alternative Publishers of Books in North America, 6th Edition, by Byron Anderson, is officially published, and available from Ingram, Baker and Taylor, Yankee Book Peddler, Amazon, and Barnes and Noble. It is the first title published by Library Juice Press, LLC. This book is a directory of alternative publishers in the U.S. and Canada, meaning … Read more Alternative Publishers of Books in North America, 6th Edition
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
From the AP story: WASHINGTON – The Federal Communications Commission ordered its staff to destroy all copies of a draft study that suggested greater concentration of media ownership would hurt local TV news coverage, a former lawyer at the agency says. The report, written in 2004, came to light during the Senate confirmation hearing for … Read more FCC study on media ownership ordered destroyed
Kim Leeder at Envirolibrarian has a brief review of the 1997 book by David Shenk, Data Smog: Surviving the Information Glut, which says that the amount of information easily available to people ends up harming more than helping civic participation. It sounds like an interesting book; I wasn’t aware of it. Since that book Shenk … Read more Data Smog
In a blog post on if:Book titled the myth of universal knowledge 2: hyper-nodes and one-way flows, Ben Vershbow reports on a set of interesting discussions about international information flows, specifically the dominance of Western cultural products (including print and digital texts) in international markets, and what it means.
Students of media consolidation and market censorship are well aware of the importance of small, independent and alternative publishers in providing balanced viewpoints in libraries. In our practice as librarians we know that there is an array of institutional challenges to learning about, acquiring and making available literature from these hidden corners of the publishing … Read more Resources for the Alternative Press
The Wall Street Journal published an article on Monday claiming that science journals routinely manipulate impact factors by encouraging contributors to cite heavily prior articles from the same journals. (The link goes to a login-free copy of the article as found on the Stay Free! blog.) Now, I think it’s true that because many journals … Read more WSJ claims STM journals rig impact factors
Interesting story behind Harvard student-author Kaavya Viswanathan, the one whose hit novel turned out to be somewhat plagiarized… She was working for (or with?) a company called Alloy Entertainment, which does “book packaging” for the YA book world, handling authors and book concepts and working with publishing companies. It seems that Alloy’s postmodern-capitalist way of … Read more The Death of the Author, as a Business Model