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
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
Notwithstanding today’s earlier post and many other posts here about what is wrong in the world of information, I’d like to observe American Thanksgiving by noting that we have much to be thankful for. I think it’s right to say that our criticism of things that are happening in the information sphere tends to be … Read more Thanksgiving
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.
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.
After offering reference help to a student the other day and having it refused, I had what I can only call an evil thought. I’d like to share this evil thought with you now, at the risk having an evil influence on library discourse. Sometimes it takes a devil’s advocate, though, to inspire work on … Read more Are we the friendly produce consultants of the information age?
Information, Society and Justice an inter-disciplinary electronic journal (website under construction) Information, Society and Justice is a peer-review, open-access electronic journal based in the Department of Applied Social Sciences (DASS) at the London Metropolitan University. The journal is governed by an Editorial Board drawn from UK and overseas. It seeks to provide a proactive space … Read more New journal: Information, Society and Justice
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
First, two new ethnographic studies of undergraduate research habits, each offering a corrective to assumptions at the foundation of Library 2.0 thinking: Anthropologist Nancy Foster led a study at the University of Rochester, and presented her findings at the ACRL conference this year. The study will be part of a book published by ACRL soon. … Read more Two minor correctives and one broadside on Library 2.0 madness
Here’s some great library PR from regular San Francisco Chronicle columnist C.W. Nevius. It’s an example of the kind of newspaper coverage that I think we mostly want.
Kathleen de la Peña McCook just pointed me to a very interesting Master’s Thesis by Carla Valetich: The Response of Socially Aware Librarians to National Crisis: A Case Study of Selected Electronic Mail from the Social Responsibilities Round Table, September 2001 – July 2002. The abstract says: At the time of the attacks on September … Read more The Response of Socially Aware Librarians to National Crisis…
First of all, this post is inspired by a new Facebook group called “Zero Based Library School,” which derives from an analogy to Zero Based Budgeting, where nothing is carried over from the past, and everything needs to be justified in terms of present needs and conditions. In librarianship, it means that nothing should be … Read more A note on library “traditionalism”
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
I love that CAKE song, “Rock ‘n’ Roll Lifestyle,” and thought of it during that thread on “A Hipper Crowd of Shushers.” Liz of the LibraryTavern blog wrote great new lyrics, really great new lyrics, to that song, that apply to hip next-gen librarians: “How do you afford your 2.0 biblio-lifestyle?” Thanks to Mark Rosenzweig … Read more How do you afford your 2.0 biblio-lifestyle?
I was tickled to see today’s NY Times article in the Fashion section, “A Hipper Crowd of Shushers,” about how hip and cool younger librarians are now, in contrast to a generation ago. Throughout Kara Jesella’s article there are specific markers of hipness that distinguish the new breed of librarians as superior to their elders … Read more The judgment of taste and the “hipper crowd of shushers”
Monika Antonelli is developing what I think is an important new conceptual direction for libraries, on the basis of ideas from the permaculture movement. She has just started a website, Greenlibraries.org, still mostly undeveloped, which will be a resource for support and documentation for making libraries more ecologically sustainable. Making libraries more sustainable is the … Read more Green Libraries
New essay by Thomas Mann, “The Peloponnesian War and the Future of Reference, Cataloging, and Scholarship in Research Libraries” (June 13, 2007). PDF, 41 pp. ABSTRACT: The paper is an examination of the overall principles and practices of both reference service and cataloging operations in the promotion of scholarly research, pointing out important differences not … Read more Thomas Mann’s new one
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
Steven Bell has an article in the current Inside Higher Ed, entitled, “Good at Reviewing Books But Not Each Other,” about the major disfunctionality in LIS discourse: our excessive “niceness” toward each other and discomfort with open disagreement. In this article, Bell elucidates an uncomfortable contrast between us nice, non-confrontational librarians and academics in other … Read more Steven Bell tough on LIS discourse in Inside Higher Ed