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
If you’d like to purchase Questioning Library Neutrality for your library but need to supply a review from a mainstream source in order to justify it, the answer is here. In the July issue of Library Journal there is a nice review of the book that should do the trick.
Critical Pedagogy and Library Instruction: An Edited Collection Critical pedagogy seeks to identify, critique, and disrupt the inequalities of the dominant culture, thus equipping learners to transform oppressive social, cultural, and economic conditions. While many theorists, critics, and practitioners have considered how critical pedagogical strategies and perspectives might be employed in higher education, the academic … Read more Call for papers on critical pedagogy and library instruction
Just some scattered thoughts post-Anaheim, potential essays that will for the moment remain seeds…. It is surprising that ALA, being what it is, doesn’t have better control of its own documents. Reports disappear… Council makes decisions that result in internal policies that are available only by request from the offices. It’s 2008 and only now … Read more Scattered thoughts post-conference
INFORMATION FOR SOCIAL CHANGE (ISC) ISSN 1364-694X (print) ISSN 1756-901X (online) CALL FOR PAPERS — The Summer 2009 issue of the journal Information for Social Change (ISC) will focus on the theme of SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY FOR UTOPIAS. This issue of ISC aims to document 21st century science and technology initiatives designed for utopian societies. … Read more ISC Call for Papers
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
The current issue of LRC: Literary Review of Canada has a light essay by an acquaintance of Marshall McLuhan, discussing what the man was like and assessing his influence: In the Garden with the Guru. If you’re only vaguely familiar with Marshall McLuhan I definitely recommend it for a little taste of he was like … Read more Bob Rodgers remembers Marshall McLuhan
We’re presently awash in talk about a great paradigm shift that puts the user at the center of our planning for services. This is sometimes referred to simply as user-centered librarianship. It has been a hot idea for at least a decade, but has gained new power and momentum because of ideas about the interactivity … Read more Dueling Paradigm Shifts
Privacy in Peril: How We are Sacrificing a Fundamental Right in Exchange for Security and Convenience is an important new book by James B. Rule, who also wrote an influential book on privacy in the 1970s: Private Lives and Public Surveillance: Social Control in the Computer Age. Just noting it as a book of interest. … Read more Privacy in Peril: How We are Sacrificing a Fundamental Right in Exchange for Security and Convenience
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
INFORMATION FOR SOCIAL CHANGE (ISC) ISSN 1364-694X CALL FOR PAPERS (please feel free to forward to other lists) — The Summer 2009 issue of the online journal Information for Social Change (ISC) will focus on the theme of SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY FOR UTOPIAS. This issue of ISC aims to document 21st century science and technology … Read more Call for Papers – Information for Social Change – Science and Technology for Utopias
I’ve been brainstorming about some essential facets of librarianship – skills, roles, services, problems – that while they have not lost any relevance have lately been ignored, passed over, forgotten, swept under the rug, or declared obsolete and old-fashioned by the vocal minority of librarians whose main concern now seems to be to create a … Read more Annotated list of things not to forget (in the 2.0 craze)…
Here is a diagnosis of a certain malady in our body politic: the “both sides have a point” reflex. It stems from a desire for fairness and from the recognition that real issues are more complex than their advocates often allow, but leads to a pathological bypass of healthy brain function. Sometimes it also appears … Read more “The truth is somewhere in between” as a way to avoid thinking
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
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
Sherry Turkle, whose 1995 book Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet was much talked about when I was in library school, has an article in the current Forbes Magazine that updates her insights about human alienation in our technological culture. She has a notable ability to take us deep below … Read more Sherry Turkle on alienation in our technological society
Anti-intellectualism must be at its peak. Nerdy glasses are in fashion; I hope they promise a recovery of intellectual values in the post-Bush years. Regarding the thinking of anti-intellectuals… They think: If they can’t understand it, it’s ivory tower stuff that excludes the everyday person; it’s elitist, exclusive, and probably BS. Intellectuals are irrelevant. If … Read more Brief observation about anti-intellectualism
Tom Wilson has announced the new issue of Information Research, an electronic journal about information organization and information seeking behavior. This issue has some neat stuff in it, in my opinion: an article about casual, social information spaces used by college students, analyzed through the theory of “information grounds;” a study of how people organize … Read more New Issue of Information Research
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
First Monday’s current issue is about the openness movement, including open access publishing, open source software development, and information projects with distributed authorship. One article is especially interesting: Sandra Braman’s Tactical memory: The politics of openness in the construction of memory, which deals with interesting questions about the possible implications of the openness movement for … Read more The politics of openness