If you’re like me, you work in a library that is facing tough decisions (no irony intended by that cliché phrase) as a result of budget cuts during the economic crisis. The choice between cutting staff and cutting the budget for materials is the easy one – protect the people who work in the library … Read more The economic crisis and the preservation function of libraries
Librarians, in my experience, are mostly ambivalent about Wikipedia, and we have good reason for our ambivalence. Wikipedia is a new phenomenon, which means it requires reflection and thought in order to understand where it is valuable and where it is not appropriate for us to use. I think that for many of us, our … Read more Wikipedia as an auxiliary reference tool
I mentioned in an earlier post how Robbie Franklin, owner of McFarland Publishers, advised me, when I was first getting Library Juice Press off the ground, to publish some conservative books along with liberal books, in order to show that I’m running a publishing house, not an advocacy group. I knew at that time that … Read more Publication and endorsement
Since the second half of last year I’ve been reading a lot of financial news, where the major theme of the financial crisis is the “crisis of trust” – banks not wanting to take the risk of extending credit to counterparties. But we’ve been living through a worsening crisis of trust in another sense for … Read more The Other Crisis of Trust (and a question about what it means for Info Lit)
Intellectual Freedom is a right that has a range of threats to it. Most obviously, governments have banned books and censored the internet. But there are other dimensions to the threats to intellectual freedom. Publishers have refused to publish books for fear of controversy. Criticism of corporations is squelched by pulling out of advertising contracts; … Read more Age Appropriateness and IF
I am a big Netflix user. Netflix has a library of about 100,000 movies that users can watch. Because of the size of the library, much of their business comes from customers who have a strong interest in film and want to see movies that they’ve read about in books and are not otherwise easy … Read more The Netflix Prize – not what’s needed
Over time, Radical Reference moved from being simply an experimental virtual reference service for political radicals to being an activist organization sharing the same space as PLG and SRRT, but offering a different flavor and a different set of political ideas. Its primary activity, however, remains what it was when the group was originally formed … Read more A question for Radical Reference
We live in an era (no blame to Baby Boomers intended) when people in positions of authority are often uncomfortable being authority figures. With a keen memory of disliking authority in our youth, we are uneasy on the other side, surely the object of jokes and plots of circumvention by kids who love their youthful … Read more Reference librarians are authority figures with no jurisdiction
We hear a lot about Radical Trust, with the emphasis being on trusting users (of systems, websites, etc.) to guide organizations. I have tried to sound a skeptical note at times, pointing out that something called “groupthink” is the danger when you decide to trust the wisdom of crowds. I’ve always most admired people whose … Read more Interface agents and human control
This is a very long post and one that I think some people will wish I had simply sent to the PLG listserv instead of putting it here before the world. I have chosen to post it here because 1) I think that it is a more effective way of getting the issues that I … Read more On the past, present, and future of PLG
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
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
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
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”
Just an observation of interest to librarians, about Web 2.0 types of websites. Two examples of rich Web 2.0 sites are Last.fm and LibraryThing. We often think of Web 2.0 sites in terms of the idea of “tagging instead of cataloging.” In fact, rich 2.0 sites, the ones that do a lot of data processing … Read more Why Web 2.0 is leading back to full cataloging
I am going to take another stab at outlining my views on “library and non-library issues.” Last time I did it I was sloppy in the way that I stated my views, and I surprised and disappointed some people who I think would not have been so surprised and disappointed if I had been clearer … Read more Library and non-library issues
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
Library 2.0 is a powerful idea that finds itself in an awkward predicament. It is an idea that has emerged out of what amounts to a separate discourse within librarianship, that of younger, web-centric librarians who have often have a sense that they are remaking the profession from the ground up for the digital future … Read more The Central Problem of Library 2.0: Privacy
Perhaps the most pressing issue facing librarianship is one that is unlikely to receive serious scholarly attention. It is, to put it simply, a battle presently being fought between two camps of librarians. Some may cite generational conflict as the primary conflict in librarianship today; baby-boomers representing traditional knowledge of librarianship as well as bibliographic … Read more Geeks and Nerds Battle for the Soul of Librarianship
Now that I’ve officially had my blog for almost month, I can reflect a little bit. Things might still change, but I have to confess that at the moment I feel somewhat outside the mainstream of library blogging culture. My blog entries aren’t getting a lot of links to them and I don’t feel much … Read more Questioning the Techie Mission