The L.A. Times reports that… the organizers of the this year’s Turin Book Fair made it an occasion to honor Israeli authors on the 60th anniversary of the nation’s founding, which understandably has made a lot of people angry. So, lots of boycotts of the book fair and heightened security. Yeah, it’s unfortunate that this … Read more Israel-Palestine conflict comes to the Turin Book Fair
Stephen Mitchell of UC Riverside wrote me the other day to ask, Do you know of academic libraries who have done BI on the War? We’re starting to talk about it and it occurred to me that someone has probably done a nice powerpoint somewhere that we could build on. I asked him if I … Read more BI on the War, anyone?
The Los Angeles Times reports that Wendy Gonaver, an American Studies instructor at Cal State Fullerton and a Quaker, was fired from her job for refusing to sign a loyalty oath. She was willing to sign it with an attached statement qualifying her willingness to “defend the constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic” through … Read more Instructor fired for refusing to sign a loyalty oath
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
Media Release Contact: Dr. Terrence W. Epperson Chair, Miriam Braverman Memorial Prize Committee Progressive Librarians Guild Phone: 609/771-3352 FAX: 609/637-5177 E-Mail: epperson@tcnj.edu April 29, 2008 FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE Miriam Braverman Memorial Prize Winner Announced (The College of New Jersey, Ewing, NJ) ‚Äì The Progressive Librarians Guild is pleased to announce the winner of the 2008 … Read more 2008 Braverman Winner
The UIUC PLG chapter event I linked to yesterday was a part of a series. This past Monday the group hosted David Bade in a discussion event titled Technology Waits For No One: Thinking About Technology, Progress and Responsibility in Academic Librarianship. David has given me permission to post the transcript of his presentation here. … Read more David Bade on technology and librarianship
American Libraries’ April issue was focused on the environment and global warming, and had an “On My Mind” piece by The Progressive Librarians Guild‘s Elaine Harger: Global Warming and Us: Assessing Our Environmnetal and Professional Liability. This brief article is thought provoking and worth a read.
From Caroline Nappo of the UIUC GSLIS PLG chapter: Dear Colleagues, Last week the University of Illinois GSLIS chapter of the Progressive Librarians Guild hosted a panel discussion titled “What is a ‘Progressive Librarian’?” Our guests were Carolyn Anthony, Sanford Berman, Allison Sutton, and Anke Voss. Professor Abdul Alkalimat moderated the discussion. An audio recording … Read more What is a progressive librarian?
Felipe Meneses of Mexico City has written a brief review of David Bade’s Responsible Librarianship: Library Policies for Unreliable Systems. It’s in Spanish, so you may or may not be able to read it without a friend to help. Thanks, Felipe!
I would like to propose that the current era in librarianship, which is normally characterized as a “period of rapid change,” is perhaps better described as a period of denial. It is a period in which librarians are scurrying to disassociate themselves from their own profession as it tends to be thought of, with a … Read more Librarian: Accept Yourself
I rarely read Annoyed Librarian. When I do it’s usually because Word Press tells me that she’s linked to a Library Juice posting, and I go and see what she wrote. I’m usually shocked by how rude and vitriolic this anonymous person is. I went to her site today looking to see if I could … Read more On Annoyed Librarian and anonymous posting
You could call it a bombshell if what the New York Times is reporting now were not already well known by skeptical observers, but it’s significant that the Times is reporting it, and that it’s being picked up by TV outlets. The big news is that “military experts” who have been been giving “objective analysis” … Read more NY Times reports on media manipulation by Pentagon
Here’s some predictable news: A group of four researchers have published findings in the new issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association showing that articles in medical journals are often written by drug companies and publishers, with legitimate scientists added as authors when the articles are submitted. Their research was based on court … Read more Drug companies authoring articles in medical journals and adding scientists as authors after the studies are written
Questioning Library Neutrality: Essays from Progressive Librarian Editor: Alison Lewis Price: $18.00 Published: April 2008 ISBN: 978-0-9778617-7-4 Printed on acid-free paper Questioning Library Neutrality: Essays from Progressive Librarian presents essays that relate to neutrality in librarianship in a philosophical or practical sense, and sometimes both. They are a selection of essays originally published in Progressive … Read more New from LJP: Questioning Library Neutrality
I should have mentioned this conference when I first learned about it. Thinking Critically: Alternative Perspectives and Methods in Information Studies. It’s coming up next month at the Center for Information Policy Research at the School of Information Studies at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee. I’m planning to be there, so if you’re there and … Read more Thinking Critically: Alternative Perspectives and Methods in Information Studies
Powell’s Books is the option for many people who want to buy a book online from a union shop, so I’m very happy that they are stocking books from Litwin Books and Library Juice Press. This note is to announce that they have added the latest book, Lara Moore’s Restoring Order: the Ecole des Chartes … Read more Lara Moore’s book now available from Powell’s
Carmen D’Avino created a lot of recognizeable animation in the 60s and 70s, some of it for The Electric Company, a PBS show for graduates of Sesame Street that I remember well. Here’s his animated bit about Libraries for The Electric Company:
I just caught some of this on the radio and want to share it. The new episode of Wisconsin Public Radio’s “To the Best of Our Knowledge” is called Dumbing Down and Smartening Up, and features interviews with Susan Jacoby, author of The Age of American Unreason (mentioned here March 16th); George Saunders, author of … Read more An Hour of Good Listening
Tim Brown has a post in Critical Mass, the blog of the National Book Critics Circle, about the “death of zines,” claiming, as though no one had heard the idea before, that zine culture is dead and has been replaced by the internet. There’s something a little bit too obvious and common sense about the … Read more Zines: not dead, just retro
This is worth a mention: Mikita Brottman’s The Solitary Vice: Against Reading. I read about it in Kevin Arthur’s Question Technology blog. The book begins by questioning whether reading is necessarily good for you, and continues as a memoir of reading in different genres. Brottman’s own site links to a number of reviews. Reading is … Read more Against Reading?