March 2007 is Small Press Month. Especially note the ten things to do for Small Press Month for bookstores and libraries. The effort is cosponsored by a range of organizations helping small presses, and special thanks are given to Alice Walker. I read about this on LibrarianActivist.org.
Email to lists from Mark Rosenzweig: —- Dear SRRT members and other progressives in ALA, The PLG Coordinating Committee has compiled the following short list of Council candidates (there may be one or two we missed) we believe are truly worthy of your votes. We urge you to BULLET VOTE for the list, that is, … Read more Progressive Council Candidates
The Presidential Records Act of 2007 is a bill presently in Congress that would overturn Bush’s Presidential Order 13233 of 2001, which was one of many outrageous secrecy measures of the Bush Administration, this one case giving former presidents the power to prevent access to their papers for many years. Kathleen de la Peña McCook … Read more The Presidential Records Act of 2007
At the ALA Midwinter in Seattle, two SRRT task forces were combined into one. The Alternatives In Print Task Force was one of SRRT’s original task forces, and has consistently advocated for the collection of materials from alternative publishers as a necessary part of living up to the Library Bill of Rights in collection development. … Read more Alternative Media Task Force
Kathleen de la Peña McCook has been indexing Progressive Librarian, and has worked through all issues published in the 1990s. The index will be published in Progressive Librarian in a future issue, and can now be found on Kathleen’s blog. Progressive Librarian index, 1990-1999 Book reviews published in Progressive Librarian, 1990-1999 Acronyms used in Progressive … Read more K. McCook indexes Progressive Librarian
John Pateman of Information for Social Change has written a review of Barbarians at the Gates of the Public Library, by Ed D’Angelo. Pateman has a Marxist perspective as well as a UK perspective, and explains his disagreement with the book in those terms.
Statement Emily Sheketoff, Executive Director, ALA Washington Office The American Library Association-Allied Professional Association (ALA-APA) would like to take this opportunity to announce its support of H.R. 800, the Employee Free Choice Act. Formed for the purpose of promoting “the mutual professional interests of librarians and other library workers,” the ALA-APA is a strong advocate … Read more ALA-APA supports the Employee Free Choice Act
Just a link to a handy website, brought to you by Public Citizen, guiding you through all the ins and outs of one of the Bush Administration’s clearest and strongest changes to government policy: drastically increased government secrecy and public disinformation. The website is Bushsecrecy.org, and it is divided into a few simple sections: Regulatory … Read more Bushsecrecy.org
My friend John Gehner just told me about this watershed piece of investigative reporting by James Bamford, an article from Rolling Stone that won the 2006 National Magazine Award in the “Best Reporting” category: The Man Who Sold the War. It is about John Rendon, who heads the “perception management” firm that was hired by … Read more John Rendon – the Goebbels of our era
Dear Friend of the Library of Congress, We are sending you this message because the Library of Congress Professional Guild, AFSCME Local 2910, needs your help. For over thirty years our union has worked with management to forge a constructive relationship at the Library of Congress. Together we have built a modern and progressive workplace … Read more Urgent message from LoC Professional Guild
The Progressive Librarians Guild endorsed a petition to impeach President Bush and to have Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice and Gonzales tried for war crimes by an international tribunal. The petition, written by Francis Boyle of the University of Illinois Law School and Joan Russow of the Global Compliance Research Project, is carefully framed within the … Read more Progressive Librarians Guild calls for Bush’s impeachment and trial for war crimes
Here’s a little detail about the present government that everybody should know. The Office of the Vice President, along with all executive branch offices, is required to submit a list of its staff for publication in the government’s “Plum Book,” and is required to submit statistics on its document classification activities. Cheney has been refusing … Read more Dick Cheney’s stealth operation
This is really funny.
I announced this earlier but deleted the post when I saw that I needed to make some changes to how I was doing these things. So now, with some things redone…. Two new features on the Library Juice Press website… First, a Friends’ Group, where friends and supporters of Library Juice Press can communicate on … Read more LJP Friends Group and Email Announcements
Frank Furedi in the free-thinking Spiked has an interesting essay in defense of denial (as in holocaust denial, AIDS denial, etc.). His position is that illiberal intolerance of such heresies breeds more of them and breeds an illiberal society. It is a good exposition of some classical principles of intellectual freedom, but stated more categorically … Read more In defense of denial
Recently a reader commented on a posting about Rick Anderson of last March, defending the idea that librarians should be “invisible facilitators of the flow of information in a capitalist society,” which is how I interpreted the intentions of Anderson and others like him (though I am sure that they would take issue with that). … Read more Rivers and dams
ALA Council Report to SRRT, Midwinter 2007 Greetings once again to SRRT members, old and new. Following up on our previous successes, in Seattle we introduced a resolution aimed at lobbying the Congress to defund the Iraq War. The resolution referenced our past successful resolutions since 2003, which addressed securing Iraqi cultural resources and rebuilding … Read more Al Kagan’s report to SRRT on ALA Council, Midwinter Meeting, Seattle ’07
In Seattle last week ALA passed this Resolution in Support of Immigrants Rights: Resolved, that ALA strongly supports the protection of each person’s civil liberties regardless of that individual’s nationality, residency, or status; and be it further resolved that ALA opposes any legislation that infringes on the rights of anyone in the USA (citizen or … Read more ALA Council supports immigrant rights
Just briefly mentioning two important things that I have neglected to follow here. 1). The 9th Circuit Court’s rejection of Brewster Kahle’s constitutional challenge to copyright laws that prevent people from using orphan works. That link is to the Cyberlaw project at Stanford and will be updated with commentary and future developments. This couirt decision … Read more 9th Circuit rejects Kahle vs. Gonzales, AAP PR
Here is an excerpt from Jesse Shera’s 1936 article in The Bulletin of the American Library Association, “The College Library and its Future.” (Vol. 30, pp. 495-501.) A PROFESSIONAL CREDO Having seen that technologically librarianship has made significant progress, and that investigatory activities have already achieved impressive beginnings, we now turn our attention to a … Read more Jesse Shera on academic librarians’ professional values