The founder of Craigslist went to an internet media conference where most of the discussion was about “monetizing pageviews,” and made people scratch their heads because his super-successful website has never been about making money and he has no plans to move it in that direction. These wall street types had trouble grasping the concept … Read more Craigslist meets the capitalists
Morgan Wilson of explodedlibrary.info has a nice summary of the blog traffic and library-world discussions about the UCLA library taser incident.
PALIAct is the Progressive African Library & Information Activists Group. It has ties to CILIP (the UK library association) and the UK’s Information for Social Change, and publishes an online journal, Information Equality, Africa, the second issue of which is just out and available from the group’s website.
Library Juice Concentrate and Library Daylight are in the final phases of publication and will be available for purchase in about a month. Review copies will be available sooner to anyone who wants to review one of these books for a publication – just contact me if you’re interested: rory at libraryjuicepress.com. I thought I … Read more Library Juice Concentrate teaser
Posted with permission December 13, 2006 Dr. Norman Abrams Acting Chancellor University of California at Los Angeles University Chancellor’s Office Box 951405 2147 Murphy Los Angeles, CA 90095-1405 Dear Acting Chancellor Abrams: I was shocked, as were many of the 66,000 members of the American Library Association, to read about and watch the November 14, … Read more ALA President Leslie Burger’s letter to UCLA regarding the taser incident
The new issue of the SRRT Newsletter, which is combined issue 156/157, January 2007, is finished and now online. Paper copies will be mailed to SRRT members and other subscribers soon. Erik Estep has put together a nice issue, with articles by some new voices in SRRT. Carol Gulyas, chair of the Alternatives in Publications … Read more SRRT Newsletter 156/157
As you may have noticed throughout the EPA library closure situation, the government’s big justification for closing the libraries has been that it is a digital age, meaning that physical libraries have lost their relevance. We know that that is hardly true, but aside from that, shouldn’t this argument mean that we will see EPA … Read more Reports disappearing from EPA library website
Today is Human Rights Day. Two sites I will recommend: OHCHR Human Rights Day page Human Rights Education Association Human Rights Day page Also note Toni Samek’s upcoming book: Librarianship and Human Rights, coming out very soon on from Chandos Publishing. Also… Kathleen de la Peña McCook and Kathryn Phenix are working on a book … Read more Human Rights Day
The website of The Progressive magazine has a running feature called McCarthyism Watch, a series of brief articles about present-day attacks on freedom of expression in the United States. A galvanizing collection of information.
ALA Council’s Bernadine Abbott Hoduski, who has been Council’s leader on the EPA library closure issue, has sent us this article from Yubanet, which begins: The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is frantically dispersing its library collections to preempt Congressional intervention, according to internal emails released today by Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER). Contrary to … Read more EPA libraries dumping collections to preempt congressional action
This is from LISNews. It turns out that LibrariansForFairness, the ostensible library group that opposed SRRT’s criticism of Israel a few years ago, is actually a project of the PR firm Rothstein and Memsic, which is connected with Standwithus, a pro-Israel lobby group. The rundown is LISNews, though brief, is very interesting and presents the … Read more LibrariansForFairness a project of PR firm Rothstein and Memsic
The Guardian (UK) published a story on Friday about a new wave of censorship in Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s Iran. Scores of Western classics, Western bestsellers, and liberal Iranian novels are censored and not being published there. One small thing worth pointing out about this. Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code is among the banned books, and … Read more Censorship in Iran
Journalism has changed in the last few decades because the ownership of most daily newspapers has moved from local, private hands to publicly traded corporations, which have demanded higher profit margins. The main result has been a reduction of reporting staff and a greater need to avoid offending advertisers and connected corporations. Consumers have been … Read more Return of the Press Barons
Why do I care so much about France? I don’t know, maybe just because it’s the traditional first stop for a semi-cosmopolitan anglophone and I am less culturally far-reaching than I would like to think. Or maybe it’s simply that I want America to be more like France. Anyway, I think this is a very … Read more Four top French book awards go to non-French authors
The Association for Library and Information Science Education (ALISE) has an Information Ethics Special Interest Group (IE-SIG) that has recently completed a Position Statement on Information Ethics in LIS Education. I have been waiting to blog this for news about whether it is going to be officially adopted by ALISE or what authority it has … Read more ALISE Information Ethics Special Interests Group
In the past few years, the New York Public Library has sold off important assets in order to raise money to continue operations. In the same period, compensation for their top administrators has increased dramatically. (The President and CEO now makes around $800,000.) The link is to an article in the New York Times dated … Read more NYPL executive pay
I think I neglected to emphasize this… Nancy Kranich’s preface to the 6th edition of Alternative Publishers of Books in North America is online. It’s good reading about the importance of alternative literature in libraries, from someone who has been studying the issue for years. Nancy Kranich is a past president of ALA and has … Read more On the importance of alternative literature in libraries
New from Library Juice Press: Barbarians at the Gates of the Public Library: How Postmodern Consumer Capitalism Threatens Democracy, Civil Education and the Public Good By Ed D’Angelo November 2006. 139. paperback. $18 ISBN 978-0-9778617-1-2 Barbarians at the Gates of the Public Library is a philosophical and historical analysis of how the rise of consumerism … Read more New from LJP: Barbarians at the Gates of the Public Library
We get our sense of where the country is at largely from the media. When elections and opinion polls tell a different story, we have to ask questions about the media. FAIR has put out an critique of the news media’s analysis of the Democrats’ electoral victories of this week. A major theme of news … Read more Who is out of step with the country, really?
Thoughtul article in the new Marginal Librarian, McGill’s library school student e-zine: Public libraries: who or what is “public”? This article has to do with Montréal’s new anti-homeless policies (that’s anti-homeless, not anti-homelessness), and ties the question of society’s attitudes toward poor people to library service and the way “the public” is operationally defined in … Read more Circumscribing the “public” in public libraries