Bank of America execs exchange their souls for money in front of a camera. Not specifically library related except inasmuch as it paints a good picture of what we’re up against, and gives us a reason to feel good about our chosen career.
INFORMATION FOR SOCIAL CHANGE (ISC) ISSN 1364-694X CALL FOR PAPERS The summer 2007 issue of the online journal Information for Social Change (ISC) will focus on the urgent theme of library and information workers as political actors in times of war, civil war, military occupation, and social conflicts worldwide. ISC seeks both contemporary and historical … Read more Information for Social Change – Call for Papers
According to the Brussells Tribunal, an international group of artists, intellectuals and activists opposed to the U.S. occupation of Iraq, the intellectual and academic community of Iraq is being destroyed: A little known aspect of the tragedy engulfing Iraq is the systematic liquidation of the country’s academics. Even according to conservative estimates, over 250 educators … Read more Liquidation of Iraqi academics
Alternative Publishers of Books in North America, 6th Edition, by Byron Anderson, is officially published, and available from Ingram, Baker and Taylor, Yankee Book Peddler, Amazon, and Barnes and Noble. It is the first title published by Library Juice Press, LLC. This book is a directory of alternative publishers in the U.S. and Canada, meaning … Read more Alternative Publishers of Books in North America, 6th Edition
The Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh District Services has sent an email to branch heads offering to distribute to interested branches 50 copies of the 2006 Voter Guide from the Pennsylvania Family Institute, which the email calls “a non-profit, non-partisan research and education organization that analyzes public policies and cultural trends for their impact on the … Read more Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh distributing right wing voter guides
The Progressive Librarians Guild approved endorsement of the following Amnesty International statement last night… AMNESTY INTERNATIONAL USA PRESS RELEASE Tuesday, October 17, 2006 Amnesty International Vows to Push for Clarification on Detainee Legislation (Washington, DC) Larry Cox, Amnesty International USA’s Executive Director, issued the following statement in response to President Bush signing the “Military Commissions … Read more The Progressive Librarian’s Guild stands with Amnesty International
Are other people getting the same result when they add these things up? Pentagon monitoring peace activists’ email to “combat terrorism”…. suspending habeas corpus to prevent the fate of (pre-judged) terrorists from being decided by our lenient and overly-fair criminal justice system…. huge prison camps being built by Haliburton subsidiary Kellog, Brown, and Root for … Read more Doing the math
AFSCME has a new page about their representation of library workers. AFSCME represents more library workers than any other union. The page is nice, and so is the logo:
“The real culture of America is not corporate monoculture and television. It’s the writers, teachers, universities, libraries and librarians. That’s the mainstream culture of America.” – Lawrence Ferlinghetti, announcing the finalists for the National Book Awards, in his City Lights bookstore in San Francisco last week.
NYU historian Tony Judt is a strong critic of Israel and a proponent, along with Noam Chomsky and the late Edward Said, of a secular, binational state as the solution to the Israel-Palestine conflict. The Washington Post has a nice article, dated Oct. 9, about how a couple of his talks in New York City … Read more Historian Tony Judt’s talks in NYC cancelled due to ADL pressure
The Federal Research Public Access Act of 2006 (FRPAA), if passed, would mandate that research by Federal government agencies (publicly funded research) automatically go into publicly accessible open access repositories. The library community and most of the academic community is in favor of this bill as a way of protecting the information commons. Scholarly publishers … Read more American Anthropological Association opposition to Open Access: a letter from the AnthroSource Steering Committee on FRPAA
Trenchant and insightful article in The Nation by Jeffrey Chester: The Google YouTube Tango. This article focuses on how corporate claims-staking such as Google’s buyout of YouTube and Rupert Murdoch’s takeover of Myspace in 2005 are part of the creation of an overall interactive environment whose main function is marketing (advertising and data collection) for … Read more The Nation on the YouTube/Google deal – leading edge of corporate takeover of the web
The Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC), which provides data on Federal “enforcement, staffing, and spending,” reported in March of this year that IRS data obtained through FOIA requests showed that audit rates for low income Americans were higher than the rates of tax audits for wealthy Americans, representing a significant change: Restricting the comparison to … Read more The IRS keeping audit statistics secret; covering up higher audit rates of the poor than the rich
For academic librarians: We think that our undergrads go to Google because it’s easier to search than our databases, with their powerful syntaxes and fields, and we’re plowing ahead with federated searching to give our resources “Google appeal” based on this idea. But we’re mistaken. Our databases can be searched with keywords pretty easily, and … Read more The real reason students like Google better than our databases
A non-librarian friend recommended this story to me recently, and on reading it I felt surprised never to have seen it before. It’s an inspiring story about literacy and learning. It’s very Reader’s Digest-y (in fact it was actually published there) and corny, but nevertheless enjoyable and inspiring, and made me feel proud to be … Read more The Ballad of Old Man Peters
The New York Review of Books discusses Google’s massive scanning project and general ascendency in a review essay that touches on five recent books…
This has been available online for a while, but I just recently found it: Language: A Key Mechanism of Control: Newt Gingrich’s 1996 GOPAC memo. In retrospect it is clear how the GOP’s rhetorical strategy and their discipline in using it was a major part of their surge of power and control through the last … Read more Newt Gingrich’s 1996 GOPAC memo
The new issue of Information for Social Change, issue 23, is now online. It is a bigger-than-usual issue with some provocative and interesting articles. Information for Social Change is a British organization of radical library workers. Here is the table of contents: Contents and Editorial * Contents * Editorial: Education for Social Change – by … Read more Information for Social Change #23
…Directing your attention to an article in yesterday’s Washington Post by Michael Grunwald: The Education Issue, which examines the implementation of the No Child Left Behind Act. Regarding the $1 billion per year Reading First program, Grunwald writes, “Five years later, an accumulating mound of evidence from reports, interviews and program documents suggests that Reading … Read more No Child Left Behind: $55 Billion Boondoggle?
IFLA and SCECSAL Report to SRRT September 29, 2006 By Al Kagan Diverging from my usual report, this time I am reporting on two meetings held in the summer of 2006. This report includes my usual comments on the conference of the International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions (IFLA) and also on the SCECSAL … Read more Al Kagan’s IFLA report