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 … Read more Intellectual Freedom advocacy in a Huxleyan world
Carol Kreck, a librarian, was arrested and removed from a public campaign event for John McCain in Denver yesterday. She was in front of the Denver Center for Performing Arts, … Read more Librarian ejected from ostensibly public McCain rally for holding a sign
Open letter from Saad Eskander, Director of the Iraq National Library and Archives, June 21, 2008 An Open Letter to the Director of Hoover Institute I have read Mr. Sousa’s … Read more Saad Eskander’s open letter to the Hoover Institution
John Ronald sent me a link to a review of a British pamphlet titled Rethinking Public Service Reform: The Public Value Alternative, from the Trade Union Congress (UK). The review … Read more Democratizing Public Services
Here’s a brief essay in the New York Times by Edward Rothstein that I am afraid I don’t have much to say about at the moment. I think I agree … Read more The problem with cultural property
CLOSED EPA LIBRARIES TO RETURN IN LAVATORY-SIZED SPACES; Political Appointee Asserts Control over All Libraries, Repeals 30-Year-Old Manual “Ordered by Congress to re-open its shuttered libraries, the U.S. Environmental Protection … Read more EPA libraries restored in miniature form
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: … Read more Crowds
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. … Read more Librarian: Accept Yourself
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 … Read more Thinking Critically: Alternative Perspectives and Methods in Information Studies
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 … Read more An Hour of Good Listening
From Lara Moore’s Restoring Order: The Ecole des Chartes and the Organization of Archives and Libraries in France, 1820-1870 (pages 208-209): It … appears that the late Empire had strong … Read more Napoleon III and public libraries
Popline, for those who aren’t familiar with it, is a government-funded public database for research on population issues and reproductive health. I’ve been aware of it as an excellent resource … Read more Popline blocking searches on “abortion”
Let’s start from the common premise that an important part of being a librarian in this time of rapid change is to keep a close eye on trends. How are … Read more Library trendspotting if you happen to like Susan Jacoby
The price we pay for the growth in egalitarianism offered by the Internet is the decentralised access to unedited stories. In this medium, contributions by intellectuals lose their power to … Read more Habermas on Web 2.0
Okay, though it tends to bring in the trolls, here is another post about something that’s hotly discussed on general political blogs… I’ve been reading Al Gore’s new book, The … Read more Pardon me for not realizing before now that Al Gore is really smart
There’s a good little article in the new issue of In These Times on privatization of core library services and functions: “Public Libraries for Profit,” by Akito Yoshikane. Though it’s … Read more In These Times on library privatization
Peter Suber is a major leader in the Open Access movement. (His Open Access News is an indispensible source – extremely detailed and up to date.) Today Richard Poynder of … Read more All about Peter Suber
Here’s an interesting article from the July-August isssue of New Left Review relating the history of socialism to the history of print culture. It suggests, without quite stating it, that … Read more Socialism and print culture
Kathleen de la Pe?±a McCook recommends some books on libraries and the public sphere. This list is a good prescription for getting reinspired as an ethically and politically grounded professional.
The Chronicle of Higher Education has a brief news item today about a Reed-Elsevier web portal for oncologists called OncologySTAT, which provides free access to medical research in journals that … Read more OncologySTAT: end run around objectivity