Two items regarding recent mainstream news reports telling the story that Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez is cracking down on free speech in refusing to renew RCTV’s license. First, Robert McChesney unpacks … Read more Venezuela’s media and the U.S. media
From ALA’s Washington Office: Please contact your Senators and ask them to support the OPEN Government Act of 2007 (S. 849), and to urge Majority Leader Harry Reid or Minority … Read more OPEN Government Act of 2007
SRRT Newsletter issue 158/159, June 2007, is published and on the web, and will be showing up in SRRT members’ (postal) mailboxes soon. Newsletter editor Erik Estep wishes to extend … Read more New SRRT Newsletter
Library Juice Press has a number of book projects in the works. Four of them are far-enough along that I feel I can announce them at this point: Questioning Library … Read more Forthcoming books
Is our society gradually forgetting the value of privacy, in libraries and elsewhere? Michael Zimmer, who writes on media ecology, technology, and privacy, gives some attention to online privacy in … Read more Some attention to library privacy
I’m thinking of planning some kind of party for Library Juice Press at ALA in Washington, DC, if there’s enough interest. I am thinking Saturday night (June 23rd). Comment or … Read more At ALA….
Tracy Nectoux, a library student at UIUC, is taking a class whose students were assigned to visit a bookstore and compare the atmosphere to a library’s atmosphere. This is what … Read more Tracy Nectoux on Libraries versus Bookstores
This isn’t an analysis of a military action after the fact, as with last July’s reports of the destruction of a public documents archive in Nablus. What is happening now … Read more Israeli authorities planning to destroy a Palestinian library in Jerusalem
There’s a brief story in the current issue of The Progressive titled, “Vet Prosecuted for Opposing Recruitment in the Library. It doesn’t go into great detail and is essentially an … Read more Military recruitment in the library, and how you can get busted for interfering with it
Arch Conservative Bush advisor Grover Norquist has been pushing the “Starve the Beast” strategy for a long time. This is the strategy that says run up a huge budget debt … Read more Savanna River Ecology Laboratory closing, thanks to Bush Administration small-esse
Bernadine Abbott Hoduski shared this information with ALA Council today… The ALA Washington Office and ALA Council’s Committee on Legislation have started a wiki on federal libraries. The wiki says: … Read more Federal Libraries Wiki
Sherry Turkle, whose 1995 book Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet was much talked about when I was in library school, has an article in … Read more Sherry Turkle on alienation in our technological society
Just an observation of interest to librarians, about Web 2.0 types of websites. Two examples of rich Web 2.0 sites are Last.fm and LibraryThing. We often think of Web 2.0 … Read more Why Web 2.0 is leading back to full cataloging
Steven Bell has an article in the current Inside Higher Ed, entitled, “Good at Reviewing Books But Not Each Other,” about the major disfunctionality in LIS discourse: our excessive “niceness” … Read more Steven Bell tough on LIS discourse in Inside Higher Ed
Marin County’s free weekly paper, The Pacific Sun, published a feature article in its last issue about the Marin County Free Library and the broader Marin County consortium of libraries, … Read more Now that’s Library PR
In the area of education research and accreditation standards for primary and secondary education, there is presently a big controversy that parallels SRRT’s fight for social responsibilities in libraries. NCATE, … Read more SRRT’s counterparts in education – current controversy
Hameeda Al-Bassam is an Iraqi librarian, a woman who is physically disabled as a result of the violence in Iraq. She operates a small, private library in service to intellectuals … Read more Hameeda Al-Bassam
The following is a brief email correspondence that I found amusing. I’m withholding the name and email address of the person who contacted me at Library Juice Press…. I recently … Read more Amusing correspondence
Paul Catherall of Information for Social Change has created a Google-based web search that searches websites from the international library left. Try the Radical and Progressive Library and Information Site … Read more Radical and Progressive Library and Information Site Search
Continuing in a self-congratulatory mode, I am proud to announce that I have joined the editorial board of Information for Social Change, the UK-based collective and semi-annual journal. ISC is … Read more Rory Litwin joins ISC editorial board