Midwinter Meeting attendees gathered in a hall of the Georgia World Congress Center to create posters, distribute “Radical Militant Librarian” pins, and generate some LIS energy for the march. A sign on the wall suggested some slogans the librarian contingent could use: “Silence is not the answer,” “Libraries are the key to freedom,” and “Too … Continue reading Librarians on the March
On May 9, after a question-and-answer session following a public lecture by US diplomat Dennis Ross at the Plaza branch of the Kansas City (Mo.) Public Library (KCPL), city police arrested and detained an attendee and the library’s director of programming and marketing. The attendee, social activist Jeremy Rothe-Kushel of Lawrence, Kansas, was charged with … Continue reading Kansas City Public Library embroiled in free-speech case
Irene Munster, associate director of the Priddy Library for the Universities at Shady Grove in Rockville, Maryland, described the waves of Jewish immigrants to Argentina from 1889 to the 1930s, many of whom established their own library collections in Yiddish, Russian, German, or Polish languages in the towns and cities they settled in. As refugees … Continue reading Immigrants and the Library
In December 2009, Ferriero said, the president issued an Open Government Directive that called on each government agency to submit an open government plan to increase the availability of its documents. NARA is now developing its fourth plan with 50 specific commitments to strengthen open government. These feed into a National Action Plan (currently the … Continue reading The National Archives and Open Government
Michael Zubal, a manager of Zubal Books in Cleveland, Ohio, related two instances when his store was involved with stolen books. The first took place in 1995 when he purchased a first edition of Tarzan and the Lost Empire (1929) by Edgar Rice Burroughs from an individual who came into the store. Shortly afterwards he … Continue reading Security, Inventory, and Provenance
Lili Boshevska, director of the University St. Kliment Ohridski Library in Bitola—one of five national libraries in Macedonia—said that the majority of the UN goals are already mirrored in national policy. “Sustainability is possible,” she said, “but there is still much to be done by 2030.” Combating poverty by eradicating illiteracy is one of Macedonia’s … Continue reading National Libraries and Sustainable Development
Section Chair Jayshree Mamtora said that the problems these countries face—relations with indigenous peoples, developing economies, immigration, climate change, multilingual populations, and communication over vast distances—are all being addressed by libraries that are experimenting with new ways of contributing to the social and economic development of the communities they serve. Keynote speaker Loida Garcia-Febo, a … Continue reading Libraries Improving Lives in Asia and Oceania
OCLC made use of the occasion to showcase its services at its “Industry Symposium” on August 14. President and CEO Skip Prichard compared the work of OCLC with the Disneyland attraction It’s a Small World, saying that “Making the big world of information small enough to manage is what we do.” Prichard added that OCLC … Continue reading OCLC: Purpose, Place, and People
You grew up in the inner city of Detroit. How did you discover literature? My mother was and is an extremely literate woman who read voraciously, and I picked up that habit from her. My Sunday school teachers encouraged literacy by recitation of set pieces in Sunday school. My 5th-grade teacher, Mrs. James, really jump-started … Continue reading Newsmaker: Michael Eric Dyson
On Monday, the Association for Library Collections and Technical Services held a session on “Saving Collections, Sharing Expertise: The FIPNet Collaboration across Library Specialties,” which explored the efforts of the Government Publishing Office (GPO) to preserve government information in both tangible and digital format.
The problems of keeping student data private in an increasingly complex world of networked information and online tracking were addressed in a Monday morning session, “Student Privacy: The Big Picture on Big Data,” sponsored by the ALA Office of Government Relations and the Office for Intellectual Freedom (OIF). The featured speaker was Elana Zeide, a privacy advocate, attorney and research fellow at New York University’s Information Law Institute.
Three librarians from the University of Virginia described their Book Traces project, an effort to discover uniquely modified copies of pre-1923 books in the circulating collections of Alderman Library, in a Sunday program sponsored by the Association for Library Collections and Technical Services. Arts and Humanities Director Christine Ruotolo explained that the university has a long-standing tradition of emphasizing book history and bibliography and, because many of their books were originally donated by distinguished faculty and notable families in the Charlottesville area, many of them have potentially valuable modifications by their former owners—marginalia, inserts, inscriptions, annotations, and even doodles that can have evidential value for humanities scholars.
