Author Archive: Peter Hepburn

Meet the Candidates for ALA President: Peter Hepburn

By Peter Hepburn | March 1, 2018

To thrive, libraries and library workers need a strong and healthy professional association that advocates for us and for those who come to our facilities or who use our online resources, enabling them to benefit from the wide range of services we offer. Within our library community, we must have an association that is itself … Continue reading Meet the Candidates for ALA President: Peter Hepburn →

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Here are some statistics to celebrate the most frequently banned and challenged books during Banned Books Week, September 23–29. 100,000 was the number of copies of Angie Thomas’s young adult novel, The Hate U Give, that were printed in its first month. The Coretta Scott King Book Awards honoree, about a teenager who witnesses a police shooting, was challenged in July by a South Carolina Fraternal Order of Police chapter for “indoctrination of distrust of police.”

American Libraries feature, Sept./Oct
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Up to $1,000 and the opportunity to be published in Short Story Dispensers nationwide will be at stake for writers of all levels, thanks to a new writing contest launching September 25. PLA, the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, and Short Édition are teaming up for the first time to encourage writers of all ages and backgrounds to submit an entry. The theme of this year’s contest is courage. The submission deadline is October 30. Full contest details are available online.

ALA Communications and Marketing Office, Sept. 25
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Honorary Book Club Central Chair Sarah Jessica Parker has selected Wayétu Moore’s She Would Be King (Graywolf Press) as her latest pick for ALA’s Book Club Central. The novel reimagines the story of Liberia’s early years through three unforgettable characters, intermingling history and magical realism. Moore is the founder of One Moore Book and teaches at the City University of New York’s John Jay College.

ALA Communications and Marketing Office, Sept. 25
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Cara Giaimo writes: “On January 29, 1908, the crew of the Nimrod landed at Antarctica’s McMurdo Sound. Led by Ernest Shackleton, the explorers would spend the next two years ranging over the continent. Although they never achieved their chief objective of reaching the geographic South Pole, they did bring the first motorcar to Antarctica and climb Mount Erebus for the first time. They also wrote, illustrated, and printed a book, Aurora Australis, the first one ever made on that continent.”

Atlas Obscura, Sept. 24
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Eni Mustafaraj writes: “Recently, Mike Caulfield wrote a Twitter thread and blog post praising Facebook’s new information panel for news publishers. In the meantime, Emma Lurie and I are exploring what knowledge panels can tell us about the credibility of online sources, especially of the ones recognized as partisan or inaccurate. Two findings: Not all snippets are equally informative or address factual accuracy; and snippets are sometimes edited to send certain signals to different audiences.”

Medium, Sept. 23
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Betty Lupinacci writes: “The Library of Congress’s ‘Baseball Americana’ exhibit gives me something new to think about each time I visit. Most intriguing to me are the numerous times women are depicted in the exhibit. For example, the song ‘Take Me Out to the Ballgame’ tells the story of a woman who wants her date to take her to the game instead of a movie or Coney Island (depending on the version). The song is reportedly based on a woman by the name of Trixie Friganza, a vaudeville performer and suffragette.”

In Custodia Legis, Sept. 25
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The Senate Commerce Committee will hold a hearing September 26 called “Examining Safeguards for Consumer Privacy.” But the committee invited only executives from AT&T, Amazon, Apple, Charter, Google, and Twitter to “review the current state of consumer data privacy” and “discuss possible approaches to safeguarding privacy more effectively.” The failure to invite even one public-interest group to counter industry talking points at this kick-off hearing on consumer-privacy proposals is disturbing.

Free Press, Sept. 24

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