I spent the day at work on Tuesday working on my outreach display for National Library Card Sign-up Month. We have a lot of storefronts in the downtown area that are vacant. I spoke to the real estate agency that handles them and asked if we could use one of the windows — the one by the bus stop — for a library display. They said “sure” so now we have our READ posters and lots and lots of information about our library cards available to people who might not want to schlep up the hill to learn about them otherwise.
Author: jessamyn
does your library have enough copies of the 9/11 report?
How many copies of the 9/11 Commission Report does your library have? Massachusetts Representative William Delahunt, hearing that his constituents were having trouble getting the book from their libraries bought copies for all 60 public libraries in his district. It was also heartening to hear that some libraries were showing their patrons how to access the content of the book on the internet as a backup. [thanks kate]
who is keeping government accountable? librarians?
The Columbia Journalism Review has an article about the responsibility of journalists to demand accountability from their government. It includes a little blurb noting that librarians’ response to the USA PATRIOT Act is one of the things that keeps USAPA on people’s radar screens, and helps keep people aware of their rights — pre-USAPA and post-USAPA.
Librarians participated in rallies, challenging Attorney General John Ashcroft when his road show promoting the Patriot Act came to some towns in the summer of 2003. They expect to collect one million signatures by the end of September to support amending the act. This from librarians. Where are the journalists? A fundamental tenet of the American system is that a free flow of information is essential to democracy. That flow is being pinched like never before. Instead of passively standing by, journalism should be working against this dangerous trend. [thanks chris]
hi – 07sep
Hi. In the interests of screen real estate, I’ve made the archives for month and category into pulldown menus and removed the counts from the category lists. If this breaks on any of your browsers, please let me know. The actual archival pages will still have the old lengthy list format.
two good articles from Library Juice
Library Juice has two very good articles this issue, a short outline of the Radical Reference project from last week’s DNC and. Even better, he has written a longer piece about the “librarian image” told from the personal point of view of someone who hits many of the librareotype bullet points [as I do, as many of us do] and doesn’t think it’s all bad.
In a sense, I am saying that we should embrace our stereotype in order to emphasize its positive aspects (without allowing ourselves to be reduced to that stereotype, as that would rob us of our individuality and diversity). The stereotype fits only a few of us perfectly, but anger over not being represented fairly by it shouldn’t lead us to deny the ways in which we do fit the traditional understanding of what a librarian is like, because there is much that is true and positive in that idea. We should be proud of being librarians according to what the word “librarian” is commonly understood to mean, and should assert our value on that basis – not on the basis that the public has misconceptions about us….