Month: September 2004

banned books, the acceptable taboo?

Posted on by jessamyn

The Ska Librarian aka Dan Cherubin has written an excellent article on Banned Books Week for Counterpoise.

Banned Books Week does a reverse spin by focusing solely on the library as a children’s space, complete with requisite put-upon spinster. With Banned Books Week, ALA has created a safe space for generating a manageable and marketable taboo. It could be that with all the actual fighting librarians do over real issues, they wanted something that they could profess to win repeatedly. If one creates one�s own taboo, one usually knows the easiest way to transgress it.

hi – 26sep

Posted on by jessamyn

Hi. I’m working on a short light-hearted article about OPAC improvement. I’ve set up a wiki for collective brainstorming. If you’ve got ideas for what you’d like to see in your OPAC [short and sweet please] email or IM me and I’ll let you in on the wiki. Meanwhile, ironically, I’m in the process of gutting my librarian.net inbox which had reached embarassing proportions lately. I can always tell when I’ve been out of town because there’s a spate of unanswered messages in those date ranges. If you sent me an email before August and you haven’t heard back from me, you might want to ping me again. To those who requested postcards, I’ve found a novel way to fulfill your request which should be in the mail this week.

Posted in hi