Clark Atlanta University School of Library and Information Studies graduated its last class of students and is now closed. The former library school is having a meeting at ALA Sunday, June 26, 2005, 5:30-7:30pm for people to talk about Clark Atlanta and discuss the school’s legacy. The Black Caucus of ALA has a bit more information. The loss of one of the only library schools at a traditionally black university is another blow against increasing diversity in the library profession. If you’re interested in this issue, you might want to keep an eye on Save Library & Information Studies. They’ve got a good collection of required reading and, it appears, a good designer. [thanks tim]
Month: June 2005
Radical Reference @ ALA
Radical Reference is doing a bunch of things at ALA in Chicago. The Boston events that I went to were fun and low key and very welcoming to newcomers. If you’re interested in the work they do, swing by and say hello. I’ll be doing a short skillshare called “Oh No He Didn’t! Rumor Control As an Essential Part of Event Based Radical Reference” Monday the 27th at 2:30.
subversive gardening, or why wikis?
A metaphor for wiki understanding: the community garden. If you’vbe got a little time to do some reading today, I’d dive into Luke’s article about Ranganathan, gardening and Wikipedia.
…there is no monolithic point of view, there is no monopoly on truth. From a critical perspective, if the object lesson centers around a Wikipedia article as the participants negotiate and carefully choose language to approximate NPOV (the Wikipedian “neutral point of view”), it’s going to be a pretty effective lesson, which will teach above all that no source — not even Wikipedia — should be taken on its own in constructing meaning. If, on the other hand, the questioning student is handed a Britannica article — equally anonymous but somehow anointed with some magical pixie-dust librarians call “authority” but fail to satisfactorily explain to anyone outside the profession — the lesson will fail (again, from a critical pedagogical perspective, at least).
blogging at ALA
I have a very hard time both attending an event and blogging about it, or even reading blogs about it while I’m there. I appluad the people that try, certainly. Andrea and Luke the Librarian are trying to add some organized useful blogged conference reports to the ALA Wiki. They could always use some more hands to help out.
PhD librarians
People have been writing me over the last few weeks talking about non-MLIS PhDs entering librarianship. It’s way outside of my range of knowledge and not something we come up against in the public library world, so I’d back-burnered it, figured I’d chat with some people at ALA about it. This week Rory has a special edition of Library Juice that contains some back and forth on the JESSE list. Pretty thougtful discussion. [thanks rebecca]