Month: May 2006

Hello from the Ohio Small Libraries Conference

Posted on by jessamyn

Hi from Columbus Ohio. The Ohio Library Council IT division has their own blog and you can read a bit about the conference there. If you look around at some of the other blogs the contributers from that blog also post to, you’ll find great stuff like Library Geek Woes and the Spotlight on Ohio Libraries blog. My two talks are here:

The Information Poor & the Information Don’t Care, Small Libraries and the Digital Divide (a slightly updated version of my favorite talk)
Until We’re All Robots: Sensible Approaches to Technology in Libraries (a more philosophical talk that I’m afraid wasn’t as accessible as I thought it would be)

Tomorrow I’m sitting in on a few talks as well as participating in the closing summary session, Then I’m getting a late flight to the airport and arriving home at midnight, after most of the Sampson family has already arrived for the graduation festivities. My family and Greg’s sister get in on Friday. You can see the bug I found in my shower on Flickr here. Other than that, I’m having a pretty nice time.

freedom to share, social software and your library

Posted on by jessamyn

I have no idea how Meredith writes as much and as cogently as she does. As I have been sputtering around thinking about DOPA, she’s helping solve the problem. Remember how I said you really need to learn about this social software thing, before they make laws that you don’t understand about tools you’ve never used? Go, right now, and read her well thought out and well-researched post about Libraries and Social Networking Software. If you’re on facebook or myspace, look me up and poke me.

freedom: the powerful and the powerless

Posted on by jessamyn

I think Sarah said it best when she posted about Michael Gorman’s latest piece [pdf] in American Libraries: Michael Gorman alienates and divides our profession. More in the comments over at Library Crunch, Free Range Librarian, and See Also….

The whole thing depresses me, honestly. I’ve respected Michael’s politics historically, and I voted for him for ALA President and for that I apologize. I’m beginning to realize just how important tone can be, in myself and in others. I don’t care how good people’s politics are, if they can’t at least make an effort to discuss things with me as if I were worth talking to, I worry about their ability to lead and inspire others who aren’t already on board with their ideas. This affected my choices for Council this year, as much as I respect Greg McClay’s honest attempt to change ALA from within and as much as I like talking to him personally, the tone of his posts makes me question his ability to bridge-build with people who don’t share his beliefs. I have similar feelings about current Councilors on both sides of the spectrum, it may be true that they feel the same way about me, some of them certainly seem to.

However, with Greg and myself and other people with blogs, it stands to reason that we’ll let more of ourselves shine through. You have the choice to read or not to read. I’m not the boss of you. In fact, due to my position on Council, my readers are more the boss of me than vice versa in some sort of quirky aggregate way. One would think, then, that being “the boss” of ALA — though as we all know it’s pretty tough to get anything done with a one year term — you’d pay special attention to the fact that you represent everyone. Maybe I think this because I exist in a constant state of performance anxiety: I want to do well on Council, on this blog, in my talks, at my job, in my relationship, in my town. I can’t imagine it being otherwise. Who doesn’t want to Do Good? Who doesn’t want to Fix the Problem(s)?

If I was the boss of you, I would want you to be happy. I don’t understand how it’s supposed to work otherwise.

intellectual freedom: yours mine and ours

Posted on by jessamyn

I’ve been slow on posting lately. There have been big topics that I’ve been chewing on and haven’t known quite what to do with. One of the stories that I keep hoping will get more in the way of legs is the the Scott Savage/OSU story. Savage is an Ohio State University librarian. The undisputed facts of the situation read like this

Scott Savage, an OSU research librarian, was on a committee selecting a book for incoming freshmen to read. Savage, a Quaker, thought the books that were initially suggested all have a liberal bent, so he proposed four conservative ones, including The Marketing of Evil by David Kupelian.

More detail is here. What happened next is the subject of the dispute. Two professors objected to Savage’s strenuous support of a book that they felt was antagonistic towards gay people and filed harassment charged against him. You can read the official complaint here [large pdf]. There were a lot of angry reports of censorship mainly on conservative sites but the story didn’t get picked up by national media in any big way. Savage wrote about the incident for American Libraries but declined to edit it when they said they would not publish his article in full. I emailed him to ask him about the situation and the email I got from him was odd and not clarifying. According to Library Journal and American Libraries, the matter is mostly worked out and harassment charges [not sexual harassment] have been dropped, though the ACRL blog claims that Savage is now filing a complaints against his accusers. One participating faculty member has outlined his interpretation of events including stating that this is not the first time that this librarian has provoked controversy by promoting anti-gay literature.

But the news media’s coverage has missed a crucial point: the discrimination reports did not focus on the book suggestion so much as the librarian’s unyielding defense of the book, even after the revelation of its bigotry, his disparagement of faculty expertise and his forwarding of others’ e-mails to an outside organization. The claim that his proposal was tongue-in-cheek is belied by the fact that when he was employed at Lakeland Community College in 2004, he displayed an antigay book prominently, provoking controversy there, as well.

I was sort of waiting to see if the “hive mind” of the blogosphere would chew on the facts of this issue and arrive at some wisdom-of-crowds type conclusions that both sides could get behind but it seems like that is not going to be the case so I figured I’d just link it up and write it down here.