The geeky among you should have already heard of xkcd, for those who haven’t, they did a strip today about librarians. [thanks mike]
Summer Reading Program Cancelled – Harassing phone calls likened to “bomb threats”
Having a policy for when you do and do not limit access to materials is always a good thing. This includes your book selection policy, your Internet use policy and your “when do we cancel a summer program when we’re getting harassed by people who think yoga is a religion”? I understand that dealing with a steady stream of phone calls and emails is unpleasant for the South Carolina library that cancelled its summer reading program due to this type of harassment from one local church, but I really wish they’d taken more of a stand and not likened this sort of pressure from one aggressive group as tantamount to a bomb threat.
The librarians got nervous and decided to cancel all the Thursdays.
“They were talking about picketing the library,†the library system director told a newspaper reporter.
The minister said he didn’t mean things to go that far, that he and his congregation had no problem with all the other Thursdays, only the evil tarot card one.
“We weren’t against the reading program at all,†he told the reporter. “We just want our children being taught the right things …â€
a few things to read
I have seen a few things that are only tangentially related to what I normally do here, but I thought you might like them.
- The New York Times does a photo essay on people and their avatars.
- Sethf does the research (yes with GOOGLE) to track down some of the facts behind Michael Gorman’s possible misquote of Jimmy Wales and who was behind it.
- Oh check me out, I’m in the BIGWIG social software showcase. I’m sorry to also be in the program, theoretically on a panel on Saturday. I said okay sometime in 2006, and had to say no sometime in March. That was apparently not enough time to not be in the program. So 1.0!
- LifeHacker does “book hacks” for the library using crowd.
- Alison Bechdel’s library card.
booktruck on Gorman
I haven’t been digging too deeply into the Gorman back and forth because I’ve said my piece and unless he says something radically different, that’s my story and I’m sticking to it. It’s been fun to read a few more spirited responses than mine, I like what booktruck has to say.
[H]e has an opportunity to fulfill a role as a public intellectual talking about libraries, archives and information topics that are important to the public, and he blows it on a self-referential argument chasing some bygone ideal of what it means to have reasoned discourse (bypassing, like, the last 70 years of western thought!), and in a needlessly puffy and alienating style that would (in a perfect world) never pass muster in a “real†scholarly setting.
Also don’t miss a counter-essay from Matthew “An Unquiet History” Battles. What is particularly interesting about his response is the bizarrely snooty comments it receives especially the first few.
[I]n the end, we’re still left with a Wild West ethos on the Web where kids armed with a powerful new toy (yes, yes, the toys and tools are “creative†too!) can hide behind anonymity, shirk responsibility, pretend to be professors of Church doctrine a la “Essjay†(in the recent Wikipedia scandal), and trash and defame the character of a John Seigenthaler. All with impunity and in the name of progress, creativity (there’s that word again!), and “wildly individual consciousnesses†(Battles is too good a stylist to float such a phrase).
If that’s the high-level discourse so often lamented to be lacking from “blogs” then I can say I don’t much miss it. It’s just blogging with a bigger vocablary, truly. Wouldn’t it be sad if the Britannica Blog just turned into another “you think you’re so great but you’re really not so great” back and forth? “Where Ideas Matter” indeed!
Not going to ALA
I forgot to mention here, I won’t be at ALA. I was planning to go. In fact I may still be on the schedule but my dear friends decided to get married in Brooklyn that same exact weekend and the choice between paying my own way to DC to be on a panel and paying my own way to NY to be at a wedding was pretty clear-cut. Close readers will note that this is the second time that I’ve passed up Annual to go to a wedding. It must be a popular weekend.
There are a few neat things going on that people should go to. The Hollywood Librarian premiere Friday night (trailer, behind the scenes video). I’d link you to the ALA press release about this but their search form is broken, as is their contact form. My friend Pete, a librarian who works at MediaMatters, is DJing a dance night with some other folks on Saturday night. No cover, no dress code, lots of librarians. More details here. I look forward to reading about the conference on the bazllion blogs covering it.