Jaron Lanier has a new book, You Are Not a Gadget (NY Times review), which I have to add to my reading list and bump up a few notches. There is an excerpt from it in the February issue of Harper’s: “The Serfdom of Crowds.” He’s writing along the lines of some of what I have been blogging about here, but from the perspective of an early tech industry insider. Also, he is an amazingly writerly writer for someone with his background…

Slides to go along with my talk at the University of Alberta in Edmonton this morning…

Phil Agre, the UCLA LIS professor who went missing last year, has been found, though I suppose that from his perspective he was never lost. UCLA police department’s missing person’s bulletin update states, “Philip Agre was located by LA County Sheriff’s Department on January 16, 2010 and is in good health and is self sufficient.” I feel like taking my hat of to Dr. Agre for successfully taking time out from society, but without knowing the whole story I don’t feel that I can do that…

The Amelia Bloomer List is for the “best feminist books for young readers” published each year. This year’s list has just been announced.

We’ve put up a page linking to all of the Prefaces, Forewords, Introductions, and Chapters that we have made freely available from our books here at Library Juice Press. The goal of course is to inspire people to buy our books, but these items are good reads in themselves, too. So check out our free content…

We have posted the Introduction to Mark Abendroth’s Rebel Literacy: Cuba’s National Literacy Campaign and Critical Global Citizenship to the web. It’s a good read, a little lengthy for the web. Of interest to anyone who follows Cuba-related issues or radical pedagogy.

My friend Ramona Islam shared with me an interesting blog post by chemist Jean-Claude Bradley, discussing the reliability (or non-reliability) of scientific reference sources that are considered trusted within the discipline. I find it especially interesting in terms of implications for projects like Wolfram Alpha and other attempts to build automated reasoning systems around inconsistently-defined and questionable data.

Colonel Morris Davis was fired from his job at the Congressional Research Service for opinion pieces he wrote about the military commissions system (he is the former chief prosecutor for the Guantánamo military commissions). The ACLU is suing the Library of Congress on his behalf in this free-speech case.

This is the second time recently that the Library of Congress has been on the wrong side of a high-profile lawsuit. The other was transexual Diane Schroer’s lawsuit over not being hired to work at the Congressional Research Service after she announced that she would begin living as a woman. (Schroer won the lawsuit.)

At Litwin Books and Library Juice Press we are in need of some helpers to do book layout. We will provide instruction. Pay is negotiable, but we regard it primarily as an internship. Please contact rory at litwinbooks.com if you’re interested. Thanks!

This is an interesting tidbit coming from Vancouver, BC, site of history’s largest librarian’s strike in 2007.

Library management has sent branches a list of “do’s and don’t’s” concerning the upcoming Olympics. Branches must not allow Olympic-related library events to be sponsored by sponsors other than those with official relations with VANOC (Vancouver Olympic Committee). So, it has to be McDonalds, not Wendy’s, and it has to be Coke, and not Pepsi. Furthermore, there are audio-visual technology companies sponsoring the Olympics as well, so if you have a technician in from another company to help with the event, their company t-shirt must be covered.

Isn’t that just a little too much?

Here is the article: Librarians Told to Stand on Guard for 2010 Sponsors, The Tyee, January 12, by Geoff Dembicki.

San Francisco Public Library has added a professional social worker to the staff to manage issues relating to library users who are homeless or in poverty. They’re paying her a lot more than they pay the librarians, which is annoying. However, it looks to me like they are addressing the needs of poor people in the community in a serious way, and what they are doing might really work. Worth thinking about in other urban public libraries.

For those of you who in the Edmonton, Alberta area, I will be giving the keynote speech at the Forum for Information Professionals at the University of Alberta’s School of Library and Information Studies next month. I will be speaking in the morning on Friday, February 5th.

The Preface and Introduction to André Cossette’s Humanism and Libraries: An Essay on the Philosophy of Librarianship are now online. The Preface is my explanation of why I chose to publish the book and what makes it valuable, and the Introduction is by the author.

“Final edition: Twilight of the American newspaper,” By Richard Rodriguez, in the November issue of Harper’s Magazine. This article is a beautiful explanation of the role that newspapers have had in defining and uniting cities. In this case it’s mostly about San Francisco, but it’s also about newspapers in general, their fate, and what it means. I read it on the plane from Minneapolis to the San Francisco Bay Area, where I am vacationing in the house where I grew up. We subscribed to the Chronicle when I was a kid, so I know exactly what Rodriguez is talking about. (I even had a paper route.) Rodriguez quotes Gavin Newsome, the mayor of San Francisco, about newspapers, saying that if SF lost its daily newspapers, “No one under 30 would notice.” I think that’s true. Gavin was in my graduating class at Redwood High School. What Rodriguez shows is the connection that daily newspapers have, or have had, to everything else. I recommend this piece for some holiday reading (preferably in print).