John Allen Paulos is a mathematician who writes books about numeracy for a popular audience. The New York Times Magazine published a brief but insightful essay by him about the dangers inherent in relying on numbers without looking at how they are arrived at (my basic issue with Wolfram Alpha). Here is the starting paragraph of that article, “Metric Mania“:

In the realm of public policy, we live in an age of numbers. To hold teachers accountable, we examine their students’ test scores. To improve medical care, we quantify the effectiveness of different treatments. There is much to be said for such efforts, which are often backed by cutting-edge reformers. But do wehold an outsize belief in our ability to gauge complex phenomena, measure outcomes and come up with compelling numerical evidence? A well-known quotation usually attributed to Einstein is “Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted.” I’d amend it to a less eloquent, more prosaic statement: Unless we know how things are counted, we don’t know if it’s wise to count on the numbers.

There’s a book idea we’ve been kicking around here at Litwin Books, and we need an author. I don’t want to completely disclose the idea for this book, but I want to say enough to potentially find the right author. It will be a reference book that takes a skeptical view of commonly-encountered statistics and facts. I want to find an author who is good with social science research methods and able to see the problems behind factual claims across a range of issues and subject matter. I want to find someone who has these skills and has a healthy dislike for the way that public discourse is distorted by misinformation, bias, and ideology. My hope is for a book that has something to offend everyone.

Any takers? Please contact me at rory at litwinbooks.com.

Yes, I know I’m supposed to be user-centered and all that, but I think the great wave of populism we’re seeing now is going to lead to bad things. Some friends say it’s a time of opportunity, that maybe the blind rage of the common man can be directed toward support of progressive policies. Perhaps, but with everyone’s attention spans diminishing and few people actually looking into details or questioning assumptions (progress to some of you out there), I tend to think that things are unraveling. And “the people” are only going to get angrier when the middle class tax increases come in a couple of years (as though there was an alternative to transferring debt to the public sector to bail out the global economy).

So as an antidote to the present populist fervor, three quotations that I hope mean something….

Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to reform (or pause and reflect).
- Mark Twain, Notebook, 1904

Most people are not liars. They can’t tolerate too much cognitive dissonance. I don’t want to deny that there are outright liars, just brazen propagandists. You can find them in journalism and in the academic professions as well. But I don’t think that’s the norm. The norm is obedience, adoption of uncritical attitudes, taking the easy path of self-deception.
- Noam Chomsky, in an interview with James Peck, found in the Chomsky Reader

History is the present. That’s why every generation writes it anew. But what most people think of as history is its end product, myth.
- E. L. Doctorow, in an interview in Writers at Work (1988)

Just a brief note on a topic I will return to later…

I find that librarians think of change in one of two ways:

1. Change is happening to the profession;

   or

2. Change is happening in the environment (social, cultural, economic, political) and the profession determines how it will change in response.

These two ways of thinking about change don’t reflect an attitude of embracing it or resisting it, but rather an attitude of greater or lesser professionalism. Embracing or resisting change is something else.

Keith Roberts and Karen Donahue summarize the characteristics of a profession as follows:¹

1. Mastery of specialized theory
2. Autonomy and control of one’s work and how one’s work is performed
3. Motivation focusing on intrinsic rewards and on the interests of clients – which take precedence over the professional’s self-interests
4. Commitment to the profession as a career and to the service objectives of the organization for which one works
5. Sense of community and feelings of collegiality with others in the profession, and accountability to those colleagues
6. Self-monitoring and regulation by the profession of ethical and professional standards in keeping with a detailed code of ethics

I think that it is endemic of the period of deprofessionalization that we are in that library managers have begun to say that “professionalism” means performance of ones tasks according to high standards of quality (as judged by them). Thus, support staff and librarians are equally “professional” if management is pleased with their work, a move by management that undercuts the autonomy of professionals.

(I am working on a paper about deprofessionalization at the moment and will share a citation to it when it’s done.)

I think that we have to consider the context of the professional status of librarianship, or lack of it, when we look at the discourse surrounding change in the profession. The professionals who comprise a professional group share a responsibility for the nature and destiny of the profession itself. If it is controlled from the outside, it is not really a profession. That is why so many of us participate in ALA committees and other units. These committees, along with graduate programs in LIS, are where the work is done that maintains the professional status of librarianship.

If you regard change in the profession as something that we have no control over, that we have only to embrace or resist, then you are approaching professional questions with the attitude of a non-professional.

If you recognize that professional questions are not questions of choosing between predetermined options but questions of values, purposes, creativity, inventiveness, foresight, and planning, then you are fulfilling your responsibility as a professional to guide the profession through a changing environment as only its members can.

1. Roberts, Keith A. and Donahue, Karen A., “Professionalism: Bureaucratization and Deprofessionalization in the Academy,” Sociological Focus 33 no. 4 (2000) 365-383.

Attempted Censorship by U.S. Attorney — A Book to Watch!

By Ann Sparanese

On June 16, the paperback edition of Triple Cross: How Bin Laden’s Master Spy Penetrated the CIA, the Green Berets and the FBI by Peter Lance will be released by HarperCollins. This is happening despite a prominent U.S. Attorney’s best efforts to stop it.

Since this book was first published in hardcover in 2006, Patrick Fitzgerald, US Attorney for the Northern District of Illinois in Chicago (the same Patrick Fitzgerald of the Valerie Plame investigation) has repeatedly attempted to have the publisher bury the book, and to prevent publication of the paperback edition. Lance, who is a five-time Emmy-winning investigative reporter with other books on terrorism under his belt, spent four years compiling “evidence that the best and the brightest in the two bin Laden offices of origin…had committed multiple acts of negligence in the 12 years leading up to 9/11 in their failure to stop the al Qaeda cell, trained by Ali Mohamed.”

U.S. Attorney Fitzgerald sent three threatening letters to the publisher charging libel, and held up the publication of the paperback edition for 18 months. [Just yesterday Fitzgerald sent an additional letter to HarperCollins, threatening to sue; things are heating up.] Initially, HarperCollins did not react to the threats, calling the book “an important work of investigative journalism,” but when Fitzgerald continued to protest, using U.S. Attorney Chicago letterhead, a U.S. Attorney Chicago fax machine on one occasion [Correction via Sparanese 6/5/09] the publisher decided to re-vet the entire book, which took a year. When finished, only inconsequential sentences were rewritten or corrected, leaving the essential arguments, evidence and documentation completely intact. This is an instance of a publisher standing up to one of the most powerful government officials in the U.S., but it is also an example of the chilling effect of censorship attempts, because for over a year Lance could do no other work than re-vetting every sentence of his book. Not a great situation for any author but perhaps the most responsible action by HCP in this case because now the situation is clear: though Fitzgerald’s name no longer appears in the title, Lance’s book remains intact and contains some new material, including a section on Fitzgerald’s attempts to kill the book.

I’ve been in communication with this author, and I really believe his is a book and an issue to watch. Until this new edition of Triple Cross hits the stands on June 16, it is still in jeopardy. The first edition of Triple Cross received no major reviews, and most likely you do not have a copy in your library. I have a feeling the publisher does not intend to make a big splash of it! Please read about it on Lance’s website and order it to make sure your library users have access to this information: ISBN 978-0-06-118941-8.

Whether or not you are totally convinced by the arguments in this book (meticulously researched material, definitely NOT conspiracy theories) what is important is that Triple Cross holds high level government officials accountable for negligence in their dealings with known terrorist operatives during the period leading up to the 9/11 attacks. It is unacceptable that this particular high-level government official has acted so aggressively to stop a book because it is critical of him – this must be the case, since nothing libelous was written. If anything, we need more genuine investigative journalism and discussion of this kind.

And there is something else: For me, as someone who fought, along with many of you in ALA and other organizations, against the USA PATRIOT Act, illegal surveillance, torture policies, and other violations of civil liberties that have been foisted upon us in the name of the “War on Terror,” Triple Cross is important because it makes a clear and compelling case that official negligence, misplaced priorities, turf wars, and arrogance – not lack of the appropriate laws and methods to fight terrorism – contributed greatly to the debacles that have since befallen the American and, indeed, the people of the world. And not one person high in the chain of command has been held accountable for any of it! So (1) tell HarperCollins you appreciate them standing behind this book and (2) please purchase it for your library. Don’t let it be buried. Let it lead to more public examination and discussion of ongoing U.S. policies and priorities.

Peter Lance will be holding a press conference to detail the attempted book-banning on June 16th in the John Peter Zenger Room of The National Press Club. You can learn more about Triple Cross and get updates on Lance’s anti-censorship campaign at http://www.peterlance.com. If you want more information about how Lance’s critical coverage of Fitzgerald might have led to Fitzgerald’s attempts to bury the book, you can read his attached article, “The Chilling Effect.”

Ann Sparanese, MLS
Head, Adult & YA Services
Englewood Public Library
Englewood, NJ
sparanese@yahoo.com

Since the second half of last year I’ve been reading a lot of financial news, where the major theme of the financial crisis is the “crisis of trust” – banks not wanting to take the risk of extending credit to counterparties. But we’ve been living through a worsening crisis of trust in another sense for decades now.

Simply put, we live in a media environment that constantly surrounds us with messages that are dishonest at their root, and it has a corrosive effect on the glue that holds society together, teaching us that it is prudent to assume that most of what we hear is bullshit. In such an environment of eroded trust, straightforward communication is a challenge.

It would be easy to say that capitalism is the fundamental problem, since the bulk of the lies come to us through advertising and public relations messages, which in turn shape the character of individuals’ own habits of daily spin. But I would not to claim that socialism as an economic system has a tremendous advantage in cultivating honesty.

In our own capitalist society, though, the crisis of trust has been accelerating as our mode of life has grown progressively more submerged in the media sphere. Corporate logos, targeted sensual stimuli, slogans, and vague, untestable claims clustered together in brands form the background against which we live our lives, far more than do rocks, trees, wood, earth, sky, or plants (or text, for that matter). These clusters of stimulation are engineered to bypass our rational faculties, our natural tools for knowing what is true. They are in fact engineered to make us believe things that are NOT true (that product X will make me happy, that company Y is my friend or part of my family, etc.).

We’re half-surprised and half-outraged to learn about new examples of financial or accounting fraud, or Bush Administration or corporate lies, but we also understand them as a natural consequence of a society whose substrate of togetherness has grown sour and untrustworthy.

What are the causes of this crisis? Reagan-Thatcherism clearly had a lot to do with it. Thatcher, after all, made the notorious pronouncement that there is no such thing as society, only individuals. I would resist simplifying things to that degree, however. Altamont was already a symbol of a new distrust and growing bitterness in society in the years that led to the Reagan revolution.

There is another factor that’s unrelated to any transition in social policy. It is the simple fact of media technology producing the potential for a world made up of recycled bits and pieces of the past and present. If you go to a furniture store to buy a chair, you choose from among examples of styles that each represent the “what is” of another time and place. There are no chairs that are simply what they are, only chairs that lie, saying they are “Pompeii Chairs,” when in fact they are not from Pompeii but were manufactured in Shunde (Guangdong province) and designed in Anaheim. To understand the state of present day society it is necessary to understand that in former ages we didn’t make selections from a list of styles representing the feeling we get about another time and place, because design wasn’t a technological process using recorded information. There wasn’t an authenticity gap; there was simply what was here and now. Products, furniture, buildings, and graphics – the stuff that makes up our environment – today are composed of these recorded pretenses of embodiment that evoke values and feelings that we imagine belonged to other places and times, giving our world an emotional character that is manufactured rather than natural. Our present is manifested largely in terms of what it is not (reconstitutions of other times and places), and a whole generation has grown up taking this for granted.

This environment of counterfeited reality has implications for us as information literacy instructors, but in all honesty I’m not sure what they are. What does it mean to teach students who have grown up in this radical new context to be information literate, or to avoid plagiarism?

At another level, what does it imply for the way we talk about our services and libraries in general?

If you’re like me, you’re a librarian in part because you have a passion for the right to information, and by information I mean truth rather than lies. One of the books that originally kindled that passion for me in terms of its social meaning was Toxic Sludge is Good for You: Lies, Damn Lies, and the Public Relations Industry, by John Stauber and Sheldon Rampton. The organization they work with, the Center for Media and Democracy, published a regular newsletter for years called PR Watch (it’s now the name of their website).

PR Watch has just come out with the 2008 Falsies Awards, which is their effort to “shine an unflattering light on those responsible for polluting the information environment over the past year.” The awards mention only a few examples of falsification perpetrated by the PR industry in the media sphere, but the PR Watch website has much more if you want to explore it.

If it sounds like I think we have an enemy, yes, you’re right, I think we do have an enemy, and it’s the PR industry.

Thanks to Susan Maret for sending the link to a listserv that I’m on.

Minerva Research Initiative: Searching for the Truth or Denying the Iraqis the Rights to Know the Truth?
by Saad Eskander, Iraq National Library and Archives

“What has prompted me to write this paper is the continuing refusal of the U.S. to pay serious attention to Iraqi calls for the repatriation of the Iraqi records illegally seized by its military and intelligence agencies. Most recently, the Pentagon has issued an announcement, calling upon U.S. universities, research centers and scholars to submit research proposals to its Minerva Research Initiative (MRI)…”

Thanks to Mark Rosenzweig for sending to multiple lists…

MediaLens is a UK organization dedicated to raising awareness of the way the media system distorts reality as a result of the forces of free-market capitalism. Their analysis of things is along the lines of Chomsky and Herman’s propaganda model of media filtering.

This month they have published a three-part analysis of current goings on in the journalism profession that demonstrates the actual functioning of this filtering system in the UK today.

I believe it is very important for librarians to at least be cognizant of this analysis of the media system, information being our field of expertise.

I’ve always been appalled by British libel law as long as I’ve known about it. Basically it puts a strong onus on defendants to prove that what they have said is true, rather than on the accuser to prove that it is false. The result is an excessive real-world limitation on freedom of speech for authors, journalists, and speakers. It has recently resulted in something known as “libel tourism,” where a powerful person or corporation that has been criticized in the press or in a book can take sue the author in British courts to take advantage of their favorable laws.

Now the United Nations has taken a position. They say that British libel law violates human rights. The UK Guardian has a report on the UN’s statement from their Thursday issue.

From IFACTION.

A favorite debate of pessimistic sophomores, or perhaps sophomoric pessimists, is as to whether our society and its future is more like George Orwell’s 1984 or Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. It’s such a common juxtaposition and so simple to talk about it that I bring it up at the risk of terribly oversimplifying things. But Orwell and Huxley knew each other (Huxley was the elder), and these are two important satiric novels from the same time period dealing with the same questions. Together they provide an easy framework for talking about two visions of dystopia that relate to social questions of today.

For Orwell, the threat of totalitarianism was of a society controlled by fear, where people knew that they were oppressed but had lost the freedom to stand up against the forces of oppression. He was clearly worried about forces that pull us toward out-and-out fascist or communist totalitarian societies. For Huxley, the threat came from another direction – the narcotic pleasures of an affluent society and people’s susceptibility to the soft propaganda of advertising and group identity. For Huxley, the evil to be worried about was not fascism or communism but something that he saw our own capitalist societies quietly sinking into, like sleep. Huxley would have been at home with some of the basic critiques, if not the language, of the Frankfurt School thinkers’ responses to advanced capitalism (though Huxley was not writing about capitalism per se).

In both novels, society has cut people off from nature and from their own souls, and has taken away their freedom and anything more than a semblance of democratic control. In both novels, society is overtaken by order, but the feel of this order and the manner in which it is maintained are different.

Both novels are also concerned, at certain levels, with the construction of knowledge and the way that truth is communicated or effaced in society. That is to say, they are both concerned with intellectual freedom.

There certainly have been some 1984-like developments in American society since Orwell was writing, and these have accelerated since 9/11/2001. The Federal government has given itself more powers of surveillance and has eroded constitutional protections against tyranny.

Our American Library Association, in keeping with its commitment to intellectual freedom, has spoken up against provisions in the USA PATRIOT ACT and other legislation and executive orders that have eroded our civil liberties during this time. And going further back, ALA and the Freedom to Read Foundation have fought and continue to fight censorship efforts by community members uncomfortable with some ideas present in libraries, and to protect unrestricted access to the internet by opposing the overuse of content filters. ALA’s Intellectual Freedom establishment is working hard to defend our society against a future that is like George Orwell’s 1984.

I will lay my cards on the table and say that I think the greater threat to our freedom, at least at present, is not a 1984 scenario, but is a threat much more like Huxley’s Brave New World. This isn’t to say that ALA shouldn’t fight censorship, or be opposed to filtering, or work against the PATRIOT ACT. It should continue to do those things. But I definitely think that ALA’s Intellectual Freedom establishment should broaden its viewpoint and look at the ways in which information as entertainment gradually works against information literacy and self-government, and the ways in which market forces can limit rather than expand the availability and use of ideas. It has begun to do this, to a certain extent; the report, “Fostering Media Diversity in Libraries,” published a year ago, is a good example of some thinking from ALA’s IF community that is cognizant of the nature of threats to intellectual freedom in a Huxleyan world. The sub-committee that produced it has since been disbanded, but it remains a step in the right direction. More thinking along these lines will require creativity – because the Huxleyan threat is by nature less obvious, more subtle, and more complex – and a certain amount of courage, because people will militate for their next entertainment fix. (”I want my MTV!”)

Unfortunately, ALA is also taking steps in the wrong direction. Just as an example, ALA is presently putting resources into a campaign to help library users prepare for the transition to digital broadcast television. Television is probably the one greatest social development since Huxley wrote Brave New World in 1931 that has pleasurably herded us in the direction he described. It is difficult to see what digital broadcast television has to do with libraries, and it seems as though ALA is participating in this campaign as a way of apologizing for being about books, and to try to disassociate libraries from boring, antiquated print media and the discipline of scholarship that goes with it. Aside from that, in a general way, I think that some of the trends that we are seeing in libraries that are based on “feel good” measures may end up short-circuiting and impoverishing independent thought in a narcotic way, rather than supporting democracy as they are advertised as doing. These are not simple questions, and require looking into things more deeply than most people have the time or the inclination to do.

If I’ve piqued your interest in Aldous Huxley, I can recommend a reading for you on the web: Brave New World Revisited, a series of essays that he wrote about modern Western society, looking back on the vision of his novel from the vantage point of 1958. I have found his ideas very useful.

It is still not dead. A resolution has just been sent to the ALA Council list for discussion, calling on ALA to recognize the dissident “independent librarians” as members of the library community who deserve our support as colleagues, calling for the return of “library materials” to the “independent libraries,” and calling for the release of prisoners.

As this debate has worn on and grown tiresome over the years, many people who understandably just want it to go away try to close the books on it by saying, “I’ve heard all the arguments, and I think both sides have a point. They just need to sit down and be rational about it for a change instead of haranguing us on our listservs. The truth, as always, is somewhere in the middle.”

Well, what are both sides saying, and what would the middle be?

On the one side, you have Robert Kent and company, who are campaigning for the cause of Cuban dissidents who have set up “independent libraries” in their homes. He acknowledges that they are dissidents and that their activities contra the Cuban government are the reason for their libraries. But in Kent’s campaign, there is no angle on the issue other than intellectual freedom in a pure, undiluted form. No room for the complexity which we know characterizes the question. For Kent, there is only one side. It is a question of good and evil.

On the other side, you have members of the Progressive Librarians Guild, myself included, and others who have engaged Kent on the listservs where he has sent his campaign messages. We have never advanced the Cuba issue other than to counter Kent where he needs to be countered.

Because we have written and spoken counter to Kent, it would be easy to assume that our message is equally black and white, but this has never been the case.

What we have pointed out, to oversimplify, is that the “independent libraries” are propaganda distribution centers set up in people’s homes rather than libraries in the usual sense, and that they are set up using funds coming from the U.S. government and routed through “pro-democracy” NGO’s that are staffed by members of the Cuban exile community who want their land and property back. (Jorge Sanguinetty should be named, because he is the originator of the “independent library” movement.) The “independent librarians” who have been arrested were arrested for violating a Cuban law that bans citizens from accepting money or material support from a foreign state for the purpose of undermining the government. The United States has a parallel law, as well as a set of more specific laws directed at individuals aiding Cuba, which American citizens also go to prison for violating, a fact which Kent has understandably avoided dealing with, because it does not fit into his simplistic picture.

Some of us who have written against Kent’s campaign are lifelong socialists and friendly toward the Cuban revolution. But readers should not conclude from that that any of us deny support to real, homegrown dissidents in Cuba, or deny that more freedom of speech in Cuba would be a good thing, or that there are serious problems in Cuba that are partly the result of failures of Castro’s government. On this side, you will not find anybody avoiding the true complex nature of the question. This side, I argue, IS the middle.

That is why everybody in the Progressive Librarians Guild who has been working contra Kent over the years was happy with the ALA Intellectual Freedom Committee’s 2003 Report on Cuba, despite its being a response that validated many of Kent’s concerns. We supported it as the final word of the Association. The report is based on ALA’s long history of support for intellectual freedom, and took the occasion to join IFLA in its prior statement on Cuba, which it arrived at because of the same issue. IFLA in 2001 and ALA in the 2003 IFC Report called on Cuba to “eliminate barriers to access to information imposed by its policies,” and expressed their deep concern over the arrest and long prison terms of the dissidents, as well as calling on the Cuban library community to monitor violations of the right to free access to information and work to promote civil liberties in Cuba.

Note that PLG liked the report and Kent found it totally inadequate.

PLG liked the report because it dealt with the complexity of the issue. The report recognized the relevance of the US blockade of Cuba in contributing to the conditions there that have led to such a defensive posture, and called on the US to end its economic embargo, because it is also an embargo of information exchange. The report also acknowledged that the “independent librarians” do not consider themselves librarians at all (this based on interviews by members of an IFLA delegation), and that the dissidents are in prison for violating the Cuban law against accepting material support from a foreign power to undermine the state. (The IFC didn’t point out that the U.S. also has such laws, as that would have been to advocate for the Cuban state’s action, which, whether comparable to what the U.S. does or not, is still essentially contrary to intellectual freedom in an absolute sense.)

Kent did not like the Report because it fell short of condemning Cuba for not releasing the imprisoned dissidents. Unlike Kent, the Intellectual Freedom Committee sees the complexity of an issue involving the policies of a sovereign state that has rule of law. I think the IFC used a mature, diplomatic approach in its choice of language regarding the imprisoned dissidents. (The Report says, “ALA joins IFLA in its deep concern over the arrest and long prison terms of political dissidents in Cuba in spring 2003 and urges the Cuban Government to respect, defend and promote the basic human rights defined in Article 19 of the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights” – hardly a defense of the Cuban government!)

Now three Councilors, inspired by Kent’s campaign (without which this would not be an issue at all, as he has worked with Sanguinetty from the beginning) are bringing forth a resolution that goes far beyond the IFC report and takes us into quite un-diplomatic territory.

I say the 2003 IFC Report is sufficient and nuanced, and expresses our commitment to intellectual freedom while at the same time respecting the real complexity of the issue. In a very general way, I think it is a much better example of what intellectual freedom means to us as librarians than are Kent’s absolutist missives. I hope you’ll contact a Councilor and express your opposition to the resolution.

You could call it a bombshell if what the New York Times is reporting now were not already well known by skeptical observers, but it’s significant that the Times is reporting it, and that it’s being picked up by TV outlets. The big news is that “military experts” who have been been giving “objective analysis” of Bush’s war on TV outlets have essentially been planted by the Pentagon to put out positive spin.

Thanks, New York Times, but where were you in 2002? 2000? 2004?

Here’s some predictable news:

A group of four researchers have published findings in the new issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association showing that articles in medical journals are often written by drug companies and publishers, with legitimate scientists added as authors when the articles are submitted. Their research was based on court documents related to the Vioxx trial.

This is a further example of why information literacy instruction should not teach a facile reliance on “reputable sources.” Those “reputable sources” are often vulnerable to distortion by corporate interests. Our teaching needs to go a bit deeper, as limited as our time and teaching opportunities may be. In response to this idea, I’ve heard the objection that we shouldn’t teach our students to be cynical. My response is that to be responsible educators we need to teach them about reality.

The reason to hope is that a lot of people do care. Lots of people in the scientific community are pissed about this kind of thing. The authors of the article in JAMA are calling for “drastic action”:

• Journals should require each author to specify the role he or she played in the research and writing, a requirement JAMA already has in place.
  
• Clinical-trial registries should include the name of the principal investigator.
  
• For-profit companies that sponsor research should not be primarily responsible for collecting and analyzing data, or for writing the manuscript.
  
• Any author who does not disclose financial conflicts of interest should be reported to his or her department chair or dean.

It sometimes seems that the pressure of big money moves things in one direction inexorably, and nothing will change until the unsustainability of the resulting system is proven and everything crashes down. It’s worth remembering the times in history, though, when people have gotten pissed off enough to fight back. History has its revolutions and periods of strong reform. Not everything ends in famine, plague, chaos and anarchy. But it is difficult to figure out what is needed to wake our society up from its long nap in front of the television…

The new issue of Information for Social Change, issue 25, is available online. It is another theme issue, this time dealing with libraries and information workers in conflict situations. Examples of what’s in it include articles in disinformation during wartime, truth commissions in Latin American countries and libraries in relation to them, women living under Muslim law, human rights and librarians, and cultural property.