Call for Papers

*Politics, Libraries and Culture: Historical Perspectives*

*Library History Round Table (LHRT) Research Forum, June 2010*

* *

The Library History Round Table (LHRT) of the American Library Association (ALA) seeks papers for its Research Forum at the 2010 ALA Annual Meeting in Washington, D.C., June 24-29, 2010. The theme of the Forum will be historical perspectives on the ways in which politics and libraries interact and influence one another. In this instance, politics should be considered broadly—not simply as concerning the administration of governments (international, national, state, local) but also the politics of other institutions and groups. Possible topics might be the effects politics have had on the history of libraries, archives, government documents and other cultural records. How have individual and institutional efforts of librarians influenced public policy pertaining to information access, reading, and services to the public? How have political concerns shaped the collection, preservation, availability and use of libraries and other repositories in different periods, locations, and jurisdictions? How have libraries, archives, and similar institutions tried to shape information politics and society through copyright law, the right to read, public library funding and other efforts?

LHRT welcomes submissions from researchers of all backgrounds, including students, faculty, and practitioners. Proposals are due on November 30, 2009. Each proposal must give the paper title, an abstract (up to 500 words), and the scholar’s one-page vita. Also, please indicate whether the research is in-progress or completed. Proposals should include the following elements: a problem or thesis the study addresses, a statement of significance, objectives, methods, primary sources used for the research, and conclusions (or tentative conclusions for works in progress).

From the submissions, the LHRT Research Committee will select several authors to present their completed work at the Forum. The program will be publicized in January 2010. So that the Forum’s facilitator may introduce and react to each author, completed papers are due June 4, 2010. The Research Forum will likely occur on Sunday, June 27, 2010. All presenters must register to attend the conference. For registration options, see ALA’s events and conferences page at http://www.ala.org/ .

*DEADLINE FOR PROPOSALS*: November 30, 2009

*DEADLINE FOR COMPLETED PAPERS: * June 4, 2010

Please submit proposals and direct inquiries to:

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*Melanie A. Kimball
LHRT Vice-Chair/Research Committee Chair*
*Simmons** College*
*Graduate School of Library and Information Science
300 The Fenway*
*Boston**, MA 02115*
Telephone: (617) 521-2795
E-mail: melanie.kimball@simmons.edu

The Pennsylvania legislature has passed a bill that funds the Philadelphia Free Library to stay open. News on their blog.

I’m glad but frankly still really disturbed by the whole thing.

Stephen L. Carter, a law professor who writes about democracy, has an article in The Daily Beast entitled, “Where’s the Bailout for the Publishing Industry?”

It begins:

Like a lot of writers, I am wondering when Congress and the administration will propose a bailout for the publishing industry. Carnage is everywhere. Advances slashed, editors fired, publicity at subsistence levels, entire imprints vanished into thin air. Moreover, unlike some of the industries that the government, in its wisdom, has decided to subsidize, the publishing of books is crucial to the American way of life.

Seriously.

Books are essential to democracy. Not literacy, although literacy is important. Not reading, although reading is wonderful. But books themselves, the actual physical volumes on the shelves of libraries and stores and homes, send a message through their very existence. In a world in which most things seem ephemeral, books imply permanence: that there exist ideas and thoughts of sufficient weight that they are worth preserving in a physical form that is expensive to produce and takes up space. And a book, once out there, cannot be recalled. The author who changes his mind cannot just take down the page.

The Fair Copyright Act is to fair copyright what the Patriot Act was to patriotism. It would repeal the OA policy at the NIH and prevent similar OA policies at any federal agency. The bill has been referred to the House Judiciary Committee, where Conyers is Chairman, and where he has consolidated his power since last year by abolishing the Subcommittee on Courts, the Internet, and Intellectual Property. The Judiciary Committee does not specialize in science, science policy, or science funding, but copyright. ”

The Conyers bill is back
Peter Suber
Open Access News: News from the open access movement
Wednesday, February 04, 2009

Amy Goodman and David Goodman (of Democracy Now) have an article in the current Mother Jones magazine about the great Windsor, Connecticut librarians’ defiance of the FBI and the PATRIOT Act and ultimate court victory for all of us on constitutional grounds.

A Marxist Analysis of the World Trade Organisation’s Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (PDF)

Policy Futures in Education
Volume 4 Number 4, 2006

RUTH RIKOWSKI
London South Bank University, United Kingdom

This article examines the World Trade Organisation’s (WTO) Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS). There are many WTO Agreements, but TRIPS is likely to have significant implications for areas such as information, education and libraries. The article provides an overview of TRIPS in general. Various intellectual property rights (IPRs) are covered in TRIPS, including copyright, patents, trademarks, geographical indications, industrial designs, integrated circuit designs and “trade secrets”. It then considers the implications of TRIPS for information provision, focusing in particular on copyright and patents. Finally, it examines the TRIPS within an Open Marxist theoretical perspective. The author argues that TRIPS is fundamentally about transforming IPRs into internationally tradable commodities. Marx began his analysis of capitalism in Capital volume one with “the commodity”. We need to get back to basic Marxism and to make it applicable to the global capitalist world that we find ourselves in today. Thus, capitalism is essentially about the commodification of all that surrounds us and the TRIPS assists with this process. Value that is extracted from labour, and largely from intellectual labour, becomes embedded in internationally tradable commodities (such as patents) that are created and socially validated by TRIPS. Profit is derived from this value and through this process global capitalism is extended and intensified.

CLOSED EPA LIBRARIES TO RETURN IN LAVATORY-SIZED SPACES; Political Appointee Asserts Control over All Libraries, Repeals 30-Year-Old Manual

“Ordered by Congress to re-open its shuttered libraries, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is grudgingly allocating only minimal space and resources, according to agency documents released today by Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER).”…

Thanks to Jonathan Betz-Zall for sending this info to the ALA Council list.

I will simply refer you to the ALA blog District Dispatch and let you read it there…

From ALA’s Washington Office:

Please contact your Senators and ask them to support the OPEN Government Act of 2007 (S. 849), and to urge Majority Leader Harry Reid or Minority Leader Mitch McConnell to support bringing the bill to the floor in early June. Unfortunately — and ironically, since this is an open government bill — there remains an anonymous hold on the bill preventing it from being scheduled. See Senator Leahy’s Press Release.

S. 849 is the result of the bipartisan efforts of Senate Judiciary Chairman Patrick Leahy and Committee Member John Cornyn, both sponsors of the bill. The OPEN Government Act has bipartisan support in the Senate, and the bill includes reforms to reduce backlogs, delays, and restrictions in responding to FOIA requests; provide incentives for agency compliance; and in general, strengthen the Freedom of Information Act, ensuring openness and accountability from federal agencies.

The House passed a companion bill, the Freedom of Information Act of 2007 (H.R. 1309), on March 15, by a substantial margin of 308 to 117.

ALA recently joined over 100 business, public interest, and historical associations to endorse S. 849 and urge the Senate leaders to schedule a vote. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the world’s largest business federation representing more than three million businesses and organizations, recently urged support of S.849 (PDF).

The OPEN Government Act would demonstrate bipartisan Congressional leadership and would help to boost public confidence in government. Please urge your Senators to support this important legislation and to ensure the bill’s quick movement to the Senate floor for a vote.

For more information and tools to show your support, go to ALA’s Legislative Action Center (hosted by Capwiz).

Arch Conservative Bush advisor Grover Norquist has been pushing the “Starve the Beast” strategy for a long time. This is the strategy that says run up a huge budget debt and then a future Congress will be unable to support government spending. The “War on Terror” is obviously the great implementation of the starve the beast strategy.

So as the “beast” is starved, little by little, services that exist for the public good die off.

That’s the way to think about the threatened closure of the Savanna River Ecology Laboratory and closures of many other facilities, including federal libraries. In this particular situation, it has to do with the Department of Energy running out of money, and the guidance of Bush appointees on how to use what is left.

I hate to be pessimistic, but considering everything, what we are up against now, in terms of the survival of librarianship as an institution for the public good, seems overwhelming.

Bernadine Abbott Hoduski shared this information with ALA Council today…

The ALA Washington Office and ALA Council’s Committee on Legislation have started a wiki on federal libraries. The wiki says:

The purpose of this wiki is to share and track information on federal library threats, re-organizations, and closings. Based on discussions with members, the main focus is to facilitate reporting of threats or closings that will enable users to make comments about that specific library’s situation.

Not much is there yet, but it may turn out to be a very important resource for protecting these important information resources.

Media critic and theorist Robert McChesney is spearheading the campaign against the postal rate hike, which has Time Warner and other major magazine publishers’ money behind it.

This is from the campaign website:

Postal regulators have accepted a proposal from media giant Time Warner that would stifle small and independent publishers in America. The plan unfairly burdens smaller publishers with higher postage rates while locking in special privileges for bigger media companies.

In establishing the U.S. postal system, the nation’s founders wanted to ensure that a diversity of viewpoints were available to “the whole mass of the people.” Time Warner’s rate increase reverses this egalitarian ideal and threatens the marketplace of ideas on which our democracy depends.

It’s time stand up for independent media. Demand that Congress step in to stop the unfair rate hikes. The deadline for comments to the Postal Service is fast approaching.

Sign the letter before April 23 to alert Congress and put the Postal Board of Governors on notice.

Text from the ALA campaign for this legislation:

Next week, to celebrate National Library Week, Senator Jack Reed (D-RI) plans to introduce the Librarian Act of 2007. The Librarian Act of 2007 amends the Higher Education Act of 1965 to provide for Perkins student loan forgiveness to encourage individuals to become and remain librarians in low-income schools and public libraries.

ALA uses Capwiz.com to help with grassroot lobbying of congressmembers, in case you were wondering why that page looks like a page on ALA’s website but has a different domain name.

I found this on the Librarians livejournal.

The Presidential Records Act of 2007 is a bill presently in Congress that would overturn Bush’s Presidential Order 13233 of 2001, which was one of many outrageous secrecy measures of the Bush Administration, this one case giving former presidents the power to prevent access to their papers for many years.

Kathleen de la Peña McCook has blogged other aspects of this bill and the movement to support it.

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Note from the next day, Thursday, March 15: The bill passed Congress yesterday, and, surprise surprise, Bush has promised to veto it.

Statement

Emily Sheketoff, Executive Director, ALA Washington Office

The American Library Association-Allied Professional Association (ALA-APA) would like to take this opportunity to announce its support of H.R. 800, the Employee Free Choice Act.

Formed for the purpose of promoting “the mutual professional interests of librarians and other library workers,” the ALA-APA is a strong advocate of workers’ rights, and protecting the right to form unions is a cause we strongly support.

By being part of a union, library workers gain local allies who can help to achieve pay equity and better salaries. This is especially important in public libraries where the union brings greater power to win budget increases from local governments. Unions are one of many ways library workers may improve salaries.

The Employee Free Choice Act goes a long way toward protecting library employees who form unions: it levels the playing field by strengthening penalties against offending employers, requiring mediation and arbitration to help employers and employees reach a first contract in a reasonable period of time, and permitting workers to form a union through “majority sign-up,” a process in which workers present signed authorization cards as demonstration of their choice to belong to a union.

Librarians are the gateways to our country’s information and an essential resource for education and literacy. The ALA-APA thanks you for introducing the Employee Free Choice Act, which will protect those library employees who wish to form unions, and we join you in hoping for its success.

PDF version of this statement

The American Library Association-Allied Professional Association