Chapter one of Vanishing Act: The Erosion of Online Footnotes and Implications for Scholarship in the Digital Age, by Michael Bugeja and Daniela V. Dimitrova, is now online:

Extinct Citations, Missing Links and Other Bibliographical Wonders

A decade ago, most research was done in the library rather than through its Web site, and scholars, editors, graduate directors and librarians were meticulous about the integrity of footnotes. They knew that citation was the backbone of research, from agronomy to zoology in the sciences and from art history to Zen studies in the humanities. The footnote upheld standards because it allowed others to test hypotheses or replicate experiments. Testing and replication are at the heart of the peer review and scientific processes upon which academe is based, from papers by first-year and transfer students to grants by postdoc and professor.

Because so much depended on the foundation of all scholarship, the footnote, academicians admonished students for sloppy or erroneous citation. This was the norm even a decade ago when most research was done in the library rather than through its Web site. Our discipline of communication scholarship was as exacting as any other in the academy, especially when it came to footnotes. Students submitting dissertations and faculty, journal articles, were fastidious about the accuracy of footnotes, knowing that their reputations relied on the fine print at the bottom of the page or at the end of the manuscript. Unacceptable were citations that simply named the source without specifying the document, as in “U.S. Mint, 801 9th Street NW, Washington, DC 20220-0001.” The worst types of mistakes would contain particulars, including an article’s title and date of publication, but might locate it in the wrong volume and issue of a journal. Indeed, if dissertation advisers went to the stacks to verify citations, as they often did, they would be aghast at checking a citation and finding none in any volume or number, or finding it with wrong pages or other particulars, and discovering a journal with those pages ripped out and missing. Those mistakes could doom a letter of recommendation for a job or advanced study. More…

We have put the introduction to Critical Library Instruction: Theories and Methods on the website as a guide to what is in the book.

LACUNY is sponsoring an event tomorrow on Critical Library Instruction at the Brooklyn College Library. The organizers are Alycia Sellie and Jonathan Cope. Ira Shor will be the featured speaker. Wish I could go…

Maria, Emily, and Alana met in Google Chat, as they did often over the course of this book project, to reflect on the process and product of Critical Library Instruction: Theories & Methods.

Alana: Hello!
Emily: Morning, y’all!
Maria: Hi!
Emily: How’re we all doing?
Maria: I’m doing okay. Nervous about my presentation at noon today. I’m talking about Critical Library Instruction for our library’s “A Little Knowledge” series. It’s a monthly event the Library hosts, where we invite someone on campus to talk about their research in an informal, conversational lunchtime session. Faculty, staff, and students are all invited. I’m starting by talking about critical pedagogy, and then information literacy, and then putting those together, which is where the book was born. And then I focus, like my chapter, on assessment.
Emily: When you say you’re talking about ‘critical pedagogy,’ what do you mean by that? I know that my own definition has sort of changed over the course of the book.
Maria: Well, I define it first in Freirean terms, and then i explain how other critics and theorists and etc. have expanded upon it and so on. For me, bell hooks is my inspriration. I have a slide up there with some quotes from “Teaching to Transgress.”
Alana: Is there a part of hooks’ work that’s especially significant to you, Maria?
Maria: Yes. She cares about students. Learners are people with souls, and we should teach in a manner that respects and cares for their souls.
Alana: I feel there’s also a strong emphasis in her work on teaching as a practice of living, a part of everyday life — especially in her work on engaged pedagogy. This connects with our shared interest in thinking about the selves & embodiments we bring to the classroom, and how we interact w/our students’ (whole) selves, their personhood?
Emily: Part of what’s helped my perspective has been moving from Sarah Lawrence to LIU-Brooklyn, and working with two very different student populations. I just don’t see how we can do anything but start with who is sitting right in front of us–not the ACRL Standards–when interests, needs, and experiences are so different.
Maria: Exactly. Standards erase difference– “pasteurized processed student product” is the phrase i used in my chapter.
Alana: They also erase context.
Emily: Exactly. I’ve been doing some work lately on the Greek idea of kairos, which means ‘the right moment for speaking.’ What it’s possible to say and what it’s possible to hear depends entirely on a complex set of intersecting factors. That’s one of the reasons I really loved the Smith and Eisenhower chapter (”The Library as ‘Stuck Place’:Critical Pedagogy in the Corporate University”). It addresses these factors directly. While it says some scary things about the context in which we work, it’s helpful to have a sense of what limits what we can do.
Alana: I love the way those authors move well beyond the classroom, and beyond the institution, to situate our practice in broader contexts of neoliberalism & global capitalism, emphases on flexible labor, and creating flexible laborers. They give us a model for how to think-through our situation.
Emily: And it’s a challenging perspective–what are we supposed to do under so many constraints?–but the fact that we might actually find real freedom in our marginality was an interesting perspective.
Maria: But still, there are things we can do, which the book makes clear.
Emily: Yes–we have methods! Like problem-posing instruction, student-centered instruction, etc. Then again, much of this is pretty standard in the instruction approaches recommended by ACRL. Do you think having a politics around this stuff–which we and our contributors do–makes a difference?
Maria: Well, it makes a difference to me!
Alana: It makes a difference to me, too, especially since learning activities are just one part of teaching and learning. There are cases when, if I’m taking power-sharing seriously, I might step out of my role as Expert, and that doesn’t seem like part of the ACRL approach.
Emily: Yes. It also requires changing the way I teach things like ‘authority.’ That’s probably the biggest thing that has changed for me since we started putting this book together.
Maria: Yes. Authority is complicated.
Alana: It also means, as some of our contributors show, that what we teach — in terms of resources, critical approaches to library tools themselves, nontraditional/alternative resources — matters, too.
Emily: And that commitment, for me, comes entirely from my political commitment to acknowledging and making clear the constructed nature of all knowledge.
Alana: Right. For me, it comes from an investment in paying attention to how knowledge is produced.
Maria: Yes. Yes to all of the above.
Alana: Were there other things from our contributors that surprised you?
Emily: I worked with one author (Margaret Torrell, “Negotiating Virtual Contact Zones: Revolutions in the Role of the Research Workshop”) who is a composition teacher. She wrote very clearly from the other side of the fence much of what librarians struggle to articulate about questions of authority. It was a real reminder to me that we need to be talking to our comp friends!
Alana: And I was pleased to work with Lisa Hooper (”Breaking the Ontological Mold: Bringing Postmodern and Critical Pedagogy Into Archival Educational Programming”) on her chapter. Somehow, even given my own interest in critical archival studies, it hadn’t occurred to me that we should collaborate with archival educators, too.
Maria: I found it exciting to work with Troy Swanson’s chapter, especially. I’d read his previous work so it was pretty cool to get to correspond with him personally. His exploration of personal epistemology was really thought-provoking. As critical teachers, we resist the banking method model of teaching. But what happens when students prefer it? Troy takes this up in an interesting way.
Emily: One thing that really amazed me was how on time our authors were, which is more than just a hey-we’re-lucky! thing. I had the sense that people were really anxious for a place to put down the incipient ideas and practices that many of us are working through in isolation. I heard a lot of “I’m so grateful for this project” from my writers.
Alana: And I was so happy with how willing everyone was to really respond to our questions, to elaborate their arguments, to really revise
in ways that meant re-thinking or re-visiting initial arguments. I think this was a tricky collection to contribute to, in part because we’re interested in both theory and practice, trying to bring those two together, creating space for ideas in ways that we don’t usually see in the literature on instruction. It’s hard work!
Emily: I was so grateful to get some of those heavy-theory chapters, too. Practitioners are rarely asked to think very hard, which is a real shame. For me, the book has been like finding a home. As a thinker who goes to work every day, having a place where those two identities can exist has been really amazing.
Alana: And it’s been a reminder that it’s okay to take time to think, to question.
Maria: It is! It has been like that. Working with my authors challenged my thinking. It helped me realize that I wasn’t the only one thinking about these topics, that there is a conversation happening, and that we were helping to facilitate it.
Emily: It’s not a perfect book.
Alana: I’d be really worried if it was the perfect, definitive volume on critical library instruction.
Emily: I’d really like a more extensive discussion of critical library instruction and service learning, and I’d like to see more stuff along the lines of institutional/global critiques.
Alana: I’d also like to see more critical engagements with race,
Emily: and queerness,
Alana: and disability.
Maria: It’s a conversation starter, I think.
Emily: Yes, and one of the core themes in this book is learning as a dialogue, that knowledge doesn’t ’settle,’ isn’t ‘final.’ We don’t offer a Top Ten Critical Pedagogy Tips and Tricks. It’s about having conversations, between students and teachers, students and students, teachers and teachers, and everybody else.
Alana: And this is why we need more, better instruction about instruction at the level of LIS programs.
Emily: I didn’t have a single instruction class. Not one. Nothing about pedagogy.
Alana: Me neither. Well, one-half of one of my reference class sessions addressed instruction.
Maria: Neither did I. The one class Pitt offered didn’t fit with my schedule.
Alana: I got my training and experience at Ohio State, where I experienced critical pedagogies from the position of teacher and learner, in my Comparative Studies courses and through working with the first-year writing program.
Emily: I’m getting it now in my composition and rhetoric program.
Maria: I first learned to teach in the writing center and then the composition classroom in my MA program at the University of Louisville.
Alana: I was so hungry for examples of classroom practice when I started learning about critical pedagogy.
Emily: Me too. I was in a conversation with faculty recently about this book, and I said, with no guile whatsover, “I believe this book could be a game changer.” It elicited huge laughs! I mean, the book is about library instruction! But I really think it could be, if it invites people to step away from ‘mastery’ and towards discussion and engagement with critical teaching practices.
Alana: That approach feels aligned with what happens in our individual teaching — we experiment, make mistakes, find some things that work super-well on one context & not in another…
Emily: We have to be able to struggle and fail, which is all political work is anyway, or the work of life.
Alana: Right on. Excellent connection.
Emily: I made the shittiest yam and bean stew over the weekend, but I’m having it for lunch because it’s what I have to eat. But now I know for next time–fewer chipotles.
Alana: And you’ll make other soups.
Emily: Many many others, probably a new one tonight. And that hooks back up with hooks–this is all part of the wholeness of us as instructors, right?
Maria: Yes, we are imperfect creatures, soft animals, even when we are teachers.
Emily: I have to go to a desk shift in a minute, so can I ask one last question? I always say in my classes, “If you take one thing away from this session, it’s that.. You can do this/you can come see me/you have a right to succeed here, etc.” What’s the ‘one thing’ you hope people take away from this book?
Maria: I hope people will take inspiration from the book to try something new, to rethink their practice.
Alana: For me I think it’s what we’re already talking about: what happens when we create spaces of possibility — by taking time to think, to experiment, to take risks in (thought-out, reflective ways).
Emily: I guess I would hope people would read the book, or even part of the book, and then turn to the librarian next to them and tell them what they thought. I hope we start conversations.

We hope you’ll join us in talking about critical approaches to library instruction. Maria, Emily, and Alana will be making room for these conversations at http://librarypraxis.wordpress.com.

Critical Library Instruction: Theories and Methods

Editors: Emily Drabinski, Alana Kumbier, and Maria Accardi
Price: $35.00
Published: March 2010
ISBN: 978-1-936117-01-7

Bringing together the voices of a range of practicing librarians, this collection illuminates theories and methods of critical pedagogy and library instruction. Chapters address critical approaches to standards and assessment practices, links between queer, anti-racist and feminist pedagogies and the library classroom, intersections of critical theories of power and knowledge and the library, and the promise and peril of reflective instruction practices. Rooted in theoretical work both from within the profession (James Elmborg, Cushla Kapitzke) and without (Paolo Freire, Henry Giroux, Deborah Britzman), contributions are complemented by stories of critical approaches put into practice in institutional settings ranging from the community college classroom to large urban research universities to virtual worlds. The intention is to begin a conversation among librarians who teach, library instruction program coordinators, faculty and instructors interested in bringing librarians into the classroom, and librarians interested in developing liberatory and anti-oppressive professional practices.

Critical Library Instruction is available directly from Library Juice Press, from Amazon.com and other online booksellers, through vendors of books to libraries, and in electronic form through ebrary.

I look forward to Republicans coming out against this….

THE WHITE HOUSE

Office of the Press Secretary
____________________________________________________
For Immediate Release October 1, 2009

NATIONAL INFORMATION LITERACY AWARENESS MONTH, 2009
- – - – - – -
BY THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
A PROCLAMATION

Every day, we are inundated with vast amounts of information. A 24-hour news cycle and thousands of global television and radio networks, coupled with an immense array of online resources, have challenged our long-held perceptions of information management. Rather than merely possessing data, we must also learn the skills necessary to acquire, collate, and evaluate information for any situation. This new type of literacy also requires competency with communication technologies, including computers and mobile devices that can help in our day-to-day decisionmaking. National Information Literacy Awareness Month highlights the need for all Americans to be adept in the skills necessary to effectively navigate the Information Age.

Though we may know how to find the information we need, we must also know how to evaluate it. Over the past decade, we have seen a crisis of authenticity emerge. We now live in a world where anyone can publish an opinion or perspective, whether true or not, and have that opinion amplified within the information marketplace. At the same time, Americans have unprecedented access to the diverse and independent sources of information, as well as institutions such as libraries and universities, that can help separate truth from fiction and signal from noise.

Our Nation’s educators and institutions of learning must be aware of — and adjust to — these new realities. In addition to the basic skills of reading, writing, and arithmetic, it is equally important that our students are given the tools required to take advantage of the information available to them. The ability to seek, find, and decipher information can be applied to countless life decisions, whether financial, medical, educational, or technical.

This month, we dedicate ourselves to increasing information literacy awareness so that all citizens understand its vital importance. An informed and educated citizenry is essential to the functioning of our modern democratic society, and I encourage educational and community institutions across the country to help Americans find and evaluate the information they seek, in all its forms.

NOW, THEREFORE, I, BARACK OBAMA, President of the United States of America, by virtue of the authority vested in me by the Constitution and the laws of the United States, do hereby proclaim October 2009 as National Information Literacy Awareness Month. I call upon the people of the United States to recognize the important role information plays in our daily lives, and appreciate the need for a greater understanding of its impact.

IN WITNESS WHEREOF, I have hereunto set my hand this first day of October, in the year of our Lord two thousand nine, and of the Independence of the United States of America the two hundred and thirty-fourth.

BARACK OBAMA
# # #

http://www.whitehouse.gov/the_press_office/Presidential-
Proclamation-National-Information-Literacy-Awareness-Month/

“Verbiage” is a derisive word describing prose that uses many words to say not a lot, or more particularly, prose that uses words carelessly, to create impressions without attending to what the words actually mean in a specific sense. For techies, “verbiage” is stuff that English majors add later for the benefit of end users, but doesn’t really matter very much. Verbiage is intended to sound good without taking care to convey clear meanings. Insofar as verbiage reflects a lack of care in the choice of words it represents laziness and a disrespect for language. In the way it shows an intention of “sounding good” and creating impressions it reflects a mass-media culture dominated by advertising. It is wording that “has to be there” but isn’t worth paying attention to.

So I break my pencil (if I used a pencil at work) every time I am in a meeting and a co-worker says, “Ok, so Annette will take care of the verbiage on that page.” I don’t know if you hear this in your workplace, but I hear it in mine a lot. There are people in libraries who use the word “verbiage” to refer to anything we write to communicate with our users in a textual way. Shouldn’t we have more respect for our users? (Our readers?)

Libraries, of all places.

I think the decline of respect for language is tied to the rise of non-print media, as well as the rise of the culture of BS that Harry Frankfurter so insightfully talked about in On Bullshit.

Words come into fashion and are used as mild doublespeak, in a process of mass self-deception. Take “intuitiveness” as the name of the desired quality of Google-like user interfaces. What “intuitive” should mean if it describes a user interface is that the interface clearly communicates the underlying functionality to the user so that the user doesn’t have to read manuals to understand what the software or database’s functionalities are and how to employ them. The way the word tends to be used most often, though, is to describe interfaces that are made less confusing by reducing the functionalities that are available to users, often with the addition of an AI-based search engine in the background whose functionalities are opaque and not possible to control directly or with any precision. Used in this way, the word “intuitive” is deceptive, because the user actually understands less of what is going on under the hood than before, and is less able to control the search. The user becomes dependent on the intelligence of the search engine to give him useful results. If it works as intended, the search engine itself might be “intuitive” if it accurately understands the average user’s desires, but its interface is unintuitive relative to an interface that provides greater control of the underlying functionality. Furthermore, its “intuition” is based on assumptions about users based on averages, which works for some but not others.

A question I am interested in asking more and more is about where control is shifting and how it is shifting. It is generally viewed as technical progress when we develop better AI for interfaces between people and systems, but if the result is a loss of control for users, is this really user centered? Where is the respect for users? And if the respect isn’t going to the users, where is it going? And where is the control going?

John Buschman sent a link out this morning to this article by Chris Dede in the current EDUCAUSE Review, “A Seismic Shift in Epistemology. The article examines the deep changes in the meaning of knowledge in the academy and elsewhere that are being effected by new technologies, with a focus on Wikipedia and other Web 2.0 applications. It’s a brief article, but I think Dede does a good job of clarifying what is going on, and manages to be more critical than EDUCAUSE authors are normally able to be (although he is not a knee-jerk “classicalist”).

Dede notes that at present, “the response of most educators is to ignore or dismiss this epistemological clash.” I think that’s somewhat true, but it’s partly because educators have so little time these days to reflect on the way that they teach and the way their curricula are structured (an important part of the problem). I like seeing things like this and I hope to see more thinking along these lines – further development of insights and clarification of problems and opportunities.

There is a great article in today’s Chronicle of Higher Education about today’s students, how they think, and why: Wake Up and Smell the New Epistemology, by Tim Clydesdale. I think what it says has a lot of applicability to anyone working with students, and especially information literacy instructors.

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.

That’s the winning design in the IFLA/UNESCO design contest for an International Information Literacy Logo.

The winning designer was Edgar Luy Perez, of Havana, Cuba.

I like the logo, and I think it was a good idea to pursue in an international effort.

It is part of the InfoLit Global Information Literacy Resources Directory.

ALA has an important policy, Policy 61, on library services to poor people. This policy was brought about in the mid-90s through the dedicated work of SRRT’s Homelessness, Hunger, and Poverty Task Force (HHPTF), with the leadership of Sandy Berman.

The HHPTF is still going strong as one of SRRT’s more active Task Forces, and has recently turned its attention to the question of implementation and awareness of the policy.

Partnering with ALA’s Office for Literacy and Outreach Services, they recently completed and analyzed an ALA member survey on Policy 61. The resulting report provides the text of the policy, summarizes its objectives, reports on and analyzes the survey responses, identifies issues and trends, and makes recommendations.

Although the report is brief, I think it is very important and deserves wide attention among librarians and in ALA.

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.

In my view, one of the most important documents and position statements that ALA has produced in the last few years was its June 2007 report, “Fostering Media Diversity in Libraries: Strategies and Actions.” This was produced by a subcommittee of the Intellectual Freedom Committee, now dissolved, called the Subcommittee on the Impact of Media Concentration on Libraries. This subcommittee studied the effect of media concentration and produced a report with guidance for librarians on what is a central issue affecting intellectual freedom in the current economic system. This report has a political-economic perspective to it that is a little different from what we usually see coming from ALA, in the sense that it goes beyond being civil libertarian and critiques – in a moderate and indirect way – the system upon which the Association’s many corporate donors depend.

I had hoped that this report would make it into the new edition of the Intellectual Freedom Handbook, or that it would have its conclusions codified in some other way so that it could have a continuing life in the Association’s communications, and not disappear into the mists of time as “that report from 2007″ that a few people vaguely remember. But at present it seems to be having an especially difficult time remaining in memory.

At the moment and for the past year or so, ALA has been having serious problems with its website, as data has been transferred between one internal architecture to another. In the process, this document disappeared and became unavailable (along with many others). ALA is struggling to make its documents available again. I’m naturally paranoid, so I can’t help wondering if there’s some selectivity going on, but I’m aware enough of what happens when systems fail to know that there needn’t be any conspiracy theory to explain the loss of documents, unless you can detect a pattern, and I haven’t looked into it enough to see any.

Karen Muller, ALA’s librarian, was very helpful in finding this document on ALA’s internal network drives, and sent it to me. In order to make it available while ALA is striving to get its website functioning properly again, I have uploaded it to my own server to share with you.

The problems ALA is having with its website are related to a rollout of a new website that should be coming along soon; documents are disappearing in preparation for it. Paranoia aside, this does leave me wondering about the general question of ALA’s grey literature and how it is controlled and made available (or not). Is there a weeding process going on in the transition to the new site? ALA produces many documents in a given year. What happens to them? I don’t think they are ever listed anywhere; their life seems to be tied to the committees that produce them, so you kind of need to know about them to find them (or ask for them if they can’t be found on the site). I think that probably no-one in ALA really knows what documents have been lost. This is a problem that has an obvious solution: index all of ALA’s grey literature in a central way. I think that the responsibility to do this would logically fall on ALA’s librarian and knowledge management officer, Karen Muller. If her job presently demands too much of her to make this possible, then maybe ALA needs to staff that function more generously and give her an assistant. If there is already some indexing of ALA’s grey literature going on, then I think the index should be made available to members and the public.

We are headed for a major turnover in member leadership in ALA as the older generation approaches retirement en masse. This means that the availability of the Association’s committee reports and studies and other grey literature is going to have growing importance. I hope that ALA will approach this issue systematically and solve the problem, and not just float onward without dealing with it.

Critical Pedagogy and Library Instruction: An Edited Collection

Critical pedagogy seeks to identify, critique, and disrupt the inequalities of the dominant culture, thus equipping learners to transform oppressive social, cultural, and economic conditions. While many theorists, critics, and practitioners have considered how critical pedagogical strategies and perspectives might be employed in higher education, the academic library remains mostly absent in these discussions. There have been few interventions in the library literature with specific reference to critical pedagogy, but these perspectives mostly consider critical literacy applications. Other forms of critical pedagogy, such as feminist, queer, and anti-racist, have yet to be fully explored in the context of the library instruction classroom. We intend for this book to intervene in this gap in the literature.

Objective of book

This book, to be published by Library Juice Press in Spring 2010, proposes to consider the following questions: How might library instruction benefit from exploring critical pedagogical strategies? What challenges are posed by the unique requirements of library instruction? And how might our use of critical pedagogical strategies help us embed library instruction in the critical classrooms on our campuses? We invite proposals that 1) investigate intersections between critical pedagogy and the library instruction classroom and 2) identify pedagogical applications that can be adopted in library instruction programs.

Target audience

The target audience for this book includes librarians who teach, library instruction program coordinators, faculty and instructors interested in bringing librarians into the classroom, and librarians interested in developing liberatory and anti-oppressive professional practices.

Suggested topics

Suggested topics include, but are not limited to:

• Envisioning what critical pedagogy might do for the library instruction classroom
• Examination of specific types of critical pedagogies–such as queer, feminist, or anti-racist–and their implications for the library instruction classroom
• Discussions of particular theories/theorists (e.g. Paulo Friere, Lisa Delpit, Peter Mclaren, Henry Giroux, Deborah Britzman, etc.) and their relevance for library instruction
• Illustrations of how critical pedagogy works in practice
• Examples of instruction sessions taught from a critical pedagogy framework
• Explorations of how critical pedagogy intersects with student and faculty research
• Considerations of how critical pedagogy can inform selection and collection development decisions
• Imagining how critical pedagogy can be useful in other teaching contexts — e.g., during the reference interview, in workshops, when librarians teach in community spaces

Submission procedure

Please submit abstracts and proposals of up to 500 words and a short author’s statement to criticallibraryinstruction@googlegroups.com by September 15, 2008, with notification by November 15. Final manuscripts of between 1500 and 5000 words will be due February 15.

Editors

Maria Accardi, Coordinator of Instruction, Indiana University Southeast: maccardi@gmail.com

Emily Drabinski, Reference Librarian, Sarah Lawrence College: emily.drabinski@gmail.com

Alana Kumbier, Reference and Instruction Librarian, Wellesley College: alana.kumbier@gmail.com