There is a new issue of Information for Social Change, on the theme of information ethics. This issue is edited by Mikael Böök. It’s a very international collection of articles, some of them a little odd and all of them interesting.

Jaron Lanier has an Op-Ed in the August 9th issue of the New York Times, titled, “The First Church of Robotics.” It is a brief revisitation of some ideas from his recent book, You Are Not a Gadget, which was reviewed in the Times earlier this year. What Lanier has to say about artificial intelligence in information systems and its consequences is highly relevant and timely.

June 1, 2010
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Miriam Braverman Memorial Prize Winner Announced

(University of Oregon, Eugene, OR) The Progressive Librarians Guild is pleased to announce the winner of the 2010 Miriam Braverman Memorial Prize. This year’s prize has been awarded to Kristen Hogan for her essay entitled ‚ “‘Breaking Secrets’ in the Catalog: Proposing the Black Queer Studies Collection at the University of Texas at Austin.” Ms. Hogan is currently enrolled in the Master of Science in Information Studies (MSIS) program at the University of Texas at Austin School of Information; she expects to graduate August 2010.

An honorable mention goes to Steven Lorenz, School of Library and Information Sciences, North Carolina Central University, for his paper, “The Finer Points of Librarianship: Does a Basic Policy Impede Library Access?.” Lorenz’s essay makes a strong argument against library fines, identifying ways in which they can serve as a barrier to library resources, even for patrons who do not currently owe any.

Essays were submitted by library and information science students from colleges and universities in the United States and Canada. Their papers considered such subjects as open access publishing and meeting the information needs of many populations including adult learners and LGBTQ teens. Ms. Hogan’s essay will be published in the forthcoming issue of Progressive Librarian, the journal published by the Progressive Librarians Guild. She will also receive a $300 stipend for attendance at the 2010 American Library Association’s annual meeting in Washington, D.C., and an award certificate at the PLG annual dinner on June 26, 2010.

The Miriam Braverman Memorial Prize is awarded annually for the best essay written by a student of library/information science on an aspect of the social responsibilities of librarians, libraries or librarianship. The prize is named in honor of Miriam Braverman (1920-2002), an activist librarian who was a longstanding member of the Progressive Librarians Guild and a founder of the American Library Association’s Social Responsibilities Round Table. She was a strong proponent of the social responsibilities perspective within librarianship and an inspiration to younger librarians entering the field.

The Progressive Librarians Guild (PLG) was founded in 1990 and is committed to supporting activist librarians and monitoring the professional ethics of librarianship from a perspective of social responsibility. For more information, visit the Guild’s website at: http://libr.org/PLG/

I have an article in the current issue of Progressive Librarian that I have put online this morning: “The Library Paraprofessional Movement and the Deprofessionalization of Librarianship.” It says something that some people won’t like, but it’s something that I think is true and something that I think we should discuss openly. It’s in the Fall/Winter 2009 issue, which is number 33 (no volume number). In the journal it’s on pages 43-60.

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…

From Salon: “Is the Internet melting our brains?” “No! The author of “A Better Pencil” explains why such hysterical hand-wringing is as old as communication itself.” By Vincent Rossmeier.

From The Australian: “Specialist Pleading,” by Frank Ferudi. “ONE of the most influential contemporary cultural myths is that our era is characterised by the end of deference. … Commentators interpret the declining influence of traditional authority and institutions as proof that people have become less deferential and possess more critical attitudes than in the past. However, it is less frequently noted that deference to traditional authority has given way to the reverence of expertise.”

From the L.A. Times: “The lost art of reading,” by David L. Ulin. “The relentless cacophony that is life in the 21st century can make settling in with a book difficult even for lifelong readers and those who are paid to do it.”

From Policy Review: “Orwell’s Instructive Errors,” by Liam Julian. “The edifying commentator is also a flawed one.”

“Exploring the Ethical Implications of Technological Change through the Thought of Walter Ong and Other Media Theorists”

That’s the title of my paper for the conference coming up this weekend in Boston, Media in Transition 6: Stone and Papyrus, Storage and Transmission.

The paper is not the greatest thing I’ve ever written, but it is a succinct statement of an idea that I think is relevant here.

If you find it useful for something, let me know.

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 new issue of Information for Social Change, issue #28, is now online. The topic of this issue is “lifelong learners.” Here is a list of the articles:

• Learning, Learning Communities and Globalisation (Dr Ray Shore)
  
• Back to the Future?- Lifelong learning in libraries (Andrew Hudson)
  
• Developing a NEETS Based Library Service (John Pateman)
  
• Policing Library Users (John Pateman)
  
• Information and liberation: writings on the politics of information and librarianship (Shiraz Durrani)
  
• Quality Leaders Project (Youth) initiative (Jane Pitcher and Elizabeth Eastwood-Krah)

Some useful material here.

Richard J. Cox’s new book is Personal Archives and a New Archival Calling: Readings, Reflections and Ruminations, just out from Litwin Books this January.

I searched around and found a fairly recent article by Dr. Cox that gets into some of the issues that he develops further in the book. If you’d like to get a taste for what you’ll find in parts of his new book, take a look at his November 2007 article in First Monday: “Machines in the archives: Technology and the coming transformation of archival reference.” …

Gathering at the Waters: Embracing Our Spirits, Telling Our Stories
Proceedings of the First National Joint Conference of Librarians of Color (JCLC)
October 11-15, 2006, Dallas, Texas
Edited by Gladys Smiley Bell

I made a bid to publish this in book form, but the preference was to do it online, and they have obviously done a very nice job with a very accessible result.

I found these three items in Arts & Letters Daily….

In the New Yorker, a look back into the distant history of newspapers, “The Day the Newspaper Died,” by Jill Lepore. She puts the present newspaper crisis in perspective.

In City Journal, Brendan Boyle reviews A Great Idea at the Time: The Rise, Fall, and Curious Afterlife of the Great Books, by Alex Beam, and in the process dips into some interesting history regarding the debate over the canon and educational philosophy.

In Vanity Fair, Christopher Hitchens writes about media self-censorship in response to Muslim protests and fatwas in “Assassins of the Mind.”

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?

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.

New article by Lincoln Cushing: Privatizing the Commons: The Commodification of New Deal Public Art.

Lincoln Cushing is an important person in the world of political graphic art, having put together books on Cuban poster art and Chinese propaganda posters, both very enjoyable and interesting books. Lincoln is a librarian who had an earlier career as a printer and graphic designer. Labor and labor history are big interests for him. I have had the pleasure of working with Lincoln in a number of areas and am always happy to be able to direct people to new work by him.

This is quite an interesting article, and returns us to an important ongoing problem, from which our justifiable excitement about Obama’s victory has I think naturally distracted many of us. I don’t think Obama is going to be very strong on questions of the public sphere and privatization, unfortunately, despite how far along that road we’ve come by this point.