ALA president, Jim Retting, had an interesting article about access in November's American Libraries Magazine. (Which you can now read online without being an ALA member - way to put your money where your mouth is ALA.) The article, Access for All, iss about the idea of access to information and how it requires a certain level of transparency in government.
Retting specifically mentioned the annual Crimea Conference, a library conference for Russian librarians, where access to information and government related information was discussed
"... [access to information] improved after the collapse of the Soviet Union but in recent years has reverted"
What? huh? Did you catch that? We've been hearing rumblings out of Russia for a while now and the relationship with our former cold war nemesis is starting to re-frost. Stories of political assassinations have led us to question their human rights stance, and, George Bush's ability to see into Putins 'good' soul through his Russian peepers not withstanding, Russia is scaring the West more than it has for some time.
Russia's political strangle hold on expression, denial of human rights, and many other nefarious doings are echoed in their attitude towards public access to information - or maybe the latter is one of the reasons they are allowed to continue with the aforementioned deeds.
In relation to oppressive countries' precedent of denying access to information Retting points out that "Most Westerners know about Tianenmen Square from the student movement but most Chinese don't know about that." That sounds bizarre to us, but that's because we live in a country with a robust press and the right to information. While I don't think that right was enumerated in the Bill of Rights, I think it should be at the forefront of any discussion of citizen empowerment and democracy. Citizens make better decisions when they have access to accurate information and governments are held more accountable when their doings are recorded, catalogued, and made available to their constituents.
When we go about determining who is in our new 'connect four' of evil, perhaps we should look not just at their nuclear arms proliferation, hostile public rhetoric, and alleged human rights abuses, but also how they deny access to information. Maybe examining trends regarding access to information, or the denial of such, could alert us of possible dangers before other, harder evidence is available.
1 comment:
Hey Brooke-
How's it going? Good post. I've worked for the Family History Library for 4 1/2 years now, that's funny you're all into ALA. Cool.
I agree with you about the right to information. I saw a show on China once and the interviewer showed that famous picture of the man standing in front of the tank at Tiananmen Square to a bunch of Chinese people our age and none of them had any clue what it was about. It’s sad and dangerous that they are not allowed info the rest of the world knows about their country. It will be interesting to see what happens in years to come.
-Kim Jones
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