Access as Warning?

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.

Better Know a Library: Cerritos Library...I've Died

...and gone to Heaven! I'm not sure if I can legally post pictures from this library directly on my blog, but I would like everyone who reads this (all 3 of you) to go to their link and prepare to salivate.

What the money!? What the allocation of resources!? What the commitment!? What the wealthy community!? I nearly shed a tear tonight. This is amazing. The children's section is out of this world. Who wouldn't want to spend every waking hour here?

I don't love the "mall" concept I can see happening in some pictures, but it looks really sharp. I'm truly speechless.

Get Back on the Saddle

Well, I just applied to work in the Library of Congress. A girl can dream, can't she? I've been pretty discouraged lately because I haven't gotten several sweet library jobs I've applied for. It's like crack and I'm having withdrawals...ok, working in a library isn't like crack at all. But I'm having withdrawals all
the same.

But yesterday when I was working on my homework I said "No, Corky", I've got to keep in library land whether or not I am currently employed by one. I've got my trusty subscription to ALA and I'm on a few email lists, not to mention library school itself. SO, I'm going to try and blog more frequently about the goings on I read about in the land of library.

Here is something awesome I read in my Web Design class last week. We were talking about web security and the idea of copyright and my teacher cited this awesome bit.


There is the humorous example of Presidential candidate Senator
John McCain's Web site using a graphic that they liked by linking
to that graphic on another person's Web site without permission.
Evidently, the person who controlled the Web site (and the graphic image)
didn't particularly care for John McCain. He changed his graphic
to display text that the showed the Senator had changed his position
on a prominent social issue in a very unexpected way! :-D

Needless to say, the McCain Web site people changed their Web site very quickly!


I already had several reason for not voting for MCcain and while this one might seem stupid to many, it's not to me. Not only did the Mccain campaign not CARE about copyright and getting permission (as evidence by the Campaign's insistence on using artists' songs on the campaign trail long after they demanded they stop-HEART and VAN HALEN no the least among them), but they didn't appear to KNOW about issues like these. I can accept if MCcain himself doesn't know the intricacies of the internets or how copyright works...but that'ts what you hire experts for!!!

I just have to add that one of my favorite things about Obama is that he has surrounded himself with experts. The way he has used technology in his Campaign is amazing. I feel like he represents a 'return of the expert' to the White House, after a long winter of "my college buddies youngest grandson who knows a little something about stuff".

Then I'll Bring the Library to Me!

I got a new job and while its a fine job, it's not a library so I feel this kind of identity loss that I don't know how to deal with. I didn't realize how much being a "librarian" defined who I was. Maybe it's a good thing that I have to regrow my independence, but all the same I miss the library!

I work at the Mountainland Head Start central office in Provo and in the basement of the building is a library for the teachers. It was a little spot o' heaven when I found out about it. Whenever I close the basement down at night I walk through it just to get some library in me. Because of my interest in libraries my boss is letting me catalog all of the "new" books for the library. Most of them are old donated books, but either way I'm loving it. My co-workers keep saying things like "Why are they making you do that? " and "Oh! That must be awful". They just don't understand.

There are almost 1000 books that need to be cataloged, the library database is beyond arcane and unreliable, and the actual library itself could use some serious TLC. SOOO I've been hatching a plan about writing a grant to get things in shape! (And I just happen to be taking a class that teaches grant writing!) I want to see if I can write grant to either get new materials for the library or that will pay me to work in it for a while and get it usable. I'm not exactly sure what I need to do, or if it's even possible, but danget that place needs a librarian! The Headstart library needs some new resources and the existing ones aren't being used because of the lack of organization. To be fair, it's not really their fault. The library has been so neglected because the program in general is underfunded. They can hardly pay the staff they have to keep up with their overflowing work loads, let alone create a new position for the library.

So, I've emailed my professor to see if she can set me in the right direction and all I have to do now is work up the chutzpah to talk to my boss and the director about it at some point...