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Ellen Satterwhite writes: “With the passage of net neutrality in the Senate on May 16, action moves to the House, which must also vote. We hope the House will follow the Senate’s lead and pass this resolution quickly to undo the FCC’s reckless and unpopular action. Already, 160 members of the House have signed on, and we expect more to follow in the coming days. You can help by continuing to tell your members of Congress (or thanking them) that net neutrality is critical to the modern library and our communities through our action alert.” But even if the resolution fails in the House, some think that net neutrality protections will soon be “the law of the land again—this time for good.”...
District Dispatch, May 16; The Hill, May 16; Business Insider, May 18 |
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Peter Coyl writes: “The turnout in the 2018 ALA election demonstrates that there is an identity crisis in our profession. Despite a ballot measure asking our membership the vital question of whether the next leader of ALA should be a librarian, voter turnout was abysmal. The question is not so much about a skill set but about the relevance of our degree and our profession. It makes one wonder how important the library degree is to ALA members, as well as how important the Association is to the lives of librarians.”...
American Libraries column, May 17; ALA Public Awareness Office, Apr. 11 |
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Haruko Yamauchi writes: “Janet Clarke is associate director of research and instructional services at Stony Brook (N.Y.) University Libraries and coeditor of Asian American Librarians and Library Services: Activism, Collaborations, and Strategies (Rowman & Littlefield, 2017). She was one of seven featured librarian panelists at ‘Supporting the Asian Pacific American Community: Librarians on Diversity, Inclusivity, and Civic Engagement,’ a round table held at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, New York, on May 15.”...
AL: The Scoop, May 18 |
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Join writer/director/actor Emilio Estevez at the ALA Annual Conference in New Orleans for a screening of his new film The Public, also starring Alec Baldwin, Taylor Schilling, and Jeffrey Wright. It centers on the regular patrons of downtown Cincinnati’s public library, many of whom are homeless and marginalized, and their interactions with the library staff who have built emotional connections with them. There will be a Q&A with Estevez moderated by Ryan J. Dowd, executive director of Hesed House Shelter. Screening times are 9 a.m.–noon and 2:30–5:30 p.m. on June 23, and 1–4 p.m. on June 24....
RUSA Update, May 15; American Libraries Newsmaker, Mar./Apr. |
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On April 23, World Book and Copyright Day, the University of Toronto’s Scarborough Library made history by facilitating the first international transfer of accessible-format books to beneficiaries in Kyrgyzstan, demonstrating the tangible impacts of the Marrakesh Treaty. The transfer took place during a national seminar on the Marrakesh Treaty organized by the World Intellectual Property Organization in cooperation with the Kyrgyz State Service of Intellectual Property and Innovation....
Association of Research Libraries, May 17 |
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Bold efforts to push academic publishing towards an open-access model are gaining steam. Negotiators from libraries and university consortia across Europe are sharing tactics on how to broker new kinds of contracts that could see more articles appear outside paywalls. And inspired by the results of a standoff in Germany, they increasingly declare that if they don’t like what publishers offer, they will refuse to pay for journal access at all. On May 16, a Swedish consortium became the latest to say that it wouldn’t renew its contract with publishing giant Elsevier....
Nature news, May 17; OpenAccess.se, May 16 |
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The Monona Grove (Wis.) School Board voted 6–1 to uphold the recommendation to keep To Kill A Mockingbird in the freshman English curriculum at Monona Grove High School. Peter Sobol was the sole nay vote at the May 9 meeting. He called the vote the most difficult decision in his time on the board. A complaint filed in December sought to have the Harper Lee novel removed from the 9th grade English curriculum, citing the use of racial slurs in the book as unacceptable....
Monona–Cottage Grove (Wis.) Herald-Independent, May 16 |
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Chelsea Clinton’s (right) earliest memory is of tumbling down the stairs and getting scooped into her mother’s lap to read Goodnight Moon. To an audience of about 120 librarians and educators at the University of Nebraska at Omaha on May 10, Clinton told of how books shaped both her childhood and her adult life. Clinton, author and vice chair of the Clinton Foundation, was the keynote speaker at a “Stronger Together” conference focused on collaborations between school districts and public libraries....
Omaha World-Herald, May 11 |
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Anne Frank tried to cover up two pages of writing in her diary that contained dirty jokes and a description of what she referred to as “sexual matters,” pasting brown paper over the pages in her red-and-white plaid notebook. But researchers have revealed the hidden text using new digital technologies. Peter de Bruijn, a senior researcher at the Huygens Institute for the History of the Netherlands, said that the newly uncovered pages are not significant for their sexual content, but because they show Frank’s first foray into trying to write in a more literary tone....
New York Times, May 15 |
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Alyson Feldman-Piltch writes: “Back in October when I surveyed my tweens and teens with the question, ‘If we could have any type of program in the world, what would you want to do?’ in some form or another the words comic con and cosplay came up. So when we received a grant for teen programming, I had a general idea of where to look. I stumbled upon Behind the Mask Studio, a puppetry, mask, and costume workshop working out of a neighboring town that had cosplay experience.”...
ALSC Blog, May 17
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Kristen Arnett writes: “For eight years I worked storytime at a public library. It’s a tough gig. You don’t know how long a page can drag on until you hear a kid in the front row yell ‘I’m bored’ at the top of his lungs when you’re one paragraph into a 25-page book. You start speed reading. You’ve never read so fast in your entire life. Is the book funny? Is the story compelling? Does it talk about garbage or something gross? I learned a lot about creativity by dealing with kids who were difficult to please.”...
Literary Hub, May 16 |
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Tucked away in the middle of a drab street in Midtown Manhattan, the Conjuring Arts Research Center holds more than 15,000 books, magazines, and artifacts related to magic and its allied arts, whether that means psychic phenomena, hypnosis, or ventriloquism. Inside, posters and banners for Houdini and Alexander (“The Man Who Knows”) compete with row after row of centuries-old books. Executive Director William Kalush pointed out 13 of the most interesting items the library has to offer....
Mental Floss, May 16; Henderson Productions, Nov. 30, 2016 |
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