LibrarianActivist.org

The Briarpatch is an alternative news magazine based in Regina (circa 1973) making creative use of folkosomies and participatory metadata.

Their latest free monthly newsletter the B-List posted this effort to collect progressive/political news and links from their readers.

Are you an online news hound? Do you use del.icio.us to tag your favourite articles? Then you’ve got what it takes to become a B-List stringer! All you have to do is tag the best articles you can find (radical, insightful analyses of current events and important trends) with the tag briarpatchb-list. We’ll do the rest! If you want more info, just drop us a line.

-PC-

So Shameless is the feminist magazine and blog for teens that I wish had been around when I was a wee feminist myself. I’d be dating myself if I told you how old I was when Sassy finally rescued me from magazine hell, so I won’t.

Not only are the contributors of Shameless smart, feminist, and yes - sassy - they also know how where the good activist resources are and how to find them. I quote from a recent Shameless blog entry from Tuval, one of their contributors:

Last night I watched an old film I’ve been meaning to see for a long time. And I got it from my favourite movie store, the public library.

That’s right - the public library. (Where you can also find a print copy of Shameless at a healthy selection of library branches.)

And the film in question is Not a Love Story, by Bonnie Sherr Klein, mother of activist Naomi Klein. Coincidentally, I viewed this film about the same time I was reading Sassy.

Do check out (no pun intended:) both of Sherr Klein’s films, Not a Love Story and the more recent, Shameless: the Art of Disability.

-PC-

Anyone familiar with UofT’s flagship humanities and social sciences Robart’s library knows that it’s the target of a lot of well earned potshots. Here are a few of its better known claims to fame:

is it sinking?
‘Brutalist‘ architecture
it’s a peacock … !?

The ‘prison’ analogy is another fave, what with the books cloistered into a closed stack system far, far away from the scant selection of windows.

Since 2005 however, quietly in a room in the library at St. Michael’s college, UofT’s partnership with the Open Content Alliance has been digitizing public domain works (books and more) for the Internet Archive. Blackfly magazine published an article (which inspired the heading for this post) in which Carole Moore, head librarian at the St. George campus spoke to UofT’s foray into digitizing public domain works in its collection to make them more accessible and the library more democratic. Articles also appeared at the outset of the project in the Washington Post and Wall Street Journal.

Owen Jarus at Blackfly spoke to how digitization can democratize and transform information through improved access, where WP and WSJ spoke to the business angle, mainly comparing the OCA’s initiative to the Google Books/copyright lawsuit situation. The subtext of course is ‘will we still need libraries’ if all the materials are online?

This week, I finished an intensive course on “Rethinking the Library” taught by guest instructor, Dr. Joseph Janes of the University of Washington’s iSchool. It gave a handful of lucky students the opportunity to have a forum to dialogue on where ‘the library’ is/can/should/isn’t going, and engage with the tough question of what was well coined by the University of Toronto Mississauga’s chief librarian, Mary Ann Mavrinac [a guest speaker] as defining our ‘core’. While this question is an ongoing subtext to librarianship, having a sit down in a course environment was a great move. So kudos to the Faculty of Information studies at UofT for offering a full course on this important subject.

The content for me is still percolating … more discussion on this later. In the meantime, if you have burning thoughts on the matter, please chime in!

-PC-

Well, I hate to add a post above PC’s great follow-up piece on FOSS, but anyone who wants to “talk turkey” in a post doesn’t get to stay at the top of the blog roll for long.

Some wonderful stuff is going down on the MediaReform website that was set up last month by a group of activists, academics, and random folks who are concerned about media in Canada. They’ve been getting a fair amount of help from the American group FreePress who have have been doing some really great work in the US on issues like media concentration, net neutrality, and supporting small & local media outlets. This could be the Canadian version — a bringing-together of some of the activists who work on those and similar issues in this country.

The main organizing tool so far, from what I can tell, is their online forum. People are posting all sorts of great content and trying to use the forum to spread the word about a variety of things that are going on right now (CRTC, independent media, ongoing meetings to try to start something, local initiatives, etc.) SO if you’re interested in such things, please have a wander over the site. Sign up, post, participate! There’s a lot of representation from Toronto, Montreal, and Vancouver, and it would be great to bring people from across the country into the discussions! If you do join, please introduce yourself and let everyone know where you’re from. And if you’re a librarian, let them know about that, too!

I hope you all get a chance to check it out and help build some momentum. As Robert McChesney (soon to be replacing Gandhi as the most quotable activist) says, “Regardless of what a progressive group’s first issue of importance is, its second issue should be media and communication, because so long as the media are in corporate hands, the task of social change will be vastly more difficult, if not imposible, across the board.” Good stuff.

-SIO

PS - Not that any of you would be so rash as to be on Facebook or anything, but there’s MediaReform.ca group there, too, which acts primarily as a landmark to direct people to the forum’s website. It’s a great way to get other people involved, though…just invite them to join the group and hope they drift on over to the forum! Not that any of you are on Facebook, of course, knowing all about the privacy issues. Please note that I did not actually link to Facebook in this post. This is not an endorsement.

The fabulous public broadcast station Television Ontario | TVO posts podcasts to, among other great shows, the lecture series Big Ideas. (And they’re available via RSS feed, MP3 file or iTunes).

Dr. Darin Barney, McGill professor of communication studies and Canada Research Chair in Technology and Citizenship, speaks via the UofT Hart House lecture series on (what else but) the relationship between technology and citizenship. He poses an argument for the politicization of technology.

Have a listen to Dr. Barney’s talk, entitled One Nation Under Google .
Read the 2007 Hart House Lecture blog by the same man here and get more info from the Hart house Lecture website here.

-PC-