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Archive for the ‘green libraries’


Friday Fun Link - Earth Portal (July 6, 2007)

Published July 7th, 2007 in Friday Fun Link, green libraries, social responsibilities | No Comments »

The worldwide series of concerts known as Live Earth have started today in Australia and Japan and will be moving around the world for the next 24 hours.

Although not directly related to Live Earth, there are a couple relevant sites you might want to check out:

  • Earth Charter is “a declaration of fundamental principles for building a just, sustainable, and peaceful global society for the 21st century. Created by the largest global consultation process ever associated with an international declaration, endorsed by thousands of organizations representing millions of individuals, the Earth Charter seeks to inspire in all peoples a sense of global interdependence and shared responsibility for the well-being of the human family and the larger living world. The Earth Charter is an expression of hope and a call to help create a global partnership at a critical juncture in history. ”
  • The Earth Portal is “a comprehensive resource for timely, objective, science-based information about the environment. It is a means for the global scientific community to come together to produce the first free, expert-driven, massively scaleable information resource on the environment, and to engage civil society in a public dialogue on the role of environmental issues in human affairs. It contains no commercial advertising and reaches a large global audience.”
  • And as always, there are pledges to be found - the good folks at Avaaz have one which they’re trying to get 50 000 signatures on (27 055 at this point).

- JH

Climate Change Petition

Published March 12th, 2007 in Community, advocacy, green libraries, open government, other, social responsibilities | No Comments »

I don’t post every petition I come across on here but this one is from a solid organization and it looks like it has some potential to at least get a legitimate hearing from top decision makers. So why not add your name to support this message?

—
Dear friend,

This Thursday, the environment ministers from the G8, the world’s biggest contributors to climate change, will be meeting in Germany. The outcome of this meeting is crucial to world’s response to global warming.

Avaaz.org has been invited to attend this meeting to present our climate change petition. A strong voice for action could help set the agenda for the G8. To help seize this opportunity, click below:

http://www.avaaz.org/en/climate_action_germany

The G8 is a summit of world leaders from the “Group of 8″ largest economies. Together, these countries account for 50% of global greenhouse gas emissions–the gasses that cause climate change. The full G8 summit is coming in June, but the agenda and outcome of this type of high-profile event is usually set far in advance–at meetings like the one this Thursday.

This year, the president of the G8 is German Chancellor Angela Merkel. Her environment minister, Sigmar Gabriel, is in charge of the ministers meeting Thursday. And at 4 pm on March 15th, we have a personal meeting with Mr. Gabriel to present our petition for binding emissions targets to stop catastrophic climate change.

Merkel has indicated an interest in making climate change a top priority. With a significant global petition, we can make the case that the world is ready for aggressive leadership on climate change–and pave the way for truly historic commitments at the G8 summit this June.

It’s a rare opportunity to have a global impact. Add your voice to the petition now:

http://www.avaaz.org/en/climate_action_germany

50,000 people from 131 countries have already demanded action. Our goal is to reach 100,000. Please sign the petition, forward this email to friends and family, and post the link on your blog–we only have a few days to make this statement count.

If we add our voices together, now, 2007 can become the year we took the first step to save the world.

With hope,

Ricken, David, Iain, Lee-Sean, Galit, Graziela, and the rest of the Avaaz.org team

Bits of news

Published April 26th, 2006 in green libraries, information commons, open access, open government, other | No Comments »

Well, the handover of LibrarianActivist is imminent. A group of really great people have offered to take it over. I will probably talk more about this in the coming week (or simply let them introduce themselves once the handover is done).

In the meantime, here are a couple of small stories that i couldn’t help mention:

Civicaccess.ca: (from dose) a new organization sees the day:

Citizens for Open Access to Civic Information and Data (CivicAccess) is a group of citizens which believes all levels of government should make civic information and data accessible at no cost in open formats to their citizens. We believe this is necessary to allow citizens to fully participate in the democractic process of an “information society.”

Airplane parts library: Green libraries anyone? Check out this particularly interesting architectural plan, made from Boeing fuselages for a library competition in Mexico! (from boing boing… where else…)

BCLA conference presentations: Some presentations from the BCLA annual conference are up on ELIS.

Access to Knowledge: A conference held at Yale last weekend. Here’s the conference wiki, and the session entitled “The role of libraries for A2K“.

Think Green

Published January 31st, 2006 in green libraries | No Comments »

It seems as though new library buildings are still creating architectural stirs. February’s Metropolis feature’s the Philology Library, at the Free University in Berlin, which has a really interesting design (dubbed a “thought bubble” in the article), and like the Seattle public library, is also pushing the limits of green architecture.