LibrarianActivist.org

I haven’t had a chance to read this, but here is Google’s explanation of the Katrina images from the Google blog:

About the New Orleans imagery in Google Maps and Earth
Monday, April 02, 2007 at 6:50:00 AM
Posted by John Hanke, Director, Google Maps/Local/Earth

This weekend, there has been a lot of discussion about our imagery of New Orleans in Google Maps and Google Earth. I thought I’d give you some background that may clear things up, and also let you know about new imagery of the region now available.

In 2005, shortly after Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans and the Gulf Coast, a very motivated group of volunteers at Google worked with NOAA, NASA, and others to post updated imagery of the affected areas in Google Maps and Google Earth as quickly as possible. This data served as a useful reference for many people — from those interested in understanding what had happened, to friends and families checking on the status of loved ones and property, to rescuers and relief workers. Shortly after the event, we received a voicemail thanking us for the role Google Earth played in guiding rescuers to stranded victims.

Several months later, in September 2006, the storm imagery was replaced with pre-Katrina aerial photography of much higher resolution as part of a regular series of global data enhancements. We continued to make available the Katrina imagery, and associated overlays such as damage assessments and Red Cross shelters, on a dedicated site (earth.google.com/katrina.html). Our goal throughout has been to produce a global earth database of the best quality — accounting for timeliness, resolution, cloud cover, light conditions, and color balancing.

Given that the changes that affected New Orleans happened many months ago, we were a bit surprised by some of these recent comments. Nevertheless, we recognize the increasingly important role that imagery is coming to play in the public discourse, and so we’re happy to say that we have been able to expedite the processing of recent (2006) aerial photography for the Gulf Coast area (already in process for an upcoming release) that is equal in resolution to the data it is replacing. That new data was published in Google Earth and Google Maps on Sunday evening.

Make no mistake, this wasn’t any effort on our part to rewrite history. But it looks like this April Fool’s joke was on us.

_DJ_

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

This will surely be fantastic if you can ”attend”:

Thursday, Nov. 23rd 3-4pm ET (12-1pm PT)
Community Development in a Library Context
with Annette DeFaveri - 1 hour AUDIO CONFERENCE

Libraries need to be connected to their communities if they are to survive and grow. Community Development means connecting, consulting, and working collaboratively with community members to understand the needs of the community and to inform the direction of library work and policies. Community Development is an energizing and vitalizing approach for librarians who want to build and strengthen their community connections in order to build strong and relevant libraries for the future.

Recognize the key elements necessary for understanding Community Development as it is applied in a library setting. Focus on practical applications of Community Development for developing programs and services, for reaching socially excluded communities, for turning infrequent users into regular users, and for identifying those systemic barriers that keep the library from being truly accessible to all.

More on the community development approach to librarianship in a July post from this blog. Annette’s a kicker and none who participate in this audio conference will be disappointed. To register, run to the Education Institute calendar. Registration is $54 for library association (CLA or one of the provincial library associations) members, $74 for non-members. If that’s too much, please join the “Communities and Libraries” Interest Group of the CLA. If you’re still a doubter, please read Annette’s “The Culture of Comfort” article on Information for Social Change.

-SIO

SOLS/OLS-N (too much acronym to spell out, just go to the site) have put out an excellent pathfinder of Community Development Resources.

I also discovered that the CLA has a Libraries and Communities Interest Group which I hadn’t heard about before. Here is an excerpt from the terms of reference:

Concerned primarily with socially excluded communities and individuals the group focuses on the philosophies, strategies, empathies and self support that librarians need to reduce the rigidity of the relationships between socially excluded communities and the library. The approach is to encourage a dialogue within the interest group to identify and critically evaluate those values and cultures of our libraries that act as systemic barriers to library participation by those who are outside the mainstream of society. Members will challenge the broader library community to reflect on how our fundamental values of inclusiveness have drifted in the pursuit of efficiency and quantification.

Annette DeFaveri appears to be convening the group, though I’m not sure who else is involved. If I hear more, I’ll be sure to post.

Finally, one of my favourite articles on community development, which happens to be by DeFaveri, is not on the SOLS/OLS-N site yet. In it, DeFaveri goes through some of the social and cultural barriers that patrons may encounter by coming (nor not coming) into a library - forcing people to pay fines and cover the costs of damaged books no matter how poor they are, for example. There are many things library staff can do to change this culture she says, and I particularly like this community card idea:

One suggestion is to create a new “Community Card” for adults who cannot provide proof of a permanent residence. This card could be issued for other adults who, for reasons of poverty, mental or physical illness, and other conditions that create social exclusion, cannot meet the financial expectations of the current library card. People with a Community Card, which would be physically indistinguishable from other library cards, would not be stopped from borrowing library materials because of fines. Similarly, replacement costs and processing fees would be noted, but would not prohibit library use. The default position for this card would be no fines.

One of my friends who used to work in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside said that the Carnegie branch of the Vancouver Public Library has one of these community card programs and that they see their incidental loss of books well worth having such an open-door policy at the branch.

I think this all ties directly back into the whole argument about “professionalism” that we have so much in library school. Roma Harris has written a lot about the topic, and linked it directly to librarianship’s latent sexism. I haven’t read a lot of her articles or books, but I’ve used a few for papers I’ve written. One of the aspects of “professionalism” that so many people identify is the development and protection of a particular body of knowledge. That protection (and measurement and quantification and emphasis on management and technology that go along with it) seems to me so anti-librarianship - especially when we start addressing library service for the marginalized people in our communities! If our goal is to reduce the barriers, shouldn’t we be trying to back away from the ones we create ourselves?

This leads me straight into the enormous beef I have with the 8Rs report . . . but I’m not brave enough yet to venture into that arena - maybe look for that posting once I graduate from library school and find myself a secure job.

-S.

A great article on the topic of library fines. (via librarian.net which also has some discussion on the topic)

J.