Radreffies' blogs

How can we support the work happening through the main Radical Reference website? >> BRRC could provide rotating volunteer service, e.g., two ...

Radical Reference and the Future of Academic Librarianship ... Truly radical reference is coming out from behind that desk and bringing that crucial ...

Radical reference is not about waiting for the question. It's not about simply being as good as we are and being the only ones who know it. ...

Radical Reference, as a service, a website, and an organization, is ... As a group, Radical Reference is primarily concerned with having the activity that occurs ...

Radical Reference. My curiosity got the best of me when I read the email forwarded through CMRLS about an upcoming Western Massachusetts Radical Reference meeting. ...

Radical Reference is a group of radical librarians and information workers who provide reference and research support to activist communities. ...

Reference resources for the general public, independent journalists, and activitists for their radical questions and ideas. Email your reference question in English, Spanish, or other languages.

Radical reference originated as a service provided by volunteer ... Radical Reference members have shared their skills at several conferences, bookfairs, and ...

Radical Reference began as part of the counter-protest against ... Radical Reference the website of a collective of library workers who provide radical ...

Radical Reference: Community Librarianship and Free/Open Source Technology ... Radical Reference is a collective of volunteer library workers who believe in social ...

Get the scripts to for the Initial Reference Checks™ call, the follow up letters and emails for every step in the Radical Reference Checking Process™ ...

Radical Reference is a collective of volunteer library workers who believe in social justice and equality. ... Portland Radical Reference Collective meets quarterly at the ...

Excited and nervous for next week's Center for the History of Print Culture in Modern America's Library History Seminar XII: Libraries in the History of Print Culture conference in Madison!

read more

Radical Reference is a collective of volunteer library workers who believe in social justice and equality. ... Portland Radical Reference Collective meets quarterly at the ...

August just flew by didn't it? And that means it's time to introduce our next blogger of the month. So welcome to the FGI podium Nathan Yang. Nathan is a Ph.D candidate in Economics at the University of Toronto. Although his thesis is about industry dynamics and social learning, he has recently done some research on why politicians adopt Twitter. Take it away Nathan.

And thanks also to Emily Keller, our August blogger from the University of Washington!!

Here's a way to spend an enjoyable lunchtime: watch Carl Malamud give his Keynote address "10 Rules for Radicals" to the WWW2010 Conference in Raleigh, NC on April 30, 2010 -- and if you've got more time, you can also watch all of the law.gov workshops over on Carl's Internet governance space at the Internet Archive! Certainly some great rules to live by!!

1. Call everything "an experiment."
2. When the authorities finally fire the starting gun, run as fast as you can.
3. Eyeballs rule.
4. When you achieve your objective, don't be afraid to turn on a dime and be nice.
5. Keep asking, keep rephrasing the question until they *can* say yes.
6. When you get the microphone, make sure you make your point clearly and succinctly.
7. Get standing. one can criticize all one wants, but if you can document malfeasance and wrongdoing, they have to talk to you.
8. Try to get the bureaucrats to threaten you (related to rule 7).
9. Look for over-reaching.
10. Don't be afraid to fail

[Thanks BoingBoing!]

As many of you know, the Government Printing Office is transcribing their historic paper shelflist into the Catalog of Government Publications (CGP). The paper shelflist was operated from 1880 to 1992. There are over 6,000 records transcribed so far.

While listening to the GPO Q&A from the Six State Virtual Conference, I learned that you can view records from the Historic Shelflist by searching the phrase "historic shelflist" in the CGP. Try it. It can be fun to specify a specific year, say 1930 or 1942.

Learn more about this project by viewing a webinar titled "The GPO Historic Shelflist Project" presented in May 2010 by Laurie Hall, that is available at the GPO OPAL Archive at http://www.opal-online.org/archivegpo.htm.

The Lower East Side Librarian Library of Congress Subject Heading of the Week for Week 32, August 11, 2010 is...

(Here's a clue:
)

read more

Radical Reference is a collective of volunteer library workers who believe in social justice and equality. ... Radical reference originated as a service provided by volunteer ...

I’ve been heartened by a recent string of long-form journalism that’s been making a buzz, provoking change, and bringing attention and insight to important issues. As it happens, these pieces often draw heavily upon government information. Examples include the Washington Post’s series Top Secret America, outlining the growth of security and intelligence in a post-9/11 America; and The Runaway General, Rolling Stone’s profile of General Stanley McChrystal, which led to his firing for disparaging comments he and his aides made about the administration. In both cases, government information illuminates the exploration of current, pressing issues in the news.

I’ve often been frustrated with standard editorial practice of mentioning, but not completely citing, the particular documents referred to in newspaper articles. It masks the ubiquity of government information in our daily lives, and sets up a barrier to readers who might be interested in examining the original documents themselves (and can make it challenging for a librarian to track it down when the patron seeks assistance). For example, in The Transformer, Foreign Policy’s recent story on Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, which fostered speculation that he might retire before the end of Obama’s first term, author Fred Kaplan refers to a hearing before the Senate Armed Services Committee early in Obama's presidency in which Gates testified. This would be findable enough, but would require more tenacity than a casual reader might muster.

The Washington Post’s recent piece, How the Minerals Management Service’s partnership with industry led to failure, is a great example of journalists harnessing the possibilities of the online environment to enhance the reading experience and access to related documents. In this long piece on the too-cozy relationship between regulators and industry, the journalists not only tell readers exactly which documents they used in their reporting, they link to highlighted, annotated full-text of primary sources used in the story, such as a memo from the Inspector General to the Secretary of the Interior on investigations of MMS employees. This supplements the story by giving the reader routes for further exploration, as well as a genealogy of the story that gives more transparency to the journalism itself.

Creating an annotated map, pointing back to the primary documents used to inform a journalist’s narrative, would be a great exercise for students studying government information, journalism, librarianship, indeed citizenship, to raise awareness of the life cycle of government information and what can happen when it is unleashed in the public square.