Blogs

Thanks to Karen from Philadelphia, Radical Reference will meet during the ALA Midwinter conference at The A-Space on Saturday, January 12 from 6-8pm

Shinjoung Yeo was profiled in the Winter 2008 issue (no. 38) of Bitch, as part of the "Bitch in: Cool Activists, Good Causes" column. It's on page. 33 and was written by Marjorie Asturias-Lochlear.

About half the article is about Radical Reference, but it also discusses feminism and race. Her fave five activist entities are listed as

The ALA Office for Diversity is sponsoring a discussion on white privilege among its events at ALA Midwinter in Philadelphia.

The discussion will be Saturday, January 12, 2008, 1:30-3:30pm Loews Hotel, Lescaze Room, 1200 Market Street

Yesterday InterActivists Eric and Mark, with a minuscule amount of help from John, Melissa, and me, upgraded the Radical Reference site from Drupal 4.7 to Drupal 5.3.

I hope folks won't perceive this post as terribly off-topic for Radical Reference. I think understanding and confronting one's own racism is essential work for all activists, regardless of the primary missions of their various projects.

As an outgrowth of the ALA GODORT 50-State Agency Database Registry, I have created a page listing databases for locating state prisoners. If you know people trying to find friends and loved ones, please direct them to this page.

Radical Reference is participating in two different presentations at this year's Mid-Atlantic Radical Bookfair in Baltimore.

The first is Radical Information For All: Radical Public, Academic, and Independent Libraries and Services.

Radical Reference will be conducting two workshops on Saturday October 20th in lovely Baltimore. You can see a full schedule of speakers, tables and other workshops here.
Descriptions of the workshops we are conducting are here. We'll have a table with (hopefully) some exciting crafty stuff too, so come over, it should be pretty great.

The August/September 2007 issue of the Catholic Worker had reviews of two books that might be of interest to readers of this site:

Book Review: Blackwater: The rise of the world's most powerful mercenary army. By Jeremy Scahill, Nationa Books, NY 2007 Reviewed by Tom Cornell. - Mostly favorable review of book critical of the use of private security firms in war zones and the lack of accountability that creates. James Scahill spoke about his book to Truthdig and to Democracy Now.

Shinjoung and I just got back from our 2 week tour driving the Internet Archive's bookmobile around Northern CA. We learned tons and talked to lots of folks about copyright/public domain, libraries and their local communities, how new technologies affect libraries, and how libraries can integrate the 250,000 (and growing) digital public domain books and other digital content from the Internet Archive.