jenna's blog

Live notes from our meeting at ALA Midwinter. (But the link is stalled at the moment! 1/18/10 8pm ET.)

As you may have noticed, the website has been updated and re-themed. It's a lot less hideous looking now, right? However...there are a few things that still need work. If you have any problems or notice any weirdnesses, please describe them here as comments to this post or email info@radicalreference.info and describe what you see. Screenshots a plus!

Saturday, January 16, 2010, 6-8pm
Yvonne Pappenheim Library on Racism, 14 Beacon Street, Boston

No ALA conference registration required; new volunteers welcome!

Contact Rebecca Martin for more info.

The United States Social Forum (USSF) Information and Communication Technology Working Group (ICT) has invited/requested librarians to help test and brainstorm the conference website, including how it will be used by our project in particular.

Monday, 1/18 2-5pm (people are welcome as early as 1 and as late as 6, though)
Openflows office 220A E. 4th St., 3rd fl. (Manhattan)

Saturday, December 19
1-5pm, drop in anytime
Openflows
220A E 4th Street (between Avenues A & B), East Village, NYC
Contact nyc@radicalreference.info if you want to participate remotely

• Are you interested in Radical Reference or already a volunteer?
• Do you have experience with website usability or want to gain some?
• Are you a coder with Drupal, CSS or other web development skills to improve or share?

If you fall into at least one of these categories, please join us!

• What does the Radical Reference site currently do, and what would we like it to do?
• What do we like about the site?
• What do we find frustrating?

The goal of this brainstorming session is to create a wishlist of functions and improvements for the site, and a roadmap for how to implement them.

And stick around after for a little social gathering!

ABC No Rio, which often hosts Rad Ref NYC meetings as well as the tech collective, InterActivist Network, that hosts our site, has a 2010 calendar on sale for $10. It's full of black and white photographs, including one that shows the origin of the space's name. Buy a calendar and help heat the building this winter.

October 29, 2009
7:00 pm to 9:00 pm.
Eyebeam - 540 W 21st Street, NYC
http://upgrade.eyebeam.org/2009/10/free-as-in-what

By popular demand, we're now microblogging on identi.ca, too. Open source 4ever!

Radical Reference is now tweeting. Well actually we haven't tweeted anything yet, but the plan is to feed links from our website out to the Twittersphere. (Is it wrong to use that word, like saying "webinar" is wrong?) Our account is RadReference, as some med school student already had radref.

The Fall/Winter 2009/2010 issue of make/shift: Feminisms in Motion contains a sort of mutual interview with Radical Reference librarians Emily Drabinski and Lia Friedman, who is make/shift's staff librarian.

They talk about how integral their librarian and activist identities are to each other.