Wednesday, August 20th, 2008 at Red and Black Cafe
Approximately 14 librarians and library students attended the first meeting of the PDX RR Collective.
Note: In the future do we want to record names as they do for NYC Collective?
A brief intro on Radical Reference was provided which covered the history and current presence of the group.
All introduced themselves and provided background on why they came to the meeting and what they hope to accomplish as a collective. From these discussions, 20 ideas were generated which fall into the following 7 categories:
1) Advocacy
2) Library / Archive Creation & Maintenance
3) Media
4) Outreach
5) Professional
6) Research / Reference Support
7) Workshops
The ideas are:
Advocacy: Public (and other) library funding: one specific example being the pending Clackamas County Library closures
Library / Archive Creation & Maintenance: Archive assistance and records management; establishing radical subject thesauri and other cataloging projects; Bitch Magazine cataloging project
Media: Fact-checking workshops with Indymedia and other independent journalists; teaming up with Independent Publishing Resource Center and other independent publishers; Media literacy, critique, and deconstruction
Outreach: Ways to assist, help, and collaborate with underserved communities; linking up with other radical groups to provide library / information services; connecting with local on-profits to offer grant help and business information; outreach to increase people of color in library and information science (LIS) field (including outreach to paraprofessional staff); literacy work; creating local fact sheets
Professional: Issues of race, class, gender identity, sexual orientation, and more in libraries; union support; LIS and feminism: introducing pedagogy and critical teaching to library practice and education; Library of Congress Subject Heading critiques
Research / Reference Support: Reference projects for activists seeking sensitive information (i.e. potentially illegal activity); bicycle law support
Workshops: Library and reference skills workshops in activist communities / skillshares
It was decided that the group will use the Radical Reference wiki to host documents. The main RR website is a wiki and there is also a mediawiki installed. You need to create a free user account to use either.
I think to keep things simple we should just use the wiki function directly on the RR site, i.e. how I entered the minutes (Lana)
A listserv will be created; all attendees and those who requested to be kept in the loop will be added to facilitate communication.
It was decided that we will meet monthly and will rotate the day, time, and city quadrant to facilitate greater access by all involved and interested in the collective.
Current Projects and Subjects for Next Meeting:
Lana is currently working on a project to help Bitch Magazine catalog their collection and create a lending library and would love other folks to help out. All interested in helping, please email: lanamt [at] gmail [dot] com
We will work towards establishing guidelines and best practices with regards to time spent on projects and criteria for accepting or denying projects at the next meeting.
People should feel free to use the listserv and wiki if they want to spearhead a project listed above or propose a new one.
Next Meeting: Date and Location TBA – update will be posted here and sent to the listserv.