Radical Reference NYC met on June 20th 2008 at 8PM at ABC NoRio.
I didn’t write down who was there!
On the agenda was the upcoming RNC convention in St. Paul, a potential fundraiser or fundraisers to support RadRef presenters attending IFLA
RNC St. Paul: Alycia began the discussion: a message was sent to the RR list to see who might be going to MN or be willing to do home support. There were a lot of offers of home support, but not much in the way of folks heading out there.
There may be some local people who could use our home support services in putting together their own street reference.
If there is local enthusiasm for creating a twin cities Radical Reference collective we could supply them with the basics of how the RR NYC collective was put together, and some of the resources that were put together for the 2004 RNC here.
[During this discussion there was a digression on roller derby, as we are all looking forward to the next bout of the Jersey City Bridge and Pummel on July 18. The idea of creating a Radical Roller Derby event for an ALA conference was met with giddy enthusiasm. John took the opportunity to grouse unrelatedly on the use of the term “pimp” in an ALA-approved event (“pimp my bookcart”).]
Fundraiser(s): Julie has volunteered to be the point person on this. The IFLA conference is expensive, $640 each for two attendees. In addition to doing events here, we could suggest that other areas do events, as well as put out a call for donations to the list.
We discussed possibly having two events, one at Brecht Forum and one at ABC NoRio. Two possible events would be something like the movie nioght and zine readings that have done well in the past, and a presentation/survey of radical archives. The latter seems a better fit for Brecht, the former for NoRio. Although climate control for summer is better at Brecht, the archives event seems better for Fall, once schools are back, than for summer.
As a variation on the movie night/zine reading idea, we came up with the idea of screening episodes of teen-oriented TV dramas, settling on Freaks and Geeks/DeGrassi/My So-Called Life. The episodes will be interspersed with librarians and others telling stories about interesting interactions with patrons.
Julie will work on getting permits to sell beer at the event.
For the Fall event on Radical Archives, we need to identify some likely collections, and decide how the event will be structured. Vani offered to reach out the Lesbian Herstory Archives, and Melissa (?) offered to contact Brecht Forum about possible dates. We will discuss this event at a later time.
Alternative Materials into Libraries, a Creators’ Guide: John reports that the question of how to get alternative materials, especially but not only film documentaries, into library collections came up several times around the Grassroots Media Conference and its follow-up. With there are several statements on the librarian side about the importance of making this happen, it seems that library acquisitions practices may not be well understood by small or independent publishers and creators. Especially important is getting materials into public libraries. Subsequent discussion on the RadRef site around a posted question and blog post have confirmed interest in meeting this information need.
The GMC is trying to have events outside the conference, during the year, collaborating with partner organizations (such as RadRef) on networking events and/or workshops. Perhaps in RR-NYC committed to a date in mid-Fall it would provide incentive to keep working on this project, and we could use that event to get feedback from media creators
Pllease feel free to edit with corrections, etc.
