Riot Librarian

Category: politics

  • Who We Are

    If I said I was feeling defeated last week, that feeling has multiplied by 1,000 after the results of this week’s election. US voters elected Trump to another four years in office, an action which, while not surprising, still leaves me reeling. there are so many thoughts connected to this election that I’m trying to…

  • Et tu, brute?

    Other people have said more insightful and salient things about Penguin’s recent defection from Overdrive, but I didn’t want to let this one go without saying something. Penguin’s decision to pull all ebooks from Overdrive’s lending program is a huge disappointment (especially when you consider it in light of the fact that they make a…

  • Banned Books Week: A Defense

    Another Banned Books Week is coming to a close, and once again, my RSS feed has been filled with arguments for and against this most well-known library tradition. I’ve always been a supporter of Banned Books Week, even organizing events around it for the Simmons College community when I was chair of the Simmons Progressive…

  • Michael Porter on Library Renewal and eResources

    Michael Porter presented a session with a nice, attention-grabbing title at ALA Annual: “You Mean Libraries Will Be Able to Deliver Content Better than iTunes and Netflix?” The session wasn’t really about how libraries will deliver content better than commercial providers; it was more like a rousing exhortation to libraries to start re-thinking how we…

  • More thoughts on ebooks, and preservation

    I haven’t had a lot of time to sit down and write up a polished piece on ebooks and my growing reservations, but I wanted to get a few thoughts out of my head in the midst of the madness that is my life these days. My growing reservations are really around one of the…

  • The endless complications of smut in the library

    I’ve seen this story pop up a few times over the last few days, about Barbara Ann Wilson, the librarian who is suing her library, the Birmingham Public Library, for tolerating a sexually hostile work environment. Wilson says that patrons view sexually explicit materials and sexually harass her, and that the Library management and the…

  • Brief segue into politics, and some stuff about books to make you happy

    I used to blog about politics all the time. But after the 2004 election, I lost my taste for it. Campaigns seemed to be existing in this bubble of spin and dishonesty, far removed from facts, from the information people needed to make informed choices. It seemed that what candidates talked about had no meaning.…

  • OpenCongress.org

    Thanks to ReadWriteWeb (how did I only just start reading this blog?) for bringing to attention OpenCongress.org–this is a great site that pulls together tons of information on the US Congress and offers users a variety of ways to stay up-to-date about their Congressional representatives and all the (probably nefarious) activities going on in Washington.…

  • You cannot escape the consumer culture

    Not even at the library, apparently. At least not in certain counties in England anymore. What I don’t understand is why the plan seems to be so ill thought out. The Policy Director, Guy Daines, says they used to give advertising bookmarks, and he’s concerned about the work of putting ad inserts into all the…

  • Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and Bin Laden, from the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001

    I will admit that prior to September 11, I paid very little attention to America’s counterterrorist efforts, or even, really, to politics. Seems surprising, considering what a junkie I’ve become, but my youthful politics tended to revolve more around issues of women’s equality and anti-capitalism than foreign policy. Of course, I’m still a feminist and…