(07:57 pm) Not Censorship But Selection

    The following email was posted by the infamous Don Wood on the Intellectual Freedom Round Table listserv. If you get a chance please read the paper it links to. I'll be talking about it after Thanksgiving. Email:

Not Censorship But Selection
http://www.ala.org/ala/oif/basics/notcensorship.htm

"In the last analysis, this is what makes a profession: the earned confidence of those it serves. But that confidence must be earned, and it can be only if we remain true to the ideals for which our profession stands. In the profession of librarianship, these ideals are embodied, in part at least, in the special characteristics which distinguish selection from censorship."

"Not Censorship But Selection," by Lester Asheim, was first published in the Wilson Library Bulletin, 28 (September 1953), 63-67. Permission to mount this article on the ALA OIF Web site was granted to the ALA Office for Intellectual Freedom in November 2005 by Michael Frank, Lester Asheim's nephew.

  (07:52 pm) ALA Council Survey

    Library Dust has one up.

  (07:50 pm) An American Sickness

    From Jay Nordlinger's column this past Thursday:

"Not a minute too soon, President Bush and Vice President Cheney are fighting back against this "Bush lied" nonsense. About the worst charge you can level against a president is that he lied his country into war - an unnecessary war. And this lie has been gaining traction among people. What Bush always had going for him - from the first; since he started running in Texas - was that he was a "straight shooter." He was almost painfully honest. Even if you didn't like him, or his policies, you knew he was sincere, that what you saw was what you got. This is an invaluable quality for a politician. (Reagan had it too.)

And Bush is now widely seen as shady, shifty - Nixonian. That is an alarming and stupid reversal.

Of course, as has been amply documented in National Review and elsewhere, the Bush-lied charge is the biggest lie of all. (For a total demolition of this lie, see Norman Podhoretz's piece in Commentary.) That this lie has made such progress says something sick about our culture. That Joseph Wilson is basically a figure of respect rather than infamy says something sick about that culture, too - especially our media culture. His lies have been exposed again and again, and he ought to go away somewhere, Agnew-like, to atone. Instead, he is a proud celebrity. Again, this is sick.

Meanwhile, Bush, Cheney, et al. have a war to win. They have a society to protect, against people bent on doing it harm. Bush and his team are constantly attacked as torturers, as haters of civil liberties - but as soon as any American is killed, they will be condemned as lax.

This is the burden of leadership. The rest of us can just sit at our typewriters and carp. The administration is supposed to stop the Lackawanna Six. But we get to say that the Patriot Act is an expression of McCarthyite evil. Isn't that a sweet deal - for us? All the administration can do is perform. And if they do their jobs, they will be thanked - maybe not soon, and maybe not even in their lifetimes, but eventually, I believe. And I think Bush knows this, too."

    Now, I sat through Fox News Sunday last week when Senator Rockefeller made the most appalling statement I have heard since the war began. That more hasn't been made of it is due to the sickness above. But I don't want anybody trying to tell me that there were no WMDs or that intelligence was off. How will we ever know the truth when a United States Senator was warning countries who could and would help Iraq a full year in advance of us going in?

  (06:55 pm) re: Technology and Libraries

    Somebody sent me an email asking why I don't try podcasting for the library. 2 reasons.

    1. Not to knock those who do podcasts but unless you've got the voice to pull it off the selling points for podcasting become very limited. If you've got a Marilyn Monroe or James Earl Jones on your staff (at least in the voice area) then by all means go for it. Otherwise podcasts simply aren't very dynamic. Now granted video is certainly more brutal a medium. Combined with the librarian stereotypes that we have earned, like it or not, you'd think video would be worse then audio. But its not. Unless you have 'the voice' its much easier to keep someone's attention visually then simply talking to them. You can bring in extra visuals (books etc.) and cut in slides with detailed information. You can be a very ordinary person and supply an extraordinary presentation. An ordinary voice is an ordinary voice.

    2. Podcasting is closer to blogging then what I talked about in terms of video. Now we only do a monthly program that takes less and less prep the more we do it and we skip the summer. For podcasting to be effective I would think you'd have to do it weekly. Yes, it too would get easier the more you do it but that's still a larger time investment than most people are going to be comfortable with. Its very hard to be creative on a regular basis and I would be wary of writing checks that your schedule can't cash.