Month: February 2007

deleting online information @ ala.org

This morning Don Wood sent a message to Publib saying that DOPA has been reintroduced in the House by Mark Kirk of Illinois.  As you’ve probably read Ted “the internet is a series of tubes” Stevens has also introduced a bill called the “Protecting Children in the 21st Century Act,” which is a sort of son of DOPA. 

Anyway, being the good citizen that I am, I decided to go see what the ALA website had on the subject.  Answer: not much.  Or, more accurately, not much that’s easy to find.  Of course, not being able to find something on the ALA website hardly qualifies as news.  Next I decided to try the Legislative Action Center, which I wrote about back in May, but lo–it has disappeared!  I think that it has been replaced by this site, which seems to do most of the same stuff–but again, I’m not sure.

To be fair, I don’t think ALA is actually deleting online information–but (and again, this is hardly news) it does seem to be making it difficult to find.

misinformation quotation

I wish I had a source for this quotation, but I assume it comes from something I was reading in 2001, when I was teaching at the University of Iowa. I taught this nutty class called the Rhetoric of Drugs, and I was also reading a great deal about the civil rights movement and its aftermath at the time.

I’m spending the day packing for my upcoming move to a house in town (no more frozen pipes–hurrah!). I ran across this scrap of paper, which contains some notes on student speeches, a rough outline of what we were going to read and discuss in March, and the following:

Information is the raw material for new ideas; if you get misinformation, you get some pretty fucked up ideas.

–Eldridge Cleaver, former Minister of Information for the Black Panther Party

It seemed relevant to, well, I could make a list. I’m sure you could make your own.

update

I’m going to be (at least in theory) upgrading to the latest version of WordPress and playing with themes and so on for the next day or so, so expect and excuse the usual glitches, repeated posts, and general zaniness.

a trip to cheyenne

I spent most of this past week in Cheyenne, WY. Well, to be more exact, I spent two days in Cheyenne and two days getting there and back–it’s a seven hour drive from Meeteetse and even farther from Cody and Powell, our other Park County libraries.

Our business in Cheyenne was two-fold: on Wednesday several of us attended a Rural Library Sustainability Workshop, which is sort of a canned workshop developed by WebJunction and put on by the good folks at the Wyoming State Library. Thursday night was the Wyoming Library Association’s legislative reception, where we thanked our legislators for supporting Wyoming libraries (thanks, Pat Childers, Alan Jones, Elaine Harvey, Lorraine Quarberg, Hank Coe, and Ray Peterson, Park County’s delegation!) and encouraged them to support the Wyoming Library Endowment Bill.

As is so often the case, the best part was meeting librarians from around the state and sharing ideas. I also got to meet a few people I knew only from the web, including Digital Initiatives Librarian Erin Kinney, whom I know from Flickr; and Katie Jones from the Wyoming State Law Library, whom I know from their blog, Law Library Letter.

Now I’m back in Meeteetse–back home.