Viva RR!

Do subject headings still matter? We say they do.

Does the Library of Congress always identify accessible and appropriately named headings and implement them in a timely manner? We say not always. All you have to do is spend one day behind a reference desk to see examples of biased, non-inclusive, and counterintuitive classifications that slow down, misdirect, or even obscure information from library users. As librarians and library workers, providing access to information is important-and classifying it in ways that are inclusive and intuitive strengthens our egalitarian mission.

Between now and Sunday, April 27, Radical Reference invites you to suggest subject headings and/or cross-references which will then be compiled and sent to the Library of Congress. You can either choose one previously suggested by Sandy Berman (pdf or spreadsheet) or propose your own.

This is a chance to positively impact the catalog of the de facto national library of the United States, which also impacts cataloging all over the world! Here’s how…

The plan
Some time between now and Sunday, April 27 at 6pm Eastern:

1. Select one or more subject headings or cross-references to suggest
2. Provide material to support your suggestion (in the form of a link and excerpted text/image)
3. Blog it somewhere (your own site; Radical Reference–if you’re a registered and authenticated user on the site, you can create your own blog post, if not, just make it a comment to this post; an online file sharing service like Google Docs or Zoho)
4. Tag it for del.icio.us: rr_lcsh2008 and for:radical_reference. If you don’t have a delicious account email me, and I’ll tag it for you.
5. If you are suggesting a subject heading not previously submitted to LC (e.g. not on Sandy’s scorecard), also submit your proposal to the Program for Cooperative Cataloging.
6. For discussion and help, join the Meebo and/or Skype chat,which will be active on Sunday from 4-6 ET for sure, and other times, as staffed.
7. If you are in the NYC area, you can come to the ABC No Rio Computer Center on Manhattan’s Lower East Side for some in person collaboration.
8. We will email a link to the tagged items to LC, print out a copy of each blog post and mail it to Sandy, and we’re kinda hoping that the members of the RADCAT (radical cataloging) discussion list will consider entering some of the suggested headings properly into the proposal for

   Example of a new subject heading request.Example of a new cross-references request.

and:

Here’s a link to the SACO Manual that might help everyone understand what is needed for filling out the form. The examples are really great, but library lingo-heavy.

http://www.loc.gov/catdir/pcc/saco/SACOManual2007.pdf

The OpenNet initiative has just finished a study, newly released in a book detailing a large scale study on access around the world to the free web. They examine global internet filtering country by country and rate it from ‘no evidence of filtering’ to ‘pervasive filtering’. Turns out at least 40 states around the world participate in some form of filtering, and that the filtering is in relation to “politics, but also relating to sexuality, culture, or religion–(subjects) that they deem too sensitive for ordinary citizens” Lawrence Lessig, in his review of the book says “No one had a clear sense of the nature of Internet censorship until now. This extraordinary work maps the unfreedom of the Net. Unfortunately, that state is becoming the norm.”

Book available from MIT Press. Citation: Ronald Deibert, John Palfrey, Rafal Rohozinski, Jonathan Zittrain, eds., Access Denied: The Practice and Policy of Global Internet Filtering, (Cambridge: MIT Press) 2008

Link, Via BoingBoing

The Chronicle of Higher Education reported today that a bill in Arizona has passed that would ban students in public schools from meeting on campus if they are organized based on race or ethnicity. Even more troubling is the section of the bill that “bar(s) public elementary and secondary schools from teaching anything counter to Western civilization.“(italics mine) Western Civilization? Can I get a definition of that please?

Republican  Rep. John Kavanagh,  said: “This bill basically says, ‘You’re here. Adopt American values.’ If you want a different culture, then fine, go back to that culture.”

For more, read this totally not biased article at The Arizona Republic titled “Plan Targets Anti-Western Lessons” for gems like this: “Pearce, a Mesa Republican, said his target isn’t diversity instruction, but schools that use taxpayer dollars to indoctrinate students in what he characterized as anti-American or seditious thinking. The measure is at least partially a response to a controversy surrounding an ethnic-studies program in the Tucson Unified School District, which critics have said is unpatriotic and teaches revolution.”

The Navajo Nation is currently without any connectivity, due to the fact that the federal government owes the provider, OnSat @ 2 million dollars. Apparently the government believes that they have been double billed or duped in some way and so are withholding payment. The thing is, because this is a reservation, and because the federal government is already screwing the Navajo with their pants on, the fact that someone can’t read what Perez has to say isn’t the point. The point is that many Navajo children live too far away from the tribal schools to attend in person regularly, and many of them attend school virtually part of the time, or submit work online. The tribe is in the process of building a wireless grid, but it’s a ways off. “Our goal in this whole thing is by 2010, we want to catch up to the rest of the nation,”.

From Forbes:

Via BoingBoing 

I’ve been following this issue since the brouhaha that erupted after Verizon blocked NARAL (the national abortion rights action league) from allowing supporters to use SMS to subscribe to news alerts, stating that they often did not allow “unsavory” or “highly controversial”organizations to use this service. Now the FCC is getting close to making their decision on the legality of such a block– they are still accepting feedback from the public …

Read about it at Ars Technica

Or after the jump more»

I was excited to see Library Journal covering this report. As Albanese states, this may not lead to anything…but it’s a good start. The language in the report is vague, but in my opinion that is the only way to go with issues like this. We’ll never get anywhere if we request unfettered access, digitization or unlimited preservation copies to works in question–so using phrases like “reasonably necessary” gives both libraries, and legislators, elbow room. Click here to read the executive summary (or the full report if you’ve got a spare hour) and to see a somehow very sweet & grainy picture of the 108 crew.

From Library Journal:

Andrew Albanese — Library Journal, 4/2/2008

The Section 108 Study Group has delivered its long-awaited report. The diverse 19-member panel was chartered in 2005 to inform legislative changes to update the Copyright Act’s exception for libraries and archives for the digital age, but it remains unclear how quickly, or if, the group’s carefully-worded, conditioned recommendations will ever make it into law. The were delivered to the Librarian of Congress, James Billington, and the Register of Copyrights, MaryBeth Peters, this week, and are intended to “provide a basis on which legislation could be drafted and recommended to Congress.” Overall, the report reflects significant work and discussion on a range of issues relating to libraries and copyright-but also deep, ongoing tension between publishers and libraries in the digital age.

Notably, the report recommended the Section 108 exception be extended to museums, which are currently ineligible. That, however, represents the only clear, unambiguous recommendation in the report. The others include broad language that could be interpreted many ways by legislators. For example, the report suggests Section 108’s “three copy rule,” which permits libraries make up to three copies of a published work for replacement purposes, be amended to allow “a limited number of copies as reasonably necessary” to create and maintain “a single replacement copy.” That point is further conditioned, however, on a library determining that a replacement copy is not available at a “fair price,” and an acknowledgement that “there may be circumstances under which a licensed copy of a work qualifies as a copy obtainable at a fair price.” more»

Looky here..for a statement from the Dean of The Public School of Health.

Want to let them know you agree? Tell them thanks for having our backs? contact Tim Parsons at 410-955-7619 or at tmparson@jhsph.edu

For more info on this whole thing see below, or go here or here or here.

UPDATE (4.3.08 2:40 PST) From the Radical Reference site:

See this blog entry for an alternate search strategy:http://brassratgirl.livejournal.com/417175.html

…Here is the response from POPLINE’s Debra L. Dickson:

Yes we did make a change in POPLINE. We recently made all abortion terms stop words. As a federally funded project, we decided this was best for now. In addition to the terms you’re already using, you could try using ‘Fertility Control, Postconception’. This is the broader term to our ‘Abortion’ terms and most records have both in the keyword fields. Also, adding ‘unwanted w2 pregnancy’ in place of aborti*. We have a keyword Pregnancy, Unwanted and there are 2517 records with aborti* & unwanted w2 pregnancy.

You can contact Ms. Dickson here: Debra L. Dickson

POPLINE Database Manager/AdministratorINFO Project    111 Market Place, Suite 310, Baltimore, MD 21202        ddickson@jhuccp.org   Tel: 410-659-6300 / Fax: 410-659-6266 

 —

Your tax dollars at work. Yesterday I saw a posting on the Progressive Librarian Guild list stating that the word ‘abortion’ was now a stop word* on POPLINE, a database of the “World’s reproductive health literature” This means that they will not find results when a person uses ‘abortion’ as a search term. Nothing will come up. Librarian Activist says that:”A librarian wrote to the POPLINE database providers to ask why a search strategy, probably involving the word abortion, retrieved fewer results than it did 3 months earlier. The response was:

‘Yes we did make a change in POPLINE. We recently made all abortion terms stop words. As a federally funded project, we decided this was best for now.’  

Best for now? I don’t think so. Contact POPLINE here.Info about POPLINE from their site:

POPLINE(POPulation information onLINE), the world’s largest database on reproductive health, containing citations with abstracts to scientific articles, reports, books, and unpublished reports in the field of population, family planning, and related health issues. POPLINE is maintained by the INFO Project at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health/Center for Communication Programs and is funded by the United States Agency for International Development. (USAID).

* A stop word is a word like ‘and’ which databases commonly ignore.

I almost can’t even wrap my head around this, but apparently, kids hate emos. They hate them so much that they want to “kill them”. Another kid says: “We’ve never seen all the urban tribes unite against one single tribe before… Emos, their way of thinking is for crap, if you are so depressed please do us all a favour and kill yourselves!” What would Elliot Smith or Ian MacKaye say about all this?

Via BoingBoing:

“Brock Thiessen at Exclaim reports on the anti-emo backlash said to be sweeping through Mexico:

‘According to Daniel Hernandez, who’s been covering the anti-emo riots on his blog Intersections, the violence began March 7, when an estimated 800 young people poured into the Mexican city of Queretaro’s main plaza “hunting” for emo kids to pummel. Then the following weekend similar violence occurred in Mexico City at the Glorieta de Insurgents, a central gathering space for emos. Hernandez also reports that several anti-emo riots have now also spread to various other Mexican cities. Via the Austin American Statesmen, several postings on Mexican social-networking sites, primarily organising spot for these “emo hunts,” have been dug up and translated. One states: “I HATE EMOS!!! They are not even people, they are so stupid, they cry over meaningless things… My school is infested with them, I want to kill them all!”’

If that isn’t enough for you–check out the YouTube video..

Mark Frauenfelder for BoingBoing blogged live from TED this year and had this great posting about Phillip Zimbardo’s talk on the Lucifer Effect and his experiences as the creator of the Stanford Prison Experiment.

“Presenter: Professor Philip Zimbardo, creator of the famous Stanford Prison Experiment in the 1971 which put students into a prison setting, randomly chosen to be either guards or prisoners. He is the author of Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil .

Zimbardo is a very lively and engaging 75-year-old with a devilish van dyke beard.

For decades, he has been studying what makes people go wrong. Raised in South Bronx, he saw his friends live Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde lives. He learned that “the line between good and evil is movable and permeable.” In other words, we all have the capacity to be good or evil. The human mind has an infinite capacity to make any of us kind or cruel, caring or indifferent. more»

Many of you have already been subjected to one of my favorite videos of the crow that makes a hook–and gets food out of a tube using it. Now, two cryptic message posts-one from Treehugger and one from BoingBoing (Blogging live from TED) gies me hope of another awesome example of how crows are perhaps the smartest, or at least trickiest animals on earth..

From Boing Boing

“Technology hacker Joshua Klein built a vending machine that teaches crows to deposit coins they find into a special vending machine that dispenses peanuts. He has been studying crows for over ten years and has learned that they are very intelligent. Their brain/body weight ratios are similar to chimpanzees. He’s showing a video of how a crow learned to use a tool to pull an object out of of a tube. It’s impressive.

Crows are smart and adaptable. For example, they drop nuts on streets so cars run over them, then wait for the traffic signal to change so they can pick up the food. Other crows who see this happen quickly learn how to do this for themselves.

His machine uses Skinnerian training. He put coins and peanuts around the machine. The crows eat the peanut on the feeder tray. Then Joshua took away the nuts and left coins in the feeder tray. It pisses off the crows. They sweep the coins around with their beaks, looking for food. When a coin accidentally drops into the slot, it dispenses a peanut. Next, Joshua took away the coins. The crows learned to find coins elsewhere and deposit them. So now he wants to train crows for search and rescue, picking up trash, and other mutually beneficial tasks.”

If you contribute to or own a blog, in which the word ‘blog’ is contained in the title (for example http://googleblog.blogspot.com/) the US Air Force is blocking you. The AF has “cut off access to all external websites that contain the term “blog” in the URL. The official argument is that blogs aren’t legitimate media outlets and therefore, shouldn’t be read at work.” Ouch! So those of us using WP are somehow in the clear (and more legitimate? I don’t think so..) but all those blogspot writers are NSFW.  “At least one senior Air Force official calls the squeeze so “utterly stupid, it makes me want to scream.” 

Via Digital  Inspiration-full story at Wired

From the BLF
“The Billboard Liberation Front today announced a major new advertising improvement campaign executed on behalf of clients AT&T and the National Security Agency. Focusing on billboards in the San Francisco area, this improvement action is designed to promote and celebrate the innovative collaboration of these two global communications giants.”

 Just click on the photo to enlarge..

In Romania, police officers have started taking ballet classes. “The aim is to develop an ability to regulate traffic and achieve elegance in their movements, which will not only be agreeable to the eyes but could also help drivers waiting at a red light get rid of their stress or sadness,” the head of the community police in the town of Timisoara, Dorel Cojan, told AFP.

The thing that I find interesting however, is that they don’t seem to address the idea that the dancing will make the officers less stressed..which seems like a pretty relevant part of the experiment and perhaps more important than reducing the stress of those behind the wheel. You can look at a video here

From Danah, via BoingBoing
I LOVE THIS

“Texas Republicans have worked overtime to make it harder for key Democratic voting groups to vote and be represented fairly. The redistricting games they’ve played are infamous. And for the Prairie View A&M University precincts, they put the early-polling place more than seven miles from the school.

So what did the students in this video do? They shut down the highway as they marched seven miles to cast their votes on the first day of early voting.”
Click here to watch the video!

Ask Farm Bill Conferees to Keep Libraries in Rural Telecommunications Section of H.R. 2419 (from ALA)

For Those With Senators and Representatives on Agriculture Committees
Ask all Members of both the Senate and House Agriculture Committees to support the Senate version of the Farm, Nutrition, and Bioenergy Act of 2007 (H.R. 2419), Section 6302, to include “libraries” in the rural telecommunications program: “Telemedicine, Library Connectivity, and Distance Learning Services in Rural Areas.” The conference committee on H.R. 2419 is meeting now and library supporters are needed to keep messages going into the conferees.

For Other Library Supporters
Contact all of your respective Senators and Representatives and ask them to contact Farm Bill conferees to keep libraries in Section 6302.
The SENATE COMMITTEE ON AGRICULTURE, NUTRITION AND FORESTRY is FAX: 202-224-1725, and the HOUSE COMMITTEE ON AGRICULTURE is FAX: 202-225-8510.
A complete list of the Committee members names, as well as background information, can be found here

from the Australian Antarctic Division: “The return of the last of three Antarctic marine science research vessels marks the culmination of one of Australia’s most ambitious International Polar Year projects, a census of life in the icy Southern Ocean known as the Collaborative East Antarctic Marine Census (CEAMARC). Australia’s Aurora Australis and collaborating vessels L’Astrolabe (France) and Umitaka Maru (Japan) have returned from the Southern Ocean, their decks overflowing with a vast array of ocean life including a number of previously unknown species collected from the cold waters near the East Antarctic land mass. The stalked structures looking like glass tulips are actually animals known as tunicates:

They are early colonisers of areas recently disturbed by ice-berg scouring. They filter food particles from the water by pumping it through an internal mesh structure and the stalk is supported by hydrostatic pressure created by their pump. Feather stars (crinoids), sea cucumbers (holothurians) and another species of tunicate have used the stalked tunicates to gain height to give them an advantage in intercepting food particles from the water before it reaches the sea-bed. The sediment surface is covered with a mass of tubes, probably of small polycheate worms.”

From BoingBoing:

Rogue archivist Carl Malamud writes:

“Paul Jones of iBiblio tipped me off to some recent M&A activity by Microsoft, this time involving the Library of Congress.

This deal involves the donation of “technology, services and funding” (e.g., mostly not money) with a purported value of $3m from Microsoft to the Library of Congress. The Library, in turn, agrees to put kiosks running Vista in the library and to use Microsoft Silverlight to “help power the library’s new Web site, www.myloc.gov.”

The official blogger of the library, Matt Raymond, says “this is really a quantum leap for the library.” Perhaps it is, but it sure smells like a whole lot of proprietary.

While at the Midwinter ALA Radical Reference meeting we were visited by a young man who wanted to talk to us about a new project he was working on.. The Open Library, which essentially frees up library records for all. It sounded like an exciting project, and I liked his moxie. That said, I didn’t know anything about him and wondered about the viability of his project. Then I stumbled across this article from the Chronicle, detailing his project, and also detailing him and his past projects. Turns out he helped write RSS at the age of 14, and then sold his company Reddit to Conde Nast while still a teen. Ho hum. I have much greater confidence and renewed excitement about this project. If you’re a librarian, help him out!

I would so vote for him, seriously!

From The Chronicle Of Higher Education
Technology blogs are abuzz today about the possibility of Lawrence Lessig, a Stanford University law professor, running for the seat in the U.S. House of Representatives previously held by Rep. Tom Lantos, a California Democrat who died this week. Mr. Lessig is well regarded by many legal and cyberspace scholars for his writings and speeches advocating that the U.S. legal system change to support the sharing of ideas and cultural and scientific works.

Jonathan Zittrain, a professor of Internet governance and regulation at the University of Oxford, notes on his blog today that Mr. Lessig has registered the domain name Change-Congress.com. And Jonathan Palfrey Jr., a law professor at Harvard University, has set up a “Draft Lessig for Congress” page on Facebook, the social networking site. The special election for Mr. Lantos’s seat is April 8.—Andrea Foster