(Via Feministing)
Students at John Carroll University in Ohio protested during a school basketball game over the school’s unwillingness to include sexual orientation to its nondiscrimination policy.

From a student statement on YouTube:

John Carroll’s mission is to create people for others. That means support, protection, love, and understanding for all people without regard to color, creed, sexual preference, gender, age, or other personal factors. That’s the goal of a Jesuit institution.

By not explicitly voicing its support of LGBTQ students, faculty, and alumni, John Carroll’s administration is breaking those unspoken bonds of trust that make JCU a community.

Despite support from the faculty union to include sexual orientation in the policy, the school’s administration is holding firm. JCU President Robert Niehoff issued a statement saying that the policy wouldn’t be changed because it goes against “traditional Catholic moral teaching.”

The nondiscrimination policy is the university’s promise to employees and faculty that the institution will not discriminate based on gender, religion or race. In his message earlier this week, Niehoff issued a lengthy explanation of his views that gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people should be welcomed and respected at the university. He stopped short of recommending that the policy be changed, however, instead offering a “community standards statement” as a supplement to the policy.

Today I received an email inviting me to a webinar on OMEKA, a web based platform for all kinds of collections created by the Center For History & New Media. This sounds pretty great and I definitely am going to read up on this, if not try to watch the webinar (and I’m sorry to have already used the word webinar twice, you’ll have to suffer through it a couple more times I’m afraid)

Here is a blurb from the release for the webinar:

“Omeka is a free and open source collections-based, Web-based platform for scholars, librarians, archivists, museum professionals, educators and cultural enthusiasts. Until now, scholars and cultural heritage professionals looking to publish collections-based research and online exhibitions required either extensive technical skills or considerable funding for outside vendors…

Omeka features a “five-minute setup” that makes launching an online exhibition as easy as launching a blog. Designed with non-IT specialists in mind, it allows users to focus on content and interpretation rather than programming. It brings Web 2.0 technologies and approaches to academic and cultural Web sites to foster user interaction and participation. It also makes top-shelf design easy with a simple and flexible operating system. Omeka’s robust open-source developer and user communities underwrite its stability and sustainability…

Webinar participation is free and open to all but advanced registration is required. This is the second webinar in the OCLC Research Technical Advances for Innovation in Cultural Heritage Institutions (TAI CHI) Webinar Series developed to highlight specific innovative applications, often locally developed, that libraries, museums and archives may find effective in their own environments, as well as to teach technical staff new technologies and skills.  We intend to make recordings of these webinars available on the OCLC Research Web site and in the iTunes Store.”

Imagine the uses for this if it’s as flexible as it seems! Not just for libraries, but “cultural enthusiasts”, and who isn’t a cultural enthusiast of some kind?

More info and advance registration link HERE. 

–Mr Kambaksh was found guilty of blasphemy and sentenced to death last year for circulating an essay on women’s rights which questioned verses in the Koran.

It later emerged he was convicted by three mullahs, in secret, without access to a lawyer. The sentence was commuted to 20 years on appeal. At that appeal, in October, the key prosecution witness withdrew his testimony, claiming he had been forced to lie on pain of death. The prosecution then appealed to the Supreme Court to reinstate the death sentence. The defence appealed to quash his conviction altogether.–

From the Independent online:

Sayed Pervez Kambaksh, the student journalist sentenced to death for blasphemy in Afghanistan, has been told he will spend the next 20 years in jail after the country’s highest court ruled against him – without even hearing his defence.

The 23-year-old, brought to worldwide attention after an Independent campaign, was praying that Afghanistan’s top judges would quash his conviction for lack of evidence, or because he was tried in secret and convicted without a defence lawyer. Instead, almost 18 months after he was arrested for allegedly circulating an article about women’s rights, any hope of justice and due process evaporated amid gross irregularities, allegations of corruption and coercion at the Supreme Court. Justices issued their decision in secret, without letting Mr Kambaksh’s lawyer submit so much as a word in his defence.

(more…)

The American Library Association has pulled out all of the library related hoo ha from the Stimulus Package, which was nice of them. You can find it HERE.

Thanks to the NPR Librarians blog (…as a matter of fact)  for letting me know.

Shai Reshef has started  a new venture, The University of the People, which will begin classes in spring of 2009. Reshef isn’t new to online school adventures, he started an online university in Europe, which he sold to Laureate, and a testing preparation company in Israel, which he sold to Kaplan. UOP will be an almost free online university, with cost determined on a sliding scale based on the wealth of their country of origin,  initially offering degrees in Business Administration and Computer Science, with more in the works. The best part is that some of the learning and teaching will be peer-to-peer, with students doing the teaching. Learn more HERE and listen to a podcast with Reshef HERE.

Interesting Open Access Experiment

More here

But this recent posting on the iilalumni list gave me just a tiny bit of pause. What a great way to attract great potential recruits! Anyone out there want to move to move to Gettysburg?
Here’s the post in full– after the jump they lay out what they are looking for..I know a lot of people who have the skills who would be great in this position:

‘Are you tired of being a cog in the wheel?  Do you feel stuck in a bureaucratic rat race?  Do you have good ideas and no way to get them on the radar screen?
Do you wish you had more interesting professional development opportunities?
Do you like country living close to a metropolitan area?  Are you interested in being part of a strong liberal arts environment with service at its core?  Do you like the idea of working in a place where you can really make a difference?
If you answered “yes” to any of the above, please read on.
(more…)

From the CHE via Kathleen de la Peña McCook

November 30, 2008

The University of California will set aside money from its own budget to continue a labor-research program on its Berkeley and Los Angeles campuses that Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger eliminated from the state budget in September, the San Francisco Chronicle reported.

Mark G. Yudof, president of the university system, agreed to use $4- million in university funds to keep the Miguel Contreras Labor Program operating through this fiscal year, which ends on June 30, the newspaper said. The university is also asking the state to finance the program next year.

The program, whose budget the governor also has proposed cutting in previous years, has produced policy research and educated students on labor and employment issues for eight years. Portions of the program´s work, including training for union leaders, have often sparked controversy among politicians in the state.

After the governor´s veto of money for the program this fall, more than 400 faculty and staff members at California colleges sent Mr.

Schwarzenegger a letter of protest in which they called the elimination of the program an “unwarranted political interference in the academic activities of the University of California.”

Aides to the governor have said that the cut was not political, but that the state´s budget deficit had forced him to eliminate money for several state programs.

The $4-million the university will spend on the program is $1.4- million shy of the amount that was cut from the state budget. That $1.4-million would have been used to pay for small grants and other funds for campuses other than those in Berkeley and Los Angeles to conduct labor and employment research, the San Francisco newspaper said. -Sara Hebel

I don’t know how I missed this, but this week, after 52 years of operation The Donnell Library in NYC is closing. It doesn’t sound like the librarians and library workers knew too much about it either..
“I cried,” said Esther Hauzwig, 77, who works two days a week at the information desk at Donnell, recalling her reaction to the news last November that the library would close for several years. “I’ve been working here for 25 years.” When asked if she would miss the current building, she replied: “You bet your sweet bippy! I am not disappointed. I am furious!”(NYT City Room Blog)

The building is being torn down to make room for a hotel, which (oddly) will house a new “branch” of the Donnell in the basement.

Said a long time patron, Mr. Rabadi “A library is like a laboratory for culture…We’ve lost the fabric of life. The whole place has become a shopping mall.”He found no consolation in the fact that part of the new hotel will house a library. “They will offer us a grave in the basement,” he said. “Maybe this is a reflection on the value of culture. Capitalism has no mercy for culture. So culture becomes subversive — like reading in a bomb shelter.”

Confusion abounds though as to what that will mean–NYPL details where the collections, including the much loved Winnie -the-Pooh & friends doll collection, will be moved– here. This branch was well loved and well used in the community given it’s location (W 53rd, across from the Museum Of Modern Art) and will be missed. Read more from the NYT here.

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