Wednesday, December 01, 2004

A LIBRARIAN AT EVERY TABLE. No. 227.

A LIBRARIAN AT EVERY TABLE
December 1, 2004. No. 227.
Sources & Sites for Community Building.


Dear sister and brother ALAET subscriber,

I began A-LIBRARIAN-AT-EVERY-TABLE [ALAET] in 2001, not long before the tragic events of September 11. As a professor working at a Florida university (Jeb Bush is governor), I have experienced a sustained shrinkage of the public sphere since 9/11/2001.For background see the article in the newsletter of the Social Responsibilities Round Table of the American Library Association: A Librarian’s Choice: the High Road of Social Responsibility and Ethics or Personal Expediency when Faced by a Devious Government. The student online discussion list at the School of Library and Information Science (where I teach) was shut down by administrative fiat when students and some faculty discussed the war in Iraq in March 2003. Just before the 2004 election a well known environmentalist was banned from speaking at Florida Gulf Coast University because she was critical of the governor’'s brother'’s environmental policies. Terry Tempest Williams Barred From Florida Gulf Coast University

To ensure that I can continue to identify community building sites without administrative censorship I am moving ALAET to this blog-- “A Librarian at Every Table.”

I will still use the ALAET website as an interface to alert you to new posts and to sign up new readers but the actual annotations will be here at this blogspot “A Librarian at Every Table.

Thank you for your interest and contributions over the past 227 issues of A- LIBRARIAN-AT-EVERY-TABLE. I hope the new blog, A Librarian at Every Table, will carry on the same spirit. [Archives of the first 227 posts are at the A LIBRARIAN AT EVERY TABLE ARCHIVE SITE.]

Additionally, I will post general observations about librarianship at Librarian and Librarian 2.

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