Image by whoalice-moore via Pixabay.
Articles
The Battle for the Soul of the Library by Stanley Kurtz (The New York Times – gift article, no paywall)
This is an opinion piece by a member of a conservative think tank. Quite interesting… in the context of America’s current scary wave of moral panic about books in school libraries and critical race theory, etc., he’s writing about the need for librarians to be neutral. Mainly, he argues that rather than getting rid of left-leaning books, librarians should maintain balance by also adding right-leaning books. It’s a fairly reasonable-sounding article, except for his frequent evocation of the “woke librarian” as (what I think is) a straw man. Surely librarians are already doing as he suggests and including a range of (respected, well argued) political perspectives?
Here’s a Twitter thread as rebuttal:
https://twitter.com/JPhillipsVT/status/1496914827666759687
Reinventing the School Librarian’s Role: How a NYC Library Director Adapted to Change by Sarah D. Sparks (EdWeek)
How New York’s Library Director adapted teacher librarianship for pandemic online learning conditions. Some interesting ideas here about digital curation, annotation and skillz in general.
How non-librarians imagine a librarian’s typical workday by John Howard Matthews (McSweeny’s)
Hilarious satirical piece. Sample: “7:15 a.m. Arrive to an exact replica of your hometown library, or what you imagine a library to look like, basically where Giles from Buffy works.”
A teacher-librarian pulls back the curtain on school libraries by Caitlin Troutman, Charity Nebbe, Matthew Alvarez (Iowa Public Radio)
Transcript of an interview with TL Chelsea Sims, explaining the policies that a school library follows, the specialist training that TLs receive and the importance of libraries for intellectual freedom and meeting diverse community needs—in the context of recent US book challenges.
What’s It Like to Be the Target of A Book Banning Effort? School Librarian Martha Hickson Tells Her Story. by Martha Hickson (School Library Journal)
Wow, this is an amazing article about one US librarian’s fight against book banning in her school and her advice to others for how to deal with or strengthen systems that might forestall it. The problems they’re having in the US at the moment… yikes. I hope Australia doesn’t go down this road…
‘Throw those in the fire’: As culture wars escalate, so do book bans by Farrah Tomazin (Sydney Morning Herald)
Another article about book censorship in the US and the teachers, librarians & parents fighting it.
Blog posts
Library Nerd Post: Ranganathan’s Laws by Kristin Anderson (Jackson County Library Services)
I read a passing mention of Ranganathan’s five laws of library science in a reading for ETL503 and it sounded so cool that I went in search of some more info. They are cool: totally relevant although written in 1931.
His five laws are:
- Books are for use.
- Every reader his or her [or their] book.*
- Every book its reader.
- Save the time of the reader.
- A library is a growing organism.
* Anderson added the their there 🙂
@JCLS_tweets definitely worth a follow on Twitter.
A brief history of school libraries and teacher librarians in Australia by Krystal Gagen-Spriggs (The Lifting Librarian blog)
Krystal is my new lecturer for ETL503 Resourcing the Curriculum and she has a pretty good blog which I’ve been checking out. This post does what it says on the tin: interesting to read about how TLs began in Oz. There’s a podcast version of it here.
Podcasts
Read the room and Barney Rosset never backed down (On the Media, NPR)
‘Read the room’ (50 min) is about the current book challenges in the US – very interesting set of perspectives, including looking at a Supreme Court case on a similar issue in the 1970s.
‘Barney Rosset never backed down’ (14 min) is a more historical look at book banning via a small publishing firm (Grove Press) in the US that faced censorship in the 1950s and 60s for publishing a Who’s Who of banned books: Lady Chatterly’s Lover by D.H. Lawrence, Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller and Naked Lunch by William S. Burroughs. They also published many other controversial books, such as The Autobiography of Malcolm X by Malcolm X with Alex Haley and Waiting for Godot by
The chequered history of great public libraries (ABC Radio National)
Geraldine Doogue interviews Professor Andrew Pettegree about the history of libraries (15 mins). He wrote a book about it with Arthur der Weduwen – I’m getting it for my birthday. Yay! Article version of this interview here.
The evolving fragile history of the library (ABC)
Same guys (Pettegree & Weduwen), same topic, but this time 51 minutes.
TikTok
Also, I might be slightly obsessed with [U.S. high school librarian] Kelsey Bogan’s TikTok account…
… aaaaand her Twitter account.
She retweeted my tweet (of her blog post) 😊
https://twitter.com/kelseybogan/status/1490764451557134341
MEANWHILE, BACK AT THE LIBRARY... 
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