Sunday, February 05, 2006

Good summary of ALA President's program. Daniel writes "The subscription-worthy blog from the Library and Information Technology Association (LITA) has what appears to be an excellent summary of the ALA President's Program with Michael Gorman, Bill Johnson, and Andrei Codrescu. This might provide some additional context for GregS' recent post Am I dreaming?. From the summarized remarks, I think Codrescu makes a good case on behalf of Cuba's informal librarians. The whole "but are they really librarians?" thread troubles me some. Whether or not they are professional librarians, are they not people who wish to share books and other information that the Cuban gov't doesn't approve of? Isn't intellectual freedom a worthy enough goal to defend without needing professional librarians? I recommend this LITA post because it also talks about the rest of the program, which seems worthwhile. I recommend the LITA blog because it's always interesting even if some of it is over my head." [LISNews.org] I went ahead and read the summary (incidentally, I did not attend the Education Forum on friday either and haven't found a summary of that). The introductory comment of the summary which I quote here in full is not only hilarious but quite sad;are we really so naive that we did not anticipate this simply from knowing the speakers bios? Here's the intro comment: "This important program had more than just a little schizophrenic feel to it. People obviously came to hear big name author and PBS commentator Andrei Codrescu, but his remarks had little to do with the title of the event, or with Michael Gorman's focus on library education. That was as it should be (I'm sure no one came to hear Codrescu discuss education for librarians), but it divided the program focus quite dramatically creating an event with a marked split personality." This just reaffirms all over and yet again what Dillon and Norris have said in their conclusion of Crying Wolf. comment []9:57:34 AM

© Copyright 2006 Anita S. Coleman. Last update: 3/5/2006; 3:52:04 PM.