Week II: Information in Democratizing
Societies
Major Topics:
Major Topics:
- Library and print traditions as shared repositories for cultural and working knowledge
- The development of symbolic representation and knowledge in the West
- The library as a public service institution
- Knowledge difference and social inequality
- Professionalism and information use
- Social and economic barriers to information access
- American Library Association views on censorship, access, and the First Amendment
Assigned Readings:
- Redmond Kathleen Molz and Phyllis Dain, Civic Space/Cyberspace: The American Public Library in the Information Age (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999), pp. 1-44 and 123-182. (some pages skipped). Note well: this is a long reading, so budget your time and information access method accordingly.
- Shapiro, J. J., Hughes, S. K. (1996) "Information Literacy as a Liberal Art." Educom Review XXXI:2 (March-April).
- Kranich, N. (2001) "Libraries Create Social Capital." Library Journal (11/15/2001).
- American Library Association. (2000) "Freedom to Read".
- From a recent NY Times in the "Fashion and Style" section[!], an article on how librarianship is now a hip profession (check out the kewl ppl in the pics). BTW, the "Librarian Avengers" Web site is maintained by a former SI student, Erica Olsen.
- IFLA statement on universal rights to access.
- As an nice adjunct to the notion of how good libraries adapt to their changing clienteles, here's a piece on the social history of lower Manhattan, as seen by a branch library.
Recommended Readings:
- First, the fun stuff: a cartoon about how the traditional public mission of libraries seems subversive in this age of privatized information
- In lecture, you saw an image of an anti-slavery primer from 1864; here's the whole publication, with all credits noted: The Gospel of Slavery
- The literature on information literacy is large, but Kate Williams, "Literacy and Computer Literacy: Analyzing the NRC's 'Being Fluent with Information Technology'," The Journal of Literacy and Technology III:1 (Spring 2003), is a good place to start. It's dense and heady, so take a deep breath before reading the work of this recent School of Information Ph.D.
- Now, an item on how the rebuilt Library at Alexandria is striving to leap centuries by presenting electronic content
- You might be bored to death by all of this history, but here William McNeill, in 5.5 pages, offers a history of humans as manipulators of symbols.
- This item is a bit dense, but it does show how stroytelling is not just for librarians and kids; it turns out that even within high-tech businesses, people tell stories as a way of making sense of what they do.
- We don't cover this much in this course, but this report argues that university presses have largely missed the boat with the Internet.
- Not unlike the censorship the Bush Administration imposes on women's health and AIDS initiatives, we're seeing similar censorship on drug information, but librarians are fighting back.
- A couple of pieces on the social image of librarians; one about the current job market for librarians, the other a sort of manifesto
- Finally, more details on the ties between IBM and the Nazis.