Last weekend I attended the Women, Action & the Media conference at MIT in Cambridge, MA. It was generally empowering and exciting to be at an activist event with a probably 90%+ female population--to learn about all the inspiring work being done, especially by young and youngish women of color.
I know it's probably bad form to post the same thing on more than one of my blogs, but it's hard not to when you really really really want to get the word out about something. So, please go see my Radical Reference post on how a government funded database on reproductive health is deliberately sabotaging access to information about abortion. (emphasis added)
Pratt Institute library school talk, April 9, 2008.
This is about activism in your library and in your life, focusing on Radical Reference and the Barnard Library Zine Collection and hoping that session participants will feel empowered to develop projects and collections in their libraries and lives. Romel Espinel invited me on behalf of SILSSA.
Lana Thelen
Women and Media Conference, 2008
This workshop will introduce skills to novice and veteran media makers alike, encouraging them to 'research like a librarian,' providing tips on how to find and recognize appropriate resources for researching and fact checking their stories. The presenters will be happy to adapt this workshop to whomever is in the room, but the impetus for proposing it is sharing skills with those newer to advanced research and critical thinking. However, people who are already confident in their research skills will undoubtedly learn some things, too. The facilitators can field questions on fact checking and research, but also on the mysteries of tagging, RSS feeds and the like. Slides and handouts available from Radical Reference.
I'm trying to clean out my inbox, close Firefox tabs, and in other ways organize my life. I've still got like 15 open tabs, but here are five I managed to close after writing a little summary about them:
Welcome to the Catalog, "Punkie Night" and "Christian Rock Music Festivals" LCSH Week 10, 2008, but still no waves of feminism...
Library of Congress Subject Headings Weekly List 09 (February 27, 2008). Here is my semi-regular commentary on Library of Congress Subject Headings. This week: the usual bit on SHes more important than the waves of feminism, and also headings that made me giggle or made me mad, including The addition of the word Christian in a couple of headings, which is a good thing.
On Friday I attended the "Beyond the Desk" themed 6th Annual Reference Services Symposium at Columbia University.
These are my notes.
The RNC Welcoming Committee in the Twin Cities has announced that it is ordering tasers for protesters. However, "The Welcoming Committee has no plans to purchase machine guns, rubber bullets, pepper spray, tear gas, concussion grenades, batons, water cannons or helicopters, all of which will be at the disposal of local police and federal agents in September."
Three men awarded book prize administered by a male university librarian and given my a male presenter. In the male dominated field of...history!
