Interesting piece by librarian Barbara Fister in this week’s Library Journal, which caught my eye particularly because she made use of the “liberation” trope so popular in the 1960s and 1970s thanks to Father Gustavo Gutiérrez’s A Theology of Liberation.
One of the findings from the research I presented last week in Champaign at the iSchools conference was that Gutiérrez’s theory of liberation was much more effective in adding to academic discourse in a variety of fields beyond theology than it was in changing the Magisterium of the Catholic Church itself (which was Gutiérrez’s real goal— he was a practicing priest in Peru, not an academic seeking tenure, though he’s now teaching at Notre Dame.)
This speaks, I think to Fister’s colleague’s interest in theory and practice, though I too am having difficulty locating the articles she mentions as being behind various library firewalls, lol!
So far, the folks on Library 2.0 Ning appear to be having a much more interesting and in-depth discussion on the topic than is the JESSE thread. I especially like the part where they share strategies for bringing this up in various classes where it seems relevant. Read more…
Well, the whole Library 2.0 thing has finally made its way onto the JESSE library education listserv in the form of a question posed thus:
“There has been considerable under-the-table discussion about Library 2.0 and Web 2.0 tools, capabilities, philosophies, and approaches to information organization and retrieval. Read more…
I see that a different, more thoughtful approach to the integer issue is being taken by Mark Lindner. However, since librarians replicate information more or less routinely, I can’t accept that it constitutes activism by definition. I do agree, however, that the question is well worth raising in the context of library activities, as does the group Information for Social Change, for example. (We do have a popular “community relations and advocacy” course here, but I’m not sure whether these are among the issues covered….)
Here’s an interesting new twist in the diffusion of theory, illustrated by Google’s Earth Day logo. How influential is something like this?
