INFOdocket Mathemagenic — Lilia Efimova on personal productivity in knowled DT > Digital Textbooks Librarian in Black Blog – Sarah Houghton-Jan Lorcan Dempsey's Weblog Second Life Library 2.0 Go To Hellman “Library on the run” if:book Important two-part piece by Melville House publisher, Dennis Johnson Part I The furor over Milo Yiannopoulos’s book deal with Simon & Schuster’s Threshold Editions inspires this publisher to ask one question of the disconcerted: Where have you been? Because this is where American publishing is now—or at least, the fifty percent of it dominated by the so-called “Big Five”—and it’s been there for a long time. Look at Threshold alone: It’s published Karl Rove, Dick Cheney, Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, and Donald Trump. And then there’s the HarperCollins (Sarah Palin) conservative imprint (yes, I too think that sounds redundant) Broadside Books (Dick Morris), founded in 2010. You’ll note some of the authors of these imprints, such as George Bush and Dick Cheney, have the blood of hundreds of thousands of people on their hands. In fact what criticism there was along the way was countered the same way S&S is countering criticism now. And note: Not publishing vile dreck is not censorship.
Infomancy Anyone who has travelled by air recently should be quite familiar with the concept of security theater; the complex set of TSA rituals designed to make us feel more safe (or at least to make the TSA feel like they are making us feel safe) while not actually addressing any of the real safety issues. Is your library guilty of this as well? How many of the library policies and procedures that we adopt are created for the actual advancement of our mission, and how many exist simply as policy theater? The biggest problem with security theater is that often the most basic safety measures that are most susceptible to theatrics. When it is something that has always been done, the safety measure takes on a higher power. This video, linked in a BoingBoing post, got me thinking again about how many policies in libraries are built on the same recursive logic that make locks secure because locks are secure (even if some basic searches for lockpicking will quickly erase that notion).