07.11.09
Posted in 2009 ALA Annual Conference at 8:15 pm by Bev Goldberg
[July 16, 2009] UPDATE: Commentary continues to appear both in and out of the biblioblogosphere speculating about the actions that precipitated the cancellation of the “Perspectives on Islam” panel. On July 14, the Huffington Post ran a story by CAIR-Chicago Executive Director Ahmed Rehab that purports to tell the real behind-the-scenes story. In turn, Jihad Watch blogger Robert Spencer has also posted his version of the sequence of events leading up to the cancellation.
Irony #1: The details offered by each to refute the other corroborate the facts offered by American Libraries on July 12 (see below), with two exceptions. Spencer asserts that the three panelists who withdrew their participation within a week of Annual Conference to protest his inclusion had gotten at least a month’s notice about his spot on the panel. Rehab asserts that the panelists weren’t directly informed about Spencer’s inclusion before July 6, and names Ellen Zyroff, the co-chair of EMIERT’s Jewish Information Committee (not the “Jewish Librarians” as reported in HuffPo) as having “reportedly lobbied the ALA to invite Spencer arguing that ‘their side needed to be represented.’”
The truth of the matter seems to be far more mundane—one of standard operating procedure gone awry. According to EMIERT Chair Myra Appel, all four speakers were invited to comprise the panel months ago even though the conference program book erroneously listed only two confirmed speakers (skip to page 109 in the PDF file). Indeed the 2009 Annual Conference Preview bundled with the March 2009 issue of American Libraries did not include any panelists in the program description because none were invited until the spring; ALA’s constantly revised conference wiki lists all four. (And yes, Zyroff did invite Spencer to join the panel in the context of presenting diversity of opinion, Appel told American Libraries.)
Irony #2: In the spirit of collegiality ALA members take pride in, Zyroff and Tara Lannen-Stanton, who coauthored an open letter protesting Spencer’s scheduled appearance, are planning to develop a bibliography and other collection-development aids about Islam.
Irony #3: The EMIERT board will be revisiting its procedures and calendar for developing programs. Appel told American Libraries of the decision July 11, three days before Rehab recommended such an action in his HuffPo essay.
Because of its unwavering commitment to intellectual freedom and inclusion, the American Library Association prides itself on representing diverse viewpoints at its conference programs. That commitment can—and has—caused headaches from time to time for program planners, presenters, and concerned bystanders. This Annual is no exception as evinced by this morning’s yesterday’s eleventh-hour cancellation of the intriguingly titled “Perspectives on Islam: Beyond the Stereotyping” because three out of four panelists withdrew their participation.
What happened? It all depends on who you talk to (like so much else in life), but the essence of the story boils down to this: Some months ago, the Ethnic and Multicultural Information Exchange Round Table (EMIERT) began developing a panel discussion that would provide information about Islamic cultures around the world as a guide for collection development. So, speakers were invited, invitations were accepted, and plans moved along through the spring and early summer.
As member-leaders do, Appel posted a message to the EMIERT discussion list several weeks before Annual that detailed her group’s conference offerings. The email included the names and biographies of the four confirmed speakers: Alia Ammar, Marcia Hermansen, Esmail Koushanpour, and Robert Spencer. And that’s when the trouble began.
Within a day, Appel told American Libraries, she received an email from an EMIERT member Tara Lannen-Stanton, who took issue with Spencer’s inclusion on the panel because of his views about Islam as expressed on the Jihad Watch blog and elsewhere. Ammar, Hermansen, and Koushanpour said they were dismayed to discover so close to conference that the panel was to include Spencer, who is described in some circles as an Islamophobe.
After several email exchanges with the concerned ALAer and EMIERT board members, Appel sent the round-table list a reminder about the program, prefaced by a statement hoping members would attend. “I anticipated that individuals would attend with an open mind,” Appel said. But, several days before Appel was scheduled to fly to Chicago, Koushanpour withdrew from the panel.
At the suggestion of a colleague of Koushanpour, Appel invited Ahmed Rehab, director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations’ Chicago office, to join the panel. Instead, CAIR-Chicago issued a press release July 9 calling for ALA to disinvite Spencer, which EMIERT did not do. The next day, Ammar and Hermansen withdrew as well, leaving only Spencer as a confirmed speaker; CAIR-Chicago published statements from the three in a July 11 press release announcing EMIERT’s decision to cancel the program altogether.
Appel explained, “With the withdrawal of three of the four panelists we cannot provide a fair and equitable forum to explore the diversity of opinions that the panel would have offered.”
The ultimate irony is the feedback Appel reports receiving from EMIERT members, who emailed their appreciation of programs with such diverse viewpoints.
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Posted in 2009 ALA Annual Conference at 6:22 pm by George Eberhart
James van Praagh signs a copy of his book for Michigan Library Association Director of Professional Development Denise Cook
Despite murmurs of controversy surrounding his Annual Conference appearance Saturday afternoon, survival evidence medium James van Praagh had the undivided attention of several hundred truth seekers curious to hear about “what the dead can teach us,” which serves as the subtitle of his latest book, Unfinished Business (HarperCollins).
Even as a toddler, van Praagh said, he could see spirits and otherworldly lights around people. “When I was about two years old,” he reminisced, “I remember being able to see a man with beautiful blue eyes smiling at me from a corner. It was only later that I found out from a family member that the description fit my grandfather who had died before I was born.” He continues to be able to perceive and communicate with discarnate entities who reveal their presence in many ways — visually, electromagnetically, or through birds and animals. The Friday night CBS television series Ghost Whisperer, now in its fourth season (of which van Praagh is co-executive producer) is based partially on his work.
Although he said he doesn’t conduct personal readings anymore, van Praagh did seem sensitive to the private concerns of some of those who asked questions at the end of his talk. When one woman mentioned her husband who had died seven years ago, he acted as if he sensed the man’s presence around her, mentioning the significance of a toy that he and his brother had played with in Germany. Skeptics might say that this was an example of “cold reading” his audience (making high-probability guesses by picking up on personal cues), but whatever his technique was, it seemed to resonate with those willing to credit information apparently coming from the “other side.”
Much of van Praagh’s outlook is standard spiritualist or New Age philosophy, as illustrated by many comments he made during his talk — during an out-of-body experience your “spirit floats on a silver cord attached to your solar plexus,” “this dimension is illusion,” “we are outside of time,” “we have several nonphysical bodies all attuned to different frequencies,” our departed family members can “hear our thoughts and prayers,” and “every single one of us is God.”
Van Praagh also believes that after death, our belief systems persist and “we go to a place that we believe in” and where similar believers also reside. “Mindset attracts mindset,” he theorized. He also believes in reincarnation; but when a questioner asked how spirits can exist in the afterlife yet be reincarnated simultaneously, he answered that only an “aspect of the soul is reincarnated, so you’ll still see your family.”
Spirits return to visit the living because they have “unfinished business,” van Praagh concluded as he left for the Exhibit Hall to sign his book of the same title.
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Posted in 2009 ALA Annual Conference at 6:18 pm by Greg Landgraf
Opening General Session speaker Christie Hefner drew a clear parallel between businesses and libraries in terms of what they need to do to survive. She noted how, as Playboy CEO, she came to the conclusion that the company “didn’t want to be a magazine company—we wanted to be a company that represented a style of content.” That led Playboy to expand to television in the 1980s, the internet in the 90s, and mobile devices today.
Libraries, she said, can not simply fill the traditional roles of providing books and research materials. Hefner suggested several ways libraries can and are moving beyond those roles, including the online distribution of materials, instantaneous translation of materials, bridging the digital divide, and partnering with both for-profit and non-profit entities. “Who could you partner with to make having and using a library card really cool?” Hefner queried.
She reminisced about the founding of the Hugh M. Hefner First Amendment Awards, which grew out of the magazine’s 25th anniversary celebration in 1979. As part of the anniversary, the magazine bought the papers from the trial of John Peter Zenger at auction and toured them around the country, inviting students to enter an essay contest on what the First Amendment meant to them. At the end of that year, the award was founded.
“Over those three decades, not surprisingly, we honored a number of librarians,” she said. “Extraordinarily heroic people, and we got to know them through the close working relationship with the ALA, the Freedom to Read Foundation, and Judith Krug.”
Hefner called working with the Foundation the best perk of her position as Playboy CEO. “For me it was more fun doing banned book readings than to go to the Playboy Super Bowl Party,” she said.
Citing Iranian citizens’ recent use of Twitter and Facebook to get out information that the government wanted to repress, as well as the six states where gay marriage is legal, Hefner argued that the digital revolution has generally made society more tolerant of diverse viewpoints. But she also observed that there’s as much effort to ban information as there ever was.
“I found that the way to respond to those is to be sure you’re true to what you believe,” Hefner said. “I would argue that the way to do that is to spend less time thinking about what you’re doing and more time thinking about what you represent.”
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Posted in 2009 ALA Annual Conference at 5:46 pm by Leonard Kniffel
ALA Annual Conference keynote speaker Christie Hefner took a few minutes to chat with me before her Opening General Session speech. Hefner is the director of the Center for American Progress and longtime CEO of Playboy Enterprises, the company founded by her father, Hugh Hefner, and restructed and expanded by Christie.
Asked what her major message to librarians would be, she said it two words: “Thank you.” “I actually love librarians,” she added, and part of my message is going to be how fortunate I’ve been in being able to work with librarians for 30 years, and part of message is the challenges—and the opportunities to rise to the challenges—of redefining what a library is today.”
Hefner also commented on the death of ALA Office for Intellectual Freedom Director Judith Krug, a friend and colleague. “I first got to know her when they started the First Amendment Award [1979],” she said, ”and she was a judge and a presenter and really an inspiration. Judy was the consummate organizer; she was one of those rare people who was in equal parts disciplined and warm and fun, and therefore a joy to be with. It was for all of us who knew her an indescribable loss.”
Hefner also said of Krug, “We were allies in many important fights—ALA v. Reno, we were tied together, to defeat a bill in Congress to cut funding for Braille editions, and other censorship initiatives that came out of Congress. Judy was a warrior.”
Aware that some members of ALA objected to her selection as keynote speaker because of her affiliation with what they see as a sexist publishing empire, I asked Hefner how she made it in the “man’s world” her father created and how she turned it around. Her response: “One of the reasons I succeeded is that I surrounded myelf with talented women, over 40% of our executives were women, and that was an enormous advantage for us.”
Hefner got the conference off to a rip-roaring start, and with the total attendance figure today at 27,353, higher than projected.
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Posted in 2009 ALA Annual Conference at 4:01 pm by Gordon Flagg
Author James Ellroy is an arrogantly proud Luddite who exults in his disengagement with contemporary culture. “I live in a vacuum,” he told a rapt crowd who attended his Saturday-morning Auditorium Speaker Series appearance. “I ignore pop culture, I don’t read a newspaper.”
Ellroy, known for L.A. Confidential and other unrelentingly gritty crime novels, saved his highest disdain for technology. He sought to enlist his audience of librarians—whom he called “lions of literacy, reptiles of reading, and beautiful beasts of books—”in the fight between digital dystopia and the book.” Extolling the printed word over on-screen information, Ellroy maintained that “computers shrink consciousness to peanut size,” while books burn images into your brain forever.
Born in Los Angeles, the “film noir epicenter” at the height of the genre—”Geography is destiny,” he observed—Ellroy related the story of his harrowing early years as the product of “a fractious childhood and an early escape into the printed word.” Already a voracious reader, when his mother was brutally murdered, Ellroy shifted his reading to crime books, laying the course for his literary career. Around that time, he discovered the city’s Wilshire Branch library. “I read books, books, and more books,” he declared, “and I usually read them in public libraries.” At age 30, when he took up writing, “I instinctively knew how to do it because I had read.”
Ellroy called his new book, Blood’s a Rover—the final volume of his American Underworld trilogy—”library-born and library-bred,” adding that it “rebuffs the digital age.” He joked that the job of his audience, as guardians of literature, “is to launch this fucker into the hands of readers nationwide.” Concluding his remarks—frequently delivered at the top of his voice and with animated gestures—Ellroy said, “Let us exalt books at every opportunity. . . and work to reestablish the book as the dominant cultural medium of our times.”
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Posted in 2009 ALA Annual Conference at 11:51 am by Greg Landgraf
The RUSA MARS Hot Topics Discussion Group presented a panel discussion on screencasting Saturday: “Casting a Wide Net: Using Screencasts to Reach and Teach Library Users.” Committee co-chair Michelle Jacobs was not in attendance, so–appropriately enough–she introduced the session via screencast.
Eric Frierson of the University of Texas at Arlington demonstrated how his library’s online catalog used embedded screencasts, with links to videos such as “Where’s the PDF?”, “I need peer-reviewed”, or “Bad Results” appearing when users are likely to need them. The education subject guide he built also features a welcome video prominently to make the quantity of material less overwhelming. “What I’m trying to do is build a comfort level, particularly with distance education students who will never meet me,” Frierson said.
Mick Jacobsen of Skokie (Ill.) Public Library offered a public librarian’s perspective on screencasting, observing that patrons do are interested in information rather than reference sources. “Very few people come to learn to use Reference USA,” he noted. “They wouldn’t know what we’re talking about. But they would respond to ‘Do you want to find more customers?’”
Carmen Kazakoff-Lane, distance education librarian at Brandon University in Manitoba, demonstrated the Animated Tutorial Sharing (ANTS) Project, a collaborative project among librarians to create and share tutorial videos across institutions.
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