Comic books have finally won their long battle for legitimacy, affirmed Charles Brownstein, opening a program on censorship and graphic novels sponsored by ALA’s Intellectual Freedom Committee. Noting that every library that matters now collects graphic novels and material that was once condemned is now lauded, Brownstein—executive director of the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund, a nonprofit organization that protects the First Amendment rights of comics creators, publishers, and retailers—said, “We are now at the moment where we’ve overcome the stigma” and the time has come to turn to other concerns, such as legal challenges to the material.
Neil Gaiman, Charles Brownstein, Terry Moore, and Craig Thompson
Brownstein presented an overview of the medium’s development, concentrating on the 1950s, when child psychiatrist Fredric Wertham and other do-gooders waged a war against comic books that Brownstein called “one of the great censorship debacles of the 20th century.” Wertham’s crusade led to the formation of the Comics Code Authority, a regulatory body intended, as Brownstein put it, “to make comics a clean and sanitary medium.”
Neil Gaiman, fresh from the previous evening’s banquet where he received the Newbery Medal for The Graveyard Book, identified the moment when the medium’s validity seemed assured: a 2003 preconference sponsored by ALA’s Young Adult Library Services Association where he and other creators “came in to talk to librarians at the bequest of librarians.” By that point, Gaiman recalled, librarians realized their users wanted to read graphic novels, and “They were coming to us to say, please explain this thing.” Gaiman recalled standing outside during a break with Art Spiegelman, winner of the 1992 Pulitzer Prize for his graphic novel Maus. “We looked at each other,” Gaiman remembered, “and said, ‘Everything’s just changed.’ ”
Craig Thompson said that when he learned that his acclaimed graphic novel Blankets (2003, Top Shelf) had been pulled from the shelves of the Marshall (Mo.) Public Library, along with Fun Home by Alison Bechdel (Mariner, 2007), his first reaction—and he apologized to the crowd for it—was amusement, followed by confusion, then flattery (”Oh wow, I’m banned”). He subsequently felt “gratitude towards the people who were working to defend my book,” then “residual Christian guilt” for causing the trouble.
Thompson grew up in a conservative Christian family where censorship was the norm. “My brother and I gravitated toward comics because every other medium in the house was banned,” he explained. Comics, however, were “under the radar.”
Terry Moore worked as a film editor before creating the popular comics series Strangers In Paradise, so he says he “went into comics with an awareness of the power of the image.” He maintains that comics’ combination of words and visuals creates something more powerful than Hollywood or prose publishers can produce. “You’re hoping to have characters so real you feel like they’re family,” Moore said, and it’s the presentation of private, intimate moments that produce that response. “That’s the goal,” he declared. “That’s why we aren’t creating G-rated fluff.”
Gaiman agreed about the primacy of the visuals. “You’re dealing with raw images,” he said, “and images have power.” He maintained that he couldn’t have created his celebrated Sandman series in prose; “it wouldn’t have had that power.” Remarking on the collaborative nature of the medium, Gaiman said, “A comics script is a letter to the artist; it’s a blueprint to the artist. That’s why I still love comics. I cannot read my prose with pleasure, but I can read my comics with pleasure.”
The panelists related various incidents where booksellers faced criminal charges for their wares. In 2007, a comics store in Rome, Georgia, was prosecuted for mistakenly distributing a comic with a story depicting Pablo Picasso painting in the nude to a child during the annual Free Comic Book Day promotion. The Comic Book Legal Defense Fund spent over $100,000 to keep the store owner out of prison. During the Q-and-A session following the presentation, several librarians told of their own challenges over graphic novels in their collections.
Gaiman cautoned, “As a bookseller or a librarian, you have to be aware of what’s on your shelves” and be careful not to put the adult material with the kids’ comics. It’s at the point where people cross barriers and put things into peoples’ hands that shouldn’t be there “that explosions happen,” he warned.
Some 525 librarians and library supporters—a virtual who’s who of librarianship—spent yesterday evening in the new wing of the Art Institute of Chicago, entralled by its splendor and by the speakers who gathered to help the Freedom to Read Foundation celebrate its 40th anniversary and pay tribute to its founder, Judith Krug, who died April 11.
FTRF President Judith Platt and Gretchen Helfich, former host of Chicago Public Radio’s Odyssey show, honored Krug in their welcoming remarks, crediting her for being the singular force behind both the foundation and the ALA Office for Intellectual Freedom. Platt said the job of the foundation was “to send the book burners back to their dark little holes with their tails between their legs.” Helfrich summarized the mission as “changing the way you see things,” in much the same way as the Art Institute’s new space.
The Foundation’s Civic Achievement Award was presented to the McCormick Freedom Museum, followed by the presentation of the William J. Brennan Award to Krug by Robert M. O’Neil of the Thomas Jefferson Center for Free Expression. Michelle Litchman, Krug’s daugher, accepted the award on beholf of her mother. O’Neil noted that Judith Krug was able to mobile a broad coalition that “profoundly influenced the course of constitutional law.” “The unlicensed practice of law is what she really did,” he joked, to thuderous applause.
Author Judy Blume presented the Founder’s Award to Krug, saying that she has planned to present it to her in person. Sometimes tearfully, Blume rememered her friend and colleague and the many censorship battles they fought together. She spoke of “my friend, my hero,” and said, “Your legacy will continue, I promise, but damn we are gonna miss you.”
Deeply moved by the praise being lavished on his late wife, an emotional Herb Krug paid tribute with a donation of $10,000 to the foundation.
Keynote speaker author Scott Turow called Judith Krug “an inspiring and spirited leader and talked about his debt to libraries and said he owed much to the hours he spent in the Glencoe Public Library in Illinois. He noted that, along with censorship, the decline in reading itself is also a huge threat to the freedom to read. He concluded that “the fate of our culture has always passed through the hands of libraries.”
Foundation treasurer James Neal closed with a witty and moving mix of stories, funny and sad, saying that Krug was not only a librarian but a legal genius and an extraordinary administrator, teacher, author, scholar, public advocate, spokesperson, and politician.
It was an emotional and celebratory evening, in an inspiring room filled with admirers, family, friends, and colleagues, who, like me, found Judith Krug to be equal parts fun and fury, friend to many, and foe to injustice on an international scale.
Cokie Roberts discussed the writing and updating of her book We Are Our Mother’s Daughters, and her research into the roles of women throughout American history for it, before a crowd of about 700 at the PLA President’s Program.
“I, of course, use libraries all the time in doing research on these history books,” Roberts said. “It is amazing how much info is there and how helpful people are in getting it out.”
In the book, Roberts said, “I ask what is a woman’s place. It’s every place, because we’re needed every place.”
She observed that women have always performed many tasks at the same time out of necessity, citing her mother’s simultaneous dictation of a speech, while making pickles and cradling a baby. “Multitasking is just a made-up guy word to describe what women have done all along,” Roberts declared to a roar of laughter.
Roberts observed that women have made some gains in politics; her mother Lindy Boggs was the 16th woman in the U.S. House when she took office in 1973, while today there are 76 women. But she also noted that women have always played an important role in politics, citing political activities by First Ladies. Martha Washington, for example lobbied Congress for veteran’s benefits, and Dolly Madison was recognized as a formidable force in her husband’s election. Roberts was careful to include Laura Bush as an active political figure, noting that she was the first First Lady to deliver the president’s radio address, using it to call for Afghan women’s rights, and that she was the only First Lady to take the microphone in the White House briefing room.
“She remains an incredible fighter for human rights, and really gets little play for it,” Roberts said.
Progress is coming more slowly in many fields than it should, however. Roberts told of talking to tennis legend Billie Jean King and arguing that the status of women in athletics had made great strides with scholarships and media coverage. “Yeah, things are better,” King said. “We get about eight percent of the coverage on sports pages. But seven percent goes to horses and dogs.”
But Roberts celebrated women such as King and astronaut and physicist Sally Ride, who not only made great achievements in their fields but also worked to make it easier for other women to follow in their path.
“From Legacy Data to Linked Data: Preparing Libraries for Web 3.0,” drew enough of an audience that some had to listen from the hallway.
Data objects and agents already have identifiers, explained Diane Hillmann of the Information Institute of Syracuse and Metadata Management Associates. In linked data, however, relationships between data also have identifiers. That way, “The relationships can be identified and explained and given context,” she said.
“No longer can I as a data provider just present my data to you and say, ‘If you don’t like it, tough,’” noted Eric Miller, president of Zepheira. Instead, data providers—including libraries—should empower users to leverage that data, even without the provider’s knowledge.
As an example, Miller described the Library of Congress Digital Preservation Initiative, which collects and digitizes at-risk information. But Miller said that the information is siloed and disconnected. “A spreadsheet is a fine way in which people can curate and manage content,” he observed. “But what we can do by surfacing that spreadsheet in this platform is to give the Library of Congress tools to create different views from that same data.”
“This is very rich stuff,” Hillmann agreed. “And when people outside of the library world discover this, they’re going to use it too. And that’s good for us.”
Jennifer Bowen of the University of Rochester described the eXtensible Catalog, a project at the university to build open-source software that reuses MARC data in an extensible environment, define a schema that will support XC’s user-interface functionality, and implement an interim solution until the completion of RDA.
Software for XC will be rolled out through January 2010.
The program was one of ten Grassroots Programs, proposed by ALA members who do not belong to ALA committees or boards. The Grassroots Programs are part of ALA President Jim Rettig’s “creating connections” initiative.
LITA’s tenth year of Top Tech Trends July 12 was likely its best attended ever–thanks to free wi-fi in the room, live streaming video from Shanachies, and a live blog to aggregate tweets from attendees (real and virtual) using hashtags #toptech and #ttt09 or giving comments or questions directly on the blog. While ALA is working hard to increase virtual participation, Top Tech Trends was more focused on being online than getting online.
“It’s part of our life and part of our culture right now,” said panelist John Blyberg, referring to the ubiquity of mobile devices, including smart phones and sub-laptops, and mobile internet access. That sentiment echoed much of the discourse, with Joan Frye Williams later moving beyond discussion of the digital divide by noting that more people have cellular phones now than have ever had computers. The first trend, mobile computing, virtual computing, and the cloud, ranked highest on LITA’s survey and was the first topic the panel discussed. The environment (green computing) was the lowest ranked topic.
Despite the trend toward mobile computing, the transformation will be a long one, argued Roy Tennent, and people will still rely on laptops and desktops alongside mobile devices for a long time. “We haven’t seen the killer netbook yet,” he said
Mobile computing is bringing about a shift from text-based content to photo and video content, remarked Clifford Lynch. It’s much easier to generate and handle photos and videos on mobile devices than to generate prose.
The presenters agreed that the cloud is prominent in today’s computing. Clifford Lynch argued for contrasting access from computation: that is, heavy computation takes place in the cloud while access is distributed to client interfaces. Lynch fears, however, that relying on the cloud leaves off one core aspect of librarianship. “Part of our self-defined responsibility is the collection and preservation of material. But if it’s out in the cloud, libraries are not preserving; someone else is,” said Lynch.
The ubiquity of the cloud means that finding stuff isn’t a problem anymore, according to Lynch. Information is everywhere, but “we’re drinking out of the firehose,” he said. Librarians will be responsible for managing the flow of that information.
Open source software was the second topic of discussion for the panel. Eric Lease Morgan stepped back from common notions that OSS will lead to free everything. There will be some institutions willing to take on their IT and software management; others won’t, he argued. OSS and open access won’t put publisher’s out of business. “We don’t have the chutzpa,” Morgan said.
Williams suggested that librarians are a shrinking market for publishers, who are moving toward individual customers. “End users are less fussy,” she said, noting that EBSCO underwrites NPR. Blyberg agreed but added that our front-end interfaces are advancing far beyond our back-end content, calling for better federated search.
The session ended with a rapid-fire session where each panelist had three to five minutes to talk about the variety of technology trends to watch. See the complete discussion and video.
Sunday morning’s PR Forum featured a panel of five experts who offered tips and tactics that will help libraries get their stories told through both new and traditional media. The program was sponsored by the PR Assembly of the ALA Public Awareness, supported by ALA Public Information Office staff.
George Eberhart, Kevin Kirkpatrick, Tom McNamee, Dave Baum
First up was longtime Chicago broadcaster and media trainer Dave Baum, who gave a quick tutorial on how to be relevant on the radio. “Find out what radio stations in your market area can feature you as a guest,” he said. “Usually there is a news and talk radio station that appeals to the 18-49 audience.” And don’t forget internet radio stations — a recent poll showed that 13% of all radio listeners tune in online. Baum also warned that you must have a convincing pitch ready for radio producers: “Give them an issue they can present both sides on, like banned books, or tell a story about how your library works. People go to sleep without stories.”
Baum heaped praise on ALA’s Public Information Office: “Of all the clients I’ve had since 1974, PIO offers you the thickest, the best, the most content-filled book of issues and answers I’ve ever seen. Don’t go wandering around in the news wilderness,” he recommended. “Check in with ALA first.”
Chicago Sun-Times Editorial Page Editor Tom McNamee echoed Baum’s emphasis on stories. “Have all your information ready before you contact the newspaper,” he advised. “Tell the city desk you have three library patrons they can contact who will tell them how the library has helped them. Give them their names, email addresses, and phone numbers.”
Kevin Kirkpatrick, executive vice president of the public-relations consulting firm Metropolitan Group, presented a dynamic demo on the power of social media to deliver the library’s message. “Social networking is not just a story, it’s a conversation,” he said. He showcased the District of Columbia Public Library’s website as a good example of social interactivity, featuring podcasts, webinars, live homework help, a live construction webcam, text message holds notifications, and catalog searches via Google gadget.
Twitter can be important as well. (”If you haven’t tweeted, you haven’t lived,” Kirkpatrick quipped.) The Newberry Library in Chicago promotes its holdings on Twitter. However, he admitted that Twitter and Facebook are often better for customer service than publicity.
Eric Friedenwald-Fishman, creative director of the Metropolitan Group, summarized his recent report on how libraries can communicate effectively with multicultural populations (PDF file). “By 2050,” he said, “49% of the U.S. population will be nonwhite.” He offered many case studies that emphasized principles and practices for working with groups that are culturally, racially, and ethnically different from your own.
Finally, AL Direct Editor George Eberhart explained how libraries can get their news into ALA’s weekly newsletter. “Ask yourself the four E’s,” he advised. “Is your news Essential for a national or regional audience? Can other libraries Extrapolate ideas from what you’ve done? Have you Explained the significance of your event? Did you inject sufficient Excitement into your announcement about your program?”
Eberhart offered tips on writing press releases: “Use the active voice. Don’t say, ‘The library is pleased to announce’ something,” he said. “Even if your library is normally grumpy, the fact that you are now pleased does not constitute news.”
He gave some examples of press releases that work: “Use humor (’Librarian transformed into human popcorn ball’), allusion (’The endless summer reading list’), mild exaggeration (’Discover the truth about twittering’), intrigue (’Oprah sends her regrets’), lists (’27 things to do before conference’), and, if all else fails, use clarity (’Registration opens for online courses’).”
“Let us know what’s going on in your libraries,” Eberhart concluded. “Other librarians will be interested too.”
