Radreffies' blogs

Thinking Ahead 2008 - Where Paths Meet: Connecting Libraries and Communities ... Radical Reference. Students for Free Culture. Intellectual Freedom in Libraries ...

Radical Reference is a group of radical librarians and information workers who ... Related topics: activism, librarianship, nrc, protest, radical reference, reference ...

Reference resources for the general public, independent journalists, and activitists for their radical questions and ideas. Email your reference question in English, Spanish, or other languages.

Massachusetts Library Association Conference Reports: Radical Reference ... Random Access Mazar: Radical Reference and the Future of Academic Librarianship. more ...

Radical Reference and the Future of Academic Librarianship by Rochelle Mazar. ... not about the group Radical Reference, but about radicalizing reference practice ...

Radical Reference is forming a Philadelphia collective and would like to reach ... Radical reference originated as a service provided by volunteer library workers ...

Talk:Radical Reference. From Library Success: A Best Practices Wiki. Jump to: navigation, search ... (This should tell you that they are far to the left of the ...

Rochelle Mazar has a nice post about providing radical reference in which she states: ... Radical reference is not about waiting for the question. ...

... librarian me nyc nypl radical reference sandy berman skillshares talks women zines ... post is part of the Radical Reference Library of Congress Subject Heading ...

Radical Reference (RadRef) began as a project to provide information services to ... Just the fact that Radical Reference was formed -- with no commercial purpose, ...

The International Book Fair of Turin is May 8-12.

The guest of honour at the International Book Fair 2008 is Israeli literature. A literature that has won increasing appreciation with European readers with authors like David Grossman, Amos Oz., Abraham Yehoshua, Aaron Appelfeld and Meir Shalev. Israeli literature knows how to blend a solid sense of its roots while confronting the conflicts and divisions that trouble contemporary societies and that for sixty years have been reproduced in territories contested by Israelis and Palestinians. Alongside them are writers of the most recent generations and the voices of Arab writers of Israeli nationality, they too witnesses of common work for dialogue and understanding of the reasons of the others, and the liveliness of the country’s free culture.

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Tariq Ramadan, professor of Islamic Studies at Oxford and at Erasmus University in the Netherlands, called on “all people of conscience” to boycott the fair.

Italian President Giorgio Napolitano opened the prestigious Turin book fair in the northern city on Thursday amid Muslim anger over the choice of Israel as the event’s guest of honour.

The shortlist will be announced on 15 May. The judges will announce the winner of the Prize at an awards event in the Ballroom at the South Bank Centre, London on 15 July. The winner receives £30,000, and each of the five shortlisted authors, £1,000.

Mad, Bad and Sad Lisa Appignanesi Virago

Nothing to be Frightened Of Julian Barnes Jonathan Cape

Miracles of Life J.G Ballard Harper Collins

Blood River: A Journey to Africa’s Broken Heart Tim Butcher Chatto & Windus

Crow Country Mark Cocker Jonathan Cape

Finding Moonshine: A Mathematician’s Journey Through Symmetry Marcus Du Sautoy Fourth Estate

The Authorized Biography of V.S. Naipaul Patrick French Picador

The Whisperers Orlando Figes Penguin Press

Rudolf Nureyev Julie Kavanagh Fig Tree

Austerity Britain 1945-1951 David Kynaston Bloomsbury

Mrs Woolf and the Servants Alison Light Fig Tree

Cold Cream: My Early Life and Other Mistakes Ferdinand Mount Bloomsbury

Watching the Door Kevin Myers Atlantic Books

Confessions of an Eco Sinner: Fred Pearce Eden Project Books

Great Hatred, Little Room:
Making Peace in Northern Ireland Jonathan Powell Bodley Head

The Discovery of France Graham Robb Picador

A Life of Picasso: Triumphant Years, 1917-1932 vol 3 John Richardson Jonathan Cape

The Rest is Noise Alex Ross Fourth Estate

The Suspicions of Mr Whicher Kate Summerscale Bloomsbury

The Brother Gardeners Andrea Wulf Willia

[Cross posted on LegalResearchPlus.com]

On a daily basis I visit various court and other government websites, often to locate recent opinions, regulations, or agency decisions. It is a common practice for law librarians and for any researcher who wants very recent sources or does not have access to commercial databases. Admittedly it is far less often that I consider whether the case I just downloaded is an authentic representation of the court’s decision.

But consider these two examples. The first from the California Courts website and the second from the website for the First Circuit Court of Appeals:

“The Official Reports page is primarily intended to provide effective public access to all of California's precedential appellate decisions; it is not intended to function as an alternative to commercial computer-based services and products for comprehensive legal research.”

“Although every effort is made to ensure that the information contained on this site is correct and timely, the First Circuit does not warrant its accuracy. Portions of the information may be incorrect or not current. The information contained on this site should not be cited as legal authority.”

In 2007 the American Association of Law Librarians completed a survey of states' online statutes, regulations and case law to determine which states, if any, were deeming their online material to be official and/or authentic. The survey, “State-by-State Report on Authentication of Online Legal Resources,” is available from the Washington Affairs Office of AALL. Survey authors Richard Matthews and Mary Alice Baish concluded that while many states considered the primary legal material that they put online to be official, no state had taken steps to authenticate those materials.

In a world where online research is becoming the norm, are courts (and other government websites) really keeping up with the needs of the people they serve by not offering official and authenticated versions of their opinions online?

-Kate Wilko

The U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) has withdrawn a secret demand, issued as a national security letter (NSL), that the Internet Archive (IA) provide the agency with a user's personal information after Brewster Kahle, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), and the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) challenged the records request in court.

• FBI Withdraws Unconstitutional NSL Served on Internet Archive, ACLU. (Includes links to documents)

Since the Patriot Act was authorized in 2001, relaxing restrictions on the FBI's use of the power, the number of NSLs issued has seen an astronomical increase. Reports from the Justice Department's Inspector General reveal that the FBI has issued nearly 200,000 NSL between 2003 and 2006. Multiple investigations have found serious FBI abuses of regulations and numerous potential violations of the law.

• Internet Archive Challenges F.B.I.’s Secret Records Demand, by Grant Gross, IDG News Service, New York Times, May 7, 2008 (or Internet Archive challenges FBI's secret records demand, by Grant Gross, in InfoWorld).

In each of the three court challenges to the NSL program, the FBI has withdrawn the information demands, ACLU's Goodman said. "I think that calls into question how much the FBI needed the information in the first place and, frankly, whether the FBI needs this kind of sweeping and unchecked surveillance power," she said.

Secret Laws are laws that citizens and even Congress do not know about or are forbidden from seeing.

A recent Senate hearing examines how these "laws" become law and why they are 'repugnant' and 'an abomination.'

The official page for the hearing with links to written testimony and a video of hearing: Secret Law and the Threat to Democratic and Accountable Government, Hearing, Senate Judiciary Committee, Subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights and Property Rights, April 30, 2008.

A brief overview of the hearing by Steven Aftergood with links his and others' to testimony: Secret Law Debated in Senate Hearing, by Steven Aftergood, Secrecy News, April 30, 2008.

A concise op-ed by Senator Russ Feingold about secret laws: Government in secret, By Russ Feingold, Los Angeles Times, May 8, 2008.

... jennifer.koerber, masslib07, progressive politics, radical reference, reference ... Radical Reference - Jenna Freedman & Eric Goldhage...

[I found this interesting news on the wonderful blog: BeSpacific -Erika]

Press Release
(from archives.gov)

May 7, 2008

Washington, DC. . . On Tuesday, May 6, 2008, Archivist of the United States Allen Weinstein submitted a report, entitled The Founders Online, to the Committees on Appropriations of the U.S. Congress. This report is the National Archives response to concerns raised by the Committees that the complete papers of America’s Founding Fathers are not available online. The Founders Online is a plan for providing online access, within a reasonable timeframe, to researchers, students and the general public. The report is available electronically at the National Archives website: http://www.archives.gov/nhprc/publications.

In announcing the completion of the report, Professor Weinstein said, “We feel this plan would provide scholars and the public access to the best available versions of the complete papers; it would also protect the longstanding interests of the publishers and host organizations which along with the Federal government have invested great resources in the past four decades. Most importantly, it would build a monument to the Founders of our nation in their own words.”

The National Archives received suggestions from the editors of the papers of John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and George Washington, university publishers, and others in crafting a blueprint for providing access to the already completed print editions and the raw materials for the editions to come. If carried out, the plan ensures that interested readers worldwide can see the work in progress with the already complete editions accompanied by transcriptions of the papers yet to be published. To hasten the transition process, the National Historical Publications and Records Commission plans to invest $250,000 as a demonstration pilot project.

The plan outlines three basic steps that remain:

* Digitizing the existing 217 volumes and publishing the Papers on a single website to allow for research and inquiry across America’s Founding Era collections;

* Transcribing and otherwise preparing for publishing on the web the remaining papers (approximately 90,000 documents) and replacing these raw materials with authoritative annotated versions as these are completed; and

* Creating an independent oversight process to ensure that rigorous performance goals are established and met by the parties carrying out all aspects of the work.

Our report on our experiment in using del.icio.us to tag EPA documents originally harvested by GPO is now completed and available for your review and comment at http://freegovinfo.info/node/1825.

For more information about this project, including a list of tags assigned to documents by project participants, please see http://freegovinfo.info/epatagging.

Our thanks to the project participants!

I’ve been trying to remember lately how I first figured out RSS and when I got myself set up with a Bloglines account. I remember that Morgan told me there were a lot of great radical librarian bloggers during the summer of 2003, but since that was before I even thought of going to library school. I stowed that information away somewhere, I think, and dimly remembered it when a friend sent me the Wired article about Jessamyn West. I know I saw the early announcements for Radical Reference through some lefty discussion list in the late summer of 2004, just as I was starting library school.

I can’t quite figure out just how I got into this reading blogs business, but I do know that three years ago today I decided to plonk my marbles down into the virtual dirt circle that is the blogosphere, and I started a little blog called lis.dom.

Cross-posted from LegalResearchPlus.com
(written by our newest teammate, Sergio Stone. Sergio is Stanford's first Foreign, Comparative and International Law Librarian.)

U.S. international agreements on Dept. of State’s Case Act Databases

An often overlooked free source for recent U.S. treaties and other international agreements is the Department of State’s Reporting International Agreements to Congress under Case Act database.

Selected bilateral and multilateral agreements in full-text are available from 1982 through 2008. Unfortunately, the site does not include a keyword search function. The database consists of agreements submitted to Congress by the Dept. of State as required by the Case-Zablocki Act, P.L. 92-403, 86 Stat. 619, 1 U.S.C. 112b. (1972). The agreements appear on this site before they are published in the official compilations of Treaties and Other International Acts Series (T.I.A.S.) and United States Treaties and Other International Agreements (U.S.T.).

Agreements from 2006 through 2008 are available here.

Agreements from 1982 through 2006 are located at the Department of State’s FOIA site.