Radical Reference and 5 Borough Defenders invite you to happy hour. Let's meet, greet, and talk social justice.

Tuesday, June 14 2016
7pm
Fourth Avenue Pub
76 4th Avenue Brooklyn, NY 11217

RSVP requested (http://evite.me/uBWqZZ8xXF)

Please send agenda items, questions, and whatever else to nyc@radicalreference.info.

Who's here:
Stephen
Cynthia
Jen (note taker)
Natalie
Evan
Melissa

1. Introductions

2. Melissa gives a recap of the last meeting

The next meeting of the newly re-forming NYC collective of Radical Reference will be:

Friday, May 6, 2016
7-9pm
Interference Archive
131 8th Street — #4
Brooklyn, NY 11215
(2 blocks from F/G/R trains at 4th ave./9th street)

Please send agenda items, questions, and whatever else to facilitators Melissa and Jenna nyc@radicalreference.info.

Attendance

Alex, Bonnie, Charisma, Eamon, Ellen, Jaime, Jenna (note-taker), Leigh, Lucia, Meg, Melissa (facilitator), Sarah, Stephen

Intro

We started with a go around where people shared one thing that gives them joy about their library work and one thing that's challenging or that they'd like to change.

Radical Reference is a collective of volunteer library workers who believe in social justice and equality. We support activist communities, progressive organizations, and independent journalists by providing professional research support, education and access to information. From 2004 until around 2012, the NYC collective of Radical Reference met regularly, put on events, and participated in activist communities.

Do you want to meet and collaborate with other anti-authoritarian library workers and LIS students in the NYC area? Come to the Radical Reference NYC local collective's first meeting in more than five years. For now our plan is to focus on whether there is interest in reviving the collective and if so, what that would look like.

Saturday, April 9, 2016
3-5pm
Interference Archive
131 8th Street — #4
Brooklyn, NY 11215
(2 blocks from F/G/R trains at 4th ave./9th street)

Please send agenda items, questions, and whatever else to facilitators Melissa Morrone and Jenna Freedman nyc@radicalreference.info.

The photo, from 2004 article in The Indypendent, is of Torie Quiñonez and Lia Friedman at a protest against the Republican National Convention in NYC. Torie and Lia live in San Diego now, but they still have a NYC home in our hearts.

Members of the Boston Radical Reference Collective compiled an alternative guide to the Boston area in preparation for ALA Midwinter 2016. Please explore here: https://bostonradicalreference.wordpress.com/alternative-guide-to-boston/.

Earlier today, Temple University hosted a talk with a series of archivists and librarians about documenting and preserving social movements. Speakers included Bergis Jules (University of California Riverside Libraries), Meredith Evans (Washington University in St. Louis) and Ed Summers (Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities), who described their work archiving protest movements surrounding Ferguson and #BlackLivesMatter, and Margery Sly and Justin Hill from Temple Libraries, who shared experiences from archiving Occupy Philly. It was a really rich discussion, covering pragmatics of data scraping tools as well as advice on how to build ties with communities whose lives are being preserved. Here are some highlights that I wanted to share!

• Bergis Jules highlighted the accessibility of social media as a source for data, calling it “a new layer of documentation quality" that has “left an extremely rich trail of documentation in one of the most rich and accessible” platforms. Jules also noted that social media content can be used against protesters in prosecution, which is crucial to consider in policies of collection and access.

Tomorrow is a international day of action for demanding social justice in the wake of systemic disregard for black lives. We've pulled together some reading sources for people interested in learning more about social justice, race and the police. Feel free to add more in the comments, see you in the streets!

Blog posts and online news media

Colorlines. (2014, October 14). Race, policing and civil rights: A community town hall. Retrieved from http://colorlines.com/archives/2014/10/watch_town_hall_on_race_policing_and_civil_rights_in_the_us.html
Video of a community meeting in Brooklyn, featuring panelists Esmeralda Simmons, Center for Law & Social Justice, Medgar Evers College; Lumumba Bandele, Malcolm X Grassroots Movement; Jumaane Williams, City Council Member; Rinku Sen, Race Forward (publisher of Colorlines); Linda Sarsour, Arab American Association; and Anthony Miranda, Latino Officers Association.

Garza, A. (2014, October 7). A herstory of the #BlackLivesMatter movement. Retrieved from
http://thefeministwire.com/2014/10/blacklivesmatter-2/
The origin story of the #BlackLivesMatter, which started with the organizing efforts of three black queer women.

TRGGR Radio. Weekly radio broadcast. http://trggradio.org/
Topics covered in recent episodes include: reports from protests and actions in Ferguson & western Massachusetts, student activism, prison abolition and activism, movements for solidarity with Palestine and Cuba, and updates from Mumia Abu-Jamal.

Academic articles and policy reports

A group of Rad Ref librarians recently put together a zine for librarians about surveillance. Includes "know your rights" info; suggestions for applications, browser plug-ins, and other tech tools for online privacy; and, of course, a reading list!

To transform this PDF into a zine, first print the odd pages. Then flip over the pages and print the evens on the reverse.

If you have comments or want to get involved in other such projects, get in touch with Alison at alisonmacrina at the gmail.

Tomorrow is 404 Day, an effort from the Electronic Frontier Foundation to raise awareness of online censorship in libraries and public schools. They’re running an online info session today at noon, PST, and they’ve reached out to librarians and information professionals to share experiences with online censorship.