contextualizing a book rather than banning it

I grew up reading Tintin books/comics, and loved them. I never read "Tintin in the Congo," though, currently the topic of news [perhaps it was not available in my leftie-leaning home town?]. This quote from a news article addresses something we discussed for LIS 2000 on the topic of censorship: contextualizing rather than banning.

"Remi later said he was embarrassed by the book, and some editions have had the more objectionable content removed. When an unaltered edition was brought out in Britain in 2005, it came wrapped with a warning and was written with a forward explaining the work's colonial context." [my emphasis]

what a "wikipedian protester" would look like at a political rally

from

"A webcomic of romance,
sarcasm, math, and language."

He also has comics on things like open source software:

and a blog in which he talks about various things, including this post mentioning Lessig's book "Free Culture"

library science is truly interdisciplinary...

per our [overly plentiful?] discussions about porn (in class during the Cohort on-campus visit), an article on the deviant use of free laptops given to schoolchildren.

bigtime CEOs' personal libraries

Fancy schmancy personal/private libraries of big CEOs; article in NYT

quote:
“As head of a global company, everything attracts me as a reader, books about different cultures, countries, problems. I read for pleasure and to find other perspectives on how to think or solve a problem..."

it's not just copyright law that's totally snafu...

Here's an except from a recent article in the New England Journal of Medicine. (Shuchman, Miriam. "Falling through the Cracks -- Virginia Tech and the Restructuring of College Mental Health Services." NEJM. 357(2):105-110)
Falling through the Cracks — Virginia Tech and the Restructuring of College Mental Health Services

...

FERPA, HIPAA, and the Privacy of College Students

The laws and professional codes of conduct that protect a college student's right to privacy are so confusing that they have produced "massive misunderstanding," according to Peter Lake, director of the Center for Excellence in Higher Education Law and Policy at Stetson University. This claim is supported by a "Report to the President" issued by three Cabinet members in June. Confusion about federal and state privacy laws was a consistent theme in discussions that these officials held throughout the country in response to the Virginia Tech tragedy.

The Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA), the college confidentiality law passed in 1974, is often interpreted as prohibiting faculty or staff members from sharing information about a student with one another or with family members unless there is an emergency, but Lake said this is a misinterpretation. FERPA was not intended to block communication between deans or professors, who may share students' academic records. It's also not aimed at blocking communication between universities and students' families, since it restricts only discussion of a student's academic record, not interactions about, say, strange behavior or illness. Yet Cabinet members "repeatedly heard reports of `information silos' within educational institutions . . . that impede appropriate information sharing."

College counseling centers may also claim that they are prevented by the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) from sharing information about a student without the student's permission, but experts differ about whether and when HIPAA applies. The Cabinet members wrote that in their meetings "and in every breakout session, we heard differing interpretations and confusion about legal restrictions on the ability to share information about a person who may be a threat to self or others."

Most college mental health personnel follow standard medical confidentiality rules, which can be frustrating to parents and to faculty and staff members. But without a strict interpretation of confidentiality, many students might not seek care. "A large percentage of our students who come for counseling have had thoughts of suicide," said Mark Reed, director of Dartmouth College's Counseling and Health Resources Departments. "If they think, `If I whisper those words, I'm going to be kicked off campus,' that will prevent them from coming."

One answer for counseling centers is to find another person on campus who can communicate about a student more broadly. Class deans, who fill that role at Dartmouth, are free to communicate with family and faculty members. Though deans cannot know what is in the student's counseling or medical records, they can share their own concerns about a student's behavior or the concerns raised by others. Said Reed, "If family call us or the coach calls us, we'll say, `You're right to be concerned, and you may also want to share that with the dean.'" Information that comes to the dean from these other sources — not the school's health or mental health service — "is not HIPAA protected," explained Paul Appelbaum, director of the Division of Psychiatry, Law, and Ethics at Columbia University.

Another answer is to find legal counsel who can weigh the risks of breaching confidentiality against the risks of keeping it. At the University of Michigan, health care professionals have been reassured by university counsel that if a breach in confidentiality is required to preserve a student's life or mental health, the university will support them, "though it's done with great gravitas," said chief health officer Robert Winfield.

Both FERPA and HIPAA have exceptions for emergencies, but even the exceptions are confusing, and the Cabinet members found that people were generally unaware of these exceptions.

Perhaps, as Lake predicts, the Virginia Tech case will ultimately help to clarify the provisions of the privacy laws and allow crucial communication to take place."

LIS2600 assignment, due July 9: Fifteen books catalogued in Koha

As Koha is currently malfunctioning, these are the remaining 6 books I want to add:

0889367655 missing links: gender equity in science and technology for development
1403970378 defining technological literacy : towards an epistemological framework
0801872596 gender & technology: a reader
0742523721 critical communication theory: new media, science, technology and gender
0889365385 technology, gender & power in Africa
1879922231 tech-savvy: educating girls in the new computer age

------------------------------------------------------------
and this one just looks interesting by itself:
0759104298 gender in ancient cyprus

NYT article, "A Hipper Crowd of Shushers," on the "new librarian"

article quotes: "Ms. Campbell added that she became a librarian because it 'combined a geeky intellectualism' with information technology skills and social activism." ... "And though many librarians say that they, like nurses or priests, are called to the profession, they also say the job is stable, intellectually stimulating and can have reasonable hours — perfect for creative types who want to pursue their passions outside of work and don’t want to finance their pursuits by waiting tables. (The median salary for librarians was about $51,000 in 2006, according to the American Library Association-Allied Professional Organization.)"

tidbits gleaned from cyberland

A nice word of the day today from Dictionary.com: "phantasmagoria: a shifting series or succession of things seen or imagined." Also, yesterday's WOTD leads me to a nice quote: "The anger caroms around in our psyches like jagged stones. -- Randall Robinson, Defending the Spirit"

and, when I'm in Pittsburgh/Oakland, I'd like to visit this hookah bar - the Sphinx Cafe. I was turned on to hookahs in Paris when the roommate of my friend, who I was staying with, was dating someone from Egypt and regularly filling the flat with sweet-smelling fruit/tobacco smoke.

Too bad the Sphinx doesn't have any food (although they do have beverages); what seems to be their sister restaurant looks a bit far from campus: in the Penn Hills neighborhood: "King Tuts Restaurant, 200 Rodi Road, Penn Hills Shopping Center, Pittsburgh." Still, I probably would go to some length to get middle eastern food.

My favorite middle eastern hookah/food purveyor in Phil'a is Fez (Morrocan). [Wow, they have a really corny website! (never visited it before now)]

I like this blog called "the Holomorphism Exchange". I found it a little while ago, resultant from some search or other, and now I can't for the life of me remember how I found it...

LIS2600 assignment, due July 1 - (2nd of 2 posting requirements): Grazr widget

see sidebar.

I don't understand why my Scopus saved search [on "digital divide" AND "library" OR "libraries"] RSS feed (via Bloglines) is not working, either in the Grazr widget or on Bloglines... when I preview the subscription while adding it to Bloglines, the list populates with search results, but afterwards -- nada.

perhaps it has something to do with the sercure-server-only access to Scopus?

LIS2600 assignment, due July 1 - (1st of 2 posting requirements): tag cloud generated by ZoomClouds

[EDITED 7/2/07: It's sort of working now; I can see the cloud! (Working as well as it's ever going to? It's kinds messy...)] [EDIT 7/6/07: It hasn't been working at all the past few days.]

ZoomClouds is not working to generate a tag cloud of my combined feeds (from this blog and my Del.icio.us and Connotea accounts). I copied and pasted the HTML from my ZoomClouds page into this blog layout (on the top right), but -- nothing. (I couldn't see it at my ZoomClouds URL either - maybe you can?) I tried both SuprGlu and FeedBlendr to create the integrated/source feed for my cloud. And, like some of the other students, I keep getting redirected to the Spanish-language eGrupos site, which apparently hosts ZoomClouds...