Nazi book burnings

The Tyee recently published a great article, The Urge to Burn Books, on book burnings in Nazi Germany in 1933.

I like how Stan Persky brings this historical event into the present with this comparison:

So, whenever people burn books — whether it’s the ancient library of Alexandria, Egypt going up in flames nearly two millennia in the past, or the 2003 torching of the National Library in Baghdad just five years ago, at the beginning of the U.S. invasion of Iraq — I take offence.

From this article I learned about an exhibition and website at the US Holocaust Memorial Museum titled Fighting the Fires of Hate.

I also learned about Empty Library, Micha Ullman’s art installation in Berlin. Petskey describes the installation:

But there’s an even more effective, permanent reminder of the book burning right in the middle of Bebel Platz. It’s a memorial sculptural installation by Israeli artist Mischa Ullman, but it’s only really noticeable at night. It consists of a small square of glass set in the rough cobblestone surface of the plaza. At night, it emits a shaft of light from underground. When you edge up to it and look down, there’s a white room, and all four walls, from floor to ceiling, are bookshelves. Empty bookshelves. A nearby ground-level plaque quotes Heine’s line about “where they burn books…” and records that this is the site of the book burning in 1933

Thanks Barbara Jo for the link!

Kill the Messenger

BCLA is a community partner with DOXA, documentary film festival in Vancouver for the documentary film Kill the Messenger.

In the wake of September 11, 2001, Sibel Edmonds is approached by the FBI. As an American of Iranian and Turkish origin, Edmonds’ linguistic skill set makes her a valuable asset to the Language Services Unit, where she spends months translating high-security clearance documents. One day shortly after reporting the possible infiltration of her unit by Turkish spies to her supervisors and their supervisors, Edmonds’ world is turned upside-down.

The first person to leave a comment will win two memberships to DOXA and two tickets to the 9pm screening on Saturday May 31st at Pacific Cinematheque in Vancouver.

ALA’s top ten banned books

Photo credit: florian.b on flickr

The ALA’s Office for Intellectual Freedom just published their list of the top ten banned books from last year. I haven’t read Olive’s Ocean or TTYL yet, but if they really are sexually explicit and have offensive language I will probably enjoy them immensely.

1. “And Tango Makes Three,” by Justin Richardson/Peter Parnell

Reasons: Anti-Ethnic, Sexism, Homosexuality, Anti-Family, Religious Viewpoint, Unsuited to Age Group

2. “The Chocolate War,” by Robert Cormier

Reasons: Sexually Explicit, Offensive Language, Violence

3. “Olive’s Ocean,” by Kevin Henkes

Reasons: Sexually Explicit, Offensive Language

4. “The Golden Compass,” by Philip Pullman

Reason: Religious Viewpoint

5. “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,” by Mark Twain

Reason: Racism

6. “The Color Purple,” by Alice Walker

Reasons: Homosexuality, Sexually Explicit, Offensive Language

7. “TTYL,” by Lauren Myracle

Reasons: Sexually Explicit, Offensive Language, Unsuited to Age Group

8. “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings,” by Maya Angelou

Reason: Sexually Explicit

9. “It’s Perfectly Normal,” by Robie Harris

Reasons: Sex Education, Sexually Explicit

10. “The Perks of Being A Wallflower,” by Stephen Chbosky

Reasons: Homosexuality, Sexually Explicit, Offensive Language, Unsuited to Age Group

parody+politics=lawsuit from CanWest

Mordecai Briemberg, webmaster/administrator of canpalnet (Canadian-Palestine Support Network), is being sued by CanWest, over a parody of the Vancouver Sun. Here’s a pdf of the first page, and here is the full text of the parody.

There are so many reasons why this lawsuit sucks:

• Briemberg claims he didn’t write the parody, or even distribute it
• He’s being sued for copyright infringement when the issue seems to be actually about politics
• These types of lawsuits have a chilling effect on freedom of speech and opinions that are critical of the stance that the mainstream media have on political issues

At the membership of BCLA passed a resolution at the recent conference to:

• Write a letter asking CanWest to drop the legal action
• Distribute this letter to libraries, media activist and civil liberties communities and also to submit this letter to CanWest to try and get it published
• Support Media Democracy Day 2008
• Work with the Information Policy Committee to educate the BCLA membership and the general community on the impact of media concentration.

Here, dear reader, are some things that you can do:

• Print off the pdf of the parody and post it on your door and on bulletin boards in your neighbourhood
• Attend the free public event CanWest: Media Bully, Wednesday May 14th, 7:30 pm at SFU Harbour Center in Vancouver
• Check out the Seriously Free Speech website, and sign their petition

Edit:  Brimberg stated that he picked some of the parody papers up at the library and handed them out at a bus stop.

Voices Carry: a concert for intellectual freedom

The Vancouver Men’s Chorus is hosting a concert celebrating 25 years of Little Sister’s 25th anniversary and their long fight for intellectual freedom in Canada. The first concert is tonight May 3, 2008 at 8pm at the Commodore Ballroom, 868 Granville Street, Vancouver. They will be taking the show on the road next month with performances in Victoria June 7, Nanaimo June 8 and Kelowna June 28.

If you go to the concert find the little BCLA ad in the program and tell all your concert going friends about librarians, libraries and intellectual freedom.

Quarterly List of Admissible and Prohibited Titles–January to March 2008

The Canadian Boarder Services Agency has published their list of items deemed inadmissible to Canada.

This list is not published on the CBSA website, nor are previous lists available on their site. If you would like to receive these updates by email, contact the CBSA  at piu-uip@cbsa-asfc.gc.ca and request to be added.

Previous lists are here and here.  

Kim Bolan at BCLA

The BCLA conference is over for another year. There were lots of fantastic sessions. Really. Over the next week or two we’ll be posting summaries of the sessions that the IFC sponsored or cosponsored.

Jon Scop has written the first in this series.

Vancouver Sun reporter Kim Bolan, as well as Perviz Madon, who was widowed in the Air India Flight 182 tragedy, addressed an audience of approximately forty people at the IFC-sponsored session “Telling Their Stories” on the final day of the BCLA Conference. Bolan’s passionate outline of her continuing effort to report on the attack and its aftermath examined some of the difficult issues arising where freedom of expression and violent fundamentalism collide.

Unshelved comic strip

Unshelved is the only daily comic strip set in a public library. Recently, they had a great series of comics about a librarian dealing with a patron who is looking at “offensive” material on the Internet.

See http://www.unshelved.com/archive.aspx?strip=20080324 and subsequent days for a novel approach to a perennial issue ….

Abortion is a dirty word

POPLINE is a free database of information on reproductive health. As with most databases, POPLINE has a list of stopwords that a search ignores. Usually, these are commonly occurring words like and and or. POPLINE has recently decided to make all abortion words stop words. This means that someone searching the POPLINE database for abortion or abortions or abort will not find any articles.

The decision is not publicized on the POPLINE web site (http://db.jhuccp.org/ics-wpd/popweb/). POPLINE is a project of the John Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. POPLINE is funded by USAID, “an independent federal government agency that receives overall foreign policy guidance from the Secretary of State”. USAID’s policies include a definite anti-abortion bias (see http://www.usaid.gov/our_work/global_health/pop/restrictions.html). The manager of POPLINE, in a response to a query from a librarian in the U.S., said tha, “We recently made all abortion terms stop words. As a federally funded project, we decided this was best for now. In addition to the terms you’re already using, you could try using “Fertility Control, Postconception”.

As a librarian, I’m not sure I’d have the skills to find Fertility Control, Postconception. Lay users of the database wouldn’t stand a chance.

Wikipedia policy

I found this interesting.  From Wikipedia:

Wikipedia is an online encyclopedia and, as a means to that end, an online community of people interested in building a high-quality encyclopedia in a spirit of mutual respect. Therefore, there are certain things that Wikipedia is not.

Wikipedia is not censored:

See also: Wikipedia:Profanity, Wikipedia:No disclaimers in articles, Censorship, and Wikipedia:Options to not see an image

Wikipedia may contain content that some readers consider objectionable or offensive. Anyone reading Wikipedia can edit an article and the changes are displayed instantaneously without any checking to ensure appropriateness, so Wikipedia cannot guarantee that articles or images are tasteful to all users or adhere to specific social or religious norms or requirements.

While obviously inappropriate content (such as an irrelevant link to a shock site) is usually removed immediately, or content that is judged to violate Wikipedia’s biographies of living persons policy can be removed, some articles may include objectionable text, images, or links if they are relevant to the content (such as the articles about the penis and pornography) and do not violate any of our existing policies (especially neutral point of view), nor the law of the U.S. state of Florida, where Wikipedia’s servers are hosted.