Let the Sun Shine In: Promoting Civic Engagement with Sunshine Week

Sunshine Week is a national effort to promote the importance of open government and freedom of information. Although originally begun as a news media initiative, it has grown to include community groups, libraries, schools, governments, and others who are committed to civic engagement and access to information. For academic libraries, Sunshine Week offers opportunities for forge collaborations with campus and community partners, and to connect programming with broader student learning goals. This chapter makes the case for Sunshine Week as a mechanism for bringing together campus and community groups around issues of common concern, either as a standalone effort or as part of a broader program focused on civic engagement. It features a partnership between the library, journalism program and donors at New Mexico State University, but includes ideas and resources that are transferable to other settings

Volume 3, Number 1, March 1983 OLAC Newsletter

Digitized March 1983 issue of the OLAC Newsletter

The Pacifican April 5, 2001

https://scholarlycommons.pacific.edu/pacifican/1479/thumbnail.jp

Progressive Library Organizations Update, 2013-2017

This article is a five-year update to the author’s book, Progressive Library Organizations: A Worldwide History, published by McFarland in 2015. It includes information on all the organizations covered in the book except the Library and Information Workers Organisation of South Africa which folded in 2000. These six organizations are from Austria, Germany, Sweden, UK, and US. The analysis is based on several new interviews in 2017, documents, publications, correspondence, and much personal experience. These organizations are in various states of health, and two of them have transformed into new structures. We can take heart that activist librarians continue to organize themselves to push back against the neoliberalism that pervades our profession and the world at-large

Librarians' Free Speech: The Challenge of Librarians' Own Intellectual Freedom to the American Library Association, 1946-2007

Traditionally the concept of intellectual freedom has developed out of the perspective of users’ rights to access library materials. The American Library Association (ALA) codified this with the Library Bill of Rights, Code of Ethics, and Freedom to Read Statement. However, librarians’ own intellectual freedom has been largely overlooked. Because of this, safeguarding librarians’ own free-speech rights has received little attention even within the profession. This article examines over a half-century of cases involving librarians’ attempts to defend their own intellectual freedom. The article also explores ALA’s conflicting responses and how it struggled to define intellectual freedom, especially in the late 1960s and 1970s when it established the Office for Intellectual Freedom, Freedom to Read Foundation, LeRoy C. Merritt Humanitarian Fund, and several committees that investigated such cases. This article explores key incidents that led ALA to create policies or change directions regarding professional’s free-speech rights. It shows the struggle within ALA on the controversial idea of defending librarians’ intellectual freedom.published or submitted for publicatio

Montana Kaimin, October 31, 1975

Student newspaper of the University of Montana, Missoula.https://scholarworks.umt.edu/studentnewspaper/7486/thumbnail.jp

Montana Kaimin, October 31, 1975

Student newspaper of the University of Montana, Missoula.https://scholarworks.umt.edu/studentnewspaper/7486/thumbnail.jp