Fourteen-year-old Anika Tabovaradan makes a passionate plea to Toronto City Council to keep her Scarborough library branch open.
“I’m no taxpayer, but when I get to use the computers in the library and do my homework, I’ll be able to get a good job someday … and when the day comes to pay taxes, I’ll be glad that you supported people paying the extra taxes to keep the system going.”
You can find out more at the Our Public Library campaign website.
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Alternative Library Spaces is a project by Ksenia Cheinman documenting special libraries or, as she defines them more specifically, libraries in the domains of arts and humanities, in order to create a database of these spaces.
This project has evolved out of a personal observation on the nature of artist-run spaces and other art organizations. Every art institution by its nature is bound to accumulate print materials (be that exhibition catalogues, brochures, event invitations, artist books and publications, zines, various periodicals or other ephemera). As these resources are constantly obtained, the questions regarding their use and storage quickly arise. Many such organizations have very limited space and yet they manage to hold on to these valuable materials. Unfortunately, however, these resources are rarely known about or made use of by the greater community.
The main focus of this project is to highlight the importance and unique character of such spaces (as opposed to public, academic and more specific art/design libraries that are part of universities and colleges) and to establish how they can be further used and developed by the institutions they belong to and by the broader public.
She is currently seeking suggestions for library spaces to include in the database and contact details are available on the project’s website if you would like to contribute.
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This is 1:45am at Toronto City Hall.
(Thanks to @meslin for posting the link)
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Privacy International – Data Trail from This is Real Art on Vimeo.
Privacy International, the oldest surviving privacy advocacy group in the world, has just released their study “European Privacy and Human Rights (EPHR) 2010“, funded by the European Commission’s Special Programme “Fundamental Rights and Citizenship”. As part of the report’s release they commissioned this video from This Is Real Art which demonstrates how people’s data exhaust can allow them to be tracked without their knowledge.
If you would like to gain some insight into how your data exhaust is tracked, I suggest that you download Collusion, a Firefox add-on by Mozilla Labs employee Atul Varma. The add-on tracks sites you visit and their connections to advertising entities that engage in “behavioral tracking”. If you do not use Firefox, a demonstration of Collusion is available online.
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American Commons: Photographing Libraries Across the Nation is a Kickstarter project from Robert Dawson. Since 1994 he has traveled through nineteen states and photographed hundreds of libraries and he is trying to raise money to complete the project.
As a photographer I have committed my life work to investigating “the commons” – the things that we share as a nation – our environment, our infrastructure, our culture – the things that keep our society civil and working. For communities across the country, libraries offer free access to information and education, a sanctuary, and hope for the future.
Libraries are local but I chose to view this astonishing system as a whole. While each library has its own unique set of needs the nation-wide system of local libraries constitutes an important part of a healthy society. In the nineteenth century there was a strong correlation between the public library movement and the movement for public education. People understood that the future of democracy is contingent on an educated citizenry. They also felt that every citizen should have the right of free access to community-owned resources. These ideas coalesced into today’s public libraries which function as a system of non-commercial centers that help us define what we value and what we share. …
After 17 years of research, the time for me to finish this project is now. Libraries are under attack today. During the Great Depression, not a single library was closed. Now, as wealth becomes concentrated in the hands of fewer people, what is left for the rest of us? No matter our political persuasions or cultural differences, libraries connect us all. This is our American Commons. Help keep it that way.
You can follow Robert’s journey in more detail on the project’s blog, Library Road Trip.
Library Bazaar is now closed and the blog has moved here.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.
