Library Bazaar

(Un)Lawful Access

Fiacre — Tue, 31 Jan 2012 14:09:39 +0000

“This project is a response to the serious threats to privacy, free speech and civil liberties raised by proposed lawful access legislation. To understand what is at stake in this invasive and costly bill, Canada’s leading privacy and surveillance experts offer their anaylsis in the hopes of stirring debate on these critical issues.”

To find out more about surveillance in Canada, check out the links below;

TEDxLibrariansTO speaker videos now online

Fiacre — Mon, 30 Jan 2012 19:30:13 +0000

The speaker videos from TEDxLibrariansTO are now available, starting with Melanie McBride and John Miedema. The final five videos will be posted over the next few days. Enjoy!

Library Porn in the Paris Review

Fiacre — Mon, 30 Jan 2012 16:21:31 +0000

Yes, you read that post title correctly. The Paris Review has a long article by librarian Avi Steinberg on the history of library related porn. And before you click that link, due to some images and profanity, the article is obviously NSFW. Oh, and apparently the library sex fantasy has “entered an apocalyptic period”. Who knew?

“Porn books and librarians have always had a passionate, mutually defining relationship—it was, in fact, a prudish French librarian in the early nineteenth century who coined the word pornography. So it comes as no surprise that the sexy librarian, a fixture of the pornographic imagination, is most at home in books. Each year, new titles are added to the librarian-porn bookshelf. This past season’s crop included additions like Hot for Librarian by Anastasia Carrera; Lucy the Librarian—Dewey and His Decimal by John and Shauna Michaels; The Nympho Librarian and Other Stories by Chrissie Bentley and Jenny Swallows; A Librarian’s Desire by Ava Delaney, author of the Kinky Club series; and soft-core selections like Sweet Magick by Penny Watson. The conventions of the form—the dimly lit stacks, the librarian’s mask of thick glasses and hair tied into a bun, et cetera—are, of course, well known. Unlike video porn, where these conventions are typically used as a wholesale substitute for narrative, porn books still feel the compulsion to tell a story, to make the glasses and bun mean something. I was curious just what story these new books were telling. What does our most current version of the librarian fantasy say about us? To answer this question, I visited the library.”

If you would like to read some of this classic library literature, I suggest buying an ereader. Apparently it is all the rage…

(Hat tip to Melissa Gira Grant)

The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore

Fiacre — Mon, 30 Jan 2012 14:26:59 +0000

“Inspired, in equal measures, by Hurricane Katrina, Buster Keaton, The Wizard of Oz, and a love for books, “Morris Lessmore” is a story of people who devote their lives to books and books who return the favor….
‘The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore‘ is one of five animated short films that will be considered for outstanding film achievements of 2011 in the 84th Academy Awards”

Number station broadcast 2/12

Fiacre — Fri, 27 Jan 2012 19:22:03 +0000

Pirate Bay offers files for 3D objects : “We’re always trying to foresee the future a bit here at TPB. One of the things that we really know is that we as a society will always share. Digital communication has made that a lot easier and will continue to do so. And after the internets evolutionized data to go from analog to digital, it’s time for the next step.”
In China, Human Costs Are Built Into an iPad : “In the last decade, Apple has become one of the mightiest, richest and most successful companies in the world, in part by mastering global manufacturing. Apple and its high-technology peers — as well as dozens of other American industries — have achieved a pace of innovation nearly unmatched in modern history. However, the workers assembling iPhones, iPads and other devices often labor in harsh conditions, according to employees inside those plants, worker advocates and documents published by companies themselves. Problems are as varied as onerous work environments and serious — sometimes deadly — safety problems.”
The ACTA Fight Returns: What Is at Stake and What You Can Do : “The reverberations from the SOPA fight continue to be felt in the U.S. (excellent analysis from Benkler and Downes) and elsewhere (mounting Canadian concern that Bill C-11 could be amended to adopt SOPA-like rules), but it is the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement that has captured increasing attention this week. Several months after the majority of ACTA participants signed the agreement, most European Union countries formally signed the agreement yesterday (notable exclusions include Germany, the Netherlands, Estonia, Cyprus and Slovakia).”
The New French Hacker-Artist Underground : “UX is sort of like an artist’s collective, but far from being avant-garde—confronting audiences by pushing the boundaries of the new—its only audience is itself. More surprising still, its work is often radically conservative, intemperate in its devotion to the old. Through meticulous infiltration, UX members have carried out shocking acts of cultural preservation and repair, with an ethos of “restoring those invisible parts of our patrimony that the government has abandoned or doesn’t have the means to maintain.” The group claims to have conducted 15 such covert restorations, often in centuries-old spaces, all over Paris.”
Site-blocking law dubbed ‘Ireland’s Sopa’ to pass without parliamentary vote : “Ireland is soon to have a law similar to Sopa passed that would give music and movie companies the power to force Irish ISPs to block access to sites suspected of having copyright infringing material on them. Irish citizens won’t have a chance to lobby their democratic representatives because there won’t be a vote on the law — snappily named “S.I. No. of 2011 European Communities (Copyright and Related Rights) Regulations 2011″ — in the Irish Parliament. Instead the law is being enacted by ministerial order because it is being prepared in the form of a Statutory Instrument.”