citizen is as citizen does

my pal wizgeneric made a good point recently about being disenfranchised by a lack of information. i have also been thinking it is disturbing how difficult it is to be an informed member of the electorate. have you seen the pa voter web site recently? agh. no wonder voter turnout sucks so bad! i'm a librarian. i'm trained to find information. if it frustrates the hell out of me, think about what sane people go through!

so here is something (courtesy of librarian.net) that is lovely: http://www.vote-smart.org/index.htm. if you put in your nine digit zip code (it tells you how to find out what that is), it will give you a list of your local incumbents, challengers, elections, and issues. there's also a list of think tanks, voter registration info, special interest group ratings, ballot measures... lots of good stuff. check it out. and vote!

whither goes a wiki

i'm very excited about a new project we're going to be doing over the summer. it all starts with the pilot we're going to be running of the college's new content management system. basically, the content management system is going to give each department control over the content that appears on their little sections of the college web site. right now, the library already has control over that. what we don't have is a wiki.

the cms is going to allow us to integrate our blog with the web site, and also to add wikis that we intend to use, first, to develop more intuitive subject guides. right now we have a page of "guides" that includes "resource guides" in one column and "pathfinders" in another. the students have no idea what the difference is, and frankly i think the difference is nearly inconsequential. so the new plan is to combine the general topic guides (resource guides) with the sample searches (pathfinders), hopefully in a way that makes sense to the students.

i'm not sure when we get to start this pilot (the library is the guinea pig for the project because we already have our own departmental web presence), but apparently IT wants it ready for college-wide implementation by august. fun!

eat my bootstraps

"i pulled myself up by my boostraps! you should too!"

the "boostraps" argument should be tossed in the dustbin of elitist bullshit as soon as possible. it assumes that 1) equal opportunity is a fact, not an ideal, 2) anyone can overcome anything, and 3) if you don't overcome anything and everything you have no one to blame but yourself because 1) equal opportunity is a fact, not an ideal.

see how nice that works out?

structural inequalities are the fact here. our society does not treat everyone equally. those who get ahead and those who don't are separated by an ocean of context and, if you want to get metaphysical about it, luck. discrimination is not just something mean or misguided individuals do to annoy people, it's a whole series of circumstances woven into the very fabric of our culture. whether we like it or not, the "civilized" world was built on the backs of people who never had a chance to pull themselves anywhere by anything. the only people who have the luxury of "pulling themseves up by the bootstraps" are people who are located in a privileged cultural position, or who can break into a privileged cultural position. that means not every american has access to that particular brand of american individualism. to assume they do is to ignore centuries of the tangible and damaging effects of racism, among other things.

the american ideal of "equality and justice for all" is a lovely concept. it's something we should aspire to achieve. but to assert that it EXISTS is, at best, extremely and insultingly naive.

a is for activism

i became interested in activism in college, which i guess is sort of cliche. but there it is. i marched, i rallied, i picketed, i wrote letters, i signed petitions. i did an independent study in which i volunteered to help run independent political candidates for city council. that was a surreal experience. my co-volunteers were a pack of contentious marxists with a penchant for strange nicknames and a really annoying obsession with bob dylan. they frequented a fabulous little mexican restaurant, however. yum.

since then my activism has been mainly of the writing letters/complaining bitterly to myself variety.

rallies are hard to come by in these here parts.

a meme! a meme!

i'm shamelessly poaching this meme from librarygrrrl, in part because i am jealous of her name and in part because i wish i had her previous job.

so the idea is to write a post about a concept starting with each letter of the alphabet. since i have such ghastly writer's block i'm hoping this will shake some cobwebs loose.

glub glub.