Radical librarian Jason Griffey (previously) wants librarians to continue their 21st century leadership in the resistance to surveillance and persecution — a proud record that includes the most effective stands against GW Bush's Patriot Act — by pledging to make libraries safe havens from trumpism and its evils: electronic surveillance; racial and gender-based discrimination; and the assertion that ideology trumps empirical reality.

Everyone thinks libraries have a positive role to play in the world, but that role differs greatly based on whether you’re talking to a librarian or a patron. Ask a patron what libraries have in common and they’d probably answer: they share books with people. Librarians give a different answer: they share a set of values. It’s time for libraries to step up to those values by supporting access to the Internet and taking the lead in fighting to keep the Internet open, free, and unowned.

LibraryBox is a library-oriented version of the PirateBox project — a little, self-contained wireless router with on-board storage that you fill up with freely usable library materials and bring with you so that wherever you go, you can share with the people you meet. — Read the rest

BB reader Jason Griffey says,

Following up on last year's cloud that was on BoingBoing, I did another Tag Cloud to help people visualize the State of the Union address: Link.

Jason Griffey has released an excellent paper on the tension within the library system between the endorsement on one hand of the Open Access model of scholarly publishing (in which scholarly materials are published gratis under permissive, Creative Commons licenses, and authors pay for for peer review; as opposed to the reigning model in which scholarly publications cost research institutes small fortunes) as being good for librarians and researchers; and on the other hand of the American Library Association's own journals, which are contracted-for and published under restrictive regimes that limit copying and sharing. — Read the rest

Inspired by last week's story about a teenager who was arrested and charged with a felony for putting rude, sarcastic note in his bag for TSA checkers to find, Jason Griffey has produced a printable two-up PDF of the note in question for you to include in your luggage, if you feel like becoming a felon yourself. — Read the rest