I know I could get my entire month's worth of Freedom to Read Week Month “Music Monday” clips out of this list but I'll post them as a group since that's how I found them.
Used a poor man's hack (point iPhone at TV) to get a clip from our local TV news about RPL joining our new province-wide consortium onto YouTube. Sorry for the crappy sound…
A friend had introduced me to “Reservoir Dogs” soon after it came out on video and I quickly became a Tarantino junkie. When I found out that “True Romance“, a movie he'd written but not directed was coming out, I was pretty pumped to go see it.
The release of this movie happened to coincide with me being introduced to a rather nice young woman by mutual friends. As these things go, I asked her to a movie but somewhat selfishly, decided that I really wanted to see “True Romance” so I suggested that this be the movie we go see. She hadn't heard of the film or Tarantino or “Reservoir Dogs” so agreed. I mean, to her the title had “Romance” in it and it started Christian Slater who'd been in “The Legend of Billie Jean” and “Young Guns II” – how bad could it be?
I picked her up and while waiting for her to get ready, checked out her movie collection. She had a VHS copy of every Disney movie ever released and really, not much else. “Oh-oh” I remember thinking. But I was *really* excited to see the Tarantino film and the thought of doing a quick switch to a different film didn't even cross my mind.
Well, you can imagine how things went. The film about a young couple (one a comic store loser, one a hooker who his boss hires for him as a birthday present) who accidentally end up in possession of a suitcase full of cocaine. It contains all the elements of the best (you may choose to put that word in quotes, depending on your personal taste – I know she would've) elements of a Tarantino movie – violence, dark humour, pop culture references, a wicked soundtrack. One scene where a mobster ends up beating the hooker (who'd been left in the room while her boyfriend goes to get ice cream! ) was so disturbing that I was cringing in my seat (and not just because I was on a first date with a Disney chick sitting beside me!)
The movie ended, I took her home and we parted ways. Believe it or not, I think we may have seen each other a few more times after that although honestly, I think the magic was gone about two minutes into the movie where it became clear that this movie wasn't anywhere near “The Lady and The Tramp” but would be a really intense version of “The Loser and The Tramp”.
TL;DR: For a first date, I took a huge Disney Fangirl to a Movie That Ranks Near The Top of “Films That Most Frequently Use The Word 'Fuck'” right up there with “Eddie Murphy: Raw” and “The Departed”.
Oh, and the movie also features perhaps the greatest scene of dialogue in the history of film between Christopher Walken and Dennis Hopper…
So many choice quotes in this article – unfortunately, you can't make this stuff up:
“The row even spread to this year's Fourth of July parade, which
included a float featuring a washing machine and a sign that read “keep
our library clean.”
“Outside West Bend, the fight caught the attention of Robert Braun,
who, with three other Milwaukee-area men, filed a claim against West
Bend calling for one of the library's books to be publicly burned,
along with financial damages.
The four plaintiffs — who
describe themselves as “elderly” in their complaint — claim their
“mental and emotional well-being was damaged by [the] book at the
library.”
“We want parents to decide whether they want their children to have
access to these books … and we want the library's help in identifying
[them through labeling and moving],” Maziarka said. “It's just common
sense.”
I think it's fair to say that the majority of the battles around Freedom of Expression are taking place in schools these days.
“The Diary of Anne Frank” is one of my favourite books of all-time and a book I probably first read when I was 12 or 13. So in a world where all kinds of censorship is happening in schools, this story where a newer, expanded version of the autobiography with more sexually explicit material that wasn't in the original release is pulled from the classroom after a single complaint and without following the school's only policies, really irked me. The decision to keep the book in the school library does little to correct the injustice of pulling it from the classroom that's happened here.
“Culpeper's policy on “public complaints about learning resources” calls
for complaints to be submitted in writing and for a review committee to
research the materials and deliberate, Allen said. In this case, the
policy was not followed. Allen said the parent registered the complaint
orally, no review committee was created and a decision was made quickly
by at least one school administrator. He said he is uncertain about the
details because he was out of town.”
Today was the big day when RPL joined three other library systems within the province who had already gone live as part of a province-wide library system called the Saskatchewan Information and Library Services consortium (SILS).
When all systems have joined, SILS will be the largest library consortium in the world in terms of geographic area covered and also number of individual sites (300+).
For RPL's Go Live day, I split my time between three of our smaller, inner-city branches (the trainers I'd been working with for the past month plus our Deputy Director were each assigned to a different RPL location to help with trouble-shooting and any questions that arose during the day) and for the most part, it went incredibly well with only some very minor glitches (literally, most were on the level of “How do I make the font bigger on the Holds Slip?”)
This was due to a combination of factors including:
– RPL was able to learn a lot from the three systems that had gone live before us about how to prepare and what snags to watch out for
– RPL management creating a great team including a very experienced systems librarian who had been through four (?) different system transitions before in places ranging from Texas to Ohio
– and of course the fact that we had pizza delivered to every location so everyone had sustenance to get them through the day!
(I'd also like to think that the staff training sessions and other related activities I was directly responsible for such as preparing a manual and FAQ of commonly asked questions raised during our month of training helped!)
So anyhow, it's been a great learning experience to be part of not only the transition to a new ILS but to also be involved with a province-wide project of such enormous scope and complexity.
But then again, I've always been somebody excited by big, bold ideas and although I had very little to do with SILS coming to fruition, believe it or not, this was my major Advocacy project in library school three years ago. Spooky, eh?
It's February which means Freedom to Read Week is coming at the end of the month. Every year, I try to do a few posts during that week to celebrate and draw attention to this important subject.
For the past year, I've been bookmarking various stories I've come across that I thought had potential for the week. I've got more than seven but less than thirty but I think I'm going to try to do an entire month's worth of Freedom to Read Week posts (give or take – since I'll exempt myself for a few of those days – some of the Music Mondays, most of the Friday Fun Links and some of the Saturday Snaps – though maybe a pic of Pace reading “Where The Wild Things Are” would be appropriate. That or “Lolita”. )
To start things off, here's a bit of background about something I've always wondered – why do some artists prevent the embedding of their videos on YouTube? Buzz band, OK Go, who saw 50 million people watch their “dance routine on treadmills” video on YouTube and catapult them to, well if not massive success, definitely a lot wider recognition.
This story isn't really about censorship or Freedom of Expression per se but really is about how business models are changing and confused by technology – the band's label refuses to allow the videos to be embedded (or even viewed in certain countries) because they don't get a share of revenue from ad clicks unless people watch the video directly on YouTube. The band naturally wants to reach the widest possible fan base and explains their side of the story.
“four years after we posted our first homemade videos to YouTube and
they spread across the globe faster than swine flu, making our
bassist’s glasses recognizable to 70-year-olds in Wichita and
5-year-olds in Seoul and eventually turning a tidy little profit for
EMI, we’re – unbelievably – stuck in the position of arguing with our
own label about the merits of having our videos be easily shared. It’s
like the world has gone backwards.” The lead singer was also recently interviewed in Time magazine on the subject.
(And here's a semi-related story as a bonus – a member of The Roots which is the house band for “Late Night with Jimmy Fallon” – discusses the behind-the-scenes of walk-on music – the themed music that plays for celebrities as they walk onto talk show sets. In most cases, this is straight forward but some music is so expensive to license, even for a few seconds, that house bands are forbidden from using it. This came up because Conan's band played the Beatles' “Lovely Rita” for one of Conan's guests on his last “Tonight Show”, Tom Hanks whose wife is named Rita. That ten seconds cost NBC something like $400 000!)
An AskMetaFilter thread which may be of particular use to those in academic libraries. Nobody's posted the top Library Science journals and I can't remember the names of the ones that were supposed to be the tops in their field (though I do remember getting lectured by our 501 professor when he realised that most of his students weren't regularly reading LIS journals outside of our assigned readings – oops!)
WikiHow is a site where anyone can add instructional guides on pretty much any topic you can think of. There's lots of good information (in between the tons of Google ads) from How to Teach Yourself Piano to How To Treat A Snakebite – although the usual caveat about the guides being user-submitted and editable by anyone applies.
“The row even spread to this year's Fourth of July parade, which
