Digital Librarian as Info-Activist

12.16.2014

Categories: Digital Librarian as Info-activist, Hack Your Education, Resources, Works In Progress, Zines

[This blogpost will be an ongoing repository of links related to digital librarianism for resistance movements. I will refer to these links as a resource while I put together a series of zines on these topics for distribution in NYC-based zine distros. I am inspired to create a radical feminist hacker space at the Bluestockings Bookstore where I volunteer. I have long been collecting ebooks and print books about “feminine” care labor (domestic work, nannying, and sex work) – and have been looking for a way to maintain a digital library of the oral histories and writings of “care women” throughout history, especially sex workers, whose voices have been silenced. By sharing my collections on Calibre and contributing to the editing of Wikipedia, I have been recently empowered with the tools to conduct this kind of information activism in a systematic way. Before I go into my link/blogroll, here’s a little …]

…BACKSTORY:

It’s rare to meet someone whose ideas and energy completely blows you away. I was blessed to encounter such a person last week – an amazing organizer of radical conferences, and an independent researcher/femininst sociologist who identifies with the principles of anarchafeminism. She led a skillshare on digital librarianism, the Calibre ebook software, and the decentralized library project of Memory of the World. She also talked about the need for there to be more female contributors to Wikipedia. She shared on Calibre two collections of books: one on feminism and the other on digital security. I’ve spent every night of December this year reading these books, and the ideas in them have opened up new worlds for me. The knowledge she made available to everyone has really impacted my thinking, and I am already beginning to curate my own Calibre library, as well as beginning to help edit Wikipedia. She has instantly become a sort of role model for me by providing me with the inspiration and tools to do the kind of information-work that I have long been trying to do, in a less community-oriented way.

I was moved by this person’s presentation on her research involving women in computer programming and hacking: why there has been an exodus of women from ICT fields in spite of long-term involvement of women in the creation of the computer sciences. The talk that she gave on gender and technology connected some of the feminist theories that I had been reading, with a new context for activism. I am now suddenly more motivated than ever to immerse myself in learning IT, cybersecurity, software development, and the FOSS/hacker culture.

This person also led a skillshare on the idea of feminist hacktivism – what is it? What does it mean to abide by transfeminist principles on the web? She introduced a project of creating an alternative mesh of feminist servers, which I want to be involved in, and she announced an upcoming TransHack Feminist Conference in Puebla, which I hope I can attend next May.

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What is a digital librarian?

ALA: What do digital librarians do?
http://www.ala.org/acrl/sites/ala.org.acrl/files/content/conferences/pdf/marion.pdf

Memory of the World – “Why and how to be an amateur librarian”
http://www.memoryoftheworld.org/blog/2014/10/28/why-and-how-to-become-an-amateur-librarian/

Memory of the World – “Tutorial on creating your own digital library”
http://www.memoryoftheworld.org/blog/2014/11/06/a-public-library-of-my-own/

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Librarian as Information Activist

Librarianism as a resistance movement
http://boingboing.net/2014/09/13/radical-librarianship-how-nin.html

“Hack the Biblio” – a blog post by Spideralex
https://n-1.cc/blog/view/1892772/hack-the-biblio-construir-bibliotecas-publicas

The role of digital libraries in countries where books are banned – by Jillian York (Electronic Frontier Foundation)
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2014/09/where-books-are-banned-internet-can-be-lifesaver

The Information Activist Librarian – a blog by Anthony Molaro
http://informationactivist.com

Librarians without Borders
http://lwb-online.org/

Bookcamping (Spanish) – a resistance library
http://bookcamping.cc/

Feminist Zines from the TransHack Feminist Conference 2014 in Calafou, Spain
http://transhackfeminist.noblogs.org/post/category/biblioteka/

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Digital Resistance Libraries & Other Digital Libraries

AAAARG
http://aaaaarg.org/

The Base’s Texts & LibraryThing
http://thebasebk.org/texts
http://www.librarything.com/catalog/TheBaseBk

Libcom
http://libcom.org

Project Gutenberg
http://www.gutenberg.org/

Librivox – user contributed audiobook readings
www.librivox.org

Unglue.it
https://unglue.it/

Open library…
https://openlibrary.org/

…a project by Archive
https://archive.org/

Independent Publishing Resource Center
http://library.iprc.org/

World Digital Library
http://www.wdl.org/en/

Digital Public Library of America
http://dp.la

Open Culture
http://www.openculture.com/

Open Science Publishing /* I will create a separate section later on academic publishing and the paradox of selective peer review journals which constricts the free flow of ideas */
http://www.plos.org/

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Free Education

Open Education – a project of…
http://www.open.edu

Free Culture Movement
http://freeculture.org/

Open University
http://www.open.ac.uk/

Open Learning Initiative at Carnegie Mellon
http://oli.cmu.edu/

Open Stax College – free textbooks project
http://cnx.org/

/* I will add a list of MOOC’s here, with a special emphasis on well-reviewed courses in computer science, programming, and data */

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Zines Libraries (Online & Offline)

We Make Zines
http://wemakezines.ning.com/

The POC Zine Project
http://poczineproject.tumblr.com/