Continuing yesterday's trend of posting items long after their "best before" date, here's a press release from the Canadian Library Association
summarizing their second annual survey of challenges to materials in Canadian libraries.
Oliver Twist, The Golden
Compass and Rolling Stone magazine were among the library
materials challenged by Canadian library users in 2007, according to a
new survey released today.
The Canadian Library Association’s 2nd annual Survey of
Challenged Materials in Canadian Libraries identified 42 items
challenged by patrons. Children’s books, mainstream films, graphic
novels and popular magazines were all challenged, and a policy on
Internet access was also disputed. The survey was released in advance of
Freedom to Read Week, February 24 to March 1.
Author Nicholson Baker takes a look at Wikipedia and includes a critique of the number of articles being deleted for less-than-solid reasons. [Edit to add a link to the article which is a pretty important detail to leave out!]
In the fall of 2006, groups of editors went around getting rid of
articles on webcomic artists—some of the most original and articulate
people on the Net. They would tag an article as nonnotable and then
crowd in to vote it down. One openly called it the "web-comic articles
purge of 2006." ... Rob Balder, author of a webcomic called PartiallyClips,
likened the organized deleters to book burners, and he said: "Your
words are polite, yeah, but your actions are obscene. Every word in
every valid article you've destroyed should be converted to profanity
and screamed in your face."
"Would this committee put money into Juno? It might not want to encourage teen pregnancy. Would the government put money into a film with a dirty title, like Young People Fucking? Would they invest in something like Brokeback Mountain? They might not want to encourage gay cowboys to have sex together in Alberta."
(via Cenobyte - whose FTRW credentials are strong. Last year, she let me say "scrotum" AND "nut sack" on her radio show during a discussion about Freedom to Read Week.)
One of the semi-frequent questions/complaints I get from our branch librarians is how to deal with patrons who are looking at pornography. But during my training, one branch librarian mentioned that she'd had an incident with a patron looking at something much much worse: rotten.com
(I don't usually do warnings on my blog but I'm doing one here. Although there's nothing disturbing on the Rotten.com front page that I linked to above, remember that you can't "unsee" anything you see once you start clicking on the links on that page! )
Rotten.com bills itself this way:
The soft white underbelly of the net, eviscerated
for all to see: Rotten dot com collects images and information
from many sources to present the viewer with a truly
unpleasant experience.
[Rotten.com] is devoted to morbid curiosities, primarily pictures of gruesome fatalities, deformities, autopsy or forensic photographs, depictions of perverse sex acts, and historical curios that are disturbing or misanthropic in nature.
I've got mixed feelings about the site myself. Does seeing a picture of a decapitated person (to take but one example of what you might see if you click through the links on the site) harm you in some way? Is it illegal? Is it immoral? (And is that simply a cultural construct or a personal bias? Or is this an absolute value?)
On the other hand, is the site just a way to satisfy natural human curiosity? Is it better to be able to see this type of material rather than having it hidden? (The US policy of not allowing photos of caskets returning from Iraq is on the very opposite end of the spectrum.) Is it any different than the six o'clock news where you can regularly see video of people being killed, dying, being tortured, being assassinated, and god knows what else. It's explicit but on some level, is it any different than a site like MyFreeImplants.com (again, as just one example among hundreds that could be cited.)
But Rotten.com
isn't just a database of the disgusting; it's also a venue for making a
point about censorship, at least according to "Soylent," the
pseudonymous proprietor of Rotten.com, whose highly graphic content has
earned him enemies around the world. The site is currently being
investigated by Scotland Yard and the FBI for cannibalism. The German
Family Ministry has threatened Soylent with legal action if he doesn't
find a way to shield minors from his site. And then there's the endless
cease-and-desist letters that flood in from a long list of major
corporations that object to the site.
"Rotten dot-com
serves as a beacon to demonstrate that censorship of the Internet is
impractical, unethical and wrong," Soylent writes in his manifesto,
adding that nothing he posts there can't be found elsewhere. "To censor
this site, it is necessary to censor medical texts, history texts,
evidence rooms, courtrooms, art museums, libraries, and other sources
of information vital to functioning of free society."
A bit of sad news today, right in the middle of Freedom to Read Week...
Dear colleagues in the Book and Periodical Council,
We sadly note that Nancy Fleming has died. Nancy was the executive director of the BPC from 1979 to 1999. She helped organize the Freedom of Expression Committee and Freedom to Read Week. Her obit in The Globe and Mail is below.
Franklin Carter
_____________________
Tuesday February 26, 2008 FLEMING, Nancy Barbara (née Chisholm) Chief Executive of the Book and Periodical Council for over twenty years and laureate of the Canadian Library Association Award for the Advancement of Intellectual Freedom in Canada, died peacefully on 24 February 2008 at Toronto Western Hospital following declining health in recent years. She was 76. Nancy leaves bereaved her three children by the late Allan Fleming, Martha, Peter and Susannah, as well as their partners; grandson McCullough and many friends and colleagues. Cremation will be followed later by a memorial event in Spring (contact peterfleming@sympatico.ca). Donations to Freedom to Read (www.freedomtoread.ca) would be appreciated.
I was a bit disappointed to click through and realise this bookwasn't actually a version of Richard Dawkins' book for young people (which would be awesome!).
But the sentiment of this controversial German kid's book certainly fits with Dawkins anti-religion polemic.
The German Family Ministry is pushing for the children's book "How Do I
Get to God, Asked the Small Piglet," written by Michael
Schmidt-Salomon and illustrated by Helge Nyncke, to be included on a
list of literature considered dangerous for young people.
The authors and publishers have released the book online in English so that interested parties can read it themselves.
Didn't get a chance to post yesterday so missed kicking off FTRW on its official start date. But never one to be a day late and a dollar short, here's a link to the main web site for Freedom to Read to kick off the week. Explore, read, look for events in a community near you!
Please find below direct access to a one page web survey produced by the Advisory Committee on Intellectual Freedom. This second annual survey is intended to help the Committee develop documentation about challenged resources and policies in Canadian libraries in the 21st century. This initiative supports Canada's Book and Periodical Council's (BPC) Freedom to Read campaign http://www.freedomtoread.ca/ as we share our results with the BPC. Our survey also complements the American Library Association's ALA) Challenge Database project. Thanks are extended to the Edmonton Public Library and the ALA for providing valuable insights into the survey questions.
When I uploaded my FTRW interview to YouSendIt a couple days ago, I didn't realise they now required you to set-up an account before downloading files (boo!)
Quinn has very generously agreed to host the file for those of who who may have found this a barrier for whatever reason.
To save the file to your hard drive, right click on that "host this file" link and select "Save Link As" to save it to your hard drive. Or click the link to listen to directly - no password or account needed.
I also had one correction from the show (so far .) I said that Little Sister's went to court because they were importing material depicting underage sex. That's not true. I mixed up their Supreme Court case with another similar but different one that happened a couple years ago which was to determine if child pornography in the form of "works of the imagination" (ie. fictional stories or illustrations instead of photos) was illegal like "real" child pornography. (If I'm reading that article right, it turns out that the Supreme Court found that it isn't.)
Okay, one and a half corrections. I mentioned that I thought Little Sister's was going out of business. Their web site is still up so this doesn't appear to be the case but there were rumours they might cease operations since they lost their case and were therefore subject to massive legal bills.
Okay, two corrections. I guessed that FTRW had been around for 25 years. (It's 24 - not bad for a wild stab in the dark though!)
Oh, why not? Three corrections. I said that ALA's Banned Books week is in November. It's in September.
(How can you tell I'm used to the written medium where your words stay there forever to be contemplated and corrected as needed rather than the transitory nature of radio communications? But if I'm putting up the radio broadcast in this format where anyone can download or listen repeatedly, I might as well 'fess up to my misstatements.)
What else? I read from "Behold The Man" on the show and Wikipedia has a nice summary of the book although they give away the big "plot twist" (but so does the back cover of the edition I own - why do publishers do that? They're getting as bad as film studios with their trailers, I swear!)
The story of how I came to know and then own this book is fun. I was a big SF fan when I was younger and found the book while browsing at RPL one day. The back cover (which thankfully didn't give away the plot) grabbed my attention so I took it home and devoured it. At the time, I remember thinking it may just be the best book I'd ever read. It was one of those books where everything fits together magically and there are no loose ends. Plus the themes being explored - faith, mythology, religion, modern society, angst - had a big impact on me in a variety of ways.
I kept the book in the back of my mind but never re-discovered it until I organized a Freedom to Read Week event a few months after I started at the Writers Guild of Alberta. I asked local bookstore Pages (excellent independent bookstore if you're ever in Calgary!) to sell books at the event and during one of the readings intermission, I went over to check out their wares.
I saw the book on the table and blurted, "Sold!" Brad, the Pages employee working the table, goes "You know that book? Wow, I only brought it so I'd have something to flip through instead of Harry Potter when the table wasn't busy!"
I bought it and a couple others I'd been meaning to add to my library and that book has come to define FTRW for me - I talked about it non-stop while serving on the Calgary Freedom to Read Week committee, I read from it during our FTRW reading last year at UWO and again on the radio show.
So what I'm saying is that you (yes, you. I can see you out there at your computer reading this blog - screw Web 2.0, that's Web 3.0, baby!) should find this book and read it.
Does anybody know a place to store a 30MB file for easy sharing online? I'd store it on my site - I have the space but know the file transfers would eat up my monthly bandwidth in no time.
I taped the FTRW interview yesterday off the air (memories of taping "American Top 40 with Casey Kasem" as a kid sitting there with a tape recorder and the radio turned up loud) and was going to put it up temporarily until I could get a proper digital copy.
I thought about just putting a single photo over top of it and making it a video file to upload to YouTube but they apparently no longer have "Director" accounts to let you put up videos over 10 minutes (the interview is 30 min.)
I saw Odeo billed as a "YouTube for audio" but they don't do any hosting of files (which means they're not the "YouTube for audio" in my mind.)
There's a new site called "Scripd" that's trying to be a YouTube of documents (PDF, doc, PPT, txt, XLS) but although they seem to have a option to listen to any documents on the site as an MP3 (automated text-to-voice?), they don't allow you to upload MP3's of spoken word or anything else directly.
(On that note, somebody observed that as the Net grows on an exponential basis, instead of a single search engine, there might be these "category" sites that are the place to go for all video, all audio, all documents, all information relevant to a single subject, whatever it is. Interesting theory.)
File hosting/sharing sites like box.net (which I otherwise like) have upload limits - no files bigger than 10MB on that one. YouSendIt only hosts a file for 7 days and has some other limitations as well although nothing that would affect me regarding this particular file.
I could see how much WinZip or another archiving program would shrink it although I don't like that this puts an extra step on the end user.
I didn't spend any time trying to compress it myself. I recorded it at 128kps but it probably doesn't need to be that high for a voice file.
Hmm, maybe I'll
just put it on YouSendIt for the time being and anybody who wants it
can grab it now. If you're reading this and the file's not available
anymore (after March 15 I think) but you want ot hear it, e-mail me and I can use YouSendIt again to re-send it to you.
