Guerrilla Librarians in Our Midst 3 #OWS: Have We Entered the Age of Protest?
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Guerrilla Librarians in Our Midst 3 #OWS: Have We Entered the Age of Protest? 6 Magnetic tongue to produce tastier tinned tomatoes 9 Real Utility: Accounting for Energy Costs Makes Mortgage Sense 11 Mysterious Life Forms in the Extreme Deep Sea 14 US, EU in Dogfight Over Airline Emissions 16 Design Rules Will Enable Scientists to Use DNA to Build Nanomaterials 18 Wildlife CSI Positively Identified Bat Killer 21 Quantum keys let submarines talk securely 23 Music Training Enhances Children‘s Verbal Intelligence 24 Recycled cans to make cheap fuel cells 26 Misinformation in TV Drama Can Gain Credibility 28 Fiery Volcano Offers Geologic Glimpse Into Land That Time Forgot 30 An Unforgettable World Series? Only If Your Team Wins 33 First icy star-disc hints at source of Earth's water 35 Facebook Profile Pics Predict Future Happiness 37 Propensity for Longer Life Span Inherited Non-Genetically Over Generations, Study Shows 39 Far West, Northeast Lead in Jobs for Artists 42 Launch of Galileo satellites heralds new era 44 Vehicle-to-Grid: A New Spin on Car Payments 46 Trying to explain the "Obama Fried Chicken" incident and others like it. 53 The Ten Most Amazing Databases in the World 56 If statins carried a rare but serious side effect, would we ever find out? 58 Knowledge is Power: Shakespeare, Bacon, & Modern Cryptography 61 Do candy bars ever go bad? 78 Do you want a smart book? 80 Even in straitened times, we must encourage, not stifle, creativity 82 Why Fingernails on Blackboards Sound So Horrible 84 Looks like Congress has declared war on the internet 86 You are what you eat: Low-fat diet with fish oil slows growth of prostate cancer cells 89 Dr. Livingstone's lost 1871 'massacre' diary recovered; discovery rewrites history 91 Study shows promise for teen suicide prevention 95 UCLA helps convert East L.A. corner stores from 'food deserts' into healthy food oases 97 Explained: Why is the Sunset ramp only closed during rush hour? 98 Royal Society journal archive made permanently free to access 100 Sistema de Infotecas Centrales Universidad Autónoma de Coahuila What Wikipedia Deletes, and Why 101 UCLA scientists design experimental treatment for iron-overload diseases 103 Penned in Prison for The Private Library 105 Top 10 Great Satirists 109 Twitterology: A New Science? 119 Grad students help undergrads get most out of UCLA 121 Breast tenderness following combo hormone therapy linked to increased breast density 124 Citation Obsession? Get Over It! 126 Global Economy Exposes Japan's Shortage of English-Speaking Graduates 128 10 Questions for virus hunter Anne Rimoin 130 Use Strong Verbs: a Fairy Tale 133 A bloody good read: 'Dracula' author's journal found 135 Postal History at the Post Office 138 Fighting violent gang crime with math 140 Great Wall restoration gives untold history new life 142 Woody Woodpecker's Great Big Little Secret 147 Waves of Memories 149 Space station may be site for next mock Mars mission 153 Creative Class 155 It Takes Two: Brains Come Wired for Cooperation, Neuroscientists Discover 160 Burning Down the House 162 Attack of the mystery green blobs 167 Murky Muybridge 170 Hubble Directly Observes the Disk Around a Black Hole 177 Henri and Me 180 Gamma rays reveal youngest stellar dervish 184 The resonance of destruction past, manufactured, and yet-to-come. 186 City Lights Could Reveal E.T. Civilization 190 The Power of Ruins 192 Taking up a Collection 194 Climate Shift Could Leave Some Marine Species Homeless 197 China launches spacecraft to test automated docking 199 Pulsating Response to Stress in Bacteria Discovered 200 2 Infoteca’s E-Journal No. 178 November 2011 Sistema de Infotecas Centrales Universidad Autónoma de Coahuila intellectual Affairs Guerrilla Librarians in Our Midst November 2, 2011 - 3:00am Scott McLemee When thinking about the future of Occupy Wall Street, there is something to say for meteorological determinism. An open-ended protest movement may grow when the weather permits, but an Arctic blast means shrinkage. OWS may bloom again in the spring, perhaps on a scale to dwarf anything that's happened so far. But when you ask people involved in the movement about what to expect in the meantime, the response can be rather evasive, and it sometimes comes with a look that says, ―Have you ever tried to do anything by consensus, let alone long-term planning? Seriously, quit asking me that.‖ But one segment of the movement has been thinking about the cold months ahead, and even beyond that. They are the ―guerrilla librarians" -- the people organizing and distributing books and periodicals to keep the demonstrators informed and entertained. A library was established in Zuccotti Park at the very start of the Occupy Wall Street demonstrations, and it has received a good deal of attention. Several more sprang up as the protests spread. With the occupation movement, decentralized improvisation is the name of the game, so it‘s impossible to tell just how many libraries have sprung up. But they exist in Boston and Philadelphia, in Portland, Ore. and Halifax, Nova Scotia, among other places. They are staffed by a mixture of professional librarians and activist volunteers, with "stacks" created through donations from publishers, bookstores, and individuals. Just keeping their collections running has been plenty demanding. But that's where a slowdown in activity during the cold months could help the libraries consolidate themselves while also establishing contacts with one another. The blog of the flagship OWS library now serves as an unofficial journal providing information and advice for the whole milieu. A stronger network is likely to come out of the American Library Association meeting in Dallas in January, where an informal working group of library and information- science professionals who supporting the occupation movement will get together to compare notes. Mandy Henk, a librarian at DePauw University, will be attending the session in Dallas. Being on fall break gave her the chance to work with the Occupy Wall Street library in early October. When we spoke by phone, she was back in Indiana but planning to return to Zuccotti Park within a few days. ―A lot of academics have volunteered,‖ she said, ―mostly grad students or professors from the New York area.‖ Her description of the work required to keep the collection running covers all the basic functions performed by the staff of a more traditional collection: acquisitions, cataloging, building and maintaining a reserves collection, and working the circulation desk where patrons can check books out. ―We also have a Friday night poetry slam,‖ she says, ―and events where authors discuss their work with the public.‖ I asked how meet-the-author events were organized. This, with hindsight, was a pretty silly question. As with everything else in OWS, the voluntarism sustaining the library follows its own rhythm. Authors just show up. Librarians work when they can and leave when they must. Flux is part of the ambience: a feature, not a bug. ―People are enjoying having a space where they are surrounded by books and ideas,‖ Henk says. ―The great thing about Zuccotti is that constant political and economic debates take place that people might otherwise shy away from.‖ (Not that the library provides only fodder for argument. Plenty of fiction also circulates.) Steven Syrek, a graduate student in English at Rutgers University, has been working at the OWS library since about the third week of the demonstration. ―People talk about this movement like it‘s a ragtag bunch of hippies,‖ he told me when we spoke by phone, ―but the work we do is extremely well-organized.‖ The central commitment, Syrek says, is to create ―a genuine clearinghouse for books and information.‖ Volunteers have 3 Infoteca’s E-Journal No. 178 November 2011 Sistema de Infotecas Centrales Universidad Autónoma de Coahuila adopted a slogan summing up what the library brings to the movement: ―Literacy, Legitimacy, and Moral Authority.‖ The hours he spends at the OWS library are, admittedly, cutting into the time Syrek has for his dissertation. Figuring out how to ―strike a better balance‖ between research and public service is an priority. But adding to the mass of secondary literature on Shakespeare feels less urgent than the work to be done in Zuccotti Park. (And besides, short of a massive improvement of the job market in literary studies, devoting energy to open- air scholarship might make more sense now than the narrower sort of professionalization that once prevailed.) As with the ―book bloc‖ that formed during protests against education cuts in Italy and elsewhere some month back, the occupation libraries seem like a new development. And a welcome one, after too many years of demonstrations where the cultural tone was set by giant papier-mâché puppets engaged in mirthless satire. (I used to feel guilty for wanting to see them consumed in flames, but eventually realized that this was a pretty common desire.) But the libraries at the anti-Wall Street protests are not quite as novel as they first appear. They have a tradition going back the better part of two centuries. In a recent article, Matthew Battles, the author of Libraries: An Unquiet History (Norton, 2004), noted the similarity to the reading rooms that served the egalitarian Chartist movement in Britain. For that matter, the Chartists also anticipated the occupation strategy as well. Battles, who is working on a forthcoming book on the history of the written word, discusses the OWS-Chartism connection in a short video: Libraries & Occupations from Matthew Battles on Vimeo. Immanuel Ness, a professor of political science at Brooklyn College of the City University of New York and editor of The International Encyclopedia of Revolution and Protest, 1500 to the Present, (Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), points out that libraries emerged as part of the sit-down strikes that unionized the American auto industry in the 1930s.