York librarian Lisa Sloniowski spoke at the Ontario Library Association conference last week, on a panel with Nick Ruest from McMaster, Sam Trosow from Western and Francesa Holyoke from UNB (the chair of the CAUT Librarians' Committee). Solidarity is a Two Way Street is her post about it on the blog she runs with Patti Ryan, Research for Citizenship:
At the OLA Superconference last week I spoke about solidarity for and amongst academic librarians, and tried to make the case that we needed to connect ourselves to citizen/activist movements, and not just focus on advocating amongst "decision-makers." I tried to make the case that librarians are about more than our graduate degrees, but the profession needs to emphasize (or return to) our core democratic values - knowledge, sharing, common space, and freedom of expression. As these issues are near and dear to the goals of this research for citizenship project, I thought I'd attach my talk here for people to read at their leisure. Apologies to those who attended for the break neck pace at which I read the paper, I was, perhaps, overly excited! Many thanks to Nick Ruest and Krista Godfrey for organizing the session and the workshop which followed, and to Francesca Holyoke and Sam Trosow, my co-panelists. The discussion got a bit lively during and after, with not everyone on the same page, of course – it's my hope that the panel provoked a conversation which will continue. The speech is in presentation format – which is to say it's not carefully formatted for publication, reader beware.
