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Virtue Information Literacy: Flourishing in an Age of Information Anarchy
Author: Wayne Bivens-Tatum
Publisher: Litwin Books
ISBN: 978-1-63400-141-0
Physical Description: 6 x 9 in.; 253 p.
Virtue Information Literacy draws upon virtue ethics and virtue epistemology to develop a new, ethical conception of information literacy. Those of us who live in heterogenous societies with relatively free flowing information inhabit a world of Information Anarchy, anarchy not in the uninformed popular sense of chaos and disorder (although plenty of that exists), but in the philosophical and political sense of self-organized activity without dominant, hierarchical (information) authorities to which most people defer or which have the power to enforce conformity. We are deluged with information from advertising, marketing, propaganda, corporate media, alternative media, social media, film, and television. And, we are free to believe whom and what we like among the deluge and to act upon those beliefs, sometimes even to our own peril. We spontaneously organize into groups of like-minded believers, assuming that our group is right and theirs wrong. Collectively, we have no information gods or masters, not even the government that claims to rule us all. We still have information authorities that some believe everyone should defer to simply because of their position: scientists, doctors, scholars, experts, journalists, priests, churches, politicians, party leaders, governments, gods, etc. Nevertheless, mass collective agreement on information authority is almost impossible to achieve.
If this characterization of the information environment is correct, how should we choose wisely among this abundance? How do we learn to find and critically evaluate the best information for our purposes? Those are traditional questions of information literacy. This book asks in addition, what sort of person must we become to survive in such an environment? What sort of moral and intellectual character or self should we develop to flourish? To survive, even to flourish, in an era of information anarchy requires the development of radically new, critical, resistant, socially situated selves or subjectivities. These new selves develop through learning common information literacy skills, but also through cultivating a range of intellectual virtues that make these selves better able to exercise their information literacy skills. Such virtues include open-mindedness, intellectual humility, epistemic modesty, intellectual courtesy, intellectual courage, intellectual caution, intellectual thoroughness, epistemic justice, and information vigilance. They are cultivated through systematic mental discipline: Information Asceticism. This ethical approach to information literacy through the cultivation of intellectual virtues is Virtue Information Literacy.
Wayne Bivens-Tatum is the Librarian for Philosophy, Religion, and Anthropology at the Princeton University Library. He has also taught academic writing at the University of Illinois and Princeton University and courses on librarianship for the University of Illinois’ School of Information Sciences and Rutgers University’s Department of Library and Information Science. He has previously published Libraries and the Enlightenment with the Library Juice Press.
The Social Movement Archive
Authors: Jen Hoyer and Nora Almeida
Publisher: Litwin Books
ISBN: 978-1-63400-089-5
Physical Description: 7x10 in.; 244 p.
What would happen if we start with a critical consideration of archiving that doesn’t place the archive or the archivist at its center? What if instead, we begin with material and movements and then ask ourselves: what is the use of archiving this? who is this archive for?
The Social Movement Archive examines the role of cultural production within social justice struggles and within archives. This book contains reproductions of political ephemera—zines, banners, stickers, posters, memes, and more—alongside 15 interviews with artists and activists who have worked across a broad range of movements including: women’s liberation, disability rights, housing justice, Black liberation, anti-war, Indigenous sovereignty, immigrant rights, and prisoner abolition, among others. These images and accompanying conversations illustrate the power of political art and ephemera to transform cultural practices, places, and communities; and its capacity to be a force for disruption in archival spaces.
Nora Almeida is a librarian, writer, and environmental activist. She is an Associate Professor in the Library Department at the New York City College of Technology (CUNY) and has been volunteering at Interference Archive since 2015 where she helps organize educational programs, media-making events, exhibitions, and more. She writes about critical pedagogy, social justice, performance, neoliberalism, and place.
Jen Hoyer is a New York City-based library and archives worker and a long time volunteer at Interference Archive where she works on exhibitions, cataloging, and more. Jen loves working through how archives can help people understand themselves and their place in the world. She currently teaches K-12 students how to think critically about the world around them through the lens of the local history archive at Brooklyn Public Library.
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Wild Librarian Bakery and Bookstore
Author and Illustrator: Stacy Russo
Publisher: Litwin Books
ISBN: 978-1-63400-121-2
Physical Description: 8.25x10.25; 38 p.; illus.
For children aged 4 through adult
Stella the librarian loves her work at the library, but she daydreams about opening her own combination bakery and bookstore. One day she follows her dream and opens a magical place that becomes a popular community gathering space. Wild Librarian Bakery and Bookstore is an inspiring story about following one’s passion. Vegan recipes included!
Stacy Russo, a librarian and associate professor at Santa Ana College in Santa Ana, California, is a writer, poet, and artist who is committed to creating books and art for a more peaceful world.
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Poetry Hounds
Author and Illustrator: Stacy Russo
Publisher: Litwin Books
ISBN: 978-1-63400-116-8
Physical Description: 8.25x10.25; 32 p.; illus.
For children aged 4 through adult
Discover the adventures of dog poets Joni and Walter! Poetry Hounds is a picture book that follows two fun-loving dogs as they write poems, go to poetry readings, garden, take art classes, ride bikes, learn how to play the guitar, and much more! These dog poets show the joy and wonder of living a creative life. Their adventures will entertain children and adults alike. Poetry Hounds features unique handmade mixed media illustrations created with watercolors, pen, and assorted recycled papers.
Stacy Russo, a librarian and associate professor at Santa Ana College in Santa Ana, California, is a writer, poet, and artist who is committed to creating books and art for a more peaceful world.
Feminist Pilgrimage: Journeys of Discovery
Editor: Stacy Russo
Publisher: Litwin Books
ISBN: 978-1-63400-111-3
Physical Description: 5.5x8.5; 183 p.
Feminist Pilgrimage: Journeys of Discovery is a collection of personal essays by contemporary feminist educators, scholars, artists, and writers. The contributors imagine the concept of “pilgrimage” in their lives through a rich and diverse exploration, including a woman’s journey to visit her childhood home in Allahabad; a pilgrimage to explore sites related to the psychology of women in Paris; a Black Feminist’s academic journey as a healing experience; living a new life on a Pagan commune in New Mexico; the transformative experience of walking the Camino de Santiago from Portugal to Spain; traveling to view the original works of photographer Anne Brigman; the story of nine women creating and sustaining a retreat for writing and support; and many more. Royalties from the purchase of this book will be donated to the Women’s Center for Creative Work in Los Angeles, California.
Stacy Russo, a librarian and associate professor at Santa Ana College in Santa Ana, California, is a writer, poet, and artist who is committed to creating books and art for a more peaceful world. Stacy’s books have been featured on National Public Radio, Pacifica Radio, the Canadian Broadcasting System, Sirius XM Radio, KCET Artbound, LA Weekly, and various other media channels. Her book publications include A Better World Starts Here: Activists and Their Work (Sanctuary Publishers); Love Activism (Litwin Books); We Were Going to Change the World: Interviews with Women from the 1970s and 1980s Southern California Punk Rock Scene (Santa Monica Press); Life as Activism: June Jordan’s Writings from The Progressive (Litwin Books); The Library as Place in California (McFarland); and two poetry chapbooks: The Moon and Other Poems (Dancing Girl Press) and Everyday Magic (Finishing Line Press). Her articles, poetry, and reviews have appeared in Feminist Teacher, Feminist Collections, American Libraries, Counterpoise, Library Journal, Chaffey Review, Serials Review, and the anthology Open Doors: An Invitation to Poetry (Chaparral Canyon Press). Stacy is a collage artist. She uses magazines, old books, acrylic paint, cardboard, and wood in her creations. She holds degrees from the University of California, Berkeley; Chapman University; and San Jose State University.
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Lucien Herr: Socialist Librarian of the French Third Republic
Author: Anne-Cécile Grandmougin
Translator: Tegan Raleigh
Publisher: Litwin Books
ISBN: 978-1-63400-094-9
Physical Description: 5x8; 136 p.
Lucien Herr was the director of the library of the Ecole Normale Supérieure, the leading academic institution of France, from 1888 to 1926. In addition to being a library innovator of the time, he was an influential socialist and an early voice in the Dreyfus Affair. From his citadel in the library, he influenced the thinking of France’s emerging socialist leaders, Jean Jaurès and Léon Blum. He had the option of a career as a professor, with all of the privileges that it would have accorded him, but chose instead to remain a librarian with a hidden world-historical role.
Anne-Cécile Grandmougin’s biographical work has been translated into English, for a readership of progressive librarians who will sympathize with Herr’s vision of libraries as the heart of shared intellectual progress for human liberation and the common good. Readers will learn about Herr’s intellectual foundations, his work at the Ecole Normale, his writing career, and his innovations as the head of the “Musée pedagogique.”
Anne-Cécile Grandmougin is Conservateur des bibliothèques, Université Paris XIII.
Documenting Rebellions: A Study of Four Lesbian and Gay Archives in Queer Times
Author: Rebecka Taves Sheffield
Publisher: Litwin Books
ISBN: 978-1-63400-091-8
Physical Description: 6x9; 272 p.
Documenting Rebellions is a study of four archives that were constituted with a common desire to preserve the memory and evidence of lesbian and gay people. They are The Lesbian Herstory Archives (New York), The ONE National Gay and Lesbian Archives (Los Angeles), the June L. Mazer Lesbian Archives (West Hollywood), and the ArQuives: Canada’s LGBTQ2+ Archives (Toronto). Using a narrative approach that draws from first-person accounts and archival research, each chapter tells a story about how these organizations came to exist, who has supported them over time, and how they have survived for more than forty years. This book is the result of a five-year project that began in 2012 and builds on the author’s own experience working with lesbian and gay archives. In Documenting Rebellions, Sheffield places lesbian and gay archives in the context of changing political opportunity structures that have afforded a liberal lesbian and gay rights movement some successes while continuing to marginalize intersectional, queer and trans people. The goal of this study is not to critique these organizations, but to show how this cohort of community archives has been affected by the very same combination of socio-political and economic factors that shape the cultural histories that they preserve.
Rebecka Taves Sheffield is an archivist and archival educator based in Hamilton, Ontario. Presently, she is a senior policy advisor for the Archives of Ontario and works on digital recordkeeping strategies. Rebecka previously served as the Executive Director for the ArQuives (formerly the Canadian Lesbian and Gay Archives), where she spent the better part of a decade learning as much as possible about Canada’s LGBTQ2+ histories.
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Dreads and Open Mouths: Living/Teaching/Writing Queerly
Author: Aneil Rallin
Publisher: Litwin Books
ISBN: 978-1-63400-061-1
Physical description: 5.5X8,5; 216 p.
This timely, provocative, unruly, formally experimental/scholarly hybrid book charts an activist life of teaching/writing queerly over the past twenty years from the author’s subject position as a queer immigrant scholar/teacher of color situated in the field of rhetoric and composition.
Quirky and polemical, Dreads and Open Mouths blurs genres and challenges the boundaries between “scholarly” and “creative,” “literary” and “pedagogical,” “personal” and “political” as it explores and makes (dis)connections among literacy, writing, teaching, rhetoric, imagination, desire, sexuality, race, gender, politics, pleasure, resistance, education practices, assessment, global geopolitics, national boundaries, and students who have traditionally been marginalized in institutions of higher learning. It adds to the growing body of imaginative experimental activist work that refuses to be constrained by convention or to follow convention for the sake of following convention. It insists that queer inquiry eschew prescriptions for conventional academic discourse.
Its eleven interrelated chapters/provocations intervene into the interstices of critical pedagogy, queer theory, and contemporary politics; mingle “lust, intellect, and personal history”; and contest normative protocols of “scholarly” writing. In doing so, they produce what might be called queer rhetorics. Interceding into hegemonic knowledge and knowledge-making by offering rhetorical/methodological/activist alternatives to dominant disciplinary protocols or reimagining the subjects produced by these knowledge-making rhetorics/practices, each chapter sidesteps prescriptive expository protocols by constructing heterodox narratives, meta-narratives, interruptions in order to affect and disturb the master narratives; produces dissident (mestiza? circular? decolonial?) non-heteronormative rhetorical paradigms; takes pleasure in writing/thinking queerly; and generates theoretical and practical possibilities for queering scenes of teaching/writing.
Aneil Rallin grew up in Bombay, lives in Los Angeles, and does not drive. Aneil is Associate Professor of Rhetoric and Composition at Soka University of America, and co-editor of the “queer and now” special issue of the journal The Writing Instructor. Aneil was previously Assistant Professor of English and the Center for Academic Writing at York University in Toronto, and Assistant Professor of Literature and Writing Studies and Director of General Education Writing at California State University, San Marcos.
Masked by Trust: Bias in Library Discovery
Author: Matthew Reidsma
Published: Litwin Books
ISBN: 978-1-63400-083-3
Physical description: 5.5X8.5; 204 p.
The rise of Google and its integration into nearly every aspect of our lives has pushed libraries to adopt similar “Google-like” search tools, called discovery systems. Because these tools are provided by libraries and search scholarly materials rather than the open web, we often assume they are more “accurate” or “reliable” than their general-purpose peers like Google or Bing. But discovery systems are still software written by people with prejudices and biases, library software vendors are subject to strong commercial pressures that are often hidden behind diffuse collection-development contracts and layers of administration, and they struggle to integrate content from thousands of different vendors and their collective disregard for consistent metadata.
Library discovery systems struggle with accuracy, relevance, and human biases, and these shortcomings have the potential to shape the academic research and worldviews of the students and faculty who rely on them. While human bias, commercial interests, and problematic metadata have long affected researchers’ access to information, algorithms in library discovery systems increase the scale of the negative effects on users, while libraries continue to promote their “objective” and “neutral” search tools.
Matthew Reidsma is the Web Services Librarian at Grand Valley State University in Allendale, Michigan. He was a co-founder and former Editor-in-Chief of Weave: Journal of Library User Experience, a peer-reviewed, open access journal for Library User Experience professionals. He is the author of Responsive Web Design for Libraries published by ALA TechSource, Customizing Vendor Systems for Better User Experiences from Libraries Unlimited, and the forthcoming Masked by Trust: Bias in library discovery from Library Juice Press. He speaks about design ethics, user experience, and usability around the world. Library Journal named him a “Mover and Shaker” in 2013, which led to many unfortunate dance-related jokes in the Reidsma household.
Decolonizing the Caribbean Record: An Archives Reader
Editors: Jeannette A. Bastian, John A. Aarons, and Stanley H. Griffin
Publisher: Litwin Books
ISBN: 978-1-63400-059-8
Physical Description: 7X10; 828p.
Little Gardens of Words: Bookseed’s Stories of Travel and Service
Author: Tim Deppe
Publisher: Litwin Books
ISBN: 978-1-63400-019-2
Physical Description: 6X9; 436p.
Since 1994, Tim Deppe has been working through his small 501(c)(3) non-profit, Bookseed, to bring children’s books and seeds to hundreds of marginalized communities in Latin America and around the world. Bookseed helps establish children’s libraries in neglected primary schools and supplies organic seeds to subsistence farmers, co-ops, and school gardens. The stories in Little Gardens of Words reflect Deppe’s experiences living and working in some of these remote and forgotten communities, among dozens of different indigenous tribes. Part travelogue and part social commentary, these stories provide insight into the historical and cultural roots of these communities, as well as their current struggles. These inspiring tales show children’s eagerness to read and learn despite poorly equipped schools with few resources, and adults’ perseverance in face of hardships and oppression. These stories also show the damaging effects of militarism, racism, and poverty that threaten these communities’ survival, and readers will be challenged by seeing our own complicity in the international political and economic policies that help create these situations.
The more than twenty stories in this volume recount one man’s efforts to plant “little gardens,” promoting literacy and self-sufficiency, where they are needed most.
Love Activism
Author: Stacy Shotsberger Russo
Publisher: Litwin Books
ISBN: 978-1-63400-055-0
Physical Description: 6X9; 136p.
Love Activism presents a daily, radical activism of kindness and a positive way to live against cruelty, violence, and injustice. This is realized through how we perform our work, what we do in our communities, and decisions we make each day. This form of activism is a holistic practice with eight beautiful elements: service, empathy, non-violence, self-care, hope, creativity, feminism, and mindfulness. Even when the dismantling of large and unjust structures, corporations, and institutions can seem daunting and disheartening, we can all make real impact in our daily lives. We can choose to live our lives as political statements. This is a profound and inspiring form of activism for ourselves, our communities, all living beings, and the earth.
Love Activism is a book for those who seek a more kind and peaceful world. It provides inspiration and support for activists. Through stories, examples, and lists of practices, readers discover the different elements of Love Activism and how they can bring these practices into their lives. The book also includes interviews with ten activists throughout the United States who are involved in various types of activism in their communities. These individuals include the founder of a community garden organization; an art therapist; the founder of a food justice organization; and an individual involved with educating his community on printmaking as a form of activism. Because this book is meant to build community and foster discussion, it concludes with questions for self-reflection and reading groups. Now is the time to be brave and love powerfully.
Stacy Russo, a librarian and professor at Santa Ana College in Santa Ana, California, is a poet, writer, and artist. She believes in libraries as community spaces; lifelong learning; public education; peaceful living; feminism; and the power of personal story. Stacy is the editor of Life as Activism: June Jordan’s Writings from The Progressive (Litwin Books, 2014) and the author of We Were Going to Change the World: Interviews with Women from the 1970s and 1980s Southern California Punk Rock Scene (Santa Monica Press, 2017) and The Library as Place in California (McFarland, 2007). Her articles, poetry, and reviews have appeared in Feminist Teacher, Feminist Collections, American Libraries, Library Journal, Counterpoise, Chaffey Review, and Serials Review. She holds degrees from the University of California, Berkeley; Chapman University; and San Jose State University. Stacy always takes her coffee black; eats chocolate every day; and loves to nap at the ocean.