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Editor’s Note: Playing Dress-Up
No full textRemember playing dress-up? We probably all did as a kid; maybe some of your youngest patrons still do so at the library.It’s enticing to play pretend every now and then, and books—our greatest escape—provide a great starting point. What book character would you most like to emulate? To dress up as? I’ve dressed up as The Cat in the Hat before, as well as Thing One (or was it Thing Two?)
From Book Rating to Book Bans: A Critical Content Analysis of BookLooks.org’s Report Cards on LGBTQIA+ Titles
No full textWhen attempting to ban books, challengers often rely on book review and rating sources that are designed and authored by people working outside the field of librarianship and who may have little to no professional qualifications. These sources, while advertising themselves as impartial, are steeped in personal bias and partisan ideological positions. BookLooks.org is one of the resources used to support efforts to remove books from K-12 public schools. However, an empirical examination of these rating sources has not been undertaken. In this manuscript, we use Critical Content Analysis to examine the “report cards” created for Stonewall award-winning (and honored) LGBTQIA+ titles included on the BookLooks.org site. While the site’s mission statement claims to uncover “objectionable content, including profanity, nudity, and sexual content,” the analysis of annotations pulled from the report cards of LGBTQIA+ titles reveals a more insidious and far-reaching agenda. Findings from our study suggest that these report cards undermine allyship and support for LGBTQIA+ students, promote skepticism about factual data and objective definitions of terms, and systematically target gender presentation that lies outside of a masculine-feminine binary. By discussing and naming the rhetorical and ideological implications of resources like BookLooks.org, we offer support for practitioners looking to defend their school and public library LGBTQIA+ collections
Not Just in English Anymore: Good Nutrition, Buena Nutrición . . . Everyone Deserves a Healthy Diet
No full textMany immigrants to the United States face not only a language barrier for being able to purchase food but also cultural and socioeconomic barriers. Immigrants often cannot read English and are significantly handicapped in their access to nutritional information. Additionally, many new residents of the US face significant socioeconomic barriers, such as the inability to access available government programs and living in food deserts or food swamps. Food deserts are those areas with a lack of availability to sufficient food and food swamps are those areas where the available food is high calorie but nutritionally lacking
From the Chair
No full textGreetings to all. As your newest GODORT chair, I come into this position feeling like a student entering their new school year. As an elementary or secondary student, it was the excitement of new shoes, new clothes, new hairdo, new backpack, new lunchbox, seeing old friends again, and wondering how to make new friends, sometimes heading to a new school depending on the movement of grades. Then, off to a higher education institution, perhaps the first long stretch away from your childhood home and living on a campus or living in an apartment with new roommates, or commuting with a car or public transportation every day, finding the right building where your class is located, new independence, and for returning students seeing classmates again. It was that sense of new and familiar, exciting and terrifying, thrilling and intimidating, all rolled up together. Leaving the secure and comfortable and venturing into the unknown and unfamiliar for the chance to learn, develop, and grow in experiences, knowledge, and networking with colleagues. An old song that I learned in Girl Scouts long ago crept into memory: “Make new friends, but keep the old . . .
From the Chair
No full textAs I write this, GODORT is in the midst of change, a shift in the structure of service that should hopefully make it easier to fill our volunteer slots and improve the overall functioning of the round table. So why does it matter to shift from 60 people in 80 available volunteer positions to 60 people in 60 available volunteer positions? There are a few reasons, and being mindful of them may help us chart our way forward.First, the role of the round table has changed as ALA has changed. When GODORT was founded, ALA revolved entirely around two annual conferences, and GODORT primarily organized itself around meeting at those conferences. GODORT planned events for knowledge exchange, social connection, and even political organizing within the bounds of the ALA conference. At present, ALA no longer has two governance conferences, and with LibLearnX concluding after 2025, there may only be one conference each year. But as this has happened, GODORT has shifted to meet more frequently outside the bounds of these conferences. The focus has changed between Friday chats, virtual conferences, virtual committee meetings, and the increased availability of communication platforms like ALA Connect
GODORT Midwinter Committee Updates
No full textAwardsDevelopmentEducationGovernment Information for Children (GIC)LegislationProgramPublicationsRare EndangeredSocial Media Outreach EndangeredFederal Information Interest Group (FIIG)State Loca
Get to Know . . . Chris Bloodworth
No full textChris Bloodworth might be a fairly new government documents librarian, but he is no stranger to government information. He has been an Adult Services Librarian at the main branch of the Detroit Public Library (DPL) since 2022. Prior to that, he had a long tenure as a research librarian at Honigman Miller, a large law firm in Detroit, and he also worked in the Arthur Neef Law Library at Wayne State University and at Ohio State University’s Moritz Law Library. Most of his training with government information has been practical, beginning when he was a graduate assistant while working on his MLIS at Wayne State University. “Though my library science graduate education has helped me become successful in my career, the knowledge and experience I’ve gained working in government documents has been learning and acquiring on the fly,” he noted
Documents without Borders: For the Culture
No full textMy frequent focus in these columns trends toward science, technology, mathematics, and engineering because I work as a librarian at a technological university where engineering is by far the largest program on campus. However, the world of international government documents is so much larger than the STEM scope I frequently write within. International agreements, declarations, and international governmental organizations (IGOs) whose mission is to protect and share culture proliferate. Culture, being one of human’s most treasured attributes, is celebrated, researched by scholars and students, and sought out by many for personal enrichment. Outside of organizations/institutions promoting culture in the U.S., like the National Endowment for the Humanities, many of these groups will benefit from international government information sources. In this column, I will discuss a few such organizations and institutions, including United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), world heritage centers, and partner and regional organizations. I will also provide ideas for further exploration
The Roles of Academic Librarians in Promoting Gold Open Access to Faculty: A Review of the Literature
No full textSince the advent of Open Access (OA) publishing as a response to the serials crisis in scholarly communications, academic librarians have often served as OA guides for faculty as they navigate the research process. However, as more studies have emerged on faculty perceptions of gold OA, the roles of librarians in promoting OA have come into question. This literature review article aims to examine articles and book chapters published from 2010 to 2023 with a geographic focus on North America that discuss how and why librarians have promoted gold OA to faculty. The literature reviewed suggests that librarians should focus on the benefits for faculty authors when discussing gold OA, and early career researchers may be more inclined toward OA than those later in their careers. Librarians have used various types of outreach, including workshops, speaking engagements, social media, and more to advance OA on their campuses. Challenges for OA outreach include a lack of understanding of OA practices, article processing charges (APCs) for OA journals, predatory OA journals, and reluctance from librarians to adopt OA for their own publishing methods. Further study on both faculty and librarian perceptions of OA; on factors that influence researchers to choose specific journals and publishing methods; and on how commercial publishers and libraries are continuing to adapt to the OA movement will provide a better understanding on the roles of librarians in influencing faculty toward gold OA
Writing Our Story: Community Building in an Academic Library Using Portable Whiteboards
No full textPortable whiteboards are ubiquitous in academic libraries and popular with the students and staff alike, both as study tools (students) and low- to no-cost, minimal effort assessment tools (staff). This case study discusses one Georgia academic library’s use of these whiteboards for student engagement after COVID-19, in a project named #ProjectWhiteboard. The purpose of this activity began as a low effort way to obtain feedback from students during the fall of 2021, after COVID-19 restrictions were lifted and the libraries were seeing more traffic, and later became a fixture in the library as a community-building initiative. This project is ongoing and is being completed in multiple locations of an academic library