Living Room Candidate

Lest we forget past campaigns.

Just got this fascinating link from a library colleague. It's from the Museum of the Moving Image. How about let's study the visual and rhetorical techniques of campaign ads as part of information literacy.

"The Living Room Candidate contains more than 300 commercials, from every presidential election since 1952, when Madison Avenue advertising executive Rosser Reeves convinced Dwight Eisenhower that short ads played during such popular TV programs as I Love Lucy would reach more voters than any other form of advertising. This innovation had a permanent effect on the way presidential campaigns are run."

http://www.livingroomcandidate.org/

Institutions, Victims and Justice

Paul Newman: from the film The Verdict (1982, directed by Sidney Lumet, script by David Mamet).

GALVIN

You know, so much of the time we’re lost. We say, ‘Please, God, tell us what is right. Tell us what’s true. There is no justice. The rich win, the poor are powerless…’ We become tired of hearing people lie. After a time we become dead. A little dead. We start thinking of ourselves as victims. (pause) And we become victims. (pause) And we become weak…and doubt ourselves, and doubt our institutions…and doubt our beliefs…we say for example, `The law is a sham…there is no law…I was a fool for having believed there was.’ (beat) But today you are the law. You are the law…And not some book and not the lawyers, or the marble statues and the trappings of the court…all that they are is symbols. (beat) Of our desire to be just… (beat) All that they are, in effect, is a prayer…(beat)… a fervent, and a frightened prayer. In my religion we say, `Act as if you had faith, and faith will be given to you.’ (beat) If. If we would have faith in justice, we must only believe in ourselves. (beat) And act with justice. (beat) And I believe that there is justice in our hearts. (beat) Thank you.

David Pogue on Google

Every Thursday I watch for the email from New York Times with David Pogue's column. He is one of the few technology writers that really writes to be understood. I trust someone who actually uses the products he writes about. This week he writes about using Google and how Google has improved its searching facility to make life so much easier for us. Those of us who remember life without Google can't even conceive how life can be even easier than yesterday's Google, but David Pogue thinks so. Here's his column.
http://www.nytimes.com/indexes/2008/09/25/technology/circuitsemail/index.html?8cir&emc=cir

What Issues are Important to You in this Election?

If you think you don't know what McCain and Obama stand for, it is about time you found out. With only 5 weeks till the elections, get serious about what is important to you.

Here are links to two websites, one for each of the presidential candidates, which present what candidates believe and promise to do on the major issues of the day. There are too many choices facing the country today to make uninformed decisions or ones based on a single issue, hearsay, gossip or TV ads by political action committees, lobbyists, or general factotums.


http://www.barackobama.com/issues/

http://www.johnmccain.com/Informing/issues/

Tomorrow, Sept. 19th, is the last day you can register to vote!
You can register to vote at the following locations:

Mobile County Courthouse
205 Government St.
Mobile, AL.
(251) 574-8586

Mobile Public Library
701 Government St.
Mobile, AL
(251) 438-7073

Tillman's Corner Office (West Mobile)
Cloverleaf Shopping
Mobile, AL
(251) 574-8552

You can also obtain voter registration forms from AmSouth Bank branches, Alabama Power, and or the Old Courthouse, 109 Government St., Room 116.

For more information, call (251) 574-8586.

publicprofiler/worldnames

This should have a huge disclaimer stating "world names for 26 countries--NOT INCLUDING the Middle East, China, Russia most of Africa and some other areas of the world." Sorry, most of the world population is not included. If you are of Western European heritage, however, it is kind of fun to see where your last name [surname] and other family names appear most often, that is, how many times per million inhabitants.
http://www.publicprofiler.org/worldnames/Main.aspx

Gov Docs Big Week

All week long our Government Documents department will be celebrating the 40th Anniversary of its inception as a Federal Depository Library. Join them

Today:

At 1:00 Paula Webb & Beverly Rossini and doing a presentation in Room 305 "Take Charge! Informed Health Decisions for Older Adults."

At 3:00 in the Library Auditorium, Mobile County Commission President, Stephen Nodine, will speak.

The rest of the schedule is here.

Established by Congress to ensure that the American public has access to its Government’s information, the Federal Depository Library Program (FDLP) involves the acquisition, format conversion, and distribution of depository materials and the coordination of Federal depository libraries in the 50 states, the District of Columbia and U.S. territories.

The mission of the FDLP is to disseminate information products from all three branches of the Government to over 1,250 libraries nationwide at no cost. Libraries that have been designated as Federal depositories maintain these information products as part of their existing collections and are responsible for assuring that the public has free access to the material provided by the FDLP.http://www.gpoaccess.gov/libraries.html

What [Media] Librarians Do on their Day Off

http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/filmblog/2007/oct/17/isthisthegreatestyoutubec

The Disadvantages of an Elite Education

Every student, and even more emphatically, every faculty member at an institution of higher "learning"--not just at elite institutions--should be required to read this essay.

"The Disadvantages of an Elite Education"
By William Deresiewicz
in the current issue of American Scholar
http://www.theamericanscholar.org/su08/elite-deresiewicz.html

Evaluating Webpages

I've been terribly negligent about keeping this blog up-to-date. One excuse is my schedule of teaching classes on how to use the library. One of the concepts I would like to include in each class, but seldom have time for, is how to evaluate the reliability of a webpage. Because it is sooo easy to use Google, one tends to ignore the constant warnings from faculty about webpages and their provenance.

Here's a webpage I've developed over the past few years providing some questions you need to ask yourself before including a webpage from the "public" Internet in your bibliography. I need to do one on Wikipedia too. My advice about using Wikipedia is to always read the info under the tab "Discussion" before using an article. It often contains some of the most amazing arguments about what's true and what's unknown and what is pure bs. Much more fun than the articles themselves--sometimes providing insight into how "information" is often a social construct.
http://www.southalabama.edu/univlib/sauer/evaluat.html