Librarian threatens to blow up Soka Gakkai building

Reported in Mainichi News and LIS-News: "'Soka Gakkai members kept on trying to get me to vote for their favored election candidates,' he was quoted as telling investigators. 'I wanted to get back at them.'"

"Libraries Unleashed" supplement in Guardian

The Guardian newspaper published a supplement called "Libraries Unleashed". See post on CMS web log.

ALA 2008 Anaheim

ALA 2008 annual conference is in Anaheim, June 26-July 2.

Billington at Yale

As reported in the Yale Daily News and LIS News, James Billington, the Librarian of Congress, gave a talk last week on "Freedom as Strategy: the Importance of an Ideal". I was there. He stressed the importance of education in sustaining a free society, and that we're not doing too well in that area. More controversially, he suggested that some kind of religious faith is necessary to prevent knowledge-based liberty from degrading into cynicism and libertinism.

It was also interesting to see how the World Digital Library has become a priority at the highest levels of the Library of Congress.

AJL 2008 Cleveland

The 2008 annual conference will be June 22-25, 2008, at the Marriott Cleveland East. Here's the official home page. There's also this blog with some additional information on it.

The keynote speaker Sunday evening will be Dr. Ellen Frankel, editor-in-chief and CEO of the Jewish Publication Society. Her appearance at the AJL convention will coincide with JPS's 120th anniversary.