Greetings,
   Thanks for your comments.  You are not alone. Several folks are upset by 
my not posting to jESSE the labor union thoughts.  There are other places 
for the discussion of labor unions in libraries, but I confess readily 
that I don't know what they are.  But jESSE is not the place for them.

  The focus of jESSE is as the website says

promotes discussion of library and information science education issues in 
a world-wide context. It addresses issues of curricula, administration, 
research, and education theory and practice as they relate to information 
science issues in general, and in general academia as the membership feels 
so moved.

The focus for jESSE is not on content, but on process for LIS education. 
That is, how is the student taught about information science concepts - 
not on what labor unions are currently doing. It is not only the software 
being used by what company, but how faculty and students are being 
educated to use those technologies.  jESSE focuses on how students are 
taught, and how students learn, in today's information rich environment. 
How do students learn about labor unions, vs the MARC format? How do 
students learn about social issues regarding their professional context, 
or technical details?  Both are equally important, yet how are they 
balanced?

If jESSE focused on the content of an LIS education at the graduate level, 
it would have to cover not only the means of production of book, serial, 
video, and other media, but the politics of information management in a 
democracy (and in a dictatorship, for that matter), the issue of universal 
bibliographic control and how that matters for a culture, the cultural 
implications of different kinds of software (the cloud, for example, and 
how that differs from personal computers and the use of mainframes in the 
1980s), the reading habits of adults and children, and a host of other 
issues.

This is simply more than jESSE can handle.  Other websites and social 
media deal with library issues and information science issues. Someone 
brought up a website that is trying to pull together these content issues 
and I support that effort.  jESSE deals with process - education - issues, 
and not content or resources issues.

  (What should be in the curriculum of a newly aspiring information 
professional is a subject for another day.  But the question has been 
raised.)

   --gw


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Gretchen Whitney, PhD, Retired
School of Information Sciences
University of Tennessee, Knoxville TN 37996 USA           [log in to unmask]
http://web.utk.edu/~gwhitney/
jESSE:http://web.utk.edu/~gwhitney/jesse.html
SIGMETRICS:http://web.utk.edu/~gwhitney/sigmetrics.html
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On Mon, 26 Sep 2011, Joyce M Latham wrote:

> I have to say I am flumoxed by your choice not to post information about 
>librarians on strike.  I am a library educator, and a scholar of unions 
>in libraries and you are just wrong ... again.
>
> Joyce M. Latham, PhD
> School of Information Studies
> University of Wisconsin - Milwaukee
> Bolton Hall, Room 554
> 414-229-3205
>
>
>
>