Competency 2: Related Blog

I Googled for a while and came across an awesome blog called Social Justice Librarian. I only found it less than an hour ago, and already I love this blog! There's a fantastic entry about how the digitization of academia is leaving public history in the dust, and how public libraries are in the unique position to facilitate public history projects:

I think we’ve all outgrown the “the Internet is going to democratize the world!” phase by now (yes? no?), but I don’t think we’re paying adequate attention to the fact that this migration of “scholarship” and preservation – basically the bulk of what will be tomorrow’s “history” - is reinforcing the exclusive nature of historical preservation. [...]

Of course, it’s easy to spout off about, and much harder to actually figure out the nuts & bolts: How to you ensure broad community representation? What do you do with communities that don’t want to participate? How do you select what is of long-term value – or do you at all? Is that up to the communities themselves, perhaps? [...]

Despite all of this chaos in my mind about the details, I do think that public libraries are uniquely suited to facilitate a public history project: something technically based on open source software, and developed in coalition with community groups.