“For a minute, forget what you know about librarians. Forget the crotchety lady who chastised you for running to the reference desk or shushed you for talking too loudly in the echoing halls. Forget that man at the John Hay who wouldn’t let you check out comics or ‘erotic literature,’ insisting you read it in a silent glass-enclosed room.”
“Instead imagine the radical potential that libraries and librarians possess to change the world. Radical librarians emphasize the political nature of access to information, busting out from behind stacks and reference desks to share knowledge, fight censorship, and connect people with the information they are looking for. Acts of guerilla DIY librarianship have included setting up mini-reference desks at WTO protests and the Burning Man festival, resisting corporatization of media by advocating for small independent publishers, pushing for bilingual materials, and bringing books to prisoners. Radical librarians are critiquing and restructuring the very methods by which libraries classify information, attempting to make these systems less biased and censored, and more user-friendly and accessible to all sorts of people.” (from The Independent via NewPages)
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