Reading Spaces

YAAN: prototypical social media for ya librarians

I just came across this article by Cindy Welch, an LIS prof at the University of Tennessee. Welch illustrates how the Young Adult Alternative Newsletter (YAAN) provided a forum for youth advocates in North America in the 70s to share ideas, but importantly, it also provided a place for support, professional identity and political expression. We hear the voices of early advocates like Mary K. Chelton, Joni Bodart, Larry Amey (editor of a Canadian newsletter, Young Adult Hotline) among others. The histories of young adult library services are few and far between, so it was a pleasure to find this one. The host site for this article, In the Library with the Lead Pipe, is pretty interesting too and worth a closer look.

CFP: The Intersection of Broadcasting and Print

Call for Papers:
The Intersection of Broadcasting and Print
May 31, 2011
 
A Special Joint Session at the Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences
Sponsored by The Canadian Historical Association’s Media and Communications History Committee, The Bibliographical Society of Canada and The Canadian Association for the Study of Book Culture
 
The Media History Group of the Canadian Historical Association, the Bibliographical Society of Canada and the Canadian Association for the Study of Book Culture seek paper proposals for a special joint session to be held at the Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences in spring 2011.
 
The theme of this special joint session is “The Intersection of Broadcasting and Print.”

While broadcasting and print have been positioned at times as oppositional and competing forms of communication, those of us who study either field are apt to encounter instances of complementary or cooperative interplay between the two. Who among us has not encountered a book transformed into a made-for-TV movie or documentary? Or seen a popular television drama spun off into a series of novels? In English Canada, popular CBC radio shows such as Morningside and Writers and Company have inspired printed collections of material originally produced for radio transmission. In Quebec, Claude-Henri Grignon’s popular Un homme et son péché crossed over from print to radio to film, then television, then film again. From other angles, what is the relationship between newspaper and broadcast journalism?
What is the significance of the rise of media conglomerates, organizations that often encompass broadcasting and print (books, newspapers, magazines) under their umbrellas and advocate the value of “synergy.”

For this joint session, we invite proposals for papers that reflect on “The Intersection of
Broadcasting and Print” from any part of the world, and in any time period since the introduction of broadcasting. Papers might focus on a specific piece or genre of “content” made manifest in both realms, or examine the phenomenon at the level of policy and practice, whether in relation to a company/conglomerate or to the broadcasting and print industries as a whole. More generally, we seek papers that explore how broadcasting and print have understood and responded to each other, and have thereby defined themselves.
 
Please submit a 250-word proposal, a one-page curriculum vitae, and your contact information to: proposals@bsc-sbc.ca or vipond@alcor.concordia.ca
 
Deadline for Paper Proposals: Wednesday, September 22, 2010.

CFP: SHARP 2011

The 19th Annual SHARP conference will be held in Washington, D.C. mid July next year. The call for papers is available now from the SHARP website. Deadline for abstracts is 30 November 2010.

There is also a "special" SHARP meeting in Brisbane on the theme of the "Long 20th Century" -- looks like a closer fit for those of us doing studies of reading and readers. Deadline for abstracts is 1 November 2010.

SHARP 2010

In a few weeks, I'll be giving a paper presentation at the Annual Meeting of the Society for the History of Reading, Authorship and Publishing. My paper is called: "Enough Books to Make Reading for Fun Possible: The inconspicuous emergence of the Canadian young adult novel and the rise of the teenage reader."  A copy of the abstract along with abstract from the other presenters in the session Reading Through Life is available here or from the SHARP Conference Website.

Reading through Life Sessions: Abstracts

From Librarians to Informationists to Intelligencers: Adrian Johns

Listen to Adrian Johns' keynote address, As Our Readers Go Digital, given at the recent 2010 RLG Partnership Symposium When the Books Leave the Building: The Future of Research Libraries, Collections and Services.

At the symposium website, you will find a 30 minute mp3 of the talk, along with slides and a printable version of the paper. From the introduction of Johns' paper: 

"There is of course something odd about giving a conference at this moment in history the title “When the books leave the building.”  The conceit that they were confined in a building in the first place is peculiarly antique – it evokes images of those old cathedral libraries with huge, musty folios chained to the furniture.  As far as I know, it hasn’t been the case for centuries that run-of-the-mill books were kept in that kind of bondage.  Yet I do think that there is a real issue being signaled by our title – or rather, a set of issues.  They have to do with what I’ve come to think of as the “three Ps” of the move to massive digital libraries: the places of reading, the practices that are deemed appropriate to those places, and the publics that they can give rise to.

Those three things – places, practices, and publics – connote to my mind the major areas of hope and doubt associated with mass digitization.  I think that when we speak loosely of the revolutionary “impact” of the new technologies, what we really mean is a set of consequences that will have to emerge through the three Ps as those technologies are put to use.  Perhaps the places they will constitute will be radically new, for example; more likely, they will be formed by the creative adaptation and combination of existing spaces.  We have already seen this happening in offices, laboratories, and libraries (my old institution, Caltech, was one of the first more or less to eradicate its bookish library altogether).

The 3 Ps also have a very long conjoint history – longer than the book itself, if by “book” we mean codex.  My point today will be that if we approach the experiences of readers as they “go digital” through the history of the 3 Ps, we can articulate for ourselves the nature of a problem that we all face."

(Adrian Johns, 2010, "As Our Readers Go Digital," keynote address 11 June 2010, RLG Partnership Symposium When the Books Leave the Building: The Future of Research Libraries, Collections and Services. Newberry Library, Chicago, IL). 

The [VERY] Sad Tale of Mrs. Mole and Mrs. Mouse

In my research into the history of the Toronto Public Library, I just came across this catalogue entry for a very cool manuscript of an early Canadian children's story called "The Sad Tale of Mrs. Mole and Mrs. Mouse". I've seen the original manuscript a few times in the collection at the Osborne Collection of Early Children's Books, but I hadn't seen the scanned version.

CFP: Mapping the Communications Circuit

*Bibliography and Textual Studies. 2010 Topic: Mapping the Communications Circuit*

The MMLA’s permanent section on bibliography and textual studies seeks proposals for papers discussing points of contact between the history of the book and literary studies. This year’s theme, “Mapping the Communications Circuit,” builds off Robert Darnton’s model for the history of the book as a circuit of communications, including texts but also authorship, readership,printing/publishing and bookselling/libraries. This theme invites scholars to reexamine the literary roots of book studies and to map out new directions for the field. Papers may focus on any historical period or geographic region, but should be primarily preoccupied with the intersection of book studies and literary studies. Abstracts falling under the general rubric of book history are also welcome.

Please send 250-word abstracts to Matthew J. Lavin, Univ. of Iowa, matthewlavin@uiowa.edu by April 15, 2010.

Katherine Paterson's response to the threat of the iPad

making the rounds on the blogosphere: Katherine Paterson's response to the threat to printed and bound books; from an OpEd piece in the NY Daily News.

Reception Study Society Journal: Volume 1, and CFP for Volume 2

Volume 1 of the RSS Journal is available online at the RSS website. There is an open call for manuscripts for Volume 2, forthcoming Spring 2010:

Call for Papers: Reception: Texts, Readers, Audiences, History, vol. II

The editors of Reception: Texts, Readers, Audiences, History, the journal
of the Reception Study  Society, invite submissions for its second
issue, which will appear in the spring of 2010.

The journal seeks to promote dialog and discussion among scholars in several
related fields: reader- response criticism and pedagogy, reception
study, history of reading and the book, audience, media/textual, and
communication studies, institutional studies and
histories, as well as interpretive strategies related to feminism, race, ethnicity,
gender, sexuality, and postcolonial studies. The journal publishes
theoretical and practical analyses in these fields, focusing mainly but
not exclusively on the literature,  culture, and media of England and
the United States. Vol. I is available on-line at the RSS website:
http://www.english.udel.edu/rsssite.

The journal is refereed and appears once each year on line. At least two
members of the editorial board will provide independent reports on each
essay submitted for publication. Contributors will receive these
reports in a  timely fashion. Papers should follow MLA guidelines and
should not exceed 6,000 words. Panelists from the RSS conferences are
especially encouraged to submit  proposals. Please limit the proposals
to 500 words and send them to Philip Goldstein. His addresses are
pgold@udel.edu and the University of Delaware, 333 Shipley St., #309,
Wilmington, DE  19801.

CFP: Canadian Association for the Study of Book Culture: Annual Conference

CALL FOR PAPERS 
Connecting Books and Society
 
Sixth annual Conference on the Study of Book Culture, sponsored by the Canadian Association for the Study of Book Culture / Association canadienne pour l’étude de l’histoire du livre during the annual Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences (at Concordia University – 31 May and 1 June 2010). 
 
This year’s CASBC/ACÉHL conference theme –“Connecting Books and Society”– is in keeping with the general theme for the 2010 Congress –“Connected Understanding”.  At first glance the idea of studying the way texts resonate in our society makes us think of current technological changes and new media but to do this is to ignore the past transformations in a field where change is nothing new. Over time, the material aspects of the written word have evolved in response to technological, social, political, ideological and economic change.  Books in their many forms have unquestionably been shaping history.
 
CASBC/ACEHL defines “book culture” broadly to refer to studies in the history of the book, literary and cultural history, historical bibliography, digital humanities etc. The conference organizers will consider papers on all periods and places, but priority will be given to papers falling within the theme of “Connecting Books and Society”.
 
Proposals (in French or English) should not exceed 250 words and should include a title and abstract, indicating the research basis of the study as well as the argument of the paper. A brief c.v. (one page) should be supplied. Papers may be in French or English and should not exceed 20 minutes. Panels of three papers will be considered.
 
Please forward proposals by 15 December 2009 to Marie-Pier Luneau, University of Sherbrooke, who is the Program Chair and a member of the CASBC/ACEHL Executive :
Marie-Pier [dot] Luneau [at] USherbrooke [dot] ca
 
Please note that presenters must be members of CASBC/ACEHL by the time of the conference, and that presenters and participants must be registered through the Congress : for further information go to http://www.fedcan.ca.
 
SPECIAL FEATURES OF THE 2010 CONFERENCE
 
CASBC/ACEHL will collaborate with the Bibliographical Society of Canada on joint sessions on May 31, 2010.
   
For further information on CASBC/ACEHL – and the conference program when it is established -- please consult our website : http://casbc-acehl.dal.ca.