Librarianship and human rights : a twenty-first century guide

Author Dr. Toni Samek is Associate Professor at the School of Library and Information Studies, University of Alberta, Canada.

Toni chairs the Canadian Library Association's Advisory Committee on Intellectual Freedom.

Summary In this book, the reader will encounter a myriad of urgent library and information voices reflecting contemporary local, national, and transnational calls to action on conflicts generated by failures to acknowledge human rights, by struggles for recognition and representation, by social exclusion, and the library institution's role therein.

This book's approach to library and information work is grounded in practical, critical, and emancipatory terms; social action is a central pattern.

This book is conceived as a direct challenge to the notion of library neutrality, especially in the present context of war, revolution, and social change.

This book, for example, locates library and information workers as participants and interventionists in social conflicts.The strategies for social action worldwide documented in this book were selected because of their connection to elements of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948) that relate particularly to core library values, information ethics, and global information justice.

This book also ecourages readers to pay attention to links between library and infromation work and the following solidarity rights not currently incorporated into any legally-binding human rights framework.

Readership The book is primarily aimed at librarians, archivists, documentalists, educators and students.

Content 1. Essential concepts presented in accessible terms (e.g., critical librarianship, information ethics, global information justice, human rights). 2. Practical orientation to action on contemporary issues (e.g., intellectual freedom, intellectual property, preservation, cultural destruction, censorship, public access to government information, commercialization, academic freedom, workplace speech, international relations, anonymity, privacy, confidentiality, human security, national security policies, transborder data flow, and information poverty). 3. Approximately 100 concrete strategies (e.g. ac