Celebrate International Peace Day with Amnesty International

Anyone around campus this Thursday is invited to our UHM Amnesty International Student Chapter first big program. It will be Thursday, 21 September from 6.00 to 7.00 pm in campus center Room 310. We'll have a brief movie on human rights on Burma, and a 5 to 10 minute talk on this from a local expert. We'll also write some letters. We'll try to take less than an hour of your precious time. I hope to see you there.

On a related note, Senator Daniel Akaka just sent our AI chapter a very nice 2-page letter expressing some recent efforts to stop torture in this country. It is good to have such people in Washington for us!

Calling Socially Responsible Librarians in Hawaii!

I just read that Jessamyn Charity West will be a speaker at this year's Hawaii Library Association conference in Waikiki. She was one of the co-editors of Revolting Librarians Redux (McFarland). It is an interesting revisit of the classic Revolting Librarians, which is now online.

I think it might be a good time to start a Hawai'i chapter of the Social Responsibilities Round Table. Anyone interested in helping to get one off the ground? We could start by passing around a sign-up sheet of people interested, and also find out what is involved in terms of paperwork next. Perhaps we could have a program in 2008. There are a lot of progressive issues we could tackle. For example, I'd love to see something on libraries and the alternative press in Hawaii. Green libraries would be another great topic since so many of our libraries will need to be remodeled.

I wonder if there used to be a state chapter of SRRT. I believe that ALA-SRRT took a leadership role in the B&T fiasco--unlike HLA. Of course, that is before I came here, so I imagine there is more to the story.