Save the date of Thursday, February 2 at noon for presentations and a discussion about our rights to access, create, and publish information here in this era of networked technologies.
We’ll be joined by Deborah Yun Caldwell, Jennie Rose Halperin, Alison Macrina, and Jessamyn West, who will dig into thorny questions like: How as a society might we balance copyright protections with free and equal access to information? Where does our individual right to privacy end and the public’s right to know begin? What is needed to reify and further the mission of providing equitable access to digital infrastructure? How might we utilize this infrastructure to the benefit of our communities?
60-ish minutes of presentations will be followed by a 30-minute forum. Please come through to listen, find community, and participate in this necessary conversation.
This event is a co-production between METRO Library Council and Library Futures. Learn more about Library Futures at https://www.libraryfutures.net.
About our presenters:
Deborah Yun Caldwell is the Data Services Librarian at the University of North Texas. She was previously the 2018-2021 Diversity Resident Librarian at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, where her work focused on equity in academia and supporting early-career librarians of color. Deborah serves on the steering committee for the PEGI Project, advocating to ensure access to public government information. She is also a member of the Library Freedom Project, where she works with other privacy advocates to equip librarians and their communities with the skills and knowledge to help mitigate the harms of living in a surveillance society. Her professional interests lie in exploring the intersections of data stewardship, privacy, cultural memory, and the justice of information access.
Jennie Rose Halperin (she/her/hers) is a digital strategist, community builder, and librarian who serves as Director of Library Futures. She is focused on growing the organization and its reach and fostering a culture of open, inclusive leadership to support equitable library policy, technology, and advocacy. She previously served as the Assistant Director for Outreach and Community Engagement at Harvard Law School Library, managed communications for Creative Commons, and worked on growth and community at O’Reilly Media and Mozilla. A committed civic leader, in 2018, she was chosen for Boston Mayor Marty Walsh’s SPARK Cohort for Millennial Leaders and received a New Urban Mechanics Public Space Invitational Grant in 2019. In 2021, she was named a visionary by Public Knowledge – a “future leader who will drive tech policy in the public interest for the next 20 years.” From 2021-2022, Jennie was on the Community Advisory Board for Invest in Open Infrastructure and has completed the Coaching Fellowship, Outreachy, and the CBYX Exchange for Young Professionals in Germany.
Alison Macrina is an activist librarian and the director of Library Freedom Project. Alison started LFP in 2015 to organize and build community with other librarians who are dedicated to library values of privacy, intellectual freedom, social responsibility, and the public good.
Jessamyn West is a library technologist from Randolph Vermont. She is a nationally known speaker, writer, and educator on the issues facing today’s libraries. Her blog focusing on libraries and politics, Librarian.net, is one of the earliest and longest running librarian websites. She writes the Practical technology column for Computers in Libraries magazine and is the author of the book Without a Net: Librarians Bridging the Digital Divide. She has taught “Tools for Community Advocacy” for the University of Hawaii’s Library School and was on the Advisory Board to the Wikimedia Foundation. As a librarian without a library, for the past fifteen years she has spent most of her time working with her local community as a hands-on technology educator.