Bay Area librarians bring information to inmates, one letter at a time
By Esther Lo article
SAN FRANCISCO, Calif. - An older transgender woman incarcerated in a West Coast prison wanted to learn how to put on makeup. A simple Google search could have given her 6,440,000 results. But behind bars, she had no access to any of that.
With extremely limited and expensive access to the Internet, she wrote to librarians through the Reference by Mail program. It’s so beautiful that she was willing to share this with us, said Rachel Kinnon, manager of the Jail and Reentry Services in the San Francisco Public Library, She trusted us enough to reach out and thought of us as a resource in that kind of very personal search.
News Highlights: Libraries and invasive Technology | American Libraries Magazine
The top Tech Trends on-demand session at the American Library Association’s Midwinter Meeting & Exhibits Virtual took a different turn this year. Rather than highlighting a range of new services or gadgets, moderator TJ Lamanna, emerging technology librarian at Cherry Hill (NJ) Public Library, stated that the panel’s aim this time was to talk about the dangers inherent in some of the technologies that can be libraries. interested in using.
John Mack Freeman, manager of the Suwanee branch in Gwinnett County (Ga.) Public Library, opened with a clip that appeared to show former US President Barack Obama voicing his support for the villain from the Black Panther film Erik Killmonger . (The clip was actually a BuzzFeed-produced PSA from director Jordan Peele, mimicking Obama’s speech patterns with cleverly synced video.)