Blog Project: Week of June 27-July 3

This week, there were no posts from HeyJude, so I will just discuss the ones from Annoyed Librarian.

In Melting in the Big Easy, AL is in New Orleans for the annual ALA conference.  She discusses the merits of Twitter, which is being used in great abundance by other attendees of the conference.  They mostly are tweeting about trivial aspects of the conference, like their huge bounties of "swag" or a particular session was boring.  AL wonders if only shallow and bored people tweet, or maybe regular interesting people do it too, but only show their shallow and bored side.  AL does commend the keynote speaker, Dan Savage, as being good, but doesn't understand why he was invited to speak at the conference.  This year's conference was pretty much the same-old, same-old, to AL.  She does go on to praise the food of New Orleans and the social aspect of the conference, if you had friends there.
My thoughts: AL's thoughts on the conference seem pretty on point, especially for someone who has probably been to many of these over the years.  In fact, most conferences are very similar to this one.  Glad that AL was satisfied with the food in the area, as it is some of the best around.  I am from South Louisiana, so I know that the food in New Orleans is wonderful.  If the ALA was going to have a generally boring conference, at least they picked a good city to hold it.

The second post of the week was Beware the Radical Militant Libraries.  In this post, AL discusses a critique one of her fans sent her.  It is by a conservative from Nassau County, Florida.  This particular conservative seems to hate anyone that is different than him. This critique is very different from the one made by "the Boss" in Oakland. There seems to be alot of hatred coming from this critique.  This particular conservative complains that the ALA is a group leaning too far to the left, and they have too much influence over what people read, from the library. AL points out that while librarians make buy books because of their likes or what they think the public will like, they have no critical say.  If a patron wants something, they will try to get it.  One complaint by the conservative is that the library seems to have more anti-Bush books and more pro-Obama books.  AL points out that is probably what the public wanted.  The conservative also states that the public library is pro-Muslim and pro-homosexual.  AL believes that the conservative obviously has no idea what he is talking about, because if the library were pro-Muslim, it would not also be pro-homosexual.  That goes against the Muslim faith. 
My thoughts:  I think this person sounds crazy and hateful.  If there were more conservative books on the shelves at the public library, maybe he wouldn't be complaining.  Your public library is pretty much what you make it.  It is supposed to be a reflection of your community.  Maybe he should get more involved and also get more of his like-minded friends involved.  Maybe then his library shelves wouldn't be so "slanted."