To show the range of events, Landgraf mentions an academic library (O’Grady Library at Saint Martin’s University in Lacey, Washington), a public library (Goffstown Public Library in Goffstown, New Hampshire), and a school library (at Country Day School in Huntsville, Alabama). The article also spotlights the ALA’s own event, a reading of the Qur’an on its front steps on September 11.

As an educator, I really enjoyed learning more about O’Grady Library’s September Project event which explored the controversy surrounding the nearby Olympia Food Co-op’s decision to boycott Israeli products (on a local scale) and the related issues surrounding the Israeli/Palestinian conflict (on a global scale). Professors Irina Gendelman and Nathalie Kuroiwa-Lewis asked their Digital Journalism students to combine library research and on-site reporting to create a digital slide installation in O’Grady Library. In the article, Professor Gendelman notes that the co-op’s boycott caused “a pretty big rift in the community, and people were polarized suddenly. This is an effort to contribute to that conversation.”

Getting folks together for difficult conversations and providing resources for people to learn more about their world is what The September Project is all about. It is also what libraries – like Goffstown Public Library, pictured below – do every day.

The UT Tyler Robert R. Muntz Library is announcing the following events in observance of the International September Project. This is our third year participating in the September Project. Since 2004, libraries around the world have organized events about freedom and issues that matter to their communities during the month of September. This grassroots project favors free over fee, public over private, and voices over silence. In addition, September is also the month for Constitution Week (September 17-23) and for Banned Books Week (this year it falls on September 25 to October 2). We bring those events under our umbrella of the September Project as well.

The library will host or present the following activities this month:

• Thanks to the generosity of the Mary Tyler Chapter of the Daughter of the American Revolution (DAR), the library is hosting an exhibit in honor of Constitution Week. This exhibit is on view in the second floor and on one of the two display cases on the third floor. This exhibit will run through the month of September. It can be viewed during library regular hours. The theme of this year’s display is “Historic Preservation, Education and Patriotism.”
• The Muntz Library is hosting a Texas Humanities exhibit entitled The Bonfire of Liberties: Censorship of the Humanities. This is one of our activities for Banned Books Week as well as the September Project. The exhibit looks at the history of censorship in the field of the humanities, showing how many works we consider classics have been considered controversial at one point or another. This exhibit is made possible by a grant from the UT Tyler Friends of the Arts (FOA).
• And our big event: We are happy to announce that we will do a screening of the film Charlie Wilson’s War on Thursday September 30 at 7pm. This will take place in LIB-401. The film presents the story of East Texas Congressman Charlie Wilson’s covert dealings in Afghanistan, where his efforts to assist rebels in their war with the Soviets have some unforeseen and long-reaching effects (from imbd.com description). The film also gives a look at how the federal government works and how funding for things like wars is done. We are pleased to announce also that Dr. James Newsom, Senior Lecturer from the History Department, will be the guest speaker for the event. Dr. Newsom will deliver some remarks and provide some context for the film.

These events are free and open to the public.

This inspired (and fun!) all-day event is organized by faculty and staff at the University of Toledo. Open to the public, it features 20-minute presentations about the right to read and think freely, punctuated by song, poems, doughnuts, and door prizes. When has a vigil sounded so fun? From the organizers:

“We are not a library, but we do an all day vigil to celebrate the right to read and think freely.  This fall, we celebrate our 13th anniversary of joining folks around the world in joining the American Library Association’s observance of intellectual freedom during Banned Books Week.  I’m attaching a fact sheet and speaker’s list of our event in case you want to use the information anywhere on your site.  Even if you don’t think we belong on your map, I thought you might like to know about our event.  Last year just over 500 attended our all-day event.”

Find this event on our map, and be sure to attend it if you’re in the area. More info:

When:        September 30, 9 a.m. through 5 p.m.
Where:       UT Honors Program Building, second floor of Sullivan Hall
Who:          UT faculty, staff, and Toledo area residents will give 20-minute presentations about the right to read and think freely. Edmund Lingan and Risa Beth Cohen will sing “Three Troubled Tunes” at 5:30 p.m.

A Digital Journalism class will explore the controversy surrounding the Olympia food co-op’s decision to boycott Israeli products (on a local scale) and issues surrounding the Israeli/Palestinian conflict (on a global scale).

The Digital Journalism students will research the topic and create a slide show which will include 40-80 quotes, various sources and images, representing multiple perspectives on the issue. The slide show will run on the library wall monitors during a week in September. This slide show will also be made available online.

Dear Colleagues,

Rather late than never, I would like to tell you about the Library of the University of Pretoria’s September Project.

September is heritage month in South Africa, and a good opportunity to celebrate our freedom, in particular our freedom of expression. We decided to do an exhibition of books that were banned during the Apartheid era, and encourage students to read the once banned books.

Supported by our literature information specialist, Adrienne Warricker, one of our assistants, Niel de Kock, hunted down these previously banned books in our collection. This task was unexpectedly more difficult than we anticipated because these books were now completely integrated into the collection, when they were previously in a separate special collection. We also found many of the previously banned books were not in our collection, exactly because they were banned, and libraries had to have special motivations to acquire them during the Apartheid era. Many more is now out of print.

We also called in the help of our colleague in Special Collections, where the previously banned books were housed before their integration into the open collection. He explained what the process and procedures were around access to these books. We thank Pieter van der Merwe for his contribution.

On the 17th of September we had our exhibition in the main library. I include some photos of the exhibition. Niel de Kock also compiled a presentation which we ran on the plasma screens in the Library on that day and subsequently during September.

The Argentinean Cultural Institute and Lincoln Library

Are hosting

“Walking in New York”

Intervened pictures and paints by

Sabrina Díaz

August 28th to September 25th at 672 Maipu Street, Buenos Aires – Argentina

The show will be opened from Monday to Friday 9am-9pm

Sabrina Díaz is a visual artist, who graduated from the Visual Art School of Lomas de Zamora in Buenos Aires. She Specialized in Photography, Digital Art and Painting. At the moment, she is the manager of the Visual Ideas Department, in the Cooperation Cultural Center Floreal Gorini.  Sabrina has been producing and exhibiting her art since 2003.

In the fog of memories, Sabrina Díaz builds her universe. Her visible topic:  New York City. Its buildings, its parks, its skies.  As flashes are fixed in remembrance, this reality will later become a route full of sensation and experience.  Just like in her previous exhibition in 2007, the artist mixes different procedures: digitally intervened pictures, acrylic painting, watercolor pencils applied on canvas or on paper (providing different chromatic effects). The limits between digital and film pictures are no longer clear.  She is producing works in which the general climate goes beyond any technique. New York, the visible subject, becomes a dream, the place where Sabrina Díaz reveals her interior world with an intense poetic dimension.

As one of the world’s oldest civilizations, Iran has contributed greatly to our understanding of literature, art, science, math and philosophy. Therefore, O’Grady Library will:

• Facilitate a discussion of Twitter and its role in recent Iranian street protests
• Show Persepolis, a film based on a graphic novel by an Iranian writer Marjane Satrapi
• Set up an interactive display on Iranian culture. Faculty and students are invited to participate by sharing their classroom assignments that explore the culture(s) of Iran. These projects will be documented and shared with libraries all over the world!

What we love so much about this September Project is that, in addition to being very informative and educational, it creatively utilizes technology to reach people around the globe. By digitally documenting the faculty and student projects, librarians will be able to share these great ideas with countless people. It is truly a global collaboration because participants get a chance to educate the world through their projects.

• Last year Terrebonne Parish Library hosted a community band concert of patriotic songs after surviving back-to-back hurricanes, Gustav and Ike.  Along with photographs of the USS New York (built from melted down scrap metal from the World Trade Center), Terrebonne Parish Library used music to unite and to overcome hard times.

• Cabrillo College in Aptos, CA celebrated Constitution Day with a musical presentation by their student choral group, led by Cheryl Anderson. They used the music in association with talks by several esteemed professors on constitutional topics.
• La Biblioteca Centro Lincoln and Instituto Cultural Argentino Norteamericano showed Elvis Presley’s 25th anniversary concert and the documentaries Flashing on the Sixties and Empire of the Industry at the Auditorium. Ricardo Poyo Castro talked about jazz and African American music.  Peter Bronzini, Roberto Moreno’s Quartet and James Murray and Proscenio also performed live shows. In this case, music was used as entertainment and as a tool to educate particpants on history and other cultures.

Musical presentation at La Biblioteca Centro Lincoln

These are just a few of the many musical TSP events hosted by librarians. We’re excited to hear more about musical events for TSP 2009 in the upcoming weeks! If you have any ideas, don’t hesitate to drop us a line and share them!

This year my academic library, the University of San Francisco’s Gleeson Library, will be hosting an event that centers around the First Amendment. They will be displaying books and posters that focus on the freedom of religion, speech, press, assembly and petition.

Also, here are just a few of the programs that other academic school libraries have hosted in the past:

• Jessica Moskowitz, a Library Technician at the University of Washington’s Gallagher Law Library, helped host a Constitution Day book display of on the U.S. Constitution, democracy and freedom.

• Julia Jorgensen and Cape Central High School in Missouri hosted voter registration, a screening of National Treasure, the Election book display, The First Time I Voted essay collection and a reading by Walter Bergen (Missouri’s first Poet Laureate).

• Karen Chobot and the Mildred Johnson Library at North Dakota College of Science cleverly combined The September Project, Constitution Day and Banned Books Week into a big event. They displayed posters from the Long Island Coalition Against Censorship, featured a window display of the music industry’s attempt to stop student file sharing and presented questionaires asking students how they think of free speech.

• Cheryl Carr and Oregon Middle School teamed up with their local public library to celebrate National Library Card Sign Up Month. They offered applications for public library cards and set up a bulletin board advocating public libraries.

• The Library Ludwig von Mises at the Universidad Francisco Marroquin in Guatemala City commemorated the Month of Freedom and Independence by displaying books on the follwing topics: ethical and philosophical principles of germ independence, the history of the Independence of the United Provinces of Central Americas, the process of separation of the Province of Central Americas and the consolidation of the Republic of Guatemala from the year 1839, and the life and work of Austrian economist Ludwing von Mises.

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