October 26, 2018 – Collated by OIF Staff and News Editors

Intellectual Freedom Highlights

• EBSCO services restored to K-12 schools after complaints of obscene material | KUTV
• Podcast & Video: Automating Inequality | Berkman Klein Center

Censorship

• Houston Public Library, city face lawsuit over ‘Drag Queen Storytime’ | KHOU 11 (TX)
• Iowa man burns children’s books from public library to protest Orange City Pride | Iowa City Press-Citizen
  • After man burns LGBTQ books in Northwest Iowa, Library says it is looking at options | Iowa Public Radio
  • ‘We stand by Orange City:’ Iowa City Public Library director responds to book burning incident | Iowa City Press-Citizen
• Citizen activists push to revise history textbooks | Education Week (FL); “The Florida Citizens Alliance is an outfit devoted to the defense of “individual rights.” The group was instrumental in writing the 2017 law and its members filed the petition in Charlotte County, with help from a textbook-review nonprofit based in Boerne, Texas, called Truth in Textbooks.”
• Orange City Public Library keeps LGBTQ book on its shelves | Siouxland Proud.com (IA); ‘A Day in the Life of Marlon Bundo’
• School board revises pair of book policies | Cody Enterprise (WY)
• Attack of the porn hunters | Inside Higher Ed (EBSCO)
• Lawsuit claims Forrest Co. Jail censorship policies are unconstitutional | WDAM7 (MS)
• CCISD pulls book from elementary school shelf after complaint about explicit content | KIII TV (TX); ‘This One Summer’
• Utah Education Network restores access to EBSCO database for students across Utah | OIF Blog

Privacy

• Privacy expert resigns from alphabet-backed smart city project over surveillance concerns | Gizmodo (Toronto)
• Happy 20th birthday, COPPA | Federal Trade Commission
• Big Brother is being increasingly outsourced to Silicon Valley, says report | Fast Company
• Tim Cook calls for strong US privacy law, rips “data-industrial complex” | Ars Technica
• What spammers could do with your hacked Facebook data | Wired
• Google is putting more privacy controls directly in search | Wired
• 5 different ways IT directors handle student data privacy | eSchool News
• Need medical help? Sorry, not until you sign away your privacy | MIT Technology Review

See this week’s additional privacy news and updates on the Choose Privacy Everyday blog.

Artificial Intelligence, Data, and Ethics

• Digital rights in the era of data collection and smart city technology | The Sunlight Foundation
• Establishing an AI code of ethics will be harder than people think | MIT Technology Review
  • Declaration on Ethics and Data Protection in Artificial Intelligence | International Conference of Data Protection and Privacy Commissioners

Net Neutrality and Broadband Access

• In farm country, forget broadband. You might not have internet at all | Cnet.com
• This is why California should not go it alone on net neutrality | The Sacramento Bee
• See how passionate your congressional district is about net neutrality | Quartz
• 3 states to try to help the FCC kill net neutrality and preempt state laws | Ars Technica

Access

• Libraries say Kentucky senator tried to pressure them into canceling opponent’s forums | Lexington Herald Leader
• ASU Library archivists make marginalized history accessible to all | ASU (AZ)
• The Art Institute of Chicago is the latest museum to offer open access to thousands of images in its archive | Artnet News

Copyright

• Federal appeals court rules Georgia laws are public domain | Jurist
• In groundbreaking decision, Feds say hacking DRM to fix your electronics is legal | Motherboard
• GSU E-reserves case goes on after publishers win second appeal | Publishers Weekly (GA)

Free Press, Social Media, and Fake News

• The Best Way to Protect Free Speech Online? De-Platform Hate. | ColorLines (Op-Ed)
• How History Class Divides Us | Education Week
• Younger Americans are better than older Americans at telling factual news from opinions | Pew Research Center Fact Tank
• 8 facts about Americans and Facebook | Pew Research Center Fact Tank
• Apple’s Radical Approach to News: Humans Over Machines | New York Times

Academic Freedom & Campus Speech

• How campus activism changed the South | The Chronicle of Higher Education
• Embattled US-accredited university in Hungary moves some programs to Vienna, citing uncertainty over academic freedom | The Washington Post

First Amendment and Free Speech

• A National Park Service move that’s completely un-American and unconstitutional | The Washington Post
• Gunning for Commercial Speech | Jurist

Around the Web

• DOJ: Businesses Can Discriminate Against Transgender Workers | Bloomberg News
• HHS dropped “gender” from civil rights webpages in early 2018 | Sunlight Foundation
• Company to supply free Narcan to libraries | American Libraries; “Emergent BioSolutions, a biopharmaceutical company headquartered in Gaithersburg, Maryland, announced October 24 that it is offering two free doses of the nasal spray version of the anti-overdose drug Narcan (naloxone hydrochloride) to all 16,568 public library locations in the United States.”
• Laurie Halse Anderson and the enduring legacy of ‘Speak’ | OIF Blog

International Issues

• University professor fights $2500 library fine in court | Newsweek (Germany)
• ‘A global crisis of attacks’ | Inside Higher Ed; “A new report identifies 294 reported “attacks” on students, scholars or higher education institutions in 47 countries between Sept. 1, 2017, and Aug. 31 of this year.”
• South Korean war on ‘fake news’ raises concern of censorship | The New York Times
• Algeria: Online rights group says news site creator arrested | The New York Times

ALA News

• Official 2018 Teens’ Top Ten titles announced
• Will Eisner Graphic Novel Grants for Libraries add a third grant starting in 2019
• Kroski’s guide to escape rooms and other immersive experiences
• ALA seeks applicants for national Policy Corps – Deadline set for November 16, 2018
• Gear up for International Games Week 2018
• ALA unveils shortlist for 2019 Andrew Carnegie Medals for Excellence in Fiction and Nonfiction
• Celebrate Health Literacy Month with expanded toolkit from NNLM and ALA
• YALSA seeks member manager for YALSAblog

 

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