Shhh!-In At Sheffield Libraries

Yesterday I read with dismay that the bundle of awesomeness that is Ian McMillan has been banned from a children's creative writing event for fear that he may make political comments.

He is a big fan of libraries, and has said “Libraries are a vital and irreplaceable part of a cultured and civilised society, and one of the few public places left where you don’t have to pay to get in.” Of course, he's quite right!

The story a few weeks ago of residents of Stony Stratford withdrawing every single book from their local library to fight its closure was thoroughly inspiring.

According to Library Workers For a Better Future,

In Sheffield it is being proposed that the present library budget of £8.5m should be cut by £2.5m by 2013/14, i.e. by £1.4m in 2011/12 and £550k in 2012/13 and 2013/14. There are no current plans to close libraries but cuts on this scale will inevitably have a major impact on the quality of the library service. As a campaigning organisation we are keen to work with the council wherever possible to highlight the good work that libraries do in our communities. This lack of cooperation on even such a simple thing as a children’s creative writing workshop leaves us with little option but to pursue other ideas...

The 'other ideas' they talk about are a 'Shhh!-in' at Sheffield Central Lending Library on the 5th February. That date is the national day of action for libraries, and at 11am at Sheffield Central Library, the following is proposed:

Shhh-In rules…

Finger to lips.

At 11am say ‘Shhhhh!’

Finish off with three cheers for the library!

Finally, borrow lots of books – lets empty those shelves. You’re allowed up to 15 out on your library card, so bring a big bag!

You can keep up to date with the campaign by following @lwfabf and the #shh4sheflib hashtag on twitter.

Shopdropping.

This word featured in a piece by Ian Urbina in the New York Times
on Christmas Eve. It's a curious process that the writer succinctly
described as reverse shoplifting.

Its beginnings lie in a US west-coast guerrilla-art movement that
wants to take over part of the public spaces of stores for artistic
and political purposes. One aim is to subvert commercialism as a
form of culture jamming (see http://wwwords.org?CLTR). As one
example, an artist might replace a product label with another that
features a political or consumerist message.

To judge by the New York Times article, the term has since spread
beyond its artistic origins to refer to any unauthorised placing of
materials in stores. Some is still political or consumer activism,
but the technique is now used for religious proselytising and for
straightforward advertising and promotion. Independent bands, for
instance, put copies of their albums in stores to promote them.

Early appearances of the term were linked to the California artist
Packard Jennings. The first example I've so far found was as the
title of an exhibition in San Francisco in March 2005 that included
some of Jennings' work.

Another term, which specifically refers to putting copies of CDs in
record shops, is "droplifting", which was coined by Richard Holland
of Turntable Trainwreck and The Institute for Sonic Ponderance in
2000.

* Ryan Watkins-Hughes, on shopdropping.net, 26 Dec. 2007: Similar
to the way street art stakes a claim to public space for self
expression, my shopdropping project subverts commercial space for
artistic use in an attempt to disrupt the mundane commercial
process with a purely artistic moment.

* New York Times, 24 Dec. 2007: At Mac's Backs Paperbacks, a used
bookstore in Cleveland Heights, Ohio, employees are dealing with
the influx of shopdropped works by local poets and playwrights by
putting a price tag on them and leaving them on the shelves.

From worldwidewords.org