This work presents the history and impact of the seven most important progressive library organizations worldwide--in Austria, Germany, South Africa, Sweden, United Kingdom, and two in the United States. Each organization is considered within its national context, and in fact, the English word "organization" does not quite fit the nature of all of the groups. The South African organization, LIWO, was transitional in that it helped bring South African librarianship from apartheid to majority rule and then disbanded. The other organizations or their successors are still working in one form or another. Some of the organizations have had or continue to have vibrant local chapters, though many of the original activists have recently retired or died. The author has interviewed many of them at a time when they were assessing their life work, and handing off to new generations.

In this book, the reader will encounter a myriad of urgent library and information voices reflecting contemporary local, national, and transnational calls to action on conflicts generated by failures to acknowledge human rights, by struggles for recognition and representation, by social exclusion, and the library institution's role therein. These voices infuse library and information work worldwide into social movements and the global discourse of human rights, they depict library and information workers as political actors, they offer some new possibilities for strategies of resistance, and they challenge networks of control. This book's approach to library and information work is grounded in practical, critical, and emancipatory terms; social action is a central pattern. This book is conceived as a direct challenge to the notion of library neutrality, especially in the present context of war, revolution, and social change. This book, for example, locates library and information workers as participants and interventionists in social conflicts. The strategies for social action worldwide documented in this book were selected because of their connection to elements of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948) that relate particularly to core library values, information ethics, and global information justice. - The first monograph of its kind - Locates librarianship front and centre in knowledge societies - Mainstreams critical librarianship

South Africa will be dealing with the legacy of apartheid for generations. Dr. Jacqueline Kalley has had the foresight and vision to document the experiences of black library users during South Africa's years of apartheid, focusing her studies on the second half of the twentieth century, when apartheid reached its zenith. Apartheid in South African Libraries is an in-depth study of the effect of apartheid on public, provincial, and community library services in South Africa. With a high degree of accuracy and objectivity, Dr. Kalley documents the past record and experiences of black libraries. She masterfully integrates the numerous aspects of this complicated subject including historical, legal, and resource concerns. A historical introduction helps provide background and context for the work, and an index, bibliography, and photographs round out the book.