COSWL Cause

Judith A. Hoffberg writes in the last issue of Umbrella :

With this issue I say goodbye, knowing full well that you can always read back issues, do database research in all the issues from vol.1 no. 1, with Umbrella being a free journal for all to read, from 1978 through 2008. This has been made possible for posterity thanks to Indiana University and Sonja Staum-Kuniej at IUPUI.

Umbrella is the most comprehensive online quarterly covering the arena of artists’ books, art books and other multiple editions, including audio and new media.

Judith A. Hoffberg also curated Women of the Book: Jewish Artists, Jewish Themes is an exhibition of 90 women artists who have created bookworks of unusual beauty and significance. Among the themes are the familly rituals, traditions and liturgy, the Holocaust, the integration of Jewish culture into art, humorous takes on being "Jewish", cultural memory and the celebration of festivals, among others. But what is most meaningful in this exhibition of more than 100 bookworks is the sense of "belonging" to either a cultural or religious community, or even both. There is a message in all these bookworks which separates them from most which are oftentimes made to be "beautiful" or defy the confines of "bookness". Instead, there is content in these works of art, which is a reflection of women from Australia, New Zealand, North America, England, Israel, Italy and South Africa.

Poet Elizabeth Alexander will read at Obama inauguration on 20 January 2009.

Elizabeth Alexander is a poet, essayist, playwright, and teacher. She is the author of four books of poems, The Venus Hottentot, Body of Life, Antebellum Dream Book, and American Sublime, which was one of three finalists for the 2005 Pulitzer Prize. She is also a scholar of African-American literature and culture and recently published a collection of essays, The Black Interior.

Adrienne Germain writes:

On its sixtieth anniversary, the Universal Declaration on Human Rights is still a distant dream for most of the world's girls and women. One in every three women in the world experiences violence in her lifetime just because she is a woman. In Africa, three million girls are at risk of female genital mutilation, and ten million girls worldwide face early and forced marriage each year.

While gender gaps in education have recently been closing, 70% of children not in school are girls, and sex discrimination pervades most other sectors. For example, only 16% of parliamentarians worldwide are women.

Nowhere are violations of women's human rights greater than in the health sector. Half a million women die and 10-15 million are permanently disabled each year from entirely preventable causes related to pregnancy and childbirth. In Sub-Saharan Africa, the lifetime risk of dying in childbirth is more than 300 times higher than in rich countries. The health impacts of poverty and injustice are not distant challenges: the United States ranks 41st in the world in maternal mortality, behind Latvia, Portugal, and Poland. In Sub-Saharan Africa, over 60 percent of adults, and 75 percent of young people, living with HIV/AIDS are female. Read more.

See also: How human rights have changed in the past 60 years.

Women Librarians Who Settled the Wild West
- ---Front Page Story Posted Tuesday December 9th at LIS News.
A timid, hair-wrapped-in-a-bun, pince-nez-wearing spinster (with a cardigan sweater). Is that the image you have of a librarian from 100 years ago? Hell no, they were gun-toting, horseback-riding, walk-2-miles-to-work-in-a-blizzard type of woman. Those were the kind of librarians who settled the West. Fascinating bit of history via the Chicago Tribune. Around the turn of the 20th century, graduates of the University of Illinois Graduate School of Library and Information Science (then called the Illinois Library School) headed to places like Texas, North Dakota, Idaho and Oregon. Lisa Renee Kemplin, senior library specialist at the University of Illinois, looks through Ida Kidder's 1908 letter from Salem, Ore., at the Archives Research Center in Urbana. The letter and other documents catalog UI librarians' trips to the West 100 years ago.

"Historians Peter Brown, Romila Thapar Have Been Named Recipients of $1 Million 2008 Kluge Prize for Study of Humanity."--News from the Library of Congress.

Remarking on Romila Thapar, Dr. Billington said: "She has used a wide variety of ancient sources and of languages, and introduced modern social science perspectives to help us better understand the richness and diversity of traditional Indian culture. And she, like [Peter] Brown, has written a great biography of one of its giants, the Buddhist emperor Asoka."

Her prolific writings have set a new course for scholarship about the Indian subcontinent and for the writing of history textbooks in India. One scholarly reviewer said that "Thapar’s rigorous professional standards are cast against a background of her implicit appreciation of an India that accommodates civilizational diversity." Another said: "Thapar’s relentless striving for historical truth–independent of the superimposition of vacillating, fashionable theories of current sociopolitical conditions–is a landmark in the global writing of history."

2008 United Nations Human Rights Prize.
The United Nations Prize in the Field of Human Rights will be awarded at the special afternoon commemorative General Assembly plenary meeting in the General Assembly Hall on December 10, 2008.

The recipients of the 2008 Prize are: Ms. Louise Arbour, Mr. Ramsey Clark, Dr. Carolyn Gomes, Dr. Denis Mukwege and Human Rights Watch. Mrs. Benazir Bhutto and Sr. Dorothy Stang were awarded the prize posthumously.