Confessions of a Mad Librarian

It's Martin Luther King Day (I used to greet people with "Happy Martin!"). While it will be difficult to turn on the TV news and not hear a snippet of the "I Have a Dream" speech, you may want to check out some more diverse material via Stanford's King Papers Project. My own favourite is the Beyond Vietnam speech.

In an attempt to make this relevant to this particular blog, two observations:

1) As far as I know, Dr. King didn't talk about library service directly, but I think he would have been heartened by Carla Hayden's focus on equity of access within libraries as ALA President.

2) Here's something that a lot of people probably don't know (although some do): King's writings, speeches, sermons, etc. are all copyrighted to his Estate and that copyright is vigourously enforced. I mean, CTEA would have covered his work regardless unless he explicitly put it into the public domain anyway, but it saddens me nonetheless. And I can see why he did it. The Nobel Prize doesn't pay THAT much, activism doesn't pay and there are still a lot of poor Baptist preachers out there, I don't care what you see on TBN. And he left a wife and four small children. Control over his work was the best financial security he could leave for them.

Assuming life + 75 years ... there's another 39 years before King's works will pass into the public domain. And while the King Papers Project is doing the Lord's work in keeping the works available for scholars and laymen, there's so much more that can and should be done. At least we still have fair use (for now).