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Sony Barari's literary exploits



For those who don't get the Library Journal Academic News Wire (a
weekly journal delivered via email), here's an interesting followup
story to the flap last week concerning Sony Barari's literary exploits
at UCLA.  Someone wondered last week if librarians were as upset as
archivists over Barari's satire.  Apparently they were, and since
there's more of them than there are of us, here's what happened:

>Library Journal Academic News Wire: March 12, 2002
>
>-----------------------------------------
>UCLA LIBRARY SLAM DOWNS LISNEWS
>Student Sony Barari says he was merely trying to be a good
>satirist when he ripped librarians in a recent article in
>the UCLA's student newspaper the DAILY BRUIN. But
>librarians reacted so strongly to his barbs that they
>crippled LISnews, Blake Carver's popular news and views web
>site for librarians. Carver says that traffic to his site
>tripled after posting the UCLA story, overloading his
>service provider, who suspended the site. "Normally we do
>about 1200 unique visitors on a weekday," Carver told the
>LJ Academic Newswire. "But since [Barari's piece] we've
>been seeing double and triple that, even on the weekend."
>Carver, however, said he's not angry with his server for
>derailing LISNews, "I'm not mad at them for shutting me
>down, they have a lot of other clients on that server, and
>it's important I don't slow things down for hundreds of
>other sites."
>
>Carver did have some criticism for his peers for their
>unprecedented outburst. "In that past some stories have
>been popular, like the interview with Pat Schroeder from
>the AAP, but nothing like this." Carver says that while
>librarians offered an overwhelming response to Barari's
>sentiments that librarians are "socially inept housewives,"
>whose work could be done by a "trained monkey with a fancy
>hat," their responses were hardly profound. "I saw little
>depth or insight to most public reactions. I'd like to
>think those were largely fueled by emotion and not
>indicative of the silent majority. There seems to be a few
>vocal and emotional librarians who felt threatened or
>offended by this story, and felt the need to react in a
>very unprofessional way." Carver says things with LISnews
>are not quite back to normal. "They have agreed to let me
>stay for now," Carver says of his server, "but I'm not sure
>for how long."

=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=

James Stimpert                       ** PLEASE USE THE FOLLOWING:
Archives (Arts and Sciences)         E-mail:    stimpert@jhu.edu
MSE Library
Johns Hopkins University             Voice:     (410) 516-8323
3400 North Charles Street
Baltimore, MD  21218                 Fax:       (410) 516-7202

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