Confused about the Mao Tse-tung fuss in Minneapolis? It involves Minneapolis Public Library, which is raising money for the building shown to the, er, left. Smartly, after an uproar in the blogosphere, the MPL’s Friends group is putting Mao on hold as a library mascot.
Bottom line: An ambitious ad agency may or may not have succeeded in helping the library reel in donors via an edgy funding campaign. In any event, a Putney Swope approach isn’t the best news for the library’s long-term image. Your typical library-goer wants help with such grubby matters as homework or job-hunting. A phony free speech crusade–with butcher Mao Tse-tung as a major character–just won’t communicate a warm-and-fuzzy feeling. Libraries unfortunately have enough real threats to worry about. I invite the whizzes at Andrews/Birt to take on the Patriot Act. An incomplete blog chronology–blography?–follows.
April 29 or around then: SkywayNews story on the fund-raising campaign, whose posters note that Mao, J. Edgar Hoover, Batgirl and Casanova were librarians–a somewhat misleading statement in Hoover’s case at least.
May 4: The LILEKS blog’s take on the controversy
May 8: Librarian.net’s not-so-flattering comments on the campaign
May 8: TeleRead Item #1: Mao and J. Edgar Hoover as library posterboys
May 10: A how-not-market-a-library item in the Shades of Mediocrity blog
May 12: TeleRead Item #2: Mao purged from Minneapolis library campaign: Good riddance–if he stays that way.
May 12: TeleRead Item #3: Buzzzzzzzzzzzzz for Andrews/Birt (free!)
As I write this, not one syllable has apparently appeared in the Minneapolis Star Trib. Among the reasons why young people see newspapers as dinos? The media reporter, by the way, the Minneapolis mayor’s sister in law, appears to be on an anti-blogger jihad–that’s clear even without a story in print, going by her questions. Apparently, “responsible” bloggers were to remain silent until the links were available to the full set of the library campaign’s graphics. At the time I posted the first item, they were not there. I looked and noted this. But the picture of Mao, reproduced in SkywayNews, told all. And access to all the material didn’t change my mind. Simply put, media reporter Deborah Rybak, not the most popular journalist in certain blogging circles, may have been doing a little spin-control for her friends in the local elite.
More links, via Technorati: Here.
