In “Cultures of Access: Differences in Rhetoric around Open Access Repositories in Africa and the United States and their Implications for the Open Access Movement” Natalia Taylor Bowdoin, University of South Carolina Aiken, reviews the definitions and variant approaches to open access (OA), and what they might mean as a mechanism for correcting the inequities in information flow between industrialized and non-industrialized nations. Her study examines the rhetoric used to present the OA institutional repositories in the United States and Africa, and speculates on what this rhetoric might tell us about different “cultures of OA.”
D. Aram Donabedian and John Carey, the authors of “Critical Information Literacy and the Technology of Control: The Case of Armenia” and colleagues at Hunter College Libraries, discuss why critical information literacy and critical pedagogy are particularly important in the Armenian context with its historical, cultural and geopolitical concerns. They argue that an open online culture with local self-determination and the basic right to share and produce information.
“A College Library in African Culture: A Case Study of Global Librarianship in Kampala, Uganda” looks at Rachel I. Wightman’s experiences as librarian in Kampala, Uganda, and her attempts to fully engage in and understand library service needs in a new cultural context.