“The great end of life is not knowledge but action.”

Thomas Henry Huxley, British biologist (1825-1895)

Advocacy has pretty much become a major buzzword within recent years. The term was, at a time, only associated with the legal profession, for after all, this is what a lawyer is; an advocate: one that speaks on behalf of, or pleads for the cause of another. But now, the term has become applicable to all such persons and activities that plead for and promote causes, whether inside or outside a courtroom, albeit mostly not with the type of compensation that bona fide lawyers can demand. Merriam-Webster Online tells us that the word ‘advocate’ comes the Latin advocare, meaning ‘to call.’ And indeed, this what advocates do when they speak, write or whatever activity they perform with respect to whatever cause they represent. They seek to summon or call attention to the issue which they believe [...]

Source: gdtrinweb@gmail.com (Trinbago Forever)

Thank you for visiting my blog. The LibVocate is all about advocacy for libraries, librarianship and information science. Libraries and the progress of civilization go hand in hand, so it seems almost pointless to question why the need for advocacy for such an institutional staple as libraries. According to the ALA (American Library Association) ALA Fact Sheet 1, there are 117, 378 libraries in the United States. The OCLC (Online Computet Library Center) in a 2003 report, Libraries: How They Stack Up, states that US libraries circulate 1, 947, 600,000 items a year, and that “Five times more people visit U.S. public libraries each year than attend U.S. professional and college football, basketball, baseball and hockey games combined.”Perhaps with such astounding figures one might then actually perceive that libraries seem to be doing quite well and in our age of information surfeit, there is now a greater and wider recognition [...]

Source: gdtrinweb@gmail.com (Trinbago Forever)