Posted: 7/24/2013 8:17:00 AM
Author: LfF Administrative Committee
Note from Librarians for Fairness:
We have plenty of people and groups who hate us. You should see some of the hate mail we receive. It is one of the reasons why anyone who wants to join us is so very carefully vetted.
Bing has become a more popular search engine than Google, and if you now do a Bing search of us, the first headline that will pop up is the spurious charge that "Librarians for Fairness is a Front group for an Ad Agency." Apparently, there was a recent, well-organized effort, using numerous clicks on those words, to bring it to the top. The accusation dates back to a LISnews debate in 2006, when a librarian researched who registered our domain name and website on the internet. That was, indeed, an excellent ad agency, which we also commissioned to design our logo. It worked for us, and not the other way around, and those were our only dealings with it. We are what we say we are... simply an organization of librarians (we also include in our membership: archivists, library workers, and a few graduate Library and Information Science students).
We are, indeed, affiliated with Stand With Us...something we are proud of and have been quite open about that. But we have tremendous autonomy. After all, we know best what is going on in the world of libraries.
We believe that this new development will work in our favor. Very few interested people will view that headline, without going into the site, where they will immediately see that the librarian who made the charge, withdrew it and apologized to LISnews readers (we bear him no grudge...he seems to have been curious, as opposed to being malicious, but we've always thought that he should have apologized to us too).
Our visitor traffic is going to increase because of this, and we are going to become better known. We are not angry. In fact, we are happy.
