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I’ve been following the exploits of David Irving for several years now, ever since I read Deborah Lipstadt’s book, _Denying_the_Holocaust_, and more recently since the Irving v. Lipstadt/ Penguin UK trial, where Irving lost his libel suit and was ordered to pay upwards of £2 million in fees. Several weeks ago, Irving was arrested in Austria on an arrest warrant issued in 1989 against him for the crime of Holocaust denial. Irving gave several speeches that year in Vienna and elsewhere in Austria that set forth his revisionist agenda. Presumably Irving was aware of the warrant for his arrest– so what possessed him to decide to visit Austria?
My guesses: he’s looking forward to the eventual trial and publicity in order to gain a wider audience for his revisionist history, sympathy in the form of those who will defend his “freedom of speech,” and he’s looking for new monetary avenues of support.

Unbelievable.

Anyway, the story that made me laugh today was today’s article in the Telegraph. Anyone out there want to make a bet that Irving will try to leverage this tidbit in his next defense?

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2005/12/02/wrevis02.xml&sSheet=/news/2005/12/02/ixworld.html

Nazi historian Irving finds his books in Austrian jail library
By Kate Connolly in Berlin
(Filed: 02/12/2005)

David Irving, the British historian, has embarrassed Austria’s judicial authorities by finding his own books in a prison library while in custody on charges of Holocaust denial.

Irving, 67, who will spend Christmas and the New Year behind bars pending trial, found two of his most contentious books in the Graz prison library after asking for something to read.

He said in an interview he signed both, German translations of Hitler’s War and The Destruction of Convoy PQ-17, before returning them to guards.

Josef Adam, the head of the prison, said it was “not possible” to know how the books had ended up in the 6,400-volume library, the contents of which he “could not know exactly”.

“Now we will dispose of the books,” he said.

An embarrassed justice ministry said it had known nothing about the existence of the books in the prison.

“Revisionists have no place in the libraries of judicial institutes,” said Christoph Pöchinger, a spokesman for Karin Gastinger, the justice minister.

Hitler’s War was the first volume of Irving’s two-part biography of Hitler and sought to describe the war from the dictator’s point of view.

The 1977 book prompted huge controversy because it portrayed Hitler in a positive light and claimed he had had no knowledge of the Holocaust.

In The Destruction of Convoy PQ-17, published in 1967, Irving blamed Capt Jack Broome for the loss of life when his convoy was destroyed while taking war materiel to the Soviet Union.

Capt Broome sued Irving for libel in the High Court in 1970 and won. The book was withdrawn from circulation.

Austria issued a warrant for Irving’s arrest in 1989 after he delivered two lectures disputing the existence of gas chambers in Nazi concentration camps.

Denying the Holocaust in Austria is a criminal offence. If convicted, Irving could face a sentence of up to 20 years.

He was arrested near Graz on Nov 11 before giving a lecture to a Right-wing student fraternity in Vienna.

I feel like there should be a disclaimer for this.

Blogging: not as easy as it looks.

It seems like I have tons of ideas running through my head when I’m sitting in class, or waiting for a train, or walking down the street. But the moment I sit down to post… tabula rasa.
Maybe it’s an irrational fear of a blank page… all of that scary white space.

One of the things that I’ve enjoyed so far about library school is meeting new people, and hearing their stories. While there’s a certain level of quiet insularity (and probably shyness/anti-social tendencies), there are also a number of people like myself who are not afraid to use our voices. In talking with a fellow student last night after class, I think that we came to the shared realization that while the courses so far are somewhat easier than our (unrelated)previous university experiences, the purpose of this professional program is to prepare us for jobs in the archival world. For most people, an MLS is a terminal degree, a means to a professional end. In other words, the program, while interesting, isn’t meant to prepare us for teaching duties– but for more practical job applications. This may all seem overtly obvious, but I think that library school programs have a tendency to masquerade as being much closer kin to an academic master’s degree– and from what I have observed so far, there’s a wide gap separating the two. Nobody seems to discuss these differences, but perhaps this is why so many archives ask for experience in or a separate MA in history?

Ahh, the MA in history as qualification for archival positions. While I absolutely am for education- and allowing people to have as much of it as they can cram into their greedy brains, I’m somewhat opposed to the practice of hiring persons holding only history MA’s as archivists. What does a person holding an MA in history know about preservation standards, provenance or replevin? Does the average history master’s student keep up with developments in the archival field? (Probably not.) Would you hire a psychiatrist to perform foot surgery? A psychiatrist has an MD, sure, but probably isn’t the right fit for that position. The same goes for hiring MA’s in subject areas to be academic librarians without holding an MLS or library experience. Sure, they probably have an excellent reading knowledge in the field– but what do they know about cataloging, donor agreement, preservation management or collection development, OPACs, or library management? The short answer: they shouldn’t be expected to have that knowledge without library training, and employers shouldn’t be shortchanging their users by hiring them. Of course, knowing that I’ll be out there job hunting soon, MLS in hand, has no effect on my opinion here. (Right.)

The expectation in many an archival or academic librarian job ad is a second MA in a subject area. I think can be a lot to ask of employees– a BA and two master’s degrees– for positions that pay $30-40,000/year, and sometimes much less.