The Expatriot Act Inaugural Address

This blog is being created as an assignment for my first semester in the University of Pittsburgh's FastTrack MLIS program, an entirely online library science graduate degree program. I consider myself a pretty technologically-savvy sort, or at least I did until I started looking through my coursework this week... Skype and VOIP and Shibboleth, oh my! Although it is all still a bit overwhelming, I'm sure I'll have a handle on the seemingly endless stream of information I'm getting, and luckily almost all of it is pretty fascinating stuff.

Now to the subject of the name of this blog -- The Expatriot Act. I thought it was a fun name for a blog for a globe-trotting library student, making obvious allusions of course to the one of the most politically-galvanizing issues for librarians in recent history -- The USA PATRIOT Act (which also wins the award for most absurd acronym). Researching this issue in respect to librarians and interviewing librarians of all political stripes (including the fabulous woman behind librarian.net and the head of the ALA herself) was one of the initial deciding factors in my wanting to go to library school, so I feel the name of the blog is as punny as it is personal.

Upon searching I discovered the sadly-broken link to my radio feature about librarians and the Patriot Act that originally aired on the formerly nationally-syndicated (and unfortunately named) NPR show Been There Done That. Some two years after its airdate, it would have been fun to be able to give it a listen, and it saddens me that a digital format of the story no longer exists. It strikes me as ironic that a more thoughtfully-planned digital archive would have prevented this orphan.