Days of Reckoning

UCLA has just released "A Bad Night at Powell Library," the official account of a story covered last year on Virtualpolitik. It describes the results of an investigation into the tasering of UCLA student Mostafa Tabatabainejad by campus police, which was captured on video by cellular telephones and then distributed throughout the world by YouTube. As someone who has written articles about the physical space of scholarly libraries (and their rules of inclusion and exclusion, which may also have ramifications for the construction of digital archives), it was a story I gravitated toward. Not only have I presented at conferences with librarians, but also as a graduate student I have studied at the same library at which the incident took place.