GSLIS Professor Emeritus Abdul Alkalimat and Associate Professor Kate Williams have teamed up to produce their latest book, Roots and Flowers: The Life and Work of Afro-Cuban Librarian Marta Terry González. The book follows Terry’s work as an influential library director in Cuba from the 1960’s through the turn of the century, establishing her as an example of Afro-Cuban involvement in Cuban culture and history and as a model for librarians serving communities during periods of social change.
Alkalimat and Williams have worked together to explore community informatics around the globe, including the United States, the UK, China, and Cuba. Alkalimat and Williams previously co-authored, with Doug Gills, Job?Tech: The Technological Revolution and Its Impact on Society (Chicago: Twenty-First Century Books, 1995). They also coedited with two others Community Informatics in China and the US: Theory and Research (Beijing: National Library Press, 2012). Roots and Flowers is now available from Library Juice Press.
Alkalimat is a professor emeritus in GSLIS and the Department of African American Studies at Illinois. His research interests include digital inequality, community informatics, and African American intellectual history as well as all aspects of Black liberation. Williams has been a member of the GSLIS faculty since 2007, where her research interests include community informatics, in particular the relationship between social networks, social capital, and the use of information and communications technology in low-income communities and public libraries as public computing places.