"We're now in an age of 'too much information'. Libraries and librarians are more important than ever.
"Children want stories. They want information. They want knowledge about the strange world they're in. Saying that the internet can be that is like setting a child free in a jungle and expecting them safely to find things to eat."
"This competition is unique in that it tests a very specific skill. The great thing about The Braille Challenge, is that it gives us the opportunity to celebrate braille literacy and bring this issue to the attention of the public,” said Nancy Niebrugge, director of The Braille Challenge. “Most of the participants who make it to the national competition are the only blind students in their school. They go through their entire lives being the exception. This competition gives them the opportunity to build camaraderie among kids who have shared similar life experiences."
As part of the latest study, the trust surveyed more than 17,000 schoolchildren aged seven to 16.
It found that 85.5 per cent of pupils had their own mobile phone, compared with 72.6 per cent who had their own books. Among children in Key Stage 2 – aged seven to 11 – 79.1 per cent had a mobile compared with 72.7 per cent who had access to books.
On Friday, ICANN, the not-for-profit corporation that coordinates the internet's naming system, voted to allow the application of the controversial ".xxx" top-level domain name for sites that display adult content.
I felt comfortable with books, with the characters. I knew that they didn’t care whether I was different or not. They were just characters, after all, and they were too busy telling me their story to care whether or not I was gay. Reading was my escape. I felt normal while reading.I remember that feeling, too. It's an especially valuable one when you're a teenager and any misstep might earn you humiliation. It wasn't so bad for me personally, but I think if I'd been in a high school where most kids had a cellphone that could take video, I'd've been worse off. The second was this:
People really write about this stuff? I thought. It felt . . . great. Imagine that you are an alien on your own planet. And imagine you find out that there are more aliens, just like you, on your planet. And imagine what it would be like–to know that someone knows what it’s like. What you’re going through.This is one of those things I love about reading, how it can take you away and maybe that place you go is somewhere you'd think you'd fit in for once. Or even just somewhere you'd want to go. All the adventure, none of the bugs and injuries.
"I just gave the go ahead to Corrections Director to proceed with Gardner's execution. May God grant him the mercy he denied his victims."While Twitter's Tweets are 'legitimate' enough to be included in the Library of Congress, how appropriate are they in this situation? I'd say not at all. Mark Shurtleff Tweeted about an execution he was involved in. He Tweeted. Say it a few times, think about how silly that sounds. Tweeting. Tweeting about someone's death.
Authorities say a 74-year-old Boise woman... is a person of interest in at least 10 other condiment-related crimes.Mostly this is posted because I like the phrase 'condiment-related crimes'. GENIUS.
The problem of limited access to high-priced scholarly journals may be reaching a crisis point. Researchers that are not at a university, or are at a not-so-wealthy one, have long been frustrated by journals that are too expensive for them to read (except via slow and cumbersome inter-library loan, or distant library visits). Now, major universities are feeling the pain as well, as bad economic news has forced budget cuts in many research libraries, even as further price increases are expected for scholarly journals. This has forced many libraries to consider dropping even the most prestigious journals, when their prices have risen too high to afford.
Alexander Price, aged eight, who lives in Keats Close, just a short walk from Heath Library, went to Rhyme Time as a toddler and has been an avid reader ever since.The article in the Camden New Journal shows a picture of some very thoroughly disgruntled, scowling, and unhappy kids. Particularly the girl in front... if looks could kill.He said: “I feel really upset and angry. I want to say to the council staff that they should not [move Ms Rundell] – it’s very mean. The job she does, no one else can do, and the job she is going to do, anyone can do, just putting books in bags.”
Google said it didn’t realize it was sniffing packets of data on unsecured Wi-Fi networks in dozens of countries for the last three years, until German privacy authorities questioned what data Google’s Street View cameras were collecting. Street View is part of Google Maps and Google Earth, and provides panoramic pictures of streets and their surroundings across the globe.
Ohio State Mansfield in 2006 was joining the growing number of colleges that ask all freshmen to read the same book as part of their arrival at the institution. Scott Savage, then the head reference librarian and a self-described conservative Christian, joined a faculty committee charged with selecting a book. In discussions, he criticized some of the proposed ideas as political, and when other committee members said that wasn't a problem, he suggested a number of conservative texts, with the most discussion focusing on one of his nominations: The Marketing of Evil: How Radicals, Elitists, and Pseudo-Experts Sell Us Corruption Disguised as Freedom, by David Kupelian.
Libraries--from the library of Alexandria to the "social libraries" that preceded public libraries--came about because of the value of aggregation. And contemporary libraries are in large part valuable for the same reasons. They are:
1. Bringing physical items together makes access easier than having books spread all around.
2. A library can allow many people to use an item many times for the same price a person would pay for a single use.Ebooks undermine 1 in their digital form. There's no getting around this. It may be good for the world, but it isn't good for physical libraries.
Ebooks undermine 2 in their terms. Few will say it openly, but publishers have never liked selling books to libraries, at least when it cannibalized sales to consumers. They don't like that almost a half of all book reading is provided by libraries although libraries account for only 4% of their sales. For similar reasons, publishers dislike personal lending, donations and the used book market.
Ebook licenses allow publishers to close off all this. And they do. Nobody disputes the other three, although, in an exception that proves the rule, you can loan some Nook books once for two weeks and then never again.
Typically, schools and filtering companies respond to an "offending" site by blocking access to it. However, in this case, blocking Google's encrypted search is complicated by the potential ripple effects.
Assange is an international trafficker, of sorts. He and his colleagues collect documents and imagery that governments and other institutions regard as confidential and publish them on a Web site called WikiLeaks.org.
The foundational principle of the new bill remains that anytime a digital lock is used - whether on books, movies, music, or electronic devices - the lock trumps virtually all other rights. In other words, in the battle between two sets of property rights - those of the intellectual property rights holder and those of the consumer who has purchased the tangible or intangible property - the IP rights holder always wins. This represents market intervention for a particular business model by a government supposedly committed to the free market and it means that the existing fair dealing rights (including research, private study, news reporting, criticism, and review) and the proposed new rights (parody, satire, education, time shifting, format shifting, backup copies) all cease to function effectively so long as the rights holder places a digital lock on their content or device.
According to literature distributed by the group, it makes more sense for 'fruit' to be spelled as 'froot'...
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