Another time, I checked out a name book. I'm writing a novel and needed some ideas for my characters. The librarian read the titles and shrieked, "Are you pregnant?! It's too soon for you to be having another baby!" (I was holding my infant son at the time.)
...There was a really interesting study of two groups of blind children. One group had grown up learning Braille and the other group had grown up using audio technology. And the authors of that study said that there was a significant difference in not just the way that they wrote but the way that they seemed to think. And they referenced theorist Walter Ong, who writes that the act of seeing our own words and then tweaking them and rewriting them, and in that process, rethinking, really creates a new kind of cognitive style.
So they said that the students who didn't learn Braille, it was as if they had shaken up their ideas in a container and then thrown them out on a piece of paper, and that there was really no clear organization, and it lacked the kind of complexity that they saw in the students who had learned Braille.
People who don't know Braille can't really take notes, can't edit your own writing, and you can't edit your own thoughts, and that’s a really significant part of the way that people learn to think.
Treating the Internet as if it were a part of the printed collection does indeed have a draconian feel to it, as it disregards the general real-time nature of information in modern society. Though the ruling decides that the filtering does not constitute a form of prior restraint, it acknowledges that filter removal can, at times, take until the next day if not longer. While this may seem reasonable, should one person have less access to information than another, simply because they rely on the public library as a point of information rather than purchasing it on their own?
It’s lucky the sign was there because, if it hadn’t been, I would never have guessed this was the place I was looking for. The library in Andrews Ganj is described as a sub-branch, and visitors should take that description literally. It’s a grey concrete block set back from the road in a dusty yard. An abandoned playground, with a broken roundabout and a swing set without any swings, peeled its paint onto scrubby grass. A couple of teenage boys lolled against their bikes by the gates. Inside three middle-aged men sat at the central table reading newspapers under the draught of a listless fan. No one had a book out. I headed for the English language shelves and perused the collection of Penguin classics and the complete works of William Dalrymple.
If the three L’s of buying a house are “location, location, location”, then the three C’s of librarianship should be “communication, communication, communication”. I don’t think what I’m going to list is anything revolutionary; I do think it might be a novel way to remember the basic interactions that keep the library moving forward.
Rather than a person knowing discrete facts, the database allows your data to be carefully analyzed as part of the aggregate. And when you analyze such a huge pot of data, you start finding odd correlations.
Internet Archive launched a new service today that will provide more than a million books in a specially designed format that can be read by visually impaired readers. The new service is part of the the non-profit’s Open Library project, which has been scanning and digitizing hundreds of thousands of books for the past several years and now has more than a million in its index. Internet Archive founder Brewster Kahle, who funds some of the Archive’s costs through his charitable foundation, said the new service more than doubles the number of books previously available to visually impaired readers.
Like a billion other people, I download things illegally. I'm also an actor, writer and director whose income depends on revenue from DVDs, movies and books. This leads to many conflicts in my head, in my heart, and in bars.
The test is based on detecting the levels of volatile organic compounds.
These are released by paper as it ages and produce the familiar "old book smell".
The international research team, led by Matija Strlic from University College London's Centre for Sustainable Heritage, describes that smell as "a combination of grassy notes with a tang of acids and a hint of vanilla over an underlying mustiness".
Asked whether a blocker could inconvenience patrons who might need to be contacted in an emergency, Talis said: "We have phones here that are always available to the public."
