It’s good to see the ongoing OCLC debacle is starting to be picked up by the mainstream press in the UK — The Guardian newspaper has a large feature in their technology supplement today: “Why you can’t find a library book in your search engine“.
Tag: theguardian
“They are a generation abandoning print and paper”
Interesting article in The Guardian today: “Internet generation leave parents behind“…
- children are spending increasing amounts of their lives in front of televisions, computers and games consoles, cramming in nearly six hours of screen time a day
- from the age of seven, children are building multimedia hubs in their rooms, with games consoles, internet access and MP3 players
- reading books is falling out of favour – 84% said they read for pleasure in 2006, 80% in 2007 and 74% this year
- one in three said the computer is the single thing they couldn’t live without
- pupils are using the internet less while at school, frustrated by the low-tech access and the restrictions put in place to stop them from accessing inappropriate material
- they are a generation abandoning print and paper, and the whole integration of technology and the way they glide from one to the other is seamless
Sue the libraries!
Nice to see libraries get a mention in this week’s IT section in The Guardian:
Sue the libraries – they’re letting people get content on the cheap
[Libraries] are the institutions which have the longest experience of making copyright goods available fairly to people who have not paid directly for them; and in all the time libraries have been around, no one has come up with a better model.
But the real value of libraries comes when they deal with large, expensive and valuable digital stores of information … To any individual subscriber the cost of all these would run into thousands of pounds a year, yet this reliable information is available free, without any of it being stolen.
Reminds me of this Tom the Dancing Bug cartoon (click for a larger version):
The Happy Endings Foundation
Both the Daily Mail and The Guardian appear to have suckered by a website that claims “Children’s books that don’t have happy endings should be banned” and that a mass “bad book” burning is planned for later this month:
http://thehappyendingsfoundation.org
If they’d bothered to check who’d registered the domain, they’d have soon spotted that the site is run by a marketing company (ArtScience) who have created a number of web sites for “A Series of Unfortunate Events”. Just in case you were thinking about doing it, don’t bother looking at the ArtScience web site — it’s a painful example of just how bad Flash splash web sites can be!