What to Call the Reinvented Library? Library as Classroom. Reading the new HORIZON Report for Higher Education 2014, I’m inspired as usual by the work of Educause and the New Media Consortium (NMC).
This year’s study continues the direction. In fact, a new framework for presenting challenges and trends accelerating technology adoption and the key technologies for higher education makes the report even more useful for anyone and everyone involved in teaching and learning. I’ve often argued for public libraries to use this report as a means for trend spotting and planning, and today it is more relevant than ever. As our colleagues in academic libraries embrace that students are creators more than consumers and welcome an influx of hybrid and online learning opportunities, they are not alone. Related courses are impacting public library customers in the form of Maker spaces, self-publishing, and library-led lifelong learning options both formal and self-directed. Creative classrooms. 6 Cities, 6 Photos: What Public Libraries Mean to Communities.
San Francisco-based photographer Robert Dawson has visited and snapped images of hundreds of public libraries across the United States.
The future beyond the Web is called FIA. The virtual future beyond the Internet is known as FIA.
At least it is to the National Science Foundation, an independent federal agency in Washington, D.C. It’s funding that intriguing topic (FIA stands for the Future Internet Architecture program) with $15 million in research grants to some of the nation’s strongest tech leaning universities. This is the third phase of a protracted study that began in 2006. If libraries can't make it here in New York, can they make it anywhere? Pew: The Library Holds Its Own in the Information Age. Libraries Matter: Impact Research. New Real Life Inspiration: Libraries change lives but this local news story about Andrew, Ezra and the Chattanooga Public Library 4th Floor makerspace. Real Life Inspiration: Libraries change lives but this local news story about Andrew, Ezra and the Chattanooga Public Library 4th Floor makerspace is inspiring, endearing, and motivating.
Must read for librarians and everyone who ever questioned the maker movement and our libraries’ roles therein. It’s a great Sunday post. Cook: The father of invention (with video) Photo “Ezra Reynolds watches his 2-year-old son eat yogurt with a prosthetic spoon he created on the Chattanooga Hamilton County Library’s 3-D printer. “Meet Andrew Reynolds, the luckiest little kid around. Two years ago, he was born without a right hand. Or a left hand. His right leg ended at his knee. His left leg? The Transparent Library. The Hyperlinked Library: A TTW White Paper. Download the paper here: The Hyperlinked Library (PDF) | The Hyperlinked Library (epub) (Coming Soon) Libraries continue to evolve.
As the world has changed with emerging mechanisms for global communication and collaboration, so have some innovative, cutting edge libraries. The Wrong Love. Much is written about love and libraries. There is ILoveLibraries.org, a site created by the American Library Association. The site does many things toward library and librarian advocacy, including the I Love My Librarian award. There is also the Love Libraries website run out of the UK, promoting UK libraries.
Tomorrow, Visualized. MACROVISION High-def MacroTiles make up a giant screen in the NCSU Hunt Library’s iPearl Immersion Theater.Photo by Marc Hall/ NCSU As I got ready to tour the James B.
Hunt Jr. Library at North Carolina State University (NCSU), Raleigh, last spring, as part of the Association of Research Libraries (ARL) meeting held nearby, the buzz about the newly unveiled building had reached such a level that I expected to find it, however cool, overhyped. It wasn’t. Why libraries deserve to be hip. This afternoon, I’m picking up my younger daughter from school and I’m taking her someplace special.
It’s a place she and I can look at works by local artists, where we can read quietly together, where we almost always run into friends. It’s one of best places in the world. You’ve probably got something like it where you live too. A New Year’s Vision of the Future of Libraries as Ebookstores. Could this library be a vibrant local ebookstore? As the New Year approaches, I have a vision of the future that brings bookstores to every town and invigorates libraries. In this vision, libraries of the future are our local bookstores. I see a future where libraries let people borrow digital books—or buy them. Libraries as digital bookstores. The Secret Resource Every Startup Needs To Know. It’s never been easier to launch a startup.
Powerful broadband networks, cloud computing and mobile and web applications have lowered the barrier to entry and created efficiencies for small businesses to scale. But while these resources make it easier to launch a business, they don’t remove the challenge of developing a winning product. To do that, startups need access to information. As a former startup founder myself, I have a secret. Tougher library policies would penalize homeless patrons for sleeping, body odor. In response to Mayor Ed Lee's concerns, the library is looking to bulk up security The way homeless residents are treated in San Francisco has come under scrutiny lately, with recent reports of homeless individuals being sprayed with hoses by Department of Public Works staff who started doing early-morning sidewalk cleanings nearby Twitter’s mid-Market headquarters.
Making Room for Innovation. Two library service prototyping spaces, in two very different places, have a remarkable amount in common.
Nate Hill runs and operates the 4th Floor in Chattanooga, a large public library loft space operating as a flexible community makerspace and event space. Jeff Goldenson co-ran and operated Labrary, a 37-day design experiment occupying a vacant storefront in Cambridge. ATTRACTION ABOUNDS At top, the 4th Floor Maker space with its 3-D printing lab was a highlight of the night at the 2013Tennessee Library Association annual conference held in the library space; the Labrary storefront (bottom) likewise attracted passers-by into its experimental area to see how future library design might look.4th floor photo by Mary Barnett; Labrary photo courtesy of Jennifer Koerberber In size, community, resources, and mission, the Harvard University Library and the Chattanooga Public Library (CPL) could not be much further apart.
Beginnings Real-time knowledge creation. Librarytestkitchen. Making Room for Innovation. Who Says Libraries Are Going Extinct? With nearly 2.5 billion materials circulated through more than 16,000 public branches, 2013 was one of the strongest years for libraries in the past decade. And things are looking up. America’s network of public libraries is older than America itself. You can make a strong case that the precursor to our modern book-lending system was developed in Boston in 1636, in Charleston in 1698, by Benjamin Franklin and his Philadelphia cohort in 1731, or in the Massachusetts town that named itself after Franklin in 1790. But what is indisputable is that this “amazing decentralized mutual aid” creation, as one librarian described it, was founded on a radical belief that all citizens have a right to information, art, and literature.