The Chronicle of Higher Education had an article about the decline in reading among Americans (subscription required). Sad news for librarians and educators: people aren’t reading as much as they used to. 15-24 year olds are just voluntarily reading 7 minutes a day…and 10 minutes a day on weekends. Yet they find time to watch 2.5 hours of TV daily. 35-44 year olds spent 12 minutes a day reading. And those over 65 read under an hour on weekdays and just over an hour on weekends.
Considering the number of books published in America each year and the proliferation of blogs and other online sources of information, I find this appalling. Surely, there has to be something out there for people to read and find entertaining?
Something in the study that I truly identify with is this tidbit: “Even Americans who have studied at the graduate level saw their reading skills atrophy: 51 percent were rated proficient readers in 1992, but only 41 percent made that grade in 2003.” I’ve felt in the last few years that my brain just isn’t as sharp as it was when I was in college. In fact, a few years ago when I cleaned out my home office to make way for kids, I found a bunch of papers I wrote in college and was amazed at my writing. I could think like that once? No way! When did I become so dull-minded?
I bought a book off the bargain books table at BN recently on exercising your brain. However, just like exercising all my other muscles, I’m having a hard time finding time to get it done. So now all the muscles in my body are atrophying. Does the brain get a flabby gut when you don’t work it out? I sure hope not!
Somehow I think of Monty Python when I think of Wikis. Don’t know why – must be the made-up, funny sounding words or something (“ni!”).
Anyway…I love the idea of a wiki – it’s just the technical issues of setting one up and reigning in the mass chaos that gets me. With Wikipedia – by far the most successful wiki – you have a community of technically-apt people working together to create and edit entries and you have a set format for how the pages should look. If you look at Wikipedia’s How to Edit page, you might just shut down your computer, curl up into a ball on the floor and cry like a kid denied a candy bar at Halloween before you attempt to make any changes to a page.
Some wikis have added WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) editing functionality and that has helped the techno-challenged, but in my personal experience, the WYSIWYG ones tend to act a little goofy and often don’t do what you expect them to do.
Sometimes a better collaborative workplace might be something like Google Documents – a nice, clean, simple way to share a set of documents with a group of people. Works just like the word processors that the average jane is more familiar with. Or maybe Yahoo Groups – you can have discussions, share links, post photos and documents…
I think that Wikipedia has done a wonderful thing for us in getting us to think about being more collaborative. Information should not be owned by one individual – we all have something to add to the collective brain. It’s just a matter of finding a good way for us to access that collective brain. What works for one group may not work for another.
Gosh – here I am being a heathen again and going against the tide of the rest of the world. Hopefully I don’t have too many readers at this point. And hopefully they don’t have stones (or tomatoes, or eggs, or other yucky items) to throw at me.
Toodle-oo!
I might get my MLS degree taken away from me after admitting this, but I’ll say it anyway: I don’t really believe in Library 2.0 (or web 2.0 for that matter).
I think some cutesy person decided to coin a term based on the versioning process of software and documentation and said that because things have changed, we must be at version 2.0.
C’mon – really? Seriously? Because if that’s the case, then we should be at version 12.0 (at the very least). I’m no expert in library history, but I do have a general idea of how things have been for libraries in the past. Private libraries have been around since the times of ancient Greece and the Romans had to one-up them by making them public. The cuneiform tablets collected in ancient repositories were replaced by scrolls which were replaced by handwritten books, which were replaced by machine-printed books…really, the list could go on and on. Generations of changes have occurred in how information is stored and retrieved and how the public gets access to this information.
Even the buildings themselves have changed. While they were once forbidding buildings, with books housed in the back and a librarian was the only one who could retrieve them, now they are warm and inviting and patrons can not only get the books of the shelves themselves, but they can even check them out themselves. In the past, you had to be extremely quiet in the library and could not eat or drink inside the building. Now we have cafes within our libraries.
Life is all about change. We must grow and learn and improve. So what others call “library 2.0,” I call another step in the evolution of the library.
The point is to keep up with changes in the world and adapt to those changes as best we can. Yes, change is happening more quickly these days, but the process of recognizing change and adapting to it is nothing new. So why must we make such a big deal out of it?
Let the flaming begin…
Toodle-oo!
From a discussion in the LITA-L listserv, I discovered this NY Times article titled “The Outsourced Brain.” I’ve thought that my recent lack of mental aptitude was due to having extended pregnancy brain drain from having 2 small children, along with not getting enough sleep and a general lack of mental exercise. Yes, working at a library is somewhat mentally stimulating, but I don’t feel like it’s enough.
But now I have another excuse. The author of the Times article discusses how he has outsourced a lot of his mental work:
“I had thought that the magic of the information age was that it allowed us to know more, but then I realized the magic of the information age is that it allows us to know less. It provides us with external cognitive servants — silicon memory systems, collaborative online filters, consumer preference algorithms and networked knowledge. We can burden these servants and liberate ourselves.”
So I have yet another excuse for my poor memory and mental confusion: I’m too reliant on technology.
Will I give up my cell phone, computer, MP3 player and Tivo to return to the dark ages of pen and paper? No way! I’m golden now – I just found my excuse for not thinking anymore. Now I can just relax and let my technology do everything for me.
Now I need a GPS so I don’t have to remember how to get to work in the morning…
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You may notice that I’ve switched from 3rd person to 1st person in writing this blog. It was a fun experiment but became a bit too cumbersome. I hope it will be just as entertaining in the first person, though.
Toodle-oo!
The FlipFlopLibrarian checked out Technorati during Week 4 and liked it as a tool to find interesting RSS feeds. FFL checked it out again this week as part of iHCPL’s Week6 exercises and while checking out some of the interesting feeds, she stumbled on something that might solve some issues her family has had.
FFL, like many others, is overwhelmed by keeping up with her family’s schedule. She’s tried different calendars to keep up with what everyone is doing, but every calendar system she has come up with has the same issue: portability.
FFL will input something into Outlook at work and then email herself at home so that she can put it on the paper calendar at the house (if she ever gets around to doing it). But DH doesn’t put anything on the paper calendar. So FFL is in charge of keeping up with the calendars of 2 adults, 2 kids and 2 dogs (yes, the dogs have events every once in a while – they have to go to the vet and such!). What if there were a calendar that could keep up with EVERYONE’s calendars and sync with both FFL and DH’s Outlook calendars? What if it were available online – from any computer? What if some of that info could be accessed from a cell phone?
Well, FFL stumbled across Cozi the other day and is pretty darn excited about it. Reviews seem to look favorable for this free online calendar. She hasn’t had a chance to try it out, but as soon as she gets a chance, she’s going to try it out. FFL will post here whenever she tries it out to tell everyone how it goes.
Until then,
Toodle-oo!
If you’ve ever wondered how a book gets onto the New York Times Bestseller list, this article in the Times explains it all (mostly). Some recent flap about the removal of Elie Wiesel’s Night has prompted the Times to explain its removal as well as how they maintain the bestseller list.
So now you know.
Toodle-oo!
make your own superhero at heromachine
FFL just signed up for Library Elf. It’s a reminder service that keeps track of library items so that you don’t get stuck with lots of fines for overdue books.
This might be pretty helpful for FFL. Every time a new semester begins at her community college, the data merge between registration data and library data purges her email address out of her library records. So she suddenly stops receiving notices. Since she works for the library, she can go into her library records very easily and put the email address back in. But then it disappears again at the next data merge.
FFL doesn’t think she’ll use the RSS or text options. She’s inundated with RSS feeds that she can’t keep up with. And she doesn’t pay for text service on her cell phone. But these are both nifty features that would be useful for some people. It’s always nice to have options!
Toodle-oo!
The FFL has now created a LibraryThing account. Other than the “look at MY library – it’s so much better than YOURS” aspect of it, she’s not quite sure how she would personally use it. It could perhaps be a personal book discovery exercise – to see what books other people have in their LibraryThing and try those books out. Or she could use it to keep track of all the books she checks out for her parents to read, so that she doesn’t check out the same book twice. (Although they so love that their books get picked and delivered by their favorite librarian that they don’t care if they occasionally get a repeat.)
FFL has discovered yet another issue with WordPress – it appears that WP doesn’t support having JavaScript in the sidebar. So no fun LT widget sporting fabulous book covers like other bloggers get to have. LT has a note that they are working on something for LiveJournal (which also doesn’t support having JavaScript), so we’ll have to wait and see when that happens.
