ALA TechSource: What Smartphone Internet Usage Means for Libraries

eBooks have been the hot topic in libraryland for a few months now and with good reason. It seems like every other day there is some new revelation that makes us either jump for joy or groan in agony. While these conversations and revelations have been happening, there has been another revolution underfoot.

The Pew, Internet, and American Life Project released a report last month on the usage of smartphones. We have known that smartphone ownership was increasing dramatically, and that use was up among minorities, and this report confirms the trends.

“I think libraries have jumped on some of the fun aspects of smartphone ownership, like QR codes, but the needs of some of our patrons are much, much more basic than that. I am not advocating that we stop doing the fun things with technology; we should have fun. In doing those fun things, we just have to remember to put effort into basic technology support as well. Some of our patrons need to be able to access us from their phones and need to be able to walk through our doors to use our high speed internet. Perhaps, while they visit us online or in person, we can show them something else amazing that we can do for them.”

NYTimes: Scroll to Codex to eBook

A brief overview of why bound books prevailed over scrolls, and why using an e-reader may make it more difficult to appreciate some works.

But so far the great e-book debate has barely touched on the most important feature that the codex introduced: the nonlinear reading that so impressed St. Augustine. If the fable of the scroll and codex has a moral, this is it. We usually associate digital technology with nonlinearity, the forking paths that Web surfers beat through the Internet’s underbrush as they click from link to link. But e-books and nonlinearity don’t turn out to be very compatible. Trying to jump from place to place in a long document like a novel is painfully awkward on an e-reader, like trying to play the piano with numb fingers. You either creep through the book incrementally, page by page, or leap wildly from point to point and search term to search term. It’s no wonder that the rise of e-reading has revived two words for classical-era reading technologies: scroll and tablet. That’s the kind of reading you do in an e-book.

USC Daily Trojan: Digital libraries wasted

Most students are, however, oblivious to the newest online resource additions. They also grossly underutilize the libraries resources — especially the very substantial number of e-resources and database subscriptions USC provides.

Students should take more advantage of the number of digital libraries that the university provides in order to have more success in their academics.

Often, students only frequent the libraries for a quiet place to study, to use a computer or to print. USC appears to be well aware of the evolution toward online resources and has continually updated its subscriptions to educational databases or purchased additional e-resources to encourage student research. Whether students use these resources, however, is another case.

(via calimae)

Slate: Print vs. Online

[In a very small study at the University of Oregon,] researchers found that the print folks “remember significantly more news stories than online news readers”; that print readers “remembered significantly more topics than online newsreaders”; and that print readers remembered “more main points of news stories.” When it came to recalling headlines, print and online readers finished in a draw.

Source: digitizd.com

Facebook's Terms of Service in "Brospeak"

Most of the terms are probably nothing surprising thanks to the stories about how Facebook really isn’t nearly as private as it was once assumed, but the idea of translating something that is important to a site that a lot of people use into plain English (or Brospeak) is a good one. If I can find someone to pay me to do this, I’ll even say it’s a great idea.

I didn’t know that there was a way that you could be alerted to FB policy changes and comment on them -

13. Amendments

  1. We can change any of these rules as long as we let you know, and give you a chance to comment on the change. We’ll give you a heads up over on thispage, as long as you become a fan. And really, who isn’t a fan of Facebook Site Governance?

Source: Gizmodo

NY Times Opinion: When Data Disappears

…But that doesn’t mean digital preservation is pointless: if we’re going to save even a fraction of the trillions of bits of data churned out every year, we can’t think of digital preservation in the same way we do paper preservation. We have to stop thinking about how to save data only after it’s no longer needed, as when an author donates her papers to an archive. Instead, we must look for ways to continuously maintain and improve it. In other words, we must stop preserving digital material and start curating it.

(via calimae)

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