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Google’s entry into the Internet provider business in Kansas City, KS, and Kansas City, MO, is moving ahead, thanks to a last-minute rally by community groups earlier this month that will enable about 89 percent of both cities to access the service – including many public libraries and schools.
The Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) awarded a $291,178 grant to the Public Library Association (PLA) to develop an online collection of digital literacy resources. The two year grant, which was given via the Laura Bush 21st Century Librarian Program, will help PLA partner with the American Library Association (ALA)’s Office for Information […]
All the tech programming in the world means nothing without the adequate infrastructure to support it. Now anyone—from teachers, administrators and librarians to students—can log on to the site Education Superhighway and have their school’s connection speed analyzed within minutes.
In Bristol, a city straddling the border of Tennessee and Virginia, the Bristol Public Library (BPL) is taking digital literacy training to the next level. The library employs a small staff of full-time teachers, who have made computer training a key component of BPL’s 25 year-old Patricia Freedman Literacy Academy (PFLA). The academy launched as a GED prep program in the late 1980s, and even then, it offered a small computer component for students who wanted to learn keyboarding, said BPL Executive Director Jud Barry. Computers have since become ubiquitous, and five years ago, BPL opened a new main library with a computer lab, where the teachers are available for one-on-one instruction five days per week.
Using cell phones to explore websites that are not optimized for mobile devices can be a frustrating experience. Libraries should consider this more than an aesthetic issue, since mobile devices are the primary Internet access point for a growing number of their users. Almost 90 percent of U.S. adults now own a cell phone of some kind, and 55 percent of them use their phones to go online, according to a June report by the Pew Internet and American Life Project. Seventeen percent of respondents said they do “most” of their online browsing on their phone.
A large segment of today’s youth, regardless of race or ethnic group, now actively exercise their political muscle online, says a new study from the MacArthur Research Network on Youth and Participatory Politics.
The CEO of Ohio’s Columbus Metropolitan Library urges public libraries to overhaul their passive ebook strategy and champion business models that also serve the public’s interests.
For ebooks, “true collection development is going to have to wait…until we have more access, if not all access to everything that’s being published,” Anne Silvers Lee, chief of the materials management division of the Free Library of Philadelphia, said during a Saturday panel discussion at the American Library Association’s annual conference in Anaheim this weekend.
The Cleveland Public Library is working to make its main branch a destination for residents living, working, and visiting downtown, and TechCentral, the $1 million technology center that opened on June 14 featuring 90 desktop workstations, loanable iPads, Kindles, and other devices, cloud-computing services, a 70-inch “interactive tech wall,” and more, is a big first step.
Kansas City librarians and other officials are in a unique position to potentially transform the public libraries and schools into even greater digital education hubs in the near future, with a little help from a new Google high speed digital Internet servic
