IWR piece on UK public library closures

Information World Review's blog has an article entitled Local governments will play safe with library closures, but will close them anyway. Most of its been said before, but I do like the following point the article makes:-

Government will find ways to work around the Act through other initiatives such as the Big Society project under which local residents will be encouraged and assisted to run library service.

But what about the library professionals who provide specialised services, recommendations and are well aware of the users' needs?

Libraries and library professionals contribute in making users more skilled, and informed as well as help them improve their digital skills.

A great article from LSE on public Library resistance to UK closures

There is a great article on British Politics and Policy at LSE entitled The threats to public libraries look overwhelming. Yet both defensive mobilizations to resist cutbacks and pressures for innovations offer hope for radical improvements.
The article looks at the grassroots activism that some counties have taken up, to stop the mass culling of public libraries.

The glorious past of the ZX Spectrum

I recently recieved a £20.00 amazon token from Cilip for introducing someone. With this I bought Race for a New Game Machine, The: Creating the Chips Inside the Xbox 360 and Playstation 3, The Ultimate History of Video Games, Smartbomb: The Quest for Art, Entertainment, and Big Bucks in the Videogame Revolution, Arcade Mania: The Turbo-Charged World of Japan's Game Centers: The Turbo-charged World of Japan's Game Centers. I've started Race for a New Game Machine, but was so boring. I therefore started reading The Ultimate History of Video Game, which is much better, but very American orientated read.
It seems there's little been little written on the ZX Spectrum, the object that started my love of PCs and especially games. The only area of coverage of the Spectrum's history was the BBC program last year.
I was first given a computer in 1983, a ZX 81, which had 1 K of memory and an awful keyboard for gaming. To this could be added a wobbly 16k expansion pack, which often caused the machine to crash. A tape recorder and television would be required to load the game. The tape recorder had to have clean heads and be at the correct tone to load the game. The best game was Forty niner in my opinion. Due to the 16k memory, some of the games were fairly rudimentary at best.
Whilst at school my peer group had access to these relics and a few BBC computer. If you were fortunate enough, and your father was a teacher, you could perhaps take this home at the weekend and play Chuckie Egg on it.
To me, the Spectrum was a revelation. I was a teenager and this machine was what most of my peer group was using. The spectrum, not only created a buzz about the games from British companies, that seemed to be sailing a wave f a future service industry based economy. These companies included Imagine software based in Liverpool. Ultimate based in Ashby De La Zouch. Ocean software based in Manchester. Gremlin Interactive. Each one had a different platform of gaming they represented.
Ultimate, usually had the most aesthetic and colourful games. These included Atic Atac, was an arcade adventure game in a haunted house. The best arcade adventures came from them.
Ocean, often got Sega and sports games, including Match day and Daley Thompson's decathlon. Many a joystick would be broken playing these games.
Imagine was best remembered for its incredible demise which was caught on a BBC documentary.
The Spectrum boom also created British programmers who hacked games for the Spectrum and became rich as teenagers. People such as Matthew Smith who created Manic Miner and Jet Set Willy. In the early 1990's he disappeared and ended in a commune in Holland.
On top of this, the Spectrum created other careers. For example a weird thing called 'game journalism', with Magazines such as Crash which was a Spectrum only magazine, and used some incredible art work by Oliver Frey. The writing was usually witty and tongue in cheek. Perfect for teenagers.
Another interesting thing about the Spectrum was the politics of the games reflected the period. For example, in 1984 Gremlin produced Wanted: Monty Mole. A mole in platform game in which character had to escape flying pickets and King Arthur [Scargill], at the height of the coal miners strike.
Another political aspect of gaming was the company Automata UK. All there games were non-violent, reflecting the still often cited claim that games create violent individuals
In 1984, with my first months wages I could afford my own Spectrum. My adventure's from now on in would always be based around a computer.

Forbes feels young learners needs libraries too

A recent articles in Forbes entitled Young Learners Need Librarians, Not Just Google has indicated many some of us have said before. Oh well.

Lib Democrats show the decline of UK Public libraries

I have not mentioned public libraries recently (as I don't work in them anymore), but I found via lisjobnet, that Lib Dem culture spokesman Don Foster said a survey showing that 35 branches were lost in the last financial year "demonstrates the severity of the crisis facing library services across the country".

This seems a shame that public libraries are getting so little support (excluding the support of some personages and blogs). Hopefully the powers that be might see that culture is not just football and opera, its allowing the young and old to advance there own minds in a library enviroment, and not in google or second life

The demise of public libraries.....is it happening?

Having worked in public libraries, I have been reconsidering staying within this area. This was underlined via a story by MaintainIT, which pointed to a Boing ,boing story about internet access being filtered and unfiltered in California. In the article RandomReader makes the following comment:-
As a former public library librarian, I can say that unfiltered Internet is simultaneously 1)important for intellectual freedom reasons and 2) a giant pain in the rear end. More broadly speaking, computers are transforming the texture of libraries and attracting new demographic slices that previously had no use for the library. Add to that what Amazon and Half.com have done for allowing book lovers to access books, and the impact of Google on giving people access to basic reference information, and you have even more more upheaval in public library land. Just today I predicted to a colleague that by 2025, the stereotype of public libraries as being about books and a quiet environment will be replaced by something having to do with computers, community programming, and probably the taint of Internet addiction/e-stalking/etc.

I'm in agreement. The days of looking for books are dead. Being an expert on e-mail is soo the vogue. No wonder i'm looking at legal libraries.

Patron training article

There is an interesting article over MaintainIT called A commitment to patron training. Sarah Washburn discusses how they have got people to come to computer training by having a small charge of $5, which is then refunded to them once they start the course.
A very neat idea, as most people don't mind wasting time but hate wasting money. The person who started this Claire Stafford says of this scheme:-

“If they come to the classes they get their money back. We did start it as a free--non-gratis--service, but we were finding that if people didn’t make a commitment, that they were not coming in. And we had waiting lists that were just tremendous! And we couldn’t serve these folks that were waiting, and the folks that did sign up forgot, or had something come up, and failed to contact us and let us know. “

Excellent.

New York Times article

There's a great in the New York Times called Can Blogs Become a Big Source of Jobs?. It looks at how blogging can aid with people with one's career. Worth a read.

33 Reasons Why Libraries and Librarians are Still Extremely Important article

A friend sent me a link called 33 Reasons Why Libraries and Librarians are Still Extremely Important. Obviously, i'm preaching to the converted (well I HOPE I am), but its great to see people try to remind some people that not everything is on the web.