PL 66/09: French, Polish and Spanish

The first contribution from our Erasmus Mundus trainees is a set of translations – that present LATINA in three different languages.

Latin used to be the language of Latium – a small region in the middle of Italy.

PL 65/09: Plan for Erasmus Mundus

A group of five Erasmus Mundus students at Akershus University College will be working as interns with LATINA/lab in November.

In this project the interns will work on the development of teaching materials in English – as well as on translations into Spanish, Polish and French – for the LATINA summer school. This includes the development of a course module for a training course in evidence-based advocacy based on library statistics.

As an introduction, I’ve summarized the project setting:

PL 64/09: Phones for development

People in villages need trade more than aid.

Peasants without information about the market, are squeezed by middle-men.  Small entrepreneurs need capital in order to get started. Secure and low-cost money transfers allow urban workers to send funds to their rural families without several days of travel. Cheap mobile phones in the South provide answers to these, and many other, questions.

PL 63/09: The net is a conversation

The first historical use of iron for tools and weapons undermined the social structures – read power and prestige – based on bronze. No more palaces in Crete.

The industrial use of iron for tools and transport destroyed dominion based on land. Power and prestige rushed to the cities.

The internet is equally powerful. It will destroy the social institutions whose main purpose is physical mediation of otherwise interested but unconnected parties.

PL 62/09: Libraries in Spain

Spain has an important library community.

The sculpture (right) is called El Alma del Ebro. It consists of letters …
Alma means soul and the river Ebro gave its name to the Iberic Peninsula and its peoples.

In 2006, the country reported

• one national library
• seven central Autonomous Community libraries
• 317 specific-user-group libraries,
• 334 higher education institution libraries
• 1,749 specialised libraries,
• 4,115 public libraries

PL 61/09: Difficult statistics

In Milan, the Statistics and Evaluation Section set up a small working group to help IFLA develop a course package on statistics for advocacy.

The hotel Acapulco Princess (right) evidently “quotes” the great Mexican pyramids.

Since 2004 the Section has worked hard to establish library statistics as a necessary and important component of cultural and educational statistics. The advocacy project builds on this work, which culminated in a conference in Montreal in 2008 (which I attended) and a volume of conference proceedings.

The task is not easy. We want to train library – or library association staff – to argue with statistics. Understanding and measuring the impact of libraries is a professional task which requires a combination of library expertise and some understanding of practical sociology and statistics.

PL 60/09: Global chatter

How do “ordinary people” – I really mean the growing global middle class – or people like Plinius – spend their free time?

We used to watch TV a lot. We still do. But the web is invading our homes and phones.

There are several new ways of mapping the ordinary interests of ordinary people in the aggregate – like

• the search terms they use – see Google’s search statistics
• the web sites they visit – see Alexa
• the categories – our collective mental map – used by popular sites like Yahoo
• the tags they use – see tag clouds all over the place
• the twitter tweets they follow – see below

PL 59/09: Living and Learning with New Media

danah boyd (right) was one of the co-authors

This report summarizes the results of a three-year ethnographic study, funded by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, examining young people’s participation in the new media ecology.

• Young people in the United States today are growing up in a media ecology where digital and networked media play an increasingly central role.
• Even youth who do not possess computers and Internet access at home are participants in a shared culture where new social media, online media distribution, and digital media production are commonplace among their peers and in their everyday school contexts.

PL 58/09: Blogging bounty

In an ideal world, somebody should pay me for all the hours I spend blogging.

That world is approaching. This morning I received a cool proposal from Technorati – the big blog aggregator:

An automaker is interested in providing vehicles for bloggers to test drive for a few days and to write about the experience.

They’re not looking for auto bloggers, they’re looking for lifestyle bloggers who cover topics like travel, fine dining, and culture. They will arrange the drop-off and pick up of the vehicle.

PL 57/09: IFLA blogging 2009

Last year, in Quebec, IFLA set up an excellent resource page with links to photos, blogs and videos from the conference.

This year, in Milan, a similar page was created. It was still useful, but the content was not well updated during the conference, as the unofficial blog collection of Loida Garcia-Febo shows. Below I’ve integrated the two – and added some more from the comments to Garcia-Febo.

Which shows the value of including a comment button. To map the flight of birds, recruit the swallows – and also listen to their twitter at #ifla2009.