PL 9/13: Spring is here

PL 4/13: Robotics in Colombia

A youngster is doing practical robotics, with recycled computer parts,  at a public library in Colombia.

The picture, from León De Greiff-Biblioteca Marsella, was published on the library’s Facebook page. This library is one of 26 libraries exploring the use of ICT with a grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. The project is coordinated by the Biblioteca Nacional de Colombia.

Resources

• Map of the libraries
• 3,2 millones de dólares invertirá fundación de Bill Gates en bibliotecas colombianas. Semana, 26.10.2012

PL 41/12: The grammar of schooling

The “grammar of schooling” explains why schools are so hard to change.

Picture: Jacksonville School Kids 1980s

The shape of classrooms

The term became current almost twenty years ago, after a US study of the resistance to educational reforms. In their seminal article, Tyack and Tobin wrote:

• The  basic “grammar”  of schooling, like the shape of classrooms, has  remained remarkably stable over the decades.
• By  the “grammar”  of  schooling we mean the regular structures and rules that organize the work of  instruction. 
• For example, standardized organizational  practices  in dividing time and space, classifying  students and allocating them  to classrooms, and splintering knowledge  into “subjects.”

When we speak, we do not consciously follow the rules of grammar.

PL 27/12: Students at work (slides)

The slide presentation of the SCECSAL paper (Google Docs). The paper was presented st the SCECSAL conference on Wednesday, June 6, The paper itself is available through the previous blog post.

If you want to know more about the TTT method, about our work on library statistics in general, or about the LATINA training laboratory, please follow the link to Plinius Home in the right margin. Feel free to contact me for further information.

PL 26/12: Students at work

Libraries need information about their own activities in order to manage their operations and to gain support for their future development.

Libraries usually have easy access to data about their budget, their staffs, their collections and their lending activitites. This information is produced by the systems used to manage their operations. But they tend to know very little about their users.

They could organize user surveys. Many libraries do. They could use systems data to study the lending patterns of their clients. A few libraries do that as well. But they would still lack information in a very basic field: what the users are doing inside the library.

PL 25/12: Eight pictures from Kenya

Most people who take pictures are amateurs. Plinius belongs to this group.

From a professional point of view, most of our pictures are mediocre, flawed or worse. The idea of  ”amateur photos” does not sound good.

But digital cameras,  web based photo archives and free editing software (like Picasa) change the way we produce and consume pictures. If a thousand amateurs take a thousand pictures each, some of them are bound to be quite good.

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PL 33/11: Leaders with experience

At IFLA Jens Thorhauge and Erik Thorlund Jepsen will speak about the Success or failure of digital library services – a decade of Danish experiences.

The summary says: - The ongoing shift of paradigm from analogue to digital library services has changed the concepts of information services and reference work in less than two decades. The paper presents a review of three categories of services developed and presented in Denmark from the mid nineties till today:

• 1) services that did not survive in spite of a vast remount of resources invested in them.
• 2) services that managed to develop
• 3) new services that are user inclusive, responsive and interactive.

PL 30/11: Budget cuts at British Library

The [British] Library will have to respond to financial reductions:

• a 15% reduction in resource Grant in Aid by 2014/15
• a halving of our baseline capital budget over the next four years, 2011/12 to 2014/15.

We are therefore entering into a financial environment which will be fundamentally different from the one we have known. We will have to deliver spending reductions at an unprecedented level and, by 2014, our Grant in Aid will be at the lowest level, in real terms, since the Library’s inception in 1973.

Resources

• BL. Growing knowledge. The British Library’s strategy 2011-2015

PL 3/11: Whichbook and Ønskebok.no

Whichbook reports that the site has 20-50,000 individual users every month.

Whether that means unique users, or simply visits, is not quite clear. In web metrics these are different statistics.