School's out, summer is here and it's "summer slide" prevention time. One of the more prominent offerings comes from Scholastic who has signed on forty-four U.S. Governors’ Spouses, along with the Governors of Colorado, Vermont and the U.S. territories Northern Mariana Islands and U.S. Virgin Islands to act as “Reading Ambassadors” for the 2015 Scholastic Summer Reading Challenge. The free Scholastic Summer Reading Challenge encourages kids worldwide to log the minutes they spend reading in order to unlock original stories written by favorite children’s authors, earn rewards, and help set a new world record for summer reading, with the goal...
Tub Lit: Kickstarter project offers waterproof books
The latest crowdsourced gem for the book crowd comes to us from Bibliobath. Thanks to Wing Weng and Jasper Jansen, a Dutch-Chinese couple based in Amsterdam, we finally have the waterproof book! They have 4 titles ready to go; a selection of short stories by Mark Twain, one of the selected poetry by W. B. Yeats, an edition of Shakespeare's Macbeth and a special Kickstarter-only edition of the Chinese classic The Art of War. The campaign just launched and the goal is to raise about $10,000 in the next month. Among the rewards are a couple geared...
A peak at some of the treasures of the Folger Shakespeare Library
Did you know that 82 of the 233 surviving First Folios of Shakespeare's plays live at The Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C.? To mark the quadricentennial of his death The Folger is sending a few copies on a tour of America. Jonathan Karl of ABC News was granted exclusive access to the Folger vault, where he got a look at some of the goodies that rarely see the light of day.
Brewster Kahle says ‘Digitize Everything’
[youtube]https://youtu.be/fDGKfVJQRkk[/youtube] What a perfect way to follow up my look at John Palfrey's new book BiblioTech: Why Libraries Matter More Than Ever in the Age of Google then with a short video from EDUCAUSE Review Online of Brewster Kahle talking about the absolute necessity of digitizing everything we can get our hands on. Kahle, the founder of the Internet Archive, has been at the forefront of the digital revolution, especially when it comes to the role of the 'library'. His mantra is simple - take the twin attributes that define the library, preservation and access, and apply it to the online...
BiblioTech: Keeping Hope for Libraries Alive in the Digital Age
John Palfrey's lucid, passionate account of the state of American libraries reminds us both how important public libraries are to a healthy democracy and how close they are to going the way of the dodo bird. We are in the midst of a tectonic societal shift from print to digital and without a concerted effort to transform the library into its 21st century equivalent we just might lose these hubs of democracy for good. The disconnect is huge; survey after survey remind us how important libraries are to their communities while in budget after budget funding for libraries continues to...