Vast Active Library and Information Science blog. From a recent library science graduate in Wellington, New Zealand. A focus on reference and current awareness tools and issues, especially free, web-based resources.

 
"We should stop seeing libraries as places of function - storing this, lending that, checking the other," he gamely deposed, "and more as places of free and shared exploration and learning via all media, a democratic space wherein to free your mind."

No disrespect to Mr Dolan, but I laughed out loud when I read that, as I did a day or so later when stumbling across an advert placed by Staffordshire county council: "Sorry Edna" ran the letterpress, above a picture of a cardigan-wearing, bespectacled librarian. "Libraries aren't the sombre, silent places you'd like them to be.

Novelist DJ Taylor, writing in The Guardian asks for more emphasis on books and silence in libraries.

He does make at least one fair point, that he was lucky enough to have space at home in which to study in quiet, but that other children aren't as fortunate, and that the library was the one place that could meet this need. On the other hand, perhaps the 'youth of today' are more comfortable with noise than Mr Taylor's generation?

(And just a small sigh at the 'Edna' stereotype.....)

| posted by Simon at 4:56 pm