By rpalin on May 14, 2009
A self-described “old newspaper man” recently asked me about a sign in my library. The sign promotes an electronic version of The Boston Globe. He asked if the school library had to pay for the service. I told him that it was part of The Globe’s Newspapers in Education program and that it was free. He responded by saying, “That’s why they’re struggling. They need to charge for these things.” As it turns out, The Globe is where he had worked—as a wire service guy. In addition to suggesting that the paper start charging for electronic content, he went on to say that the “bloated” organization must be substantially downsized. I was surprised at this. I thought that papers had been making cuts. I wondered aloud if the costs of printing and delivery were insurmountable, and if the paper (and others) were doomed by that issue alone. In his opinion, the viability of newspapers is tied to controlling the costs of workers. Efficiency is the name of the game, he said. There’s simply way too much waste.
If this is the main issue, and newspapers truly are bloated with employees, then printed errors of fact are pretty hard to explain. Yet, the AP reports that an Irish university student duped newspapers around the world by fabricating a wordy quote and inserting it into a Wikipedia article. The student deliberately set out to see how much journalists relied on Wikipedia for obituary writing. In this case, it was used a lot and used carelessly.
Wikipedia is a favorite research tool of students at all grade levels, including college. Librarians, teachers, and professors routinely caution against its use for anything more than basic, step-one research. It’s open-source, after all, and can be edited at any time. While many articles are closely monitored by users interested in accuracy, others are not. If a researcher uses the wrong article at the wrong time, therefore, truth will be sacrificed. This lesson, repeated in classrooms around the world, is apparently not repeated in news rooms around the world.
If an old newspaper man is to be believed, and newspapers are still substantially staffed, errors of fact must result merely from sloppy research. If substantial mistakes can’t be ascribed to job cuts and too few staffers trying to do too many things, then the basics of research and Wikipedia’s use could and should be followed by the pros, and not just school students. Learn about Wikipedia as a research tool.
Posted in news, research | Tagged news, newspapers, research, wikipedia |
By rpalin on April 1, 2009
kindle2
Here’s what I knew: Amazon’s Kindle 2, with the ability to make any book large-print and a text-to-speech feature for some books, is a powerful new tool for school libraries attempting to serve a diverse student body. The device could certainly help meet the needs of struggling readers and students with vision problems, for example. Further, with reasonably priced downloadable content from amazon and many classics freely available on-demand from manybooks.net and other sites, the Kindle could reduce a library’s reliance on a slow inter-library-loan process and thereby benefit all students.
Here’s what I now know: When attempting to integrate Kindles into a school library program you’ll likely face some challenges. Most vexing, for me, has been getting content onto the device. Technically this is easy, but buying content is the problem. Unlike other purchases at amazon (like the Kindle device itself, for example), all digital content must be tied to a credit card. A credit card is something, I bet, that most schools don’t use. Instead, they probably have a corporate account at amazon, which allows for a regular purchase-order approach to buying. If a school employee wants Kindle content, then, a personal amazon account would be needed. This, of course, poses at least one significant problem: All content would be tied to the buyer’s account and could only be managed by the buyer. Now, from within one’s amazon account, content can be downloaded to a computer and then synced with a Kindle via USB, but this could lead to a file swapping nightmare–not to mention copyright issues. While amazon did tell me via email support that digital content can be purchased with gift cards, I called them and pointed out that in order for a gift card to be redeamed, it needs to be tied to a credit card account, which brings me back to the original problem. Right now the only solution seems to be an institutional credit card that could be used for establishing an individual library Kindle account. It’d be nice if amazon followed Apple’s model in the iTunes store, where a personal credit card can be deactivated from an account once sufficient gift-card credit has been added to the account. (Purchase orders can be used to buy gift cards). That way a library account truly belonging to the school could be easily created.
Posted in books, tech | Tagged books, kindle, libraries |
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