I've written twice* before about what's to become of libraries in the digital age. A widely emailed New York Times article should give heart to all of us who have worried about their fate. Here's the gist...A Pew Survey found recently that the percentage of those who believe book borrowing is a "very important" library service (80%) is about the same as those who believe computer access is a "very important" library service (77%). As it happens, libraries have been meeting the challenge of the digital age all along:
In the past generation, public libraries have reinvented themselves to become technology hubs in order to help their communities access information in all its new form.It's possible to have too much information. Back in the dark ages, when the web was in its infancy, a friend of mine quipped that it needed a good librarian to get the stuff organized. This was a few years before Google. Today, the web clocks in at nearly 15 billion web pages, and it's still growing at a mind-boggling rate. Google or no Google, we have digital overload.
—Kathryn Zickuhr, Pew Research Center
All of which makes an "information manager" more important than ever—specialists who know how to search, locate, categorize, and vet information. And guess who does that really, really well? Librarians.
What's more, librarians share their skills. Every major library now offers its patrons—not just access to digital equipment—but courses in how to use it...and how to maneuver the vast information galaxy.
So 100 years from now, even if we find their shelves bereft of the printed book, libraries and librarians will be more important than ever—as communal centers of knowledge. We'll still need them—so we better damn well make sure they're around! A warning to us all: we need to keep a close watch on our municipal budgets.
* See Whither Go Libraries in the Digital Age—Part 1 and Part 2.
By Kristi Spuhler for LitLoversThese days you never know what creature you might come face-to-face with in your local library. Many of us, it turns out, are meeting up with the furry canine variety. Woof.
Therapy Dog programs are popping up all over the place, aimed at encouraging struggling readers to find comfort—and pleasure—in reading aloud. The dogs provide a helping paw.
Snuggling up next to a canine buddy while reading is meant to help students build confidence in reading skills and generate enthusiasm rather than anxiety for library time.
One volunteer group, BARK, offers 20-minute sessions once a week for young readers to relax and practice. During a session, a child picks out a book and, after a few friendly pats for the
furry pal, is all set to begin the story. It’s that simple. A dog offers a friendly ear and no judgement. When students stumble over words in front of peers and teachers, it's intimidating. But dogs take the pressure off, letting young readers focus on the story and on improving their skills.
The results are remarkable. In a study conducted by Tufts University, second graders who read aloud to a canine companion over the summer months retained their reading skills more effectively than those paired with a human buddy.
Another study by UC Davis in 2010, according to BARK, suggests that kids in reading-to-dog programs improve their reading skills by at least 12% when compared to children not involved in these programs. A fuzzy ear and an encouraging nuzzle may be just what a struggling youngster needs!Have any of you been involved in a program like this? Leave us a comment—we'd sure love to hear about it!
There are so many—they're the unsung heroes—WOMEN who made astonishing contributions to science and to the Allied war efforts.
For half a century or longer, their lights were hidden under bushels—but not by their own doing.
Their accomplishments went unrecognized, were dismissed, in some cases, ridiculed … and for one reason: they were FEMALE.
Thankfully, today, many are finally getting the recognition they deserved yet were so long denied. Their achievements have been heralded through a profusion of recent books. It's time.
Let's start in 2016 with Hidden Figures, Margot Lee Shetterly's book about the black female mathematicians at NASA during the early rocket age: they struggled in the face of both sexism AND racism—a doubly high barrier.
Though Hidden Figures is hardly the first book about unrecognized women, it's perhaps the most famous. In addition to reaching bestseller status, the book also became a BLOCKBUSTER FILM—earning close to a quarter of a BILLION world-wide.
This January Marie Benedict published The Only Woman in the Room, a novelistic treatment of the famous Hollywood film star, Hedy Lamarr. Lamarr led a double life: she was also a crack scientist who invented a radio-guided torpedo system.
Although dismissed by the military during World War II, Lamarr's invention later played a role in developing GPS and cell phones. Hedy's Folly, a nonfiction work on the same subject, was published by Richard Rhodes in 2011.
Also out this January is Larry Loftis' nonfiction account of Odette Samson, a female British spy dropped into Nazi territory—Code Name: Lise.
AND get this! Pam Jenoff has just released a FICTIONAL treatment of real life female British spies … dropped into Nazi territory—The Lost Girls of Paris.
THIS just in, a late entry: April 9, 2019, saw the release of Sonia Purnell's A Woman of No Importance: The Untold Story of the American Spy Who Helped Win World War II.
2017 saw a number of books about female breakthroughs in male domains. CODE-BREAKING proved a big topic that year: strangely, TWO nonfiction works were both devoted to one woman in particular—Elizebeth Smith Friedman.
Elizebeth, a groundbreaking cryptologist, founded along with her husband the modern science of cryptology prior to and during WWII. After the war William Friedman went on to head up NSA's cryptology unit—and even had a building named in his honor. It took decades for Elizebeth's name to be added to the plaque—even though some considered her the BETTER coder.
Check out these two nonfiction works on Elizebeth Smith Friedman:
• The Woman Who Smashed Codes by Jason Fagone
• A Life in Code by G. Stuart Smith
In the VERY same year (we're still in 2017), came Code Girls by Liza Mundy. Again, during the war years, the Army and Navy recruited women from around the country to learn code-breaking. They moved to Washington to take up the challenge, and only now, after years of secrecy, are we learning of their impressive contribution.
Also, in 2017, Jennifer Chiaverini came out with The Enchantress of Numbers, a fictional telling of Ada Lovelace, daughter of poet Lord Byron. More than a century passed before Lovelace was acknowledged as the developer of computer language (i.e., code). That's right, she was essentially the FIRST computer programmer—and it was the 19th century!
Finally, in 2017, moving away from math and science, Chuck O'Brien released Fly Girls, a nonfiction account of female aviators during the 1920s and '30s. The women, talented flyers in their own right, had to fight in order to compete against men in popular air races. In the face of ridicule, they managed to beat their male counterparts … a lot.
This is hardly an exhaustive list, but I'll stop here. There are many more books championing unsung female achievements; these are just the ones that came to mind.
So wouldn't it be a great idea to spend an ENTIRE BOOK CLUB YEAR reading about these remarkable women … and the many others I've left out?
By Kathy Aspden, Author *
Here’s the thing I love about screenwriting – it’s about using the fewest words to create the largest picture.
There’s a wonderful economy in the language of films. You’re given two hours at best – which translates into 120 pages of script, one page per minute.
I’ve had table readings of my scripts – no action included – and have been surprised to find that it really is one minute per page.
So here’s your mission: Write a scene that doesn’t include the character’s thoughts, desires and complex histories, but somehow conveys a character’s thoughts, desires and complex histories. It’s like a puzzle.
Add to that the fact that somebody important who’s reading your script does not want you to direct them. It sounds confusing, doesn’t it? It is.
RENNIE
I was wrong. You can tear up my contract and keep the money. I’ll take my chances on the outside.
This is a line from my screenplay, A PERFECT WORLD – a dystopic society in 2046 where America is bankrupt from taking care of the sick.
All illness has been traced to HPAS - Hybrid Procreation Autoimmune Syndrome – caused by the cross-pollination of people breeding outside their race of origin: The American Melting Pot. The government has decided it’s time to fix the problem before humanity is too sick to survive.
What if medicine suddenly became illegal and the sick were encouraged to die while America cultivated a new race?
Now picture my dilemma as the screenwriter. Exclamation points are frowned upon. Italics aren’t allowed. Underlined words are not encouraged unless absolutely necessary. Using all caps (ala Christian Gray style) is a complete no-no.
And yet my character, Rennie, is a woman in a government run clinic, who is thirteen-weeks pregnant with a genetically viable child, produced through a government sanctioned union, and she wants out.
She wants out at the top of her lungs. She wants out in spite of the fact that she has signed a contract. She wants out even though she knows that medical care outside of the facility has been deemed illegal.
SHE WANTS OUT!!
But it’s not my call as a writer to do the director’s job (or so they say). So I write the words and hope he/she gets it. Or more likely, I hope the twelve-year-old he/she intern assistant to the producer gets it.
It’s all good, though, as long as YOU get it.
* Kathy Aspden is the author of Baklava, Biscotti, and an Irishman, as well as a book reviewer for LitLovers.
Cool photo...could be right out of Anne Fadiman's Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader—a terrific collection of essays about a lifetime spent in the pursuit of books: reading, writing, and collecting them. (The author is best known for The Spirit Catches You, You Fall Down, 1997.)Here's what happened: Having sublet her apartment, Fadiman returns home from a lengthy trip. It turns out her subleasers are two design-oriented guys who thought they'd do her a favor and spiff the place up a bit.
So what did they do? They rearranged her bookshelves. Nothing practical mind you, like genre, subject, or author name...no-no-no. That would be PROSE-AY-ICK. They reorganized the books by—you guessed it—COLOR. And Fadiman? Amused...and horrified.
Well, I've got some pretty spiffy bookshelves myself, built by Victorians 120 years ago. Here's what mine look like.
A beautiful mess. Books are crammed in topsy-turvy and arranged willy-nilly, with no claim to the niceties of decor or organization. It's all DVDs, old Disney videos, kids crayons, cookbooks and wine glasses (off to the left), along side Shakespeare (my grandfather's 1920s set).Bookshelves are deeply personal things. This lovely mess has meaning: it reflects a sort of "what-you-see-is what-you-get" approach to our lives. More importantly, the mess contains a good bit of family history, giving us pleasure just to look at it.
So how personal are your bookshelves—what do they say about you? Finally (and we've talked about this before), how much longer will bookshelves grace our homes? What will we lose when everything is digitalized. And, yes, I ♥ my Kindle.