Enter the Blog

This blog was created as part of my studies - MTeach (teacher librarian) -hopefully here you may find some musings on education, libraries, life and studying along with generally witty and insightful comments (if i can manage any!).

Please add comments along the way. I'll be glad for any input, especially from fellow students and library lovers

Kylie




Monday, November 4, 2013

"Libraries really are the gates to the future" - Gaiman

Authors are sometimes the library's best advocates. Neil Gaiman gave a lecture for the Reading Agency
 on the 14th of October in London. Here is just some of what was said.  


Neil Gaiman Image: http://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/oct/15/neil-gaiman-future-libraries-reading-daydreaming


“....libraries are about freedom. Freedom to read, freedom of ideas, freedom of communication. They are about education (which is not a process that finishes the day we leave school or university), about entertainment, about making safe spaces, and about access to information.
I worry that here in the 21st century people misunderstand what libraries are and the purpose of them. If you perceive a library as a shelf of books, it may seem antiquated or outdated in a world in which most, but not all, books in print exist digitally. But that is to miss the point fundamentally...
In the last few years, we’ve moved from an information-scarce economy to one driven by an information glut. According to Eric Schmidt of Google, every two days now the human race creates as much information as we did from the dawn of civilisation until 2003. That’s about five exobytes of data a day, for those of you keeping score. The challenge becomes, not finding that scarce plant growing in the desert, but finding a specific plant growing in a jungle. We are going to need help navigating that information to find the thing we actually need.”
For the full article go to the Guardian 
 Finding the plant in the Jungle is what makes the need for qualified teacher librarians so essential for today's world.

No comments:

Post a Comment