To say that “librarians are the original search engine” is to concede that search engines do what librarians do, which would be another way of saying that there is no reason to talk to a reference librarian if you can just Google it.

…

If you want a slogan for a coffee mug, I would prefer to see one with an SAT-style analogy, like, “Librarians are to search engines as astronomers are to telescopes.” People who don’t know much about astronomy can get some use from a telescope, but we understand that with an astronomer’s knowledge it can become much more powerful as a tool for discovery. We would not say, “Astronomers: The original telescope,” and we wouldn’t think for a second that that a slogan like that would be flattering to astronomers or supportive of the astronomy profession.

(Source: freegovinfo.info)

“Results of the study indicate that parents and educators can rest easy knowing that students comprehend books they read digitally as well as they comprehend books read in a print format,” especially since electronic reading devices are rapidly becoming popular for both personal and educational use, the study says. Only narrative texts were used, and the results do not include informational texts or textbooks.

(Source: twitter.com)

ebookporn:

eReaderLookup.com is a database of ebook reader devices that has quick filtering and comparison capabilities.

This website was created to facilitate the research of ebook readers. Today it is sometimes difficult to make an informed choice based on marketing campaigns of big corporations, although there might be ereaders offering much more at the same or better price.

This site offers you facts about ereaders and allows you to easily find the devices that match your parameters. Some of the information is being obtained from device manufacturers and reviews; some is being contributed by website users.

thelifeguardlibrarian:

thelibrarianontherun:

“Given the choice between reading e-books or print books, children prefer e-books, a new, exploratory field study shows. Children who read e-books also retain and comprehend just as much as when they read print books, the study also suggests.

A new “QuickStudy” – so named for its short duration and the small size of its sample group – from the Joan Ganz Cooney Center observed 24 families with children ranging in age from three-to-six reading both print and e-books in the Summer and Fall of 2011. Most of the children in the study preferred reading an e-book to a print book and comprehension between the two formats were the same.

‘If we can encourage kids to engage in books through an iPad, that’s a win already,’ said Carly Shuler, senior consultant for industry studies at the Joan Ganz Cooney Center at Sesame Workshop is a New York based non-profit organization dedicated to understanding how children learn through digital media.

Enhanced e-books – those that have more bells and whistles than e-books, like interactive features and games – were also compared in the study with their regular e-book counterparts. Children recalled fewer of the details of the content of enhanced e-books versus the same e-book.

‘Kids were more focused on tapping things and that took away from their comprehension as well as the interaction between the parent and the child,’ said Shuler.

The findings from the study are preliminary and the Joan Ganz Cooney center will be conducting larger, more rigorous studies of the issue. Two more QuickStudies are currently being conducted around the questions of why parents and children select certain e-books over others and how parents and children read e-books together.”

 Oh, our little digital natives.

But really, just bring on the reading. I think exposure to ebooks is an important step in developing children’s visual literacy along with digital literacy. And of course, their ability to read.

The more I used the Fire, the more it felt like I was looking through the wrong end of a spyglass and all I could see was Amazon. I had read that the Fire is designed as a consumption device for Amazon products but I hadn’t believed that they would go to so much trouble to hobble what should be a general purpose computer. This is an unfortunate sign for the company; it means that the people who are running it are salesmen and bean counters who are more concerned about what a product does for the company and its bottom line than what it actually does for the customer.

(Source: twitter.com)