 Tuesday, June 18, 2002
U.N. Conference Says Digital Divide Still Growing
"The digital divide between rich and poor countries is growing despite the many efforts to help developing nations break into the global economy via computers, U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan said on Monday....
'Some countries have prospered while others have fallen behind,'' said Yoshio Utsumi, secretary-general of the Geneva-based International Telecommunications Union. 'If we do not take any action, the gap between the information 'haves' and 'have nots' will continue to grow.'
Utsumi said 'information poverty' remained a reality for much of the world. More than 80 countries had fewer than 10 telephone lines for every 100 inhabitants. And in three out of five countries, fewer than one out of 100 people used the Internet, he said." [New York Times: Technology]
Pun headline, cool idea. Library Stuff is featuring each day's Overdue comic strip at the top of each day's posts! Read the press release, or just contemplate doing the same (something I'm trying to figure out how to handle in my current three-column template).
Hey, I'm raving about the strip, too, so if you're not reading it already, get thee over to the web site and subscribe!
Business Card-sized CD-R Media 100pk for $40
"Wanna burn a bunch of business-card discs? $40 gets you 100 CD-biz-card blanks, each holding 50MB. You could hand out copies of Seth Schoen's Bootable Business Card Linux, a substantial fraction of Project Gutenberg, you name it. I'm told that you can burn these with any tray-loading burner." [Boing Boing]
It would be interesting to make library cards out of these discs and give them to legislators. I'll have to think out what should be on the CD, but an index page that points to library services, interesting statistics, remote database access, and maybe some patron testimonials (video, Flash,?) could be a good start.
Robert Brown points out Neil Gaiman has some excellent things to say about librarians and he's right! Actually, both of them are right. :-)
"My very favourite moment of A.L.A. was a grandmotherly librarian enthusing to me about how very much she had enjoyed my single use, in Stardust,of what my own grandmother would, and then only under duress, refer to ominously as 'The F Word'.
That very narrowly beat out the amazing graphic novel preconference (amazing because it wasn't, as I half-expected, a bunch of librarians who were comics fans, but was, much more interestingly, 175 librarians who could see the enormous demand for graphic novels in their libraries, particularly amongst teens, and wanted to know more about these things that, due to demand, they were putting on their shelves); spending quality time with Jane Yolen (who I normally forget is *j*a*n*e* y*o*l*e*n* because mostly I think of her as my friend Adam's mum/Allie's grandma etc., so seeing her in her element and worshipped like the goddess of some exotic tribe made me inexplicably happy); and seeing the "Advanced Listening Copies" of Two Plays For Voices ; not to mention signing finished copies of Coraline; spending time with Art Spiegelman, and with the lovely Colleen Doran and the not-as-lovely-as-Colleen-but pretty-darn-loveable-in-his-own-right Jeff Smith; and the librarian who told me how Sandman graphic novels were the most checked-out things from her rural library "until they meet someone who adopts them, and then they don't come back" -- she didn't see it as books getting stolen, she was just happy that a kid out there had found a book he or she wanted so much she or he "adopted" it; and spending time with author Chris Lynch; and, above all, realising the incredibly powerful role that all the librarians play in keeping America literate (for little pay and not a lot of appreciation, I don't think it's overstating things to suggest these people are the thin grey line between literacy and barbarism)." [Neil Gaimain's Journal, June 6, 2002]
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