Saturday 17 July 2010

Bookless libraries (responding to Cultural Offering.com)

What makes a library? The building? The signage maybe? Neither.  It’s the books, because a container is defined by its contents. And if books are offered in a digital format on platforms such as the Kindle or the iPad, it’s not a library anymore, rather a memory farm…

How about the home? With the arrival of various digital platforms what benefits could it possibly have to still keep collecting real books in the home? Check out this article from USA Today for some very interesting facts on those benefits…

‘The U.S. Department of Education recently undertook a monumental project called the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study, which tracks the progress of more than 20,000 American schoolchildren from kindergarten through the fifth grade. Aside from gathering each child's test scores and the standard demographic information, the ECLS also asks the children's parents a wide range of questions about the families' habits and activities. The result is an extraordinarily rich set of data that, when given a rigorous economic analysis, tells some compelling stories about parenting technique.

A child with at least 50 kids' books in his home, for instance, scores roughly 5 percentile points higher than a child with no books, and a child with 100 books scores another 5 percentile points higher than a child with 50 books. Most people would look at this correlation and draw the obvious cause-and-effect conclusion: A little boy named, say, Brandon has a lot of books in his home; Brandon does beautifully on his reading test; this must be because Brandon's parents read to him regularly.

But the ECLS data show no correlation between a child's test scores and how often his parents read to him.’

Convinced about the goodness of owning/ having books yet?

Cultural Offering.com: Bookless libraries

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