Accessibility is one of those issues that often needs a headline to grab attention. Too often, the headlines we see are about public institutions that didn’t heed warnings and are facing litigation under the Americans with Disabilities Act.
I love living and working in rural Western New York, but the schools and libraries in my geographic area are facing daunting challenges in the shift to digital content. E-content is often priced on a site-based basis, and that means our small school libraries end up paying an inequitably high price.
For the December ebook report, Douglas County (Colo.) Libraries looked at availability of books the top 10 New York Times Children’s Chapter Books list. The mix of fiction and nonfiction on the list reveals the problem of trying to force a move towards digital content.
As several large book publishers continue to deny libraries access to their e-books, and others make e-books available under difficult terms, libraries find themselves unable to provide the reading and educational materials demanded by their patrons. As a result, many librarians are asking, “What can I do to advocate for fair e-book lending practices?”
I am a gamer. One of the games I spend quite a bit of time playing is World of Warcraft, which might best be described as a really pretty, 3D graphical user interface to a series of amazingly complicated spreadsheets. At the highest level of play, every step is theory-crafted using log files of past performance and simulations of potential performance.
A majority of the 57 state and regional chapters of the American Library Association have signed a joint statement in opposition to the practices of publishers and distributors that have established unfair pricing in the sale of ebooks to libraries.
Grand Rapids (Mich.) Public Library has launched a radio frequency identification system (RFID) that was installed in its eight branches in late November 2012. The library is the first in North America to adopt an ultra-high-frequency (UHF) RFID system.
Remember back when we as a profession pretty much lost it over the decision by HarperCollins to have ebooks expire after 26 loans? Ah, we were so young, so naive. If we had any clue about the limitations yet to come, we would have been a lot more welcoming of what now seems like not such a bad deal.
