News Report

http://www.ala.org/ala/alonline/currentnews/newsarchive/2009/february2009/wsjcloseslibrary.cfm
2/13/2009
No Author Listed
Wall Street Journal to Close its Research Library

On March 23 the research library for the Wall Street Journal was shut down. The news of this happening originally came out on February 5 when Leslie A. Norman, head of the library, announced that her and her colleagues received news that their jobs would be terminated. Leslie and her colleagues were responsible for doing research for reporters so that they could write their articles. Now that the reporters will not have someone else to do their research it will take much longer for them to do their jobs. They will be doing their own research by using a Lexis product called Due Diligence Dashboard and other databases including Factivia.

It is not alarming to me to see that this is happening and I am sure that this sort of thing is happening across the country with the economic crisis that our country is in. Before reading this article I did not know that reporters received much of their research information from someone else. Now it is interesting to see that they are going to be using databases similar to what we have been learning to use in class in order to gather information to write their articles.

News Report

http://www.ala.org/ala/alonline/currentnews/newsarchive/2009/march2009/nyplbudgetcrisis.cfm

The three main libraries in New York City, New York Public Library, Queens Library and Brooklyn Library, are expecting major budget cuts after hearing of Mayor Bloomberg’s budget plan for the 2010 fiscal year. The plan calls for a 17% decrease in funding towards the public libraries in the city. The libraries are also expecting to lose nearly $3 million each due to a decrease in state funding. Another cause source of money that the libraries are concerned about is the money they receive from private donations. With the economy looking worse and worse, the libraries are anticipating as much as a $20 million decrease in funding from private donations. In order to deal with these severe budget cuts the NYC libraries are planning on cutting down their hours of operation in some cases to less than five days a week as well as laying off hundreds of workers.
After doing many news reports on similar subjects I have become almost immune to the shocking amounts of budget cuts in libraries across the nation. For most of my news report topics I have turned to the ALA website and it seems like the vast majority of the articles have been about the budget cuts in libraries. This article in particular is a bit more interesting because of the libraries it is dealing with. These New York libraries are so large compared to most I have read about this semester and therefore the amounts of money they will be losing is also much larger.

Kevin Petersen

Information Navigation

This article again talks about a very important topic for our class: information literacy. Over the past decade the availability of information on the internet has exploded. This has caused students of this generation to be provided with a lot of information that can be easily accessed although it may not be very credible. The Internet has grown from 18,000 sites in 1995 to now over 100 million. This has broadened the search area greatly which makes it much harder for students to be sure which information is credible.
Many librarians though do not agree with each other on the ways in which information literacy is being taught. Some think that information literacy should almost be taught as a completely separate course while others disagree; saying that searching for information is becoming simpler by the day and that taking too much time to teach these skills would be a waste.
My opinion is that students do need to be taught the difference between what information is acceptable and what is not. The creation and expansion of Google has made it extremely easy for students to type in a few keywords and in less than a second be provided with thousands of related websites. While Google can be very helpful, it certainly is not the best option for student research but students have been turning to it because of its simplicity. I think that if students are taught how to use scholarly databases at an earlier point in the education process, it will be much easier for them to turn to them for research instead of using Google because using a scholarly database will not seem like as much of a chore as it does too many students now.

-Kevin Petersen

Reading Assignment "Infodiet"

This article was extremely interesting to me. It talks about how students have come to rely on Google for all of their research needs. It claims that students today have no idea how to use libraries or how to search library catalogs on a computer. Steven Bell, the author, refers to the information and search results found in Google as "junk food", while referring to the quality information found in libraries and their search catalogs as the "nutritious food". Bell says that in order to get students to begin to use search catalogs, they need to be made more similar to Google. The simplicity of Google is what students are attracted to and therefor if search catalogs were made just as easy to use they would appeal more to college students. The article tells us that James Morris, from Carnegie Mellon University, has made up the term "infobesity" which refers to the Google-ized information search which is made up of large amounts of low quality information. These links to low quality information cause students to write low quality research papers, but since Google is far easier to use students will be writing low quality papers until search catalogs are made to be the same.

I personally think the Steven Bell did a great job with this article. While reading this I felt like he was decribing me when he was talking about the stereotypical college student in today's world. Before i got to UNCW and started taking this course I had no idea that the information I was finding on Google was far inferior to that of the search catalogs available in the library. He is right though when he says students use Google because it is so much easier. Before this class I could not have even began to use a search catalog effectively enough to gather information for a research paper. It is much harder and more time consuming in comparison to typing a few keywords into the Google search engine.

-Kevin Petersen

Da Vinci Reading

This article is mainly about the way that libraries have changed since they were first introduced. At first libraries were made because books were rare and far too expensive for common people to afford and keep in their home. Once Johan Gutenberg invented the printing press and introduced it to the public libraries were changed dramatically. Another man who had a very large impact on the evolution on libraries was architect Andrew Carnegie who provided the money for thousands of libraries to be built. The article provides ten main trends that have caused libraries to change and they are: communication systems are changing the way people access information, all technologies end and will be replaced by something new, we have not yet reached the ultimate small particle storage, search technology will become increasingly complicated, time compression is changing the lifestyle of people who use libraries, over time we will be transitioning to a verbal society, demand for global information is growing exponentially, the stage is being set for a new era of Global Systems, we are transitioning from a product-based economy to an experience based economy, and libraries will transition from a center of information to a center of culture. These are the trends that are transforming our libraries today.

I think that as our society evolves and new technologies become available libraries will become less important. I believe that over time all books will be available on the Internet. The day that happens is probably not too far away because so many books are already available on websites such as Google Books. Libraries will begin to have fewer books and more computers which is another thing we are already seeing today. Here at UNCW we are experiencing a growth in computers available in the libraries. As many of you may recall, Mrs. Pemberton told us about an entire new section of Macintosh computers that will be added to our library for next year. This shows that the changes talked about in the article are already underway.

-Kevin Petersen

News Report

http://www.ala.org/ala/newspresscenter/news/pressreleases2009/february2009/orscosla.cfm
State Funding for Many Public libraries on Decline
Febuary 10, 2009
No Author

This article is much like many others that have been popping up on the ALA press release web page. It is about the decrease in funding for libraries during a time where the use of libraries has been skyrocketing. The article mentions that the southeastern section of the United States has been hit the hardest. The state with the largest reduction in library funding has been South Carolina which has had it's funding cut back by as much as 30% for it's libraries. Other states with large library cut backs include Mississippi, Louisiana, Alabama, and Georgia. Jim Rettig, the president of the ALA, spoke about this problem saying, "Libraries are part of the solution when a community is struggling economically – assisting the unemployed with jobs searches and filing unemployment benefits, helping the unskilled learn to use a computer, providing homework help and access to e-government services" and then added to that by saying, “Now is the time to call members of Congress and make sure libraries are included in the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act.” North Carolina was also on the list of states expected to experience a decline in funding for libraries in the 2009 Fiscal Year.

We have spoke about this problem almost every week while sharing our news reports but the problem does not fail to amaze me each time. Agreeing with the words of Jim Rettig, I do believe that libraries have become increasingly important to citizens of the United States during these hard economic times and that we need to do more to improve their funding. Citizens are becoming dependent on libraries for the use of the Internet. With the unemployment rate soaring higher and higher people need computers to look for jobs because employers are posting jobs on the Web instead of in newspapers because it is cheaper. Public libraries have become increasingly important as of late and our nation needs to figure out a way to fund them more properly.

News Report 2

On October 10, 2008, George W. Bush passed a bill that will required any school that are receiving money from the government for telecommunication programs to educate its students about “appropriate online behavior”. This bill is called Broadband Data Improvement Act and it is designed to help protect young people from the dangers of the web. In 2006 a bill called the Deleting Online Predators Act (DOPA) was proposed and while it made it through the House of Representatives easily it did not get passed by the United States Senate. DOPA proposed that schools and libraries block all social networking and online chat websites to protect students from online predators. Many groups though felt that what DOPA proposed was not appropriate and that instead students should be educated about those types of websites. The new bill was designed in the hope that students will learn how to deal with things such as cyberbullying, and how to appropriate communicate through social networking sites with putting themselves into danger or getting themselves into trouble.

I think that this new bill is a good idea and that all schools should considers taking part in this. The bill states that only schools receiving money for a certain type of program are required to participate but I think that all schools should consider educating their students about the dangers of online social networking. An appropriate time in my mind for school to begin teaching this would be when students first enter middle school. I believe it is around this age that young students will really begin to get involved with online social networking. The internet can be very dangerous and students may get themselves into trouble if they are not fully educated on the dangers of the web.