PVLD Director's Blog

Happy Holidays, Happy Reading!

After getting more and more questions from the community about e-book readers like the Kindle, and with the knowledge that many people will have e-book readers under their Christmas trees this year, I fully intended to write a post on that subject....but whether due to the many recent articles and blog posts about e-books and the future of reading that have my head spinning, or sugar overload from the endless array of treats in the staff work area, or just the fact that I am winding down for a nice long vacation, I just don't have a thoughtful blog post in me right now!

Instead I'll share this post promoting the joy of books and reading from the Wise Bread blog.  Wise Bread is about personal finance and stretching your dollars, but I find it's often the source of thought-provoking ideas on living more meaningfully, too.  I love the form of re-gifting that Mr. Lefall suggests, and would love to get a pre-loved book that has been important to someone I care about.

I'm going to be enjoying some time off at home until after the New Year and am planning to do some serious housecleaning in addition to lots of reading.  Now, inspired by Mr. Lefall's "book 'em" project, I'll be weeding my bookshelves not just with an eye to things I can pass on to our Friends of the Library for their book sales but also putting aside some of my treasured favorites to share with people I love.

Best wishes for a happy and healthy New Year, and I look forward to reconnecting in 2010.

Reading Makes You Smarter

Driving home from work yesterday I heard this story on National Public Radio about how the act of reading physically strengthens the network of fibers that carry information around the brain.  These cells are called "white matter" as opposed to the "grey matter" cells that store and process information, and there is growing evidence that as the "information superhighway" of the brain white matter plays an important role in brain function.

It turns out that intensive reading practice (along with other activities like playing a musical instrument and jugglingthat require the coordination of activity in different parts of the brain) results in better structural integrity of the white matter, and that greater skill in reading translates to "stonger" white matter.

So...next time you read a book you are not just getting smarter because of what you learn from its contents, you are also providing your brain with a form of strength training.  Now I will feel less guilty the next time I decide not to break out the Wii Fit in favor of curling up with a book!

Reading real books

(Note this is a re-post as I had to fix a glitch!)

After my blog post about the Kindle last week I got plenty Facebook comments from friends and colleagues, most of whom are Kindle fans...but I still have this little niggle about whether an e-book will ever replace a real, physical book. 

That niggle got more pronounced with two items in the media this week.  The first is an article by David Ulin on The Lost Art of Reading from Sunday's Los Angeles Times that our Adult Services Manager Sylvia Richardson brought to my attention. Its not about e-books per se, but it did make me wonder whether there is something about the physical nature of a book - the act of turning pages, and even the smell of the paper, that lends itself to reading as the contemplative act that Mr. Ulin describes.  It's also hard for me to imagine that a device that allows one to flip from e-book to website to blog at the push of a button would not offer temptations and distractions that a confessed multi-tasker like me would find impossible to resist...thereby making it even harder to immerse myself in the book at hand. For me, at least, I think curling up in a quiet room with a real, paper book is the only way to experience the distancing from the day-to-day world that is a true joy of reading.

This morning, I heard this item on National Public Radio's Morning Edition -

I love author Jonathan Lethem's description of reading as a "very private, eccentric, intense journey" and I confess that I hadn't really thought about the privacy implications of digital books.  As a member of a profession that has long been fiercely protective of peoples' right to maintain the privacy of what they read, and yet at the same time a person who values the openness that the Internet provides and has questioned whether my profession sometimes oversteps people's right and responsibility to decide how private they want their reading (or any other information about them) to be I found the NPR item very thought-provoking.

I do think that the privacy concerns raised by the Electronic Frontier Foundation and ACLU are legitimate, and I agree that an approach that Google's "just trust us" approach is inadequate, but I also wonder whether a requirement that all data about reader behavior be deleted isn't going too far.  Shouldn't there be a role for the individual reader in determining whether/how data about them is used?

The bottom line?  I don't think e-books will replace reading "real" physical books in my life any time soon.  I may break down and get a Kindle (and I've already downloaded the Kindle app for my IPhone even though I haven't used it yet) for benefits such as being able to load it with travel guides, or to access newspapers when I travel...but when it comes time for what David Ulin calls "real reading" you'll find me with an old-fashioned book in my hands!

Curling Up With a Kindle?

Anyone who knows me knows one of my great pleasures is curling up with a book.  While there is no doubt I am also a technology junkie, I've been very sceptical about e-books...but I have to confess that I am beginning to change my mind.

This started with seeing the first generation Kindle that a colleague bought to take on a European vacation.  The thought of being able to carry around the full text of multiple travel guides on a device that was roughly the size of a single book, and also use that device to download newspapers and other information while travelling was pretty appealing.

Then I got my Iphone, and while it's small size limits its usefulness as a medium for reading I have been amazed at how handy it is for reading newspaper articles and other shorter pieces.

A few weeks ago a friend emailed me to say she was thinking about getting a Kindle for her mother and asked whether the library had any for people to try. We don't but it is an interesting idea if we could find the money and figure out the licensing/copyright issues.

Monday morning as I drove to work I heard this interesting piece by Linda Wertheimer on NPR's Morning Edition (if you don't want to listen you can click here for the transcript):

And then just today as I was surfing some of my favorite blogs while eating lunch I came across this post about the Kindle Iphone app on colleague Genesis Hansen's Wrong Again blog. (As an aside Genesis is a Manager at the Newport Beach Public Library, and an up-and-coming library leader who was one of the inaugural participants in the State Library's Eureka Leadership Program for future library leaders).

Hmm...Linda Wertheimer curls up with her Kindle and Genesis uses her Iphone to have access to multiple books any time, anywhere ...maybe I need to give e-books a try.

On the other hand, since one of my favorite places to read is in the bathtub maybe I should wait for the waterproof version!

Transforming Reading

On Friday our Digital Library Services Manager, David Campbell, told me about this article by Clive Thompson on the Future of Reading in the latest issue of Wired Magazine.  It's a great description of how technology is allowing reading to be transformed from a largely individual act to a social one, which in turn has the potential not to diminish the importance and value of reading but to enhance it.

I need to check out some of the websites Mr. Thompson references, but the idea that technology will unleash the sharing of annotations, commentary and opinions not just on books or written works as a whole, but on excerpts or snippets - and thereby greatly facilitate people's ability to discover things they might want to read - is intriguing.

I am also intrigued by the idea that technology could create a class of what Mr. Thompson calls "professional readers"and I would term "citizen reviewers"...people who share their views on what they read and build a followership based on the quality of their insights and the alignment of their interests with those of other readers and not because they happen to be published in the newspaper or Library Journal.  Of course this is already happening already through blogs and Tweets and Facebook postings and user reviews on Amazon.com and in library catalogs...but the development of sites like BookGlutton have the potential to take it to a whole new level by enabling not only annotations and comments, but real time exhanges of ideas and opinions.

On a professional level I can see how these changes will also be another force for change in the practice of librarianship.  The days when we can base decisions about what to add to the collection based on whether an item was "professionally reviewed" are clearly numbered, and our efforts to develop "social catalogs" need to be stepped up exponentially if we are to offer the same opportunities to share the experience of reading that a commercial site like BookGlutton offers.

On a personal level I just hope the BookGlutton IPhone app isn't too far away!

Reading on the Rise

Recent years have been marked by a steady drumbeat of reports and articles about the decline of reading, so it was gratifying to hear a couple of weeks ago about the results of a recent National Endowment for the Arts survey that actually shows an increase in the rate and number of American adults who read literature. 

The greatest increase in reading was among 18-24 year olds, which I found a bit surprising until one of our library volunteers forwarded me this article by one of my favorite authors, Ann Patchett (thanks Mary!)

Read it, and remember why you are a reader!

Boys and Reading

Getting boys to read can be a challenge, as evidenced by conversations our staff have with parents and educators and among themselves, and by articles such as this one from the Washington Post. Just do a Google search using the terms "boys" and "reading" and you get more information than you can possible absorb on the topic of how to encourage boys to read, including a link to author Jon Scieszka's terrific Guys Read website. (as an aside, Jon Scieszka was recently named as the Library of Congress' first ever national ambassador for children's literature - very cool!)

Here at PVLD Young Readers Librarian Michael Barb has a passion for getting school-aged boys to read, and to that end is planning a great father/son program for this spring.  Keep an eye out for "Knights in Training"!

As someone who comes from a family of readers (boys and girls alike) and who has no children of my own, I don't have a clue what makes a book enticing to a young boy, so I'm always fascinated by articles on this topic.  Late last year I spent an enjoyable and educational few minutes listening to this National Public Radio interview with John Scieszka while running errands on a Saturday morning - and it inspired me to actually go read some of the Stinky Cheese Man (although I confess I just skimmed it!)

This past Sunday the New York Times had a great article about the very popular "Wimpy Kid" books and how they are inspiring boys to read, which in turn inspired me to check out Diary of A Wimpy Kid:Rodrick Rules (the one and only Wimpy Kid book available on the shelf at the Peninsula Center Library, which tells you something).  I just started reading it and am already chuckling.

I loved the NY Times article's closing paragraphs, too -

"Slightly older readers vouch for the accuracy of Mr. Kinney’s observations. Ethan Bloom’s brother, Josh, 13, who is an eager reader, said, “A lot of spy and fantasy books are ridiculous, but this isn’t ridiculous at all. Everything in it is completely true — the way the parents reacted to things, the dumb things we do, all the annoying things you have to do with younger brothers.”

And is he looking forward to the next “Wimpy Kid” installment?

Absolutely, Josh said. “We’ll be making a trip to the library,” he replied.

Not a bookstore?

“Naw,” he said, “ I don’t buy books. I can waste my money on other things.”

What a great plug for the Wimpy Kids books, and for libraries!

Books vs Bits

This Op-Ed piece by James Gleick from last Sunday's New York Times provided a nice counterpoint to the article on screen-based literacy that I blogged about last week.  Acknowledging that the role of the book  as "the world’s pre-eminent device for the storage and retrieval of knowledge" may be ending in this increasingly digital world, Gleick posits a new role for the book "as a physical object, and as an idea, and as a set of literary forms."

He talks about the unique immersion in a narrative that is the essence of reading a book, the feeling of possessing and being possessed by a book that a reader like me finds impossible to replicate when getting information via a screen. 

Gleick says this not out of sentimentality, but because of his view that the book will continue to have utility even when all information is digitized because as he puts it "it is a technology that works."  He writes

"As a technology, the book is like a hammer. That is to say, it is perfect: a tool ideally suited to its task. Hammers can be tweaked and varied but will never go obsolete. Even when builders pound nails by the thousand with pneumatic nail guns, every household needs a hammer. Likewise, the bicycle is alive and well. It was invented in a world without automobiles, and for speed and range it was quickly surpassed by motorcycles and all kinds of powered scooters. But there is nothing quaint about bicycles. They outsell cars....It is significant that one says book lover and music lover and art lover but not record lover or CD lover or, conversely, text lover"

Thank you Mr. Gleick for helping me see why my inchoate feeling that digital technology does not mean the end of the book is not just wishful thinking!

Literacy in a Screen-based World

Yesterday's New York Times Magazine was headed "The Screen Issue" and dedicated to an exploration of how screen-based media are changing our world.  I was particulary intrigued by Kevin Kelly's essay "Becoming Screen Literate", in which he describes his view that "We are now in the middle of a second Gutenberg shift — from book fluency to screen fluency, from literacy to visuality."

He is not alone in this view, and there has been much written about how new screen-based media are transforming the very way we think.  Wht struck me about this article was Mr. Kelly's description of literacy as requiring a rich set of tools far beyond the basic building blocks of the ability to comprehend the meaning of a word on a page:

But merely producing movies with ease is not enough for screen fluency, just as producing books with ease on Gutenberg’s press did not fully unleash text. Literacy also required a long list of innovations and techniques that permit ordinary readers and writers to manipulate text in ways that make it useful. For instance, quotation symbols make it simple to indicate where one has borrowed text from another writer. Once you have a large document, you need a table of contents to find your way through it. That requires page numbers. Somebody invented them (in the 13th century). Longer texts require an alphabetic index, devised by the Greeks and later developed for libraries of books. Footnotes, invented in about the 12th century, allow tangential information to be displayed outside the linear argument of the main text. And bibliographic citations (invented in the mid-1500s) enable scholars and skeptics to systematically consult sources. These days, of course, we have hyperlinks, which connect one piece of text to another, and tags, which categorize a selected word or phrase for later sorting.

All these inventions (and more) permit any literate person to cut and paste ideas, annotate them with her own thoughts, link them to related ideas, search through vast libraries of work, browse subjects quickly, resequence texts, refind material, quote experts and sample bits of beloved artists. These tools, more than just reading, are the foundations of literacy.

He then goes on to propose that rapidly advancing computer technologies, including the use of technology to harness "the collective intelligence of humans", are enabling the application of the building blocks of textual literacy described above to be applied to visual images so that they can be searched, sorted, organized and retrieved much as words and text are today.

"As moving images become easier to create, easier to store, easier to annotate and easier to combine into complex narratives, they also become easier to be remanipulated by the audience. This gives images a liquidity similar to words. Fluid images­ made up of bits flow rapidly onto new screens and can be put to almost any use. Flexible images migrate into new media and seep into the old. Like alphabetic bits, they can be squeezed into links or stretched to fit search engines, indexes and databases. They invite the same satisfying participation in both creation and consumption that the world of text does." 

 Unwritten, but implied, is a sense that this new "visuality" will supplant text-based literacy as the primary means of communicating ones thoughts and ideas.  I have to admit that as someone who loves the written word this makes me a bit apprehensive.  Ispend very little time watching movies, television, or YouTube because I prefer to read instead; and while I love the new Web 2.0 and social networking tools I am drawn to those that are primarily based on the written word, such as blogs and written status updates from my Facebook Friends.

One of the things I love about reading is that the words on the page are transformed through my own experience and imagination into images of my own making, and I avoid seeing the movie versions of books that I have loved because the visual images on the screen rarely live up to what I have imagined.

I can't help but wonder whether something will be lost when communication is via a visual depiction in glorious technicolor that leaves little to the imagination, rather than words (whether spoken or written) that demand transformation into an image of my own making....but what do you think?

Adult Literacy- Why I Care

I've been thinking about why I care so much about the current threat to California's adult literacy programs.  Literacy has never been an issue in my family or among my friends, and it's not really an issue in the community PVLD serves...so why do I care more about this than I do about many of the other cuts to "social services" contained in the various budget proposals floating around Sacramento?

Part of it is personal.  I've written before about how important reading is to me and I actually can't remember a time when I couldn't read.  I grew up surrounded by avid readers on both sides of my family, and the fact that this trait was passed to the youngest generation is evidenced by the 50 or so books that my nieces and nephew bought at the Friends of the Library book sale when they visited us this summer! To me reading is like breathing - I can't imagine how you live without doing it.

It wasn't until I was an entry level librarian in my first professional job at the Pasadena Public Library that I realized that there are many adults in our society who can't even read enough to fill out a job application, get a driver's license, or help their children with homework.  That realization came to me thanks to my friend Vickey Johnson, which is the second reason I am so passionate about the topic.  Vickey and I went to library school together, and then worked together at Pasadena Public where she helped implement one of the first adult literacy programs in the State...funded in part by the then brand new State Library program that became the "English Acquisition and Literacy" program that is now under threat.  Vickey was passionate about literacy and reading, and took that passion with her when she later became Director first of the Sunnyvale Public Library and then of the San Mateo County Public Library.  Last May Vickey lost her long battle with cancer, and I can't think of a more fitting tribute than to protect public library literacy programs.

In addition to the importance reading has to me personally, and my desire to honor my friend Vickey's memory, I have had the opportunity to learn how literacy changes lives.  At Pasadena Public Library I had my first exposure to the transformative power that learning to read can have not only on the adults who struggle with functional literacy but on their entire families, and the stories that people who work in the adult literacy field tell are no different today.  The following case stduy comes from Fresno, not Pasadena, but there are thousands like it from across California:

Bette's Literacy Journey:  a success story (note:  Bette is not her real name)

Older adult; dropped out of high school in the 11th grade.  First language is English.  Lives in a small, rural Fresno County town that has only a post office and a library.  Assessed a first grade reading level when she started in 2004.

Goals met in 2005 - reading improved to 3rd-4th grade level:  Read the Bible.  Read for pleasure.  Read to her grandchildren.  Help grandchildren with homework.

Goals met in 2006: Used a map.  Voted for the first time.

Goals met in 2007:  Write checks.  Pay bills.  Read medicine labels.  Fill out medical forms.  Read the newspaper.  Access community resources.  Write letters to friends.  Read a bus schedule.

Now imagine your life if you couldn't do these things! Imagine the cost to the economy and society if as many as one in five adults can't do these things!

Finally, I know the power of words!  Just check out this video that has been floating around the Internet to see how the impact of the ability to use words effectively -

Now tell me that investing in literacy isn't one of the most important investments we can make....