One thing before I go…
This year is the 340th anniversary of the 1647 Putney Debates; the remarkable experiment in open political debate conducted by the Army. BBC History magazine had some articles devoted to it, but otherwise it’s gone largely unnoticed.
A new exhibition has opened in the church where the debates took place- see the [...]

A quote there from a discussion I had with some students on their use of the Learning Centres.
They don’t use books because they find them difficult to navigate. They don’t have the rapid response they expect from using the Internet. They appreciate that the net is ‘full of crap’ but it is still their first [...]

Online access will become increasingly routine and accessible (it is to be hoped.) More and more materials are routinely available online, and so people increasingly use that medium for, e.g., encyclopedia lookups.
Since at least the 1964 Act, and for some time before, the provision of materials other than books has been recognised as part of [...]

Walt Crawford  makes a good point clearly.
Other than part of point 1- UK public libraries are not perceived as safe by many people- I wholeheartedly agree.
Some clarifiers first here:

I am not anti technology- I’m blogging here and as a service, I do a lot of work with our VLE etc
I am not change phobic- I  do [...]

Private Eye reported the anger of some residents that a local authority had spent £34K on uniforms, asking why that money could not have been spent on books.
Hillingdon is to introduce uniforms, spending some of the vaunted savings from their restructuring on it. This will cost at least £30k and probably a lot more. This [...]

As reported elsewhere, CILIP is once again revising its Framework of Qualifications.
It’s not so long ago that the FoQ was revamped, with ACLIP joining MCLIP and new routes to Chartership being introduced.
The value of Chartership is a frequent matter of discussion. Some sectors value it, others patchily. It is a necessity for higher pay grades [...]

John Midiema posts about the Slow Reading entry on Wikipedia. If you feel you can add anything, please do.
Slow Reading represents an attempt to get us to think about how we engage with what we read. I see it as part of a turn against seeing everything as mere ‘information’ to be processed as quickly [...]