“To a great extent, the computer’s usefulness for serious reading depends on the user’s strength of character.”

” The attention span of children may be one of the main reasons why an immersion in on-screen reading is so engaging, and it may also be why digital reading may ultimately prove antithetical to the long-in-development, reflective nature of the expert reading brain as we know it”

” in a world where (in any decent-sized gathering of students) you can practically see the text messages buzz around the room and bounce off the walls, each as memorable as a housefly; where the narrowing time between writing for and publishing on the Web is helping to kill the art of editing by crushing it to death. The Internet makes words as cheap and as significant as Cheese Doodles.”
….
“the meaning and music of the words is what matters, not the glitzy vehicle they arrive in.”

“research shows that people are continually distracted when working with digital information. They switch simple activities an average of every three minutes (e.g. reading email or IM) and switch projects about every 10 and a half minutes. It’s just not possible to engage in deep thought about a topic when we’re switching so rapidly.”

But for the reference librarian there has to be something a little humiliating about being replaced by a coffee machine. The only saving grace is that it’s a really expensive coffee machine. We know from all the stereotype-defying articles that librarians are changing their titles to sound more hip.

From today, more than 4,000 libraries across England, Wales and Northern Ireland will be open to any member of the public no matter where they live, thanks to a new scheme introduced by top librarians.

Stanford’s Virtual Archives contains a small, but growing, subset of some of our collections. Patrons can open virtual manuscript boxes and a sampling of scanned documents from the real life box will appear along with a link to that collection’s online finding aid.
see: http://www-sul.stanford.edu/depts/spc/pubserv/outreach2.htm

….internet is not changing the fundamental socio-economic character of civic engagement in America.
…
Still, there are hints that the new forms of civic engagement anchored in blogs and social networking sites could alter long-standing patterns. Some 19% of internet users have posted material online about political or social issues or used a social networking site for some form of civic or political engagement. And this group of activists is disproportionately young.