Room to Read, a non-profit organization that donates libraries to communities in developing nations, is the inspiration and life-work of former Microsoft executive John Wood, who delivered the keynote address at the Public Library Association Conference in Minneapolis, MN on March 25, 2008. I was fortunate enough to be in attendance as Mr. Wood brought his energy, intellect, humor and passion to an audience of over 2,000 librarians.

In addition to donating libraries, Room to Read also builds schools, publishes children’s books in the native languages of developing countries and provides scholarships to girls in nations where they would not normally have the chance to receive an education due to lack of funds and cultural preferences. Founded on the belief that “World Change Starts with Educated Children” - and that education is the key to breaking the cycle of poverty, Room to Read has established over 5,100 libraries in the developing world since its inception in 2000.

Mr. Wood was inspired to leave his job at Microsoft after a vacation spent trekking in Nepal where he had the opportunity to visit a local school whose library’s only books were popular soft-cover fiction titles in English left behind by other hikers. His promise to return with more appropriate books for the schools’ students, was met with a certain degree of skepticism, as the local teachers had heard this many times before; but return he did, with Yak-loads of books. The joy he saw on the faces of the students as they eagerly accepted his donation convinced Mr. Wood to quit his job at Microsoft and found an organization that could address this problem on a larger level.

His transformation from Microsoft Executive to proselytizer-and-chief of a pioneering non-profit organization is documented in Mr. Wood’s memoir Leaving Microsoft to Change the World. I picked up a copy at the conference, and found it informative, inspiring, and surprisingly entertaining. As I write this JJML has ordered a copy, which should be on our shelves in a short time. Had I known about this book when I was compiling my Staff Picks list for April, it would definitely would have been on the list. I recommend both the book and the charity as worthy of your time and money.

You can find out more about Room to Read at http://www.roomtoread.org.

From the Computers in Libraries 2007 conference in Washington, DC

Speaker: John Van Oudenaren, Senior Advisor, World Digital Library Initiative, Library of Congress.

The World Digital Library isn’t available online yet, but if, after reading this post, you’d like to get some idea of what it will be like, I’ve included a couple of links in the article that will take you directly to other Library of Congress sites, that offer a similar experience, although with different content.

The World Digital Library is going to be an online digital Library of significant original materials of all major cultures for educators, students, and the general public It is not a book digitization project (such as Google’s book digitization project).

The Library of Congress is working with a group of international partners & businesses to create the WDL. Primary among these is UNESCO. Initial funding for the project came from Google, although the DWL, is not affiliated in any way with Google’s digitization project.

Mr. Van Oudenaren stressed that WDL is also not just a website, but encompasses three equally important components:

1. Content acquisition
2. A world-wide network to produce and distribute content
3. and the website, www.worldigitallibrary.org (This link currently offers information about the project.)

Key objectives are to:

• promote international and inter-cultural understanding;
• provide a resource for educators and students;
• acquire rare and unique content;
• work with partner countries to digitize content in places were little or no scanning is being done, bringing “hidden treasures” to light;
• help balance of English/non-English content on web;
• present cultural content in a way that appeals to the new generation of Internet users around the world.

The idea for it grew out of the Library of Congress’s American Memory Project and Global Gateway Project. (These are the links I mentioned earlier.)

Its designers hope the end result will offer a multilingual, high quality user experience that is fast, and seamless, regardless of whether the content you are looking for is in America, Africa or Siberia. Users will be able to search and browse large volume of content in seven languages: English, Arabic, Chinese, French, Russian, Spanish & Portuguese.

Content will be multi-format and include manuscripts, maps, photos, prints, postcards, rare books, sound and video clips, and 3-D presentations of architecture and monuments. There will also be special features provided by experts, educational content for educators and students, and some social networking features (blogs, chat, tags, etc.). Since this will be a world-wide resource, accommodations will be made for low-bandwidth users from countries where broadband is not widely available.

As I mentioned, the WDL is not available online yet. In fact, the prototype is just now under development. No time-frame was announced for when it will be available for public viewing. I for one, can’t wait.

Powered by ScribeFire.

Well, this live blogging thing has turned out to be harder than I thought for many reasons, with which I will not bore you. However, I was able to cobble together one post today, about a session I attended that was very interesting.

This afternoon I listened to a presentation by Tim Spaulding, the founder of LibraryThing. Tim’s presentation was billed as being from a “Cutting Edge Technology Leader.” Definitely true. Here’s a pithy comment that was written about LibraryThing:

I’ve seen the future of online catalogs and it’s name is LibraryThing.

Tim told us who said this, but I missed it. Sorry.

Library Thing is a website with over 180,000 members who catalog their book collections. So far over 2.5 million books have been cataloged. Once cataloged, books can then be tagged with descriptive words (tags). Currently, there are over 16 million tags have been added. Tag “cloud” shows top 32 tags. With 16M tags, LT has a very good idea of how regular people view books. The cool thing is that tags added by real people are often more accurate than the topics assigned by the Library of Congress, because they capture the way we actually think about a particular book, not just some abstract concepts.

LibraryThing also has lots of fun data the aim of which is to explore who you are through the books that you own. Virtually all the content on LibraryThing is created by users.

Some other features of Library Thing:

1. It shows you how many books you share with other users, and who you share the most with.
2. You can review books, and track others reviews about books in your collection.
3. Has author pages, and treats them as importantly as the books themselves.
4. Combines different editions of a book into one work.
5. Has suggestions of other books you might like, and an “unsuggester” - books you won’t like. (e.g. if you liked this, then you definitely won’t like this….)
6. LT enables better recommendations, because people are making them based on their own experience, and what has influenced them. Amazon has info about books you just bought, LT has info on books you keep.
7. LT builds connections between people with similar interests.
8. You can feature books that you’ve cataloged on your blog.
9. Upcoming feature - Books I’ve read/bought in chronological order.
10. and more…it’s a really cool site for folks who love books.

All you need is an e-mail address to join. No other personal info is collected, although you can share additional personal info if you want.
Highly recommended for book lovers.

http://www.librarything.com.

Powered by ScribeFire.

From the keynote session:

Here’s the first thing I learned: askaninja.com is a funny site

Fact #2: 73% of American adults use the Internet; 93% of American teenagers use the Internet.

#3: The number of people who access the Internet from libraries has doubled in the last three years.

#4: 55% of teenagers have created their own profile on a social networking site like MySpace. Only 20% of adults have such profiles. The good news is that most teenagers are aware of online dangers and have learned to protect themselves, and limit their online exposure.

#5: 39% of online teens have published their own creative work online.

#6: About 1/3 of teens provide tech support for their families.

#7: 44% of young adults internet users seek information on at Wikipedia sites. Many of these are college students, but thye, at least, are aware that this information needs to be confirmed by other sources.

#8: Millions of people participate in “grid” computing projects: measuring climate change, testing drug molecules to fight aids, etc. (Explanation: they allow their computer’s processing power to be shared (when they’re not using it) over the Internet by scientists engaged in complex research projects.)

Interesting prediction #1: 20 years from now, a Supreme Court nominee will be questioned by a Senate confirmation panel committee regarding information found in her Facebook account.

There was, of course, much more of interest, but it’s hard to pay attention and type at the same time. Hopefully, I’ll get better at it as the conference continues.

All statistics provided by the conference keynote speaker, Lee Rainie, Director Pew Internet and American Life Project

I (Eric) am at the Computers in Libraries Conference in Arlington, VA, just outside Washington, DC. Since it is a Computer-oriented conference, they have arranged for wireless Internet everywhere that conference activities will take place. Therefore, I am able to post anything interesting that happens at the conference in this blog as it happens. I thought that was a pretty cool idea, whether or not it turns out that way remains to be seen. Right now I’m in the opening day keynote session, which is entitled Web 2.0 and What It Means to Libraries. Sounds like it might be interesting. I’ll let you know if it turns out that way. Later…