161–170 of 250 posts
Libraries are great. They should be funded with taxes by society, not the whims of charity. Raise taxes and on people like Bezos and Gates for the needs of society.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Let me give you a hypothetical company IT department: while you are allowed to work there with any education background, only an MBA can be a manager. How do you think they would perform at IT tasks? Who runs libraries? People with Masters in Library Science. I expect severe budget and certification crises would come to any library that won't put a certified librarian in a head position. Or, I'm a working class guy a…
Every library I've been to in every town I've been to had Sunday hours. This includes New York City and its surrounding suburbs, Buffalo and its surrounding suburbs, several towns in Conneticut and several more in Toronto Canada and its surrounding suburbs. Even my university library has sunday hours.
The problem libraries solved, mostly access to information, has largely been monopolize by the internet. Most, including the third world impoverished, have access to the internet. Therefore the necessity of a library has been largely diminished and inevitably libraries will disappear. Complaining about libraries when people have no sanitation and access to clean tap water sounds largely like a first world problem, as…
His company hosts a large part of the biggest library ever existed: Internet.
Carnegie's legacy, the example used in the article, doesn't translate to the present.
If Bezos wanted to democratize information in a comparable way, perhaps he could underwrite universal access to high-speed Internet. Many many parts of the country still do not have reliable, high-speed, low latency Internet connections.
I would much rather billionaire types take on large issues that governments don't want to touch, like space flight or specific diseases in foreign countries, than something already in service like libraries. Maybe I just have a bias due to having a library just up the street from where I live currently, but I have never not had access to an adequate library in my life time, and only see room for marginal diminishing…
Visit a library in a low-income area (where people need them the most) and see the kinds of computers people use to hunt for jobs, do their homework, etc. I've been to a library that was running windows 2000 on TWO ancient Dells with with CRT monitors in 2015. And the two computers they had were being used by adults and students. There is so much to be gained from improving libraries.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Who runs libraries? People with Masters in Library Science. I expect severe budget and certification crises would come to any library that won't put a certified librarian in a head position. And you would be wrong. My local library is considered one of the best small-town libraries in the nation (I believe at one point it literally won an award for being the best) -- and does not have a certified librarian in a hea…
There are MBA's who are also curious and interested in "going digital", "leveraging big data", etc. Left to initiate programs under these banners, and evaluate themselves I expect the MBA to perform sub-optimally. My point is not to disrespect MLS, in fact as even as a programmer, I'd probably be terrible as a head sys-admin/tech-support for a library too. I'm wondering why we've never heard of anyone making a good c…
Because they are underfunded, Bezos seems to be addressing that.
>>kind of my point, no?
No, the provided example seems to be counter to your point.
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Yet if I want to make a serious study of something, I hit the textbooks. The internet is, in my experience, a poor replacement for a stack of well written physical textbooks. The internet may be a big library, but in many ways it's not a very good one.
Counterpoint: My friends all went through mechanical engineering WITHOUT reading textbooks - that was the secret to their success. No one is going to touch the textbooks in a library.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Visit a library in a low-income area (where people need them the most) and see the kinds of computers people use to hunt for jobs, do their homework, etc. I've been to a library that was running windows 2000 on TWO ancient Dells with with CRT monitors in 2015. And the two computers they had were being used by adults and students. There is so much to be gained from improving libraries.
Physical libraries seem so inefficient. Can't the same thing be accomplished at a fraction of the cost by distributing laptops with subscriptions to KhanAcademy etc ?
Libraries are struggling with an identity crisis as printed books become less relevant. It's an issue not solved by the injection of billions. Carnegie's legacy, the example used in the article, doesn't translate to the present. If Bezos wanted to democratize information in a comparable way, perhaps he could underwrite universal access to high-speed Internet. Many many parts of the country still do not have reliable,…
For many people, their public library is their only access to Internet of any speed. And they're using that connection, the same one this community constantly rallies around as a human right, on the only boxes that public library can afford.