Archives for January 2008

Tony Gill, Director of the Gruss Lipper Digital Laboratory at the Center for Jewish History posted this announcement on the METRO Digital Collections Special Interest Group mailing list:

The Center for Jewish History recently
completed a METRO-funded pilot project to digitize and make freely
accessible online 40 Yiddish and Hebrew children’s books, many of which
are richly illustrated, from the collections of two of the Center’s
Partners: The YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, and the Yeshiva
University Museum.

The collection, which is still growing rapidly, can be found online.

The books were digitized and made
available by the Gruss Lipper Digital Laboratory, the Center’s
state-of-the-art in-house digital collections-building facility. In
addition to making the children’s books available through CJH Digital
Collections, the books were also uploaded to the International
Children’s Digital Library (www.icdlbooks.org), thereby making them even more widely accessible to current and future generations.

The Children’s Books Pilot Project at
the Center for Jewish History was supported in part by funds from the
Metropolitan New York Library Council (METRO) through the New York State
Regional Bibliographic Databases Program. Thanks to the success of this
METRO-funded pilot project, the Center has since received a generous
gift from the Morris and Alma Schapiro Fund to digitize a further 50
children’s books.

Please let us know what you think of this new digital collection by completing our brief online survey.

Take a look at the collection and take the survey (I did.)  Enjoy!

This came in this morning from Gary Price over at Resourcesshelf.com:

"Google Generation" is a Myth, Says New Research
Google is in the title but that’s an attention grabber. The primary focus of the report is about younger people and access to info.

"A new report, commissioned by JISC and the British Library, counters the common assumption that the Google Generation — young people born or brought up in the Internet age – is the most adept at using the web."

The report, which Gary links to in his post, is worth a good, long look, especially if you are wondering why your bibliographic database instruction sessions don’t go quite the way you hoped more often that you’d like.  The reason why kids today don’t do much better at database searching than anyone else is a complicated one, but if I had to make a snap guess I’d say because kids today (in my experience, of course, as everything on this blog is in my experience) don’t generally have much in the way of programming skills, or  very much skill with systems analysis, logic, deductive reasoning, or–perhaps especially–curiosity about how the darned thing works.

There’s more to be said about this–a lot more, and I’d like to come up with a more substantial post regarding the whirlwind that’s spinning around my brain right now–but read the report first.  Two things strike me as being worthy of further discussion: first, why some knowledge of cataloging can make a real difference in crafting top notch search strategies, and second, why ease of use does not necessarily imply usefulness.  More on those topic (I hope) tomorrow.

Anyway, read the report.  Enjoy!