Reported in All Africa Online, the Namibian Minister of Education stated "due to their inabilities to properly access information from libraries and the Internet, Namibians are still just as ignorant and illiterate as their grandparents in these modern times of information sharing".

According to the CIA Factbook 85% of the adult population are literate; but Minister Nangolo Mbumba emphasises the development and use of school libraries as being "urgent and important". Minister Mbumba added "There is no other way education will work unless we have libraries that can empower our children with relevant information from books and research documents."

Which puts the Namibian attitude generations ahead of Western countries with the resources and research to put the theory into practice ...

No more to read here >>

Break out the Champagne, roll out the red carpet, get out the balloons and chocolate! Alexa Traffic monitoring of WLW ranks this immodest online publication as 1,836,445 in the world, in terms of site visitors. That puts it in the top 0.2% of all websites.

However, a casual surf through the web shows that there really isn't a lot of high quality information to compete against. Also, there doesn't seem to be any causal relationship between information quality and frequency of use. Although libraries are used to delivering 'popular literature' to their readers under the banner of Material Of Choice, perhaps it's time to question if information should be treated the same way.

There are legions of anecdotes relating to the struggle library folk have with trying to educate patrons on assessing information quality. Although the message does eventually get through, it's becoming apparent that it is a futile battle to convince the folk who make the decisions on filtering.

At least this is the case in one Australian state, which is refusing to allow government schools to access any search engines other than Google, is blocking sites such as Internet Librarian, does not want students to use clustering search engines, has blocked sites selected by teaching subject experts ...

No more to read here (yet) >>

Literary journalist Louise Doherty, reporting from the Writers' Festival in Edinburg, got more than her money's worth when a false fire alarm triggered an evacuation of the hotel where many prominent authors were staying.

Well, maybe not HER money's worth - perhaps she was being paid to hang around the world's finest literary figures and shoot the breeze, enjoy world class haggis (now there's an easy bar to raise); and speaking of bars, probably also had an account that she wasn't expected to settle herself, while the rest of us are locked in library offices drinking instant coffee and munching on stale sandwiches or the metric equivalent, and dealing with less-than-literary patrons who just want change for the photocopy machine and to use the computers to check their email and download illegal music files. Although perhaps once again, we've gone off on a small tangent.

This publication would like to publicly recognise the important work of literary journalists, and also find out if anyone is currently hiring ...

No more to read here >>

What do you do with a faculty member who walks around the library eating? Remind them that the rules also apply to them of course. And leave a copy of the rules where they congregate, and the not eating bit highlighted. And suggesting that it doesn't set a very good example for student library users.

Unfortunately, such actions now constitute Workplace Bullying. Apparently.

In one such case, the errant faculty member is reported as having retorted with "It's not your library, it belongs to everyone". There wouldn't be a librarian on the planet that would not agree with this observation. The answer is simple, then. Faculty members who can't follow basic rules and have classes in the library on a timetabled basis should be rescheduled somewhere else, and let "everyone" else have some library time on an as-needed basis ...

No more to read here >>