Tag Archives: TeleRead

A national digital library endowment: How America’s billionaires could be modern Carnegies for real

Update: James Fallows’s blog on The Atlantic’s site reproduced part of this proposal, and the long version appeared in Sabrina Pacifici’s award-winning LLRX library journal. More details and an FAQ on the proposal are here. Warren Buffett was on CBS Sunday Morning. The interviewer, Rebecca Jarvis, asked if he owned an iPad. No. iPhone. No. [...]

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Help the Gates Foundation decide how to spend money on libraries: Time to free ‘The Great Gatsby’ and other classics and support national digital library systems?

Update, December 3: My defense of the Gates survey against a Southern librarian’s thoughtful criticism of it. In an even more wired future, what will be the needs of public libraries in the U.S. and elsewhere? Just what’s the role of libraries if “a person can access much of the information in the world from [...]

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Hurricane Sandy and the national digital library issue: With smartened-up journalists and voters, could we have stopped or slowed down global warming?

Canned and dried foods, flashlights, radios, cellphones and good UPSes aren’t the only essentials that the wired might buy in an anticipation of the growing number of weather-related exigencies like Hurricane Sandy. I’ve also purchased a $99 battery-powered portable hotspot through which my iPad and other WiFi-equipped devices  can stay in touch with the rest [...]

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Books vs. movies and other streamed media: Which should be first priority at Library of Congress?

With so many local libraries facing cutbacks, the case for a well-stocked national digital library system grows stronger each day. At TheAtlantic.com  I’ve written of the possibility of a decentralized public library system existing within the Library of Congress but run by librarians in many cities, so that Washington does not dictate to America what [...]

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