LISNews: Librarian News

Information literacy

Opinion piece in the NYT that has elements on information literacy.

Excerpt: People assimilate new information in a selective fashion. When people get information that supports what they initially thought, they give it considerable weight. When they get information that undermines their initial beliefs, they tend to dismiss it.

Full piece here

The indispensible Lifehacker on one aspect of what makes a leader great.

"Note how many business titans are or have been avid readers. According to The New York Times, Steve Jobs had an "inexhaustible interest" in William Blake; Nike founder Phil Knight so reveres his library that in it you have to take off your shoes and bow; and Harman Industries founder Sidney Harman called poets "the original systems thinkers," quoting freely from Shakespeare and Tennyson. In Passion & Purpose, David Gergen notes that Carlyle Group founder David Rubenstein reads dozens of books each week."

“Print knowledge” is an awareness of the mechanics of the reading process, like the fact that English is read from left to right and that written words map on to spoken ones. Adults often take this knowledge for granted, but research demonstrates that children benefit when these aspects of print are explicitly pointed out. In a study published in the May-June issue of the journal Child Development, for example, Ohio State professor Shayne Piasta and her coauthors report that when preschool teachers drew students’ attention to print while reading to them, the children’s skills in reading, spelling and comprehension improved. These positive results were long-lasting, too, still showing up a full two years later.

Full article

By Lonnae O'Neal Parker and David Montgomery, Published: April 23. The Washington Post
The odds of being handed a free book out of the blue were much higher Monday night than any other night of the year, thanks to the legions of volunteers and booksellers celebrating World Book Night. The event, which began last year in England and added the United States and Ireland this year, aims to spread the love of books by giving away 500,000 free paperbacks to those who might not otherwise have access or resources, or to those who just look like they could use a good read.

Volunteers in the Washington area and across the country — some 25,000 in all — scattered about pressing one of 30 mostly contemporary titles into unsuspecting hands. Among the books being given away were “The Absolutely True Diary of a Part Time Indian,” by Sherman Alexie, Khaled Hosseini’s “The Kite Runner” and rocker Patti Smith’s memoir, “Just Kids.”

Read more about it at: http://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/at-world-book-night-dc-literacy-advocates-gree...