Data is a buzzword today but it can mean many different things, writes Michael Clarke
There is a lot of excitement about data at the moment in STM publishing but when people talk about it they can mean many different things.
First and foremost there is research data itself. A lot of discussion is currently underway to make research data more accessible and to make sure it is properly archived. There is a need for more data repositories that can handle the diverse array of researcher data and maintain it over time.
There are some interesting data archives springing up that are very specialised. The geneticists are way out in front on this with Flybase and Wormbase and the like. But the notion is spreading. Archaeologists recently launched one called tDAR. DataONE is under development to archive ecological and environmental data. Dryad is providing archiving of data underlying peer-reviewed articles in the basic and applied biosciences. Given the myriad data repositories, a lot of work is being done on making these data sets linked and interoperable so they can be interrogated and mined. This is one of the goals for the semantic web championed by Tim Berners-Lee and others.
Second there is there is the publishing of research data – or of linking to it from journal articles. There are questions here about what is appropriate to publish and what sort of demand you can place on peer reviewers. Publishing supplementary data is becoming more and more common, however, and as more and more data is being generated. I was glad to see NISO get involved recently and begin to recommend some standards around this.
Third you have publication metrics. There is a lot of experimentation today around article-level metrics and alternatives to the impact factor, or altmetrics. These include looking at citations to articles independent of the journal they appear in. This makes a lot of sense as, even in the best journals, there are some duds. Similarly, in the second- and third-tier journals there are some gems. Public Library of Science (PLoS), with its open-access mega journal PLoS ONE is a particular champion of article-level metrics as one way to help user navigate through the wealth of content published in the title.
PLoS is also experimenting with a number of altmetrics that, at the moment, are of questionable value. For example, usage and coverage in social media probably tells us more about the size of the author’s research field and his or her ability to network than they do about the underlying science. The number of people who have bookmarked a paper in Mendeley is interesting but again biases towards large fields (and, of course, to the subset of scientists that use Mendeley). But still, the experimentation is interesting and welcome despite its limitations.
A fourth kind of data is usage data and some really interesting things are happening around the intersection of semantic metadata (really metadata of all kinds) and usage data. Publishers are beginning to cross-tabulate usage data with data about content to ask interesting questions. What kinds of content are different user groups interacting with? When members of a user group begin to look at a certain paper or set of papers outside their field, is that a signal of an interdisciplinary breakthrough? Are there ways to leverage these dynamic communities of interest to help readers find information more efficiently and to find information of relevance that they might have missed? And, of course, publishers are exploring how they can build on this information to generate revenue via product upsells and targeted advertising.
This is the kind of user interaction that Amazon and others have been using for a long time and but is just starting to make inroads in STM. In some ways it is more interesting in STM than in consumer sectors because of the vast quantity of information; the goal is not simply to sell more saucepans to people that bought the ‘Joy of Cooking’ but rather to better understand how very smart people are using very complex information.
Michael Clarke is executive vice president for product and market development at Silverchair Information Systems. Look out for more of his thoughts in the interview in the June/July 2012 issue of Research Information magazine
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The huge popularity of social media today has led us to lose sight of the bigger Web 2.0 picture, argues David Stuart
Over recent years, an increasing number of library and information professionals have integrated social media sites and services into their professional offerings. Whereas making use of social network sites such as YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter, or having an organisational blog would once have been perceived as cutting edge, such services are increasingly becoming an expected part of a library’s online presence.
Today, users expect to be able to discover the latest updates about a library’s service in their Twitter stream; they expect to be able to ask questions of the library and information professional without resorting to email or the telephone; and, where the library has made content available online, users increasingly expect to be able to share it simply among their friends and colleagues.
By and large, many library and information professionals have met these expectations; they consider themselves to have successfully adjusted to the new Web 2.0 world, and are ready to look forward to Web 3.0 and whatever changes that may bring.
But Web 2.0 and social media are not synonyms. There was meant to be more to Web 2.0 than merely signing up to Twitter, Google+, and Pinterest. Examining the differences between social media and Web 2.0 can give some clues to other avenues that still need to be explored by the library and information professional.
In recent years, interest in Web 2.0 has fallen as interest in social media has risen.Google Insights for Search (www.google.com/insights/search/#q=social%20media%2Cweb%202.0) reveals that searches for ‘Web 2.0’ have fallen away from a peak in mid 2007, while at the same time there has been a surge in searches for ‘social media’. By the beginning of 2010 ‘social media’ had become a more popular search term than ‘Web 2.0’, and it is now more popular than ‘Web 2.0’ ever was. This change in terminology represents the success of a soft, user-friendly, and narrow version of Web 2.0, at the expense of a harder, more technical, broader vision.
In Tim O’Reilly’s seminal 2005 paper, What is Web 2.0?, he identified a list of features that distinguished those websites and services that survived the dot-com boom from those that didn’t. These features included the ability to harness collective intelligence, using the web as a platform, data as the next ‘Intel inside’, the end of the software release cycle, lightweight programming models, software above the level of a single device, and a rich user experience.
As a list of features rather than an explicit definition, Web 2.0 has often been a difficult concept to pin down, and as such has been accused of being adopted to represent whatever the person wants it to mean at the time of giving a speech or writing an article. In comparison ‘social media’ may be explicitly defined, referring to those sites and services that enable the web to be used for sharing and interacting with user-generated content. However, while social media services often include the features that fall under the term of Web 2.0, they are often softer and more restrictive, at least from the perspective of the average user.
What the vision has become
‘Web as a platform’ has increasing become a ‘social network site as a platform’ as we all contribute to, and build upon, social network sites. While the content is being placed on the web, these social network sites can act as walled gardens that limit the extent that content can flow freely between different social media services.
With social media, the concept of harnessing collective intelligence is generally restricted to those explicit contributions that are aimed at a user rather than useful information that may be implied from user behaviour or be deduced from other actors’ social networks.
Data is still the next ‘Intel inside’, although it has not been widely embraced by the community of library and information professionals. Whereas an image or video can have an immediate visual impact, sharing tables of data may not only seem dry and without immediate use, but it can require the use of software that the library and information professional has less experience of. The data that is created as a by-product of using social media is generally of use to those who created the platforms rather than those making use of the platforms; much of the data gathered by the social networks is restricted, even regarding how a user’s own content is used.
Lightweight programming models have done little to help users to take control of their data, but rather have enabled the tentacles of the social network site behemoths to expand their control of the web. Services such as Facebook Connect enable users to log into third-party websites, meaning a Facebook account may be necessary even for those not wanting to use Facebook. A host of developers are creating additional software and applications for popular networks such as Twitter and Facebook as they help us feed to feed the networks.
Missing the wood for the trees
Of course, social networking services have been and are useful. However, too often the focus has been on the soft front-end of web services and we have failed to see the wood for the trees.
When we see Facebook we see its 845 million users, the engaging applications that have been downloaded tens of millions of times, and the opportunity to merge the networks of our professional and private lives. We tend to overlook concerns we may have about its privacy policies, a user’s right to determine what is or isn’t inappropriate content, and the difficulty we may have in extracting our content.
When we see Twitter we see a platform for simply engaging with colleagues and following celebrity gossip. But we miss the opportunity for a distributed network that could better deal with the spikes in interest as big news stories break, and we miss the potential to more effectively harness collective intelligence by having a search facility that goes back further than a couple of weeks. This is not to say that the current generation of social media should not be used; indeed these tools undoubtedly have much to offer the library and information professional. It is simply time for the conversation to move on from discussions stating ‘you should be using Tumblr’ or asking ‘have you tried Pinterest?’, and start considering the impact of these services in the wider web ecosystem.
Taking control of content
This means taking steps to have more control over the content we create, using the web as an open platform so that our collective intelligence can be harnessed, and useful data shared. If the library and information professional doesn’t pay more attention to such matters, then who will?
Taking control of our content means paying more attention to those terms and conditions we too often automatically click through as we sign-up to a new service. It means balancing the size and the glitz of a site with the openness of its content. This may mean an increased duplication of content as a library uses a popular site to make its content available to the majority of its users, and a more open site to share their content with everybody, including those who don’t want to sign up to another social networking site.
This is an area where the much-maligned blog continues to have an important role. While the ‘the death of the blog’ is often declared in the face of the latest fashionable site or service, it allows the owner to retain control of the content that they publish and allows them to make it available to everyone.
When appraising social media services, the library and information professional should consider how the content is being made more widely available.
This not only includes the potential of lightweight APIs for automatically interacting with their services, but also how content is published within web pages. Where a site makes use of additional markup standards, such as microformats, microdata, or RDFa, the text can not only be indexed by other services, but the meaning of the text can be understood.
Adding semantics
Adding a semantic level to data is not something that has to be restricted to large-scale web services, but is something the library can incorporate into information it publishes on its own site. When semantics are applied across the web then we will be able to harness collective intelligence on a web scale, rather than just using the term to refer to a few comments on a blog. Even if library and information professionals do not feel they have the skills to add additional mark-up to their data, they can nonetheless make it available through services such as Google’s Fusion Tables.
The web provides a constantly-evolving landscape of sites and services that the library and information professional needs to survey regularly. Does the latest site offer a new way to share content? Is it likely to be a flash in the pan – here today, gone tomorrow? What are the implications of not joining a particular site now? Too often these decisions are being made at the soft, user-friendly end of the spectrum, when the library and information professional should be paying more attention to the technical aspects. How open is the service? How easily can other services be integrated into it? Is it making use of open standards?
There are still libraries and information services within some organisations where even the established social media services are avoided due to concerns about the opening up of potentially sensitive information, and for those organisations there is still a need to emphasise the potential of the current social media to aid communication within an organisation. For the rest, it is important to move beyond the limited perspective that is encapsulated under social media and embrace other aspects of Web 2.0 whatever banner they emerge under in the future.
David Stuart is a research associate at the Centre for e-Research, King’s College London
Among all the technological marvels and their roles in our lives, the most revolutionary contribution of technology has to be the democratisation of knowledge all around the world.
Online courses on a wide range of topics are provided openly and for free by premier institutions of the world. As these courses reach larger audiences, they will mitigate the huge gap in knowledge created due to lack of fundamental resources and varying methods of teaching. These courses would not only benefit students but will also prove to be touchstone for teachers.
Among the open education courses available on the Web, the most popular one is OpenCourseWare (OCW) run by Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), which provides all its education materials from undergraduate level to graduate level for free. As of now, more than 2,080 courses are available online. Many of them include lecture notes, interactive Web demonstrations, textbooks written by MIT professors and streaming video lectures. Details of the available lectures can be found at http://ocw.mit.edu. Along with MIT's own site, video lectures are also available on YouTube and iTunes and can be streamed online or can also be downloaded for viewing offline.
MITx, a recent online learning initiative by MIT, offers a portfolio of its courses through online interactive learning platform. It has been designed keeping in mind all aspects of difficulties that might be faced by students on the online platform. It would not only offer online laboratories, student-to-student communication, but would also provide a chance to earn certification of completion award by MITx, based on the mastery of the subject.
Other options
Among the courses offered by other universities, video courses of Harvard, Yale University, University of California – Berkeley, and Stanford University are worth checking out, but unlike MIT OCW, these are restricted in number.
In 1999, the idea of having an enhanced learning programme involving the Indian Institutes of Technology and Indian Institutes of Management was conceived by IIT Madras, which was subsequently funded by the Ministry of Human Resource Development. Today, it is known as the National Programme on Technology Enhanced Learning (NPTEL).
As of now, 260 courses are available online, but this number is set to reach 1,000 in the next phase of the programme. With more than 4,900 hours of classroom course, illustration of concepts via animations, links for reference books, discussion forums and case studies, it has enough potential to disseminate quality education among Indian students. In the era of ubiquitous mobile phones, 3GP format of video courses are especially made for mobile phone users.
Virtual Labs is a new initiative to provide remote access to labs in various disciplines of science and engineering (www.vlab.co.in) taken up by the Ministry of Human Resource Development. At a time when a majority of institutions are facing a crunch in testing equipment and resources, this would provide a platform where resources can be shared.
The integration of NPTEL with Virtual Labs will provide a complete package for education by bridging the gap between theory and practice.
The hurdle
A major hindrance in taking the online education programme to the remotest of places is lack of infrastructure. Two things that are prerequisite for the programme's success are affordable computer devices and availability of adequate Internet speed.
The low-cost Aakash tablets seem to be a strong step towards online education revolution. However, its availability and reliability are the issues the government must sort out as soon as possible. Making courses available on DVDs and hard disks for affordable prices can mitigate the problem of online streaming of videos on low-speed Internet.
(The author works as Scientist-B at the Defence Research and Development Organisation, Bangalore.)
Books are to education and learning what air and water are to life. Every child needs access to the printed word and lots of encouragement to explore it in order to develop properly.
You might, therefore, be surprised to learn that many schools do not have a library or a librarian – which seems a contradiction in terms. How can you have an organisation whose raison d’ ê tre is learning if it has no library? It’s like a restaurant without a kitchen or a zoo without any animals.
There is no law requiring schools to have libraries either. I worked in a Kent secondary school in the 1990s which had a reasonable – if not wonderful – library extensively used by pupils until the head, clearly not a real educationist, decided that it was, quite literally a waste of space. She decreed that the books be shelved (marginalised?) in the back of English classrooms because she wanted to use the former library room for something else. Result? Reduced emphasis on wider reading and much less access to fewer books for students.
The Society of Authors, which represents over 9,000 writers, is campaigning with other organisations for school libraries to be a legal requirement.
A recent open letter from the Society to schools minister Nick Gibb asserted, among other things, that ‘Primary and secondary schools should be required by law to have a school library and a trained librarian.’
Out of the question for small schools? The letter acknowledges that ‘While we think dedicated librarians should be compulsory in secondary schools and all but the smallest primary schools, we recognise that librarians are an expensive resource and at the very least a designated teacher should get specialist training in such schools.’
To Gibb’s credit he said at the Association of Teachers and Lecturers conference in April: ‘I passionately believe that every school should have a library.’ But one man’s passionate belief is a long way from the complete change of mindset – and financial investment – that a proper school library provision needs.
Children need protecting from philistinism just as prisoners did thirteen years ago. As in schools today, library provision in prisons must have been patchy. The Prison Rules came into force on 1 st April 1999 and were made under the power delegated to the Secretary of State by Section 47 of the Prison Act 1952.
Rule 33 states: ‘A library shall be provided in every prison and, subject to any direction of the Secretary of State, every prisoner shall be allowed to have library books and to exchange them.’ Separate, but similar, rules govern Young Offenders’ Institutions.
Now, I am one hundred per cent in favour of education and books for people who have landed themselves in prison. It is almost certainly their best hope of rehabilitation to a non-criminal life.
But it seems absurd that, although there is no definition of the term ‘library’ for prisons – so provision could still be pretty poor – prisoners have in general a better protected right to libraries and books than school children.
Yes, school libraries and librarians cost money so what about some imaginative thinking?
Many public libraries are closing – to the outrage of civilised people and those who care about education and learning. If local authorities and schools were to work together it would be possible to combine local and school libraries. The community library is then run within the school by a designated librarian and is open to both the public and school pupils.
Variations of this idea have been tried quite successfully in some places – at Sawston in Cambridgeshire, for example, where the local library is part of Sawston Village College. Let’s have much more of it.
Another thought: Surely very small schools could combine library resources and share a librarian? If one school housed the library children from elsewhere in the group could be transported there once a week to choose and exchange books. And teachers could take resource boxes back to their own schools for limited periods. Not ideal or perfect but a great deal better than nothing.
Books, libraries and access to the printed word are not only the key to all other learning and educational achievement, they are also a basic human right. It is scandalous that many of our children are being denied. Legislation please, Mr Gibb. ASAP.
Libraries are changing, despite their facades. And they're changing to high-tech service companies with embedded librarians, according to some library professionals. Of course, that assumes they aren't defunded out of existence.
For ladies and gentlemen of a certain age, the library is changing too fast. For kids, it's not changing fast enough. University students are caught in the middle. Their library experience must be like surfing: riding the edge of a moving wave, never quite cresting, never quite crashing. Such a state has to be thrilling, but ultimately exhausting.
One popular image of the library of the future comes from the cartoon Futurama. The temporally misplaced character from our own time, Fry, enters Mars University’s Wong Library with his friends. It contains the largest collection of literature in the universe. Zoom in on two CDs, one labeled “Fiction” and the other “Non-fiction.”
In many ways, the library of today looks much the same as the library of yesteryear. The card catalogs may be consigned to a basement storage area and the tables where they used to stand are studded with computers. But otherwise there are carrels and stacks, stairs and information desk, patrons and librarians.
Transition is underway: from a place where you go to get information to a place you go to create; and from a place you go to create to a service you use.
From kids to adults
Sarah Houghton, the director of the San Rafael Public Library in California and the blogger behindLibrarian in Black, said the little kids who come into her library expect three things.
“Every screen is a touchscreen,” she told Ars, “and when it’s not they get confused as hell. Kids expect instant delivery of everything. If you can’t get it right that second, it doesn’t exist. When you tell them that a thing they want doesn’t exist digitally, that it’s a physical thing and that’s it, it blows their mind. If there is some book they need to write a report on, say, Mayan culture, and it’s not online, they get mad.
“I’ve encountered people in their mid-late 20s who have that same expectation.”
Although many libraries are slow to change, the expectations of today’s children make that change a certainty.
From books to tools
One of the biggest changes university libraries have seen in recent years is in the number and types of tools available to find information.
"With enhanced catalogs, digital surrogates, linked databases, and the hardware to bring all of these things to the fingertips of a library user, a library user becomes a walking catalog.”
“When libraries got rid of their physical card catalogs in favor of online catalogs, plenty of folks were worried that the experience of finding things, especially by physically browsing library stacks, would be diminished, ” Chris Bourg, Associate University Librarian at Stanford, told Ars. “(But) our catalog SearchWorks, has a feature which allows users to virtually browse the book covers of related items across 17 different campus libraries at once—something that would obviously be impossible to do physically.”
Daryl Green believes recall is one of the great improvements in the technological profile of the modern university library. Green is a rare books librarian at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland and an author of the collection’s excellent Echoes from the Vaultblog.
“I think that emerging technologies will only make recall quicker in catalogs and databases,” he told Ars. “A reader can trace a foot-noted lead with lightning-fast speed and determine whether the citation they’re following is something that requires their attention or not within a minute of seeing a footnote. Previously, this crucial step in the research process (following the breadcrumbs) was the most labor intensive, but with enhanced catalogs, digital surrogates, linked databases, and, most importantly, the hardware to bring all of these things to the fingertips of a library user, a library user becomes a walking catalog.”
Another change librarians have noted is the university library’s ongoing change to a multiuse space.
“We think of the library as a hybrid environment that consists of physical spaces, people, and objects; as well as a digital entity that provides online access to digital resources, services and tools,” Bourg said about Stanford’s libraries. “But the truth is that technology has simply provided libraries with new ways to fulfill our age-old mission of collecting, preserving, organizing and providing meaningful access to information in support of teaching and research.”
Green agrees.
“The nature of the academic library has always been to provide a platform for research, study, social activity and discovery,” he said. “I think, at its heart, the nature of the library will never really change, but the services that we provide and the role that we play in a student’s or researcher’s life will constantly shift.”
From building to service
Another denizen of the Stanford Library is Elijah Meeks. Not a librarian per se, Meeks is a “digital humanities specialist,” most recently the co-creator of the interactive ORBIS atlas of Roman history. He sees the university libraries in the future behaving like Google.
“I see libraries of the future, those that survive, as acting like high-tech services companies, mini Googles focused on a particular demographic and physical footprint. Like Google providing, as best it can, a massive variety of services, I see the university library doing the same. This Google Model would require more than the cool Google offices and transparent walls (we have some of those in some of our buildings). Instead, it needs small, agile teams focused on doing really good work and recognizing the value created by supporting a broad constituency.”
Steven Gass, associate director for Research and Instructional Services at MIT, sees the economics of the university library as militating toward a consolidation of collections. Satellites and branches have been closed all over the country and Gass sees the future of the university library as one of continuing consolidation of physical collections but mitigated with innovations like “embedded librarians.” These are librarians who live out in the different departments, labs and research centers of a university, responding to the specific needs of their scholars and students.
“Their job,” he told Ars “is to know what those are doing and be proactive and push out relevant material.”
The most extraordinary example of this concierge function may be the Welch Medical Library at Johns Hopkins. This library closed its physical doors to patrons at the first of the year. Patrons can download articles and other materials online or use its embedded librarians to access information, including books.
An important role that librarians are going to need to play, according to Gass, is that of online credibility coach. By and large, people know, or learn, often osmotically, what constitutes a credible source in a book. It is a safe bet that a book on Chaucer published by Oxford University Press is going to be more reliable than one published by Hustler. But how to do the same for material that is native to the Web?
“It is a shared goal among colleagues nationwide to promote good information learning skills,” said Gass, “how to identify quality information, to instill new academics with how to think about information, about its quality, to teach the 'tricks of the trade,' so to speak, in assessing accuracy.”
From the capital to the borderlands
This transition time is one of great opportunity for those involved in libraries, but all transitions, all borders and verges, are places of great vulnerability as well. Grand changes are possible here, but so are operatic failures. The future seems promising. It’s the present that worries some librarians.
“The myth that the information scholars need for research and teaching is, or soon will be available for free online is a dangerous one,” said Bourg, “especially when it is used as an excuse to cut funding to libraries. Right now libraries face enormous but exciting challenges in maintaining print collections and services where they are still necessary, while simultaneously developing strategies for collecting, preserving, organizing, and providing access to digital objects. I fear that if libraries across the nation don’t get the resources we collectively need to meet these challenges that we may be at risk of losing big chunks of our cultural record because of a lack of funding for digital collecting and preservation. “
If there is one thing that all librarians worried about, it was this: the de-funding of libraries. It has happened from the university research libraries all the way down to the neighborhood libraries that set expectations students bring when going to college.
Houghton traveled to Denmark last summer and visited the public library in a small, poor town.
“Their library was five times bigger than mine,” she said, “It had better computer technology, better everything.” The reason for that was simple, she said.
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The New Delhi, India, native has been reading for nearly 60 years, speaks two languages (English and Hindi) and serves as the Montgomery County Norristown Public Library’s liaison to the outside community.
The head librarian for the circulation department for the past 27 years has been immersed in books and libraries since she started in 1971 as a librarian at the T.N. Medical College in Bombay, India.
“Reading is very important in life because it empowers you,” she said. “It develops your mind and imagination. You never know which book will inspire you and enrich your life.”
A month ago, Verma was reading “The Room.” This past week she was reading “Zeitoun” by Dave Eggers.
In her liaison role she started a book club in 2000 at the library that meets on the third Saturday of the month at 2 p.m.
“I have a steady 15 people who come,” she said. “An English professor, Hal Halbert of Montgomery County Community College, leads the discussions.”
The group uses the library system’s MCLINC service to find books that have a sufficient number of copies available for the group.
Verma manages a circulation staff of nine full-time and seven part-time staff members and 14 volunteers. The scheduling to cover 11-hour work days, six days a week, requires that staff members either start early or late to run the front desk. Verma fills in at the front desk for vacationing workers and when someone calls in sick, she said. The computer lab with 16 public-use computers, donated by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, is also supervised by Verma’s staff.
Verma and Laurie Tynan, the former library executive director, built the computer lab in 2002 with workers from the Montgomery County public property department.
Her second responsibility at the library is to program all the youth and adult programming each year. Youth programs range from the Anime Club and Game Day to the Early Dismissal and ‘You Tell Us’ programs during the school year and the teen summer reading program in the summer.
“If one can teach a child to enjoy books that child has a companion for life, will never be bored and will always have the knowledge they need to be successful in everything they do,” she said. “One way to foster reading in children is through setting an example of reading together.”
The adult programming includes black history, disciplining dogs, jazz, hip hop, cartooning, English conversation classes, writing workshops, chess club, Civil War, yoga and an AARP driver safety program.
“I plan at least two programs a month for adults, depending on the time of year and the subject,” she said. “In the summer we focus on the teens and in the fall we start again with programs for adults.”
In 2006, Asha was awarded the “Librarian of the Year” award by former state Sen. Connie Williams, D-17th Dist. In 2006, Williams said, “What we look for with nominees are ways the librarian has made the library experience more enjoyable and specific ways they’ve made the library better.”
Kathy Arnold-Yerger, the executive director of the library, said Verma “has it all.”
“It is all about relationships that she has formed in the community and the outside businesses,” Arnold-Yerger said. “She has helped us deal with all the organizations. This has been invaluable to us.”
Verma grew up in Mumbai, India, graduated from Bala Model High School, earned an undergraduate degree at Elphinstone College, library and master’s degrees at Bombay University and a master’s degree in library science at Villanova University in 1978. She was the second oldest of six children by Shanti Valecha and the late Chanderbhan Valecha, an officer of the Reserve Bank of India. Verma married Dr. Satya Verma in 1974 in a traditional Indian wedding with 400 guests and the couple emigrated to America in February 1975. Dr. Verma has had an optometry practice in Whitpain for 35 years and is a professor at Salus University in Elkins Park.
The couple have two daughters, Pooja D’souza and Kajal Law, and two grandchildren, Rahul D’souza, 6, and Ajay D’souza, 3.
On April 26, author Jerry Spinelli appeared at the library through a grant application written by Verma to the Pennsylvania Humanities Council. Three hundred people attended the Spinelli event, she said. The grant also paid for copies of Spinelli’s children’s novel, “Knots in My Yo-Yo Sting” for every fifth grader in the Norristown Area School District.
“Non-profits are not doing well. With the library staff shortage and the rising cost of books,” Verma said, “more people depend on the library. We have not been able to hire full-time staff.”
“I read two or three books a month. I like all kinds of books,” Verma concluded. “Elizbeth Gilberts’ “Eat, Pray, Love,” “Digging to America” by Anne Tyler and “Snow Flowers and the Secret Fan” by Lisa See. For me there is nothing like a book, leafing through the pages.”
Kindles, Nooks and other electronic reading devices are quickly gaining in popularity. A few years ago, only the biggest of bibliophiles had an e-reader. Today, more and more people are purchasing devices or installing apps onto their phones.
Digital sales are steadily increasing and publishers, recognizing the changes in the marketplace, have begun releasing a greater variety of books into e-book format. While the technology is still new and there are a few bumps along the way, such as the Amazon pricing scandal and the debate over DRMs, e-books are here to stay and many people may find that they’re much more versatile than traditional books.
Kindles for Parents and Kids
The Kindle provides a great opportunity for your whole family. No matter the age of your child, everyone can benefit from some aspect of the e-reader’s technology. Kindles allow kids nearly unlimited access to books, making them a convenient form of entertainment while on car rides, at the doctor’s office, waiting in line at the grocery or other occasions where kids may become bored and restless.
Unlike regular books, the Kindle is small, lightweight and surprisingly durable; you don’t have to worry about tearing book covers, dog-earing pages or cracking the spine. Of course, e-readers are more valuable than books, so parents may be concerned about the risks of dropping them, having sticky liquids spilled on them or other kinds of rough handling. Some e-reader companies are creating kid-friendly versions, so that may be a good alternative for some people.
What Are the Benefits of e-Readers for Kids?
You can store nearly unlimited numbers of books so avid readers always have a selection to choose from
You can download any public domain book for free, so classics are instantly available
In addition to reading books, kids can play games, solve puzzles or even surf the web on some e-readers
Most e-readers have an option to read the book aloud or download audio books for younger readers
You can adjust the text size to aid reading comprehension
Books can be divided into reading lists so a family can share a device
You can load Kindle or Nook apps onto your smart phone
The reading device comes with a built-in dictionary to look up unfamiliar words
What are the Drawbacks of e-Readers for Kids?
Expensive technological investment to buy an e-reader
Technology is fairly fragile
If something happens to the e-reader, you may lose all the books you own or be unable to install them to another device
You must keep the e-reader charged
Not as many children’s books are released to the Kindle as adult books
Many e-readers don’t support full-color illustrations and picture books
Parents may be tempted to give a child an e-reader instead of spending time reading with him
Overall, e-books can be a great addition to a child’s life and education, but they’re not the right investment for everyone. Focus on providing the best solution to your family, and don’t forget that reading with your young child is always better than relying on digital babysitters.