Well, we have reached that time in the year when CKG nominations can be sent in. This has never seemed to me to be easy - and today I suspect is made even more difficult as authorities move away from approvals and reviewing new books before they are even added to stock. The discipline of having to read and assess a novel - even if it might not ...

Congratulations to all the LIS-related recipients of awards in this years' Queen's Birthday Honours!  And special congratulations to Christine Fretten (Librarian, House of Commons) and Susan Wilkinson (HM Prison Birmingham, Library), who are CILIP members.  Thank you to the staff at Ridgmount Street for preparing the list, which I've ...

I often write about reading in this blog; it is a fairly natural - even logical - progression or collocation for anyone thinking about information, books or libraries. In Is Google Making Us Stupid, Nicholas Carr wonders if - like the Italian humanist Hieronimo Squarciafico [who, after Gutenberg's printing press] worried that the easy availability ...

… and what does Ray Bradbury mean when he says that There is no future for e-books because they are not books at BookExpo America When, or indeed, why is a book not a book? If we take digitized version of William Blake’s Songs of Innocence, or even of his Fahrenheit 451, and present it on-screen, surely we have an electronic or digitized version ...

In a 2006 keynote paper, Michael Jon Jenson, wrote that - having previously forecast the end of paper books, he had discovered that he was wrong: My fundamental error was in thinking that technology was the driver, rather than the human culture using the new technologies. So are we humans really incapable of learning new tricks, of moving on, of ...

I don't know how your library's reading groups work, but ours are led by librarians. They meet every four weeks, and everyone turns up having read the same book. We also have reading circles, which have more of a free-for-all vibe. There's one school of thought that says staff should leave RGs to get on with it themselves. Our reasoning is that ...

I was reading a piece in the Columbia Journalism Review by Ezra Klein, The Future of Reading, which explores his experiences with a Kindle, and - more generally - with reading on something that is not paper-based. Klein quotes William Powers’s brilliant essay “Hamlet’s BlackBerry: Why Paper Is Eternal,” (pdf) which considers the evolution of paper ...

I promised to provide some more information about Dolly Parton's Imagination Library scheme. Here is an article from Elenore Fisher of Rotherham Libraries which gives a lot more detail of the scheme as it will operate in Rotherham. If you have any questions or comments about the scheme please let me know and I will invite Elenore to ...

Well, my portfolio is pretty much done. It’ll be sent off soon. This blog was started as part of the chartership process. Now it is nearly at an end, I think it’s time to put an end to the blog. I have said all I want to say on the issues I have covered. As a summary:- Above all [...]

Photograph from The Star In a desperate attempt to get more people to read my blog I decided to illustrate it with a picture of the photogenic country and western star Dolly Parton. Imagine my surprise when it turned out to be relevant to the topic of librarianship in South Yorkshire! Ms Parton (we are not on first name terms) visited ...