Authors in UK call for 'a library in every school' legislation

A host of award-winning authors including Sarah Waters, David Almond, Philip Reeve and Malorie Blackman are calling on the government to make it a legal obligation for every school to have a library.
The position of the Department for Education is that while it would like to see a library in all schools, "this should be a local decision, not one mandated by government", and it is "up to schools to target resources appropriately".

But the campaign, run by writers' body the Society of Authors and backed by a mass of writers, publishers, academics, librarians and education professionals, is asking schools minister Nick Gibb to make it a statutory requirement for every primary and secondary school in England and Wales to have a library, on the grounds that "there are proven links between reading and attainment".

"The absence of school libraries and trained librarians is deplorable – particularly in primary schools," Society of Authors' general secretary Nicola Solomon has written to Gibb. "Over the last decade libraries and the use of school libraries services has been undervalued and neglected. It is our belief that this needs to change and that all primary and secondary schools should be required by law to have a library, and dedicated librarians should be compulsory in secondary schools and all but the smallest primary schools."
As a new survey from the School Library Association shows that around 80% of school libraries have seen a real terms cut in budgets over the last year, support for the Society of Authors' campaign has poured in from the literary community.

"Study after study has shown how children who read for pleasure achieve significantly more, regardless of background, than those who don't," said children's author Helena Pielichaty, chair of the Society of Authors' children's writers and illustrators group. "It makes sense, then, to find as many ways of promoting reading for pleasure as possible. Let's have a library at the heart of every school and books at the heart of every library. Let's nurture generations of story-loving, fact-discovering, poetry-guzzling pupils and let's give teachers the tools and time to do it. I truly believe that if we do, educational standards in the UK will rocket."

Waters, the award-winning author of Tipping the Velvet and Fingersmith, added her agreement. "Books matter," she said. "They inspire, they inform, they delight; they encourage independent thought, invention and empathy. At a time when public libraries are being closed down, and when hard-pressed families have ever less money to spend on books, it is absolutely vital that school libraries are made a priority, and that teachers are given every support in fostering literacy."

Blackman, author of the bestselling Noughts and Crosses series, said it was "astounding that in the 21st century it is not compulsory for each and every school in the country to have a library and a dedicated school librarian". "How can the provision of a library service in our country be compulsory in prisons but not in schools? Reading for pleasure leads to reading for education, illumination, communication and instils nurtures and encourages understanding and empathy – at the very least," she said. "As one in three homes in the UK do not contain books, school libraries play a vital part in creating access to the tools which enable all of our children to fulfil their potential."

Kevin Crossley-Holland, children's author and the new president of the School Library Association, meanwhile, stated that "a well-stocked, well-furbished, well-administered and well-patronised library – a place to inspire the imagination and provide information, a place of delight – should be the cornerstone of every primary and secondary school in our country".

Crossley-Holland, who has won both the Guardian children's fiction prize and the Carnegie medal, added: "If only the government would full-bloodedly espouse and implement this mission, they will be making a profound statement about their commitment to educational standards, and to what it actually means for a society to be civilised. Here's a common cause, and an investment in the future, if ever there was one."

Photograph: Graham Turner for the Guardian

The Society of Authors now has a meeting lined up with Gibb to discuss the issue of making school libraries statutory, it said.

Alison Flood
guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 27 June 2012 
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2012/jun/27/authors-library-every-school-legislation?newsfeed=true

Bank opens up: World Bank to open up its data and research

OPEN access activists will receive a welcome boost in their campaign next month following a decision by the World Bank to open up its data and research.

The new policy comes into force on 1 July and will see the bank embrace an open access policy for all its research outputs and knowledge products. The World Bank has said it is committed to making knowledge freely available online and the new policy will be rolled out fully over the next 12 months.

World Bank Group President Robert B. Zoellick said: ‘Knowledge is power. Making our knowledge widely and readily available will empower others to come up with solutions to the world’s toughest problems. ‘Our open access policy is the natural evolution for a World bank that is opening up more and more.’

The policy will apply to research carried out by World Bank employees and any projects funded by the bank. External research funded by trusts that are administered by the bank will be governed by the rules of the trusts.

The move formalises arrangements to make research and knowledge freely available online and will allow anyone to use and distribute knowledge products and research findings for both commercial and non-commercial use.

The bank’s two journals – World Bank Research Observer (WBRO) and World Bank Economic Review (WBER) – which are published by Oxford University Press will also be covered by the new policy.

A new open access portal has been created online to enable all published material to be found in one place, making search much easier than it has been in the past. Known as the Open Knowledge Repository the portal already features more than 2,000 works from the last three years and will be regularly updated.

Caroline Anstey, World Bank Man aging Director, said: ‘Anyone with internet access will have much greater access to the World Bank’s knowledge. And for those without internet access, there is now unlimited potential for intermediaries to reuse and repurpose our content for new languages, platforms and media, further democratising development by getting information into the hands of all those who may benefi t from it.’

https://openknowledge.worldbank.org/

By Annie Mauger, CILIPUPDATE, June 2012

Don't Turn In Your Library Card!

This time of year, many thousands of young people stride onto the commencement stage and take their diplomas—and, with the other hand, turn in their library cards. Okay, not literally. And I’m sure most graduates don’t stop checking books out of libraries or downloading them on their Kindles. But many still have the impression that college is the time in our lives when we devote ourselves to serious learning, and that after we walk off the stage, it’s time to start the doing. This notion is hopelessly outdated.

In today’s innovation-obsessed economy, almost everyone has to be a thinker as well as a doer. All of us—recent grads and proud old alums—have to keep on learning to come up with better ideas about how to improve a product, service, or process.

Because they are thinkers as well as doers, the best idea people understand that intellectual curiosity is not irrelevant to business success. They would agree with Warren Buffett, who believes—as his business partner Charlie Munger relates—that “it’s very hard to succeed in something unless you take the first step—which is to become very interested in it.”

In a professional context, intellectual curiosity is basically an abiding interest in any and all matters that could improve the job you’re doing. It leads to the kind of learning that is not episodic. It’s constant. It’s what Buffett does.

He is acclaimed as the richest super-investor in the world, but is perhaps less known as someone dedicated to the proposition that learning never ends. There’s a simple reason why he seeks out knowledge every day: he knows of no other strategy for remarkable success. “If Warren had stopped learning early on, his record would be a shadow of what it’s been,” Munger said in a commencement address five years ago at the University of Southern California’s law school.

Intellectual Seriousness

Buffett’s intellectual bent is revealed in his whole way of investing. He came up at a time when most investors practiced a version of voodoo economics, playing the market much as they would a Ouija board or a slot machine. (Some might say that for many investors today, old habits have been difficult to break, in this respect.) Learning from his mentor, Benjamin Graham of Columbia University, Buffett fixed his attention not just on the waxing and waning of a company’s stock, but primarily on its deeper value, as indicated by such measures as earnings and assets.

Searching for the “intrinsic value” of a company, Buffett would conduct research of a kind few others did on their own, often heading down in person to Moody’s or Standard & Poor’s during his early days in New York. Buffett later recalled, “I was the only one who ever showed up at those places. They never asked if I was a customer. I would get these files that dated back forty or fifty years. They didn’t have copy machines, so I’d sit there and scribble all these little notes, this figure and that figure.”

He also looked for ideas and market clues in conventional ways, like reading annual reports and the Wall Street Journal, but often with a splash of difference. In the 1980s, in Omaha, he went so far as to strike a special deal with the local distributor of the Journal, as Alice Schroeder reports in her riveting biography The Snowball: Warren Buffett and the Business of Life. “When batches of the Journal arrived in Omaha every night, a copy was pulled out and placed in his driveway before midnight. He sat up waiting to read tomorrow’s news before everybody else got to see it,” she writes.

Long after walking off the commencement stage, Buffett is still hitting the books—and the newspapers and the reports and many other sources of potential insight. He devotes as much time to thinking and learning as he does to doing. (With just a little exaggeration, Munger notes that Buffett spends about half his time sitting and reading and the other half talking to people who might have some good ideas to offer.)

This isn’t just about book learning. We have to be ready to learn while doing. Basically, this means understanding that there are not one but two products of the work we do. The first is the actual thing we make or the service we provide or the process we manage. The second product, no less essential, is what we learn along the way. It’s the ideas we get about how to do better.

Whether the learning is on or off the job, professional life today requires a level of intellectual seriousness that many of us still don’t associate with day-to-day business performance. And there’s a lesson for 2012 graduates: Hold on to that library card!

by  By Andy Boynton, with William Bole.