Libraries In the Middle

With more and more of the world's content online, it is critical that students understand how to effectively use web search to find quality sources appropriate to their task. We've created a series of lessons to help you guide your students to use search meaningfully in their schoolwork and beyond.

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Developing information literacy skills is perhaps the most important issue in 21st Century Learning and yet the struggle to do so is an uphill battle. We asked our friends in the library world what...

Think of sitting quietly in a spartan room. There are no TVs, computers, smartphones, books, magazines or music. If you're like most people, this probably sounds like a recipe for boredom. In our culture, we avoid moments of "not-doing" because we don't associate boredom with having any value. And our aversion to boredom and not-doing have been amplified in our hyper-connected age.

Just yesterday I was bemoaning that there are librarians everywhere who are simply satisfied as a gate-keeper of books, for all intents and purposes a specials class in the specials/planning period rotation, and are dismissive of the expectations AASL has laid out for the critical roles we are trained to fulfill in our schools.

Since the launch of iBook Author and iBooks2 app by apple and the educational technology experts started discussing the possible impact of this move on education as a whole and on textbooks in particular.

Talk about a revolution. Since Amazon unveiled the first Kindle in 2007, digital devices have dramatically changed the way kids read and even think about books. But it’s less clear how ereaders and tablets will affect libraries and schools. As any librarian who’s dealt with ebook adoption can quickly tell you, “It’s complicated.”

Search is a lot about discovery—the basic human need to learn and broaden your horizons. But searching still requires a lot of hard work by you, the user. So today I’m really excited to launch the Knowledge Graph, which will help you discover new information quickly and easily.

Future U is a multipart series on the university of the 21st century.

E-books will be obsolete within five years.  Crippled by territorial license restrictions, digital rights management, and single-purpose devices and file formats that are simultaneously immature a...

This post is part of “How We Will Read,” a Findings interview series exploring the future of books from the perspectives of publishers, writers, and intellectuals. Read our kickoff post with Steven...

Reference is dead. Don’t worry though, fiction and nonfiction will keep it good company in the great resting place in the sky for obsolete library sections. These days, it’s the Common Core standards that should be driving collection development in the school library, and CC requirements extend well beyond fiction, nonfiction, and reference.