NREN, Jean Armour Polly [nice books to read .txt] 📗

I can envision that little girl walking into the public library with thefollowing request:"I'm doing a school report on the Challenger disaster. I need a videoclip of the explosion, a sound bite of Richard Feynman explainingthe O-ring problem, some neat graphics from NASA, oh, andmaybe some virtual reality mock-ups of the shuttle interior. Canyou put it all on this floppy disk for me, I know it's only 15 minutesbefore you close but, gee, I had band practice." This is whypublic libraries need NREN.

We would do well to remember the words of Ranganathan, whosebasic tenets of good librarianship need just a little updating from1931:

"[Information] is for use.""Every [bit of information], its user.""Every user, [his/her bit of information].""Save the time of the [user].""A [network] is a growing organism."

And so is the public library. A promising future awaits the publiclibrary that can be proactiv