Posts from Tompkins Square Library

Last year, Victoria joined a basic reading and writing class at Tompkins Square Library's Center for Reading and Writing. She agreed to speak with me about her experience so far and what brought her here.

Where are you from?

I grew up in Kenya, in the Masailand, in a village with 10 huts.

What other languages do you speak besides English?

I speak the Masai language and Swahili, and other tribal languages: Kikuyu, Luo, and Kamba. I came to America in 1986. I speak English every day, but 

Pedro, a native New Yorker, faced up to a number of personal challenges before he enrolled in the Tompkins Square Center for Reading and Writing (CRW), the library's adult literacy program last year. I asked Pedro about his journey this past year as a student.

How did you find out that the library has a program for adults to work on basic reading and writing skills?

Someone mentioned to me that the library had a program. I passed by that nice building on Sixth Avenue—

The key to lifelong learning is that it should be just that—life long. As a living being, humans are always changing and with that comes advanced personal knowledge that can be used internally and to interact with the world. The hitch is that our lives are designed to learn when we are young. Despite the fact that our brains are most pliable when young, we are capable of learning at any age as long as we possess sufficient health. How then do librarians promote life 

We are born with scarcely any of the skills or abilities we need to survive in the world and must amass skills to succeed. Without care and guidance from family, we would not survive the first day of life. While we all walk down different paths in life, the one common feature to all paths is that the path is never perfectly straight and narrow or clear of debris as we might like. There are pitfalls as the skills or abilities we possess don’t match the pavement we find ourselves on. Unexpected twists or bends change our world view as society evolves in unprecedented manners we are not 

“What is the role of a library when it no longer needs to be a warehouse of books and when users can obtain information without setting foot in its doors? (p. vii)” There are potentially two ways to look at the previous question: one as a doomsayer and the other more optimistic in nature. The doomsayer would note that doing a search on Google for the phrase ‘demise of 

"Balancing the demands of consumers, regulators, policymakers, and stakeholders is a daunting task… even under the best of circumstances. Add to this the ever increasing complexity of contemporary … issues and simply keeping up with the changing landscape can become a full time job." Sound familiar from the current debates between Facebook and users, or Google and users, or YouTube and users?

Counter to potential expectations, the previous quote did not come from any social media dispute, but from the 

2008. Did your anxiety rise that year? That was the year Google measured 1 trillion unique websites spewing out information to you. I know my mind cannot begin to comprehend what the size means. I, like everyone else, want information, free information, but having more information than I can get a handle on is overwhelming. That’s where the anxiety comes in. Our brains simply are not designed to grasp the magnitude of information at our disposal and navigate the data. 

Color, sound, flash—today’s web experience is experientially active. Surfing the Internet is a multisensory experience that puts the user in the midst of information and entertainment. The one catch is that you need a fast connection alongside the computer hardware. To download PDF a file while watching a music video that you are simultaneously twittering about certainly is beyond the reach of a cell phone. And while the glitz and sound of cutting edge technology is a lure, it is time to consider what we can achieve globally if we step back our 

For Internet searching, roughly 65% of computer users turn to Google. To see the popularity of Google, one has to look no further than ‘Google’ being 'declared' a verb by Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary. How is that for official proof that Google is big in the search world and winning prominence?

In its path to verbification, 

“With the emerging digital economy becoming a major driving force of our nation's economic well-being, we must ensure that all Americans have the information tools and skills that are critical to their participation. Access to such tools is an important step to ensure that our economy grows strongly and that in the future no one is left behind.”

— from Falling Through the Net, a letter from William M. Daley, U.S. Secretary of Commerce 1997-2000

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The day has come, and the sound of cash register bells still ring in your ears. Or, the bells would ring if the cashier's computer had sound effects. But it doesn't matter, for you are riding the surging thrill of attaining the hailed product of the latest media bliss.

You have bought the computer all the tech blogs and computer gurus are talking about. After shelling out a minimum of $499 dollars, US, you open the box, and there it lays in pristine shiny plastic with a black emblem - your new 

Unusual connections abound in hyperspace, and not just from html linking within web pages. Take for example the unlikely cohabitation between a teen pop star and human rights activism on the same website. With the egalitarian nature of content available on the Internet, unlikely partners such as Justin Bieber, the TV-like Really Annoying Orange, and human rights abuse reporting in

Like a repeated news ticker, once again Facebook  is in the news. As a high player in the social media marketplace, it comes as no surprise that Facebook would lead headlines, but unlike Twitter , who caught media attention for reaching a record of 5 billion  tweets last week, Facebook's latest news round is not so glamorous. It does boil down, however, to the fact that social media is a marketplace.

There are only a handful of art forms native to America. Among these are jazz, musical comedy, the mystery novel, and the comic book. As far as comics are concerned there are arguably no characters more beloved and instantly recognizable than Charles Schulz’s Peanuts. After all, the saga of Charlie Brown and his friends is arguably the “longest story told by a single artist” in the history of all mankind. But what do we really know about this cartoonist and his alter ego? In the biography

My tour of the downtown branches of The New York Public Library continues!  After being here for a few years and here for the past few months I am now here for a few days.  All of this traveling has been a wonderful experience as each branch is as varied and interesting as the neighborhoods they serve.   Spring is around the corner and soon I will be