“U.S. slow to digitize nation's cultural heritage - San Francisco Gate” plus 1 more |
| U.S. slow to digitize nation's cultural heritage - San Francisco Gate Posted: 09 Jan 2011 08:29 PM PST America stood at the forefront of the public library movement in 1731, when Benjamin Franklin founded the Library Company of Philadelphia, our first successful lending library. Looking back on the project decades later, Franklin wrote in his autobiography that the growth of lending libraries had played a role not only in educating but also in democratizing American society. Lending libraries may have been the newfangled democratizing factor of their day. Centuries later, though, the United States finds itself trailing Europe and Japan in creating the modern equivalent: a national digital library that would serve as an electronic repository for the nation's cultural heritage. In other words, there's a real digital library divide. In contrast to the United States, the National Library of Norway has been a global early adopter. In 2005, it announced a goal of digitizing its entire collection; by now it has scanned about 170,000 books, 250,000 newspapers, 610,000 hours of radio broadcasts, 200,000 hours of television and 500,000 photographs. And the libraries of the nearly 50 member states in the Council of Europe have banded together in a single search engine, theeuropeanlibrary.org. And the European Commission has sponsored Europeana, a portal for digital copies of art, music film and books. Until recently, however, many U.S. institutions and academic centers have concentrated on making scans of their own special treasures rather than combining their electronic resources into a single online access point. Some of those individual efforts are now beginning to dovetail. Last month, the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard said it would coordinate a planning program for public and private groups interested in creating a "digital public library of America." The idea, says Robert Darnton, the director of the Harvard University Library and one of the project's originators, is to link the electronic resources of university libraries and cultural institutions like the Library of Congress and make them accessible at a single portal. The project would also widen the audience for the kind of historical out-of-print books, letters, images, films and audio clips that are usually the province of scholars. The idea for an American digital public library was prompted in part by the work of Mountain View's Google. In 2004, it started a digitization project, Google Books, that has since scanned more than 15 million books. People can read out-of-print items at no cost on Google Books, if those works are no longer subject to copyright protection. But if a judge approves a settlement between Google and copyright holders, subscription fees to access scans of out-of-print books still covered by copyright will have to be paid by universities and other institutions. An American digital public library would serve as a nonprofit institutional alternative to Google Books, Darnton says. This article appeared on page D - 6 of the San Francisco Chronicle This entry passed through the Full-Text RSS service — if this is your content and you're reading it on someone else's site, please read our FAQ page at fivefilters.org/content-only/faq.php |
| Cultural Diversity in the Nursing Profession - Associated Content Posted: 09 Jan 2011 04:47 PM PST The population of the U.S. has more than tripled in the twentieth century. More than half of the population increase is that of culturally diverse groups. Racism is still a very real reality for minority nurses. This is Prejudice in nursing still exists and is a problem for nurses who are not white females. Racism is experienced by multicultural workers regularly from patients and co workers even though diversity is continually increasing in America. Mandatory cultural education for nurses would not only promote acceptance of diverse groups, it would promote ethical decision making when it comes to racial issues in the work place. Educating nurses on multiculturalism would help provide a comfortable work environment for ethnically diverse nurses. The nursing profession would, as a result, see a rise in the critically low number of nurses in the United States. Culturally and racially diverse nurses are verbally attacked on a regular basis by prejudice patients. "He was prone to fits of yelling and anger, but in the past I had always been able to calm him down. Entering the room this particular night, I could tell that he was not in the best of moods, but I was not expecting the encounter that ensued. All of my attempts to calm him failed. In fact, they seemed to just heighten his anger. And at the apex of his anger, he yelled, "N- - - - -, get out of my room!" When the evening supervisor arrived on the ward, I was still in the break room fuming from the incident. She came in and asked me to explain what had happened; I gave her my interpretation of the incident. Her reply did nothing to soothe my anger. She basically said, "Get over it." (Coleman,2005). Coworkers who fit the majority (white females) tend to lack understanding of the emotional pain culturally diverse nurses face at work for being "different." This entry passed through the Full-Text RSS service — if this is your content and you're reading it on someone else's site, please read our FAQ page at fivefilters.org/content-only/faq.php |
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