It was great being back in Hangzhou, where I spent half a year in 2004. Already, Hangzhou was known as one of the most beautiful cities in China, and the local citizens were very proud of it. Coming back this time, my friend told me of many small changes that in different ways improved the […]

Below is a brief report I wrote for Rural China Education Foundation, based on my visits to two field sites, where they are experimenting with starting rural school libraries. This report was written for RCEF and based on their needs, and my observations. I am releasing it publicly, because it might offer interesting ideas or […]

Just a quick update on my plans for the summer. I am leaving on Monday for Beijing and Dalian, to participate in the OpenCourseWare Consortium conference on Open Educational Resources, organized by CORE and Dalian Technical University. Then I will visit some old friends and ex-students from the time I taught in China, and spend […]

In February, I translated a news report about the Indonesian government planning to buy the Copyright for Indonesian text books, and let libraries distribute them freely. At that time I made a plea for these books to be also released as Creative Commons on the web. Since then three more articles have been published on […]

My problem with doing research is that I come across so many interesting topics, and it is hard not to pursue them, and get lost. Sometimes I write books down in my “books to read” list, or download pdfs meaning to read them later. Sometimes I spend hours on things that I absolutely do not […]

Looking through a bunch of old PDFs I have downloaded, I came across this little tidbit from the IFLA Newsletter, June 2007:
Help needed: Directory of National Libraries on Wikipedia
The Standing Committee has discussed the creation of a Directory of national libraries worldwide,
taking into account existing lists such as that maintained by the European Library […]

I really should be studying, but I made my first bookmarklet. The problem I tried to solve: When students of University of Toronto sit at home using Google Scholar to search for, say, information on the text book publishing industry in Swaziland, they often arrive at articles that are subscription only. However, usually they do […]

As I grew up, I always loved reading. I spent my days off in the town library, where all the staff knew me, and if my mother couldn’t find me, she would call them and ask for me. I graduated from the children’s department on the second floor at the age of 12, and started […]

I love libraries, and I practically grew up in one. Whenever my mother didn’t know where I was, she would call the kind librarians at Hamar Public Library (the white building), and they’d usually found me in a comfortable couch reading a book. I knew them all by name, and I still drop by once […]