Guelph Public Library hides 40 books by local authors in the community

by: Vik Kirsch

GUELPH—A book by a Guelph author Edeet Ravel made its way to Toronto's Union Station hub – and the Guelph Public Library couldn't be more delighted.

Chief executive Kitty Pope said it's part of a novel program of scattering throughout the community and further afield donated books written by Guelph authors – so others can enjoy them and pass them on as well.

One person did that while traveling, leaving Ravel's A Wall of Light novel at Toronto's central station for another individual to read and, in turn, leave behind for yet another reader.

"It's another way of promoting Guelph and our great authors," Pope said Tuesday. "It's just kind of fun and it's a great summer project."

The library's mapping where the books make stops (www.library.guelph.on.ca/bookfind), and she fully expects that area to grow within and beyond Guelph.

"Guelph likes to travel during the summer, so we totally expect they'll go on that map and give us lots of interesting locations."

Guelph's Book Find Project, launched Monday with seed funding from Young Canada Works, has scattered 40 books by Guelph authors just waiting to be found. Donated primarily by authors and publishers, they're in a variety of places that people visit or gather at, like recreation centres, offices, coffee shops, churches and shopping sites.

The books include, for example, My Ghosts by Mary Swan, Wild Dog Summer by Jean Mills, and the contribution by Ravel, a Canadian-Israeli writer based in Guelph. All the books are clearly identified through stickers in the inside cover, complete with instructions on how to participate in Book Find.

In connection with the program, members of the public are invited to search for these treasures, enjoy reading them, email the library (bookfind@library.guelph.on.ca) and to release them "back into the wild" at easily accessible public locations of their choosing.

from: Guelph Mercury

Pediatrics Group to Recommend Reading Aloud to Children From Birth

by: Motoko Rich

In between dispensing advice on breast-feeding and immunizations, doctors will tell parents to read aloud to their infants from birth, under a new policy that the American Academy of Pediatrics will announce on Tuesday.

With the increased recognition that an important part of brain development occurs within the first three years of a child's life, and that reading to children enhances vocabulary and other important communication skills, the group, which represents 62,000 pediatricians across the country, is asking its members to become powerful advocates for reading aloud, every time a baby visits the doctor.

"It should be there each time we touch bases with children," said Dr. Pamela High, who wrote the new policy. It recommends that doctors tell parents they should be "reading together as a daily fun family activity" from infancy.

This is the first time the academy - which has issued recommendations on how long mothers should nurse their babies and advises parents to keep children away from screen until they are at least 2 - has officially weighed in on early literacy education. 

While highly educated, ambitious parents who are already reading poetry and playing Mozart to their children in utero may not need this advice, research shows that many parents do not read to their children as often as researchers and educators think is crucial to the development of pre-literacy skills that help children succeed once they get to school.

Reading, as well as talking and singing, is viewed as important in increasing the number of words that children hear in the earliest years of their lives. Nearly two decades ago, an oft-cited study found that by age 3, the children of wealthier professionals have heard words millions more times than have those of less educated, low-income parents, giving the children who have heard more words a distinct advantage in school. New research show that these gaps emerge as early as 18 months.

According to a federal government survey of children's health, 60 percent of American children from families with incomes at least 400 percent of the federal poverty threshold - $95,400 for a family of four - area read to daily from birth to 5 years of age, compared with around a third of children from families living below the poverty line, $23,850 for a family of four. 

With parents of all income levels increasingly handing smartphones and tablets to babies, who learn how to swipe before they can turn a page, reading aloud may be fading into the background. 

"The reality of today's world is that we're competing with portable digital media," said Dr. Alanna Levine, a pediatrician from Orangeburg, N.Y. "So you really want to arm parents with tools and rationale behind it about why it's important to stick to the basics of things like books."

Reading aloud is also a way to pass the time for parents who find endless baby talk tiresome. "It's an easy way of talking that doesn't involve talking about the plants outside," said Erin Autry Montgomery, a mother of a 6-month-old boy in Austin, Tex.

Low-incoming children are often exposed little to reading before entering formal child care settings. "We have had families who do not read to their children and where there are no books in the home," said Elisabeth Bruzon, coordinator for the Fairfax, Va., chapter of Home Instruction for Parents of Preschool Youngsters, a nonprofit program that sends visitors tot he homes of low-to-moderate-income families with children ages 3 to 5.

The pediatricians' group hopes that by encouraging parents to read often and early, they may help reduce academic disparities between wealthier and low-income children as well as between racial groups. "If we can get that first 1,000 days of life right," said Dr. Dipesh Navsaria, an assistant professor of pediatrics at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health, "we're really going to save a lot of trouble later on and have to far less remediation."

Dr. Navsaria is the medical director of the Wisconsin chapter of Reach Out and Read, a nonprofit literacy group that enlists about 20,000 pediatricians nationwide to give otu books to low-income families. The group is working with Too Small to Fail, a joint effort between the nonprofit Next Generation and the Bill, Hillary and Chelsea Clinton Foundation that is aimed at closing the word gap.

At the annual Clinton Global Initiative America meeting in Denver on Tuesday, Hillary Rodham Clinton will announce that Scholastic, the children's book publisher, will donate 500,000 books to Reach Out and Read. Too Small to Fail is also developing materials to distribute to members of the American Academy of Pediatrics to help them emphasize the read-aloud message to parents.

from: NY Times

City Cracks Down On 9-Year-Old For Opening Free Library In His Front Yard

by: Scott Keyes

Spencer Collins, 9, stands in front of his homemade library before being forced to shut it down

CREDIT: Spencer’s Little Free Library Facebook page

A nine-year-old boy in eastern Kansas who decided to open his own little front-yard library and share books with his neighbors has been shut down for violating a city zoning ordinance.

Spencer Collins lives in Leawood, Kansas, a suburb of Kansas City. Like many precocious children, he loves reading. “It’s kinda like a whole ‘nother world, and I like that,” he told KMBC.

Last month, Collins had an idea for how to share his passion for literature: a little free library. The Little Free Library Movement began in 2009 when Todd Bol of western Wisconsin built a mailbox-like structure that held books and placed it in his front yard with a sign to “take a book, return a book.” Little free libraries have since popped up around the world.

On May 11, Mother’s Day, Collins put out his own little free library, complete with children’s classics like Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time and Roald Dahl’s The BFG.

But a month later, his parents received a letter from officials saying the library violated the city’s zoning ordinance and needed to be removed or they would be fined. The city prohibits people from having structures on their property that are detached from the physical house.

City officials justified the move because they said they “need to treat everybody the same,” says Richard Coleman, noting they can’t just ignore the two complaints they’d received because “we like the little libraries.”


Collins is now rallying support on his Facebook page and studying municipal ordinances in an effort to get the city council to amend its code.

from: ThinkProgress

How technology rewrites literature

Writers including Tom McCarthy and Joe Dunthorne consider whether the coming of computers and the net has changed the way they write
by: Thomas McMullan

In an interview with the Paris Review, the American poet Frederick Seidel mentions a time in the 1970s when he visited an old girlfriend at Columbia University. Seidel's girlfriend was studying for a PhD in Electrical Engineering and during his stay the poet was given five minutes to work in a secure room on the Defence Department mainframe:

"The computer was enormous and filled the room but it had such a tiny screen. I typed out the beginning of my poem Homage to Cicero and was hooked then and there. What hooked me was the way you could instantly change the shape of the stanza, the length of the line. It was the instantly part that got me."

With ebooks on course to outsell printed editions in the UK by 2018 much has been written about the subject of technology in terms of readers, but it's often overlooked that new tech does more than give writers a different cut of cloth to scribble on. Writing with electronic devices has affected structure, research and editing. It has affected order and it has affected rhythm, from the tap-tap-swipe of a typewriter to the swipe-swipe-tap of tablet.

No excuse for sloppinesss … Blake Morrison

"In the early days of word processing you'd often hear the complaint that novelists were writing too much – not shaping as they used to when they had to work on a typewriter," says the poet and author Blake Morrison. "I don't think it's true. When it's so easy to cut and paste, and to create multiple drafts rather than having to type them out afresh each time, there's really no excuse for sloppiness."

As Morrison suggests, the order offered by computers has made indexing, saving, copying and pasting all essential parts of putting together a modern piece offiction. Writing with word processors has given a new organisation to shaping sentences but it has also given flexibility; paragraphs can be switched, flipped and thrown out with an ease that would've been impossible when working with a typewriter. As we become increasingly inundated with little black screens this fluidity is becoming ever more central to how writers shape their work.

"Most notes are on my phone now. It's more subtle than taking out a notebook and means you can pick apart your friends or family while they think you are sending a text," says Joe Dunthorne, critically acclaimed author of Submarine.

Lazier or freer? Joe Dunthorne

"I don't do much planning with my novels which means I end up with lots of offcuts and dead ends. I used to keep a file on my computer called "recycle" where I stored all the decent ideas saved from discarded chapters and stories and poems. The idea was that, eventually, all these lines would be rehoused. But increasingly I use the search function. In seconds, I can find every simile I've ever written about an onion or every description of a particular character asleep. I'm able to pull together resources in a much more fluid way. I can't quite decide whether this has made me a lazier writer or a freer one."

So does the inclusion of new digital techniques mean other parts of the author's process are being left behind?

Necessary mess … Zoe Pilger

"I write on a laptop. I've just got a really old laptop that weighs three tonnes so I never take it out of the house. The only time I write by hand is when I take notes. It's a complete mess," says Zoe Pilger, author of Eat My Heart Out and art critic for The Independent. "Writing on paper in that way allows for incoherence and messiness which is a necessary stage of the creative process."

While most writers still work on paper at some stage, the act of physically underlining and crossing-out sentences is paling in comparison to digital highlights and tracked changes.

In Civilisation and its Discontents, Sigmund Freud links technology with amputation, with the tools created by man replacing his organs and limbs: "Man has, as it were, become a kind of prosthetic God," says Freud. "When he puts on all his auxiliary organs he is truly magnificent, but these organs have not grown onto him and they still give him much trouble at times." Freud was a heap of dust by the time Microsoft Word came along, but does his point hold for modern writers? Has anything been lopped-off from the contemporary author to make room for all the new ways of writing? "Following Freud's logic of technology as prosthesis, what's been amputated from the writer in order to create the newest hard- and software?" asks Tom McCarthy, author of the Booker Prize-shortlisted C. His answer: "Attention."

Attention amputation … Tom McCarthy

Many writers see the internet as a squat little monster sat on their chest, constantly offering distraction. McCarthy, however, is keen to avoid overstating its impact on writers. "You have to be wary of presuming that the advent of the internet creates some new-media 'Year Zero' for the writer. Western literature begins with an account of a signal crossing space, in the Oresteia: a technologically-broadcast message whose reception, repetition and interpretation lay out the condition of the whole drama that follows. The hardware changes over time, but the base situation doesn't."

While McCarthy suggests that the basic situation of communication remains, other writers highlight how access to the internet has affected part of that process. "In Eat My Heart Out there's a section that takes place in a neo-burlesque club," says Pilger. "But I've never been to a neo-burlesque club in my life, so I researched it by watching a lot of burlesque routines on YouTube. Another time I wanted to fictionalise a particular set by a particular band at a festival I'd been to. Whereas before writers would have to use their memory and imagination to embellish, I just looked it up on YouTube and could watch the exact set in 2007. Technology provided me with a memory."

Whether it's YouTube or Twitter, the contemporary writer can pull on disparate information, absorb it and paste it in their text. And that process can go both ways. Writing with new platforms; drafting on Google Docs, emailing paragraphs or uploading chapters to Dropbox, all pull the writer's work out of their private space and places it in a cloud. While this may make writing more systematic, it can also leave it vulnerable.

"In the early 90s, when I lived in Berlin, I had this huge old typewriter," says McCarthy. "It was an ex-Stasi one. With the collapse of the East German regime, and the gutting of its offices, the paraphernalia that had maintained the giant surveillance bureaucracy was flooding the flea markets and secondhand shops; you could get these typewriters really cheap. It had great long arms: you had to throw your fingers at the keys, and it made a loud noise - rapid-fire, like a machine gun.

"Now, of course, I write on a laptop, like everyone else. But, in a way, the situation's come full circle: far from being obsolete, the apparatuses of state surveillance are (as we know) very much operative, embedded right inside the machine, or hovering around it in its network, like an aura."

Fom typing on a rolling stream of white space to editing in a cloud, shifts in hardware have altered the way writers research, draft, refine and, ultimately, conceive of their work. The basic mechanism may stay the same, but new tools have led to new relations between authors and the words they use. With the internet, the barrier between the writer and the world has become as thin as skin. It's a skin that strokes and soaks but it's also a skin that's watched and recorded. One of the main outcomes of new hardware may be that, unlike Seidel's secure five minutes with the Defence Department mainframe, the contemporary writer is no longer alone in the room.

from: Guardian

How authors from Dickens to Dr Seuss invented the words we use every day

The English language didn't just spring from nowhere. So who introduced such gems as cojones, meme, nerd and butterfingers?
by: Paul Dickson

Butterfingers 

Charles Dickens used the term in his 1836 The Pickwick Papers (more properly called The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club): "At every bad attempt at a catch, and every failure to stop the ball, he launched his personal displeasure at the head of the devoted individual in such denunciations as 'Ah, ah!—stupid'—'Now, butter-fingers'—'Muff'— 'Humbug'—and so forth."

Chintzy 

Originally this word meant to be decorated or covered with chintz, a calico print from India, or suggestive of a pattern in chintz. It was extended to mean unfashionable, cheap or stingy, coming from none other than Mary Ann Evans, better known by her pen name George Eliot, who wrote in a letter in 1851: "The effect is chintzy and would be unbecoming."

Chortle 

Blend of "chuckle" and "snort", created by Lewis Carroll in Through the Looking-Glass: "'O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!' He chortled in his joy." Carroll also coined the term "portmanteau word", for merging two existing words into one new word. In such blending, parts of two familiar words are yoked together (usually the first part of one word and the second part of the other) to produce a word that conveys the meanings and sound of the old ones – smog from "smoke" + "fog", and brunch from "breakfast" + "lunch". Portmanteau itself is a quaint word for suitcase, originally combining the French porter (to carry) and manteau (cloak) to make a name for a cloak-transporting suitcase designed for carrying on horseback. Lexicographer Ben Zimmer has noted that the portmanteau "remains perhaps the most popular method of new word formation in English, from slang ('chillax', 'geektastic') to business jargon ('webinar,' 'advertorial')".

Cojones 

Testicles in the allegorical sense, representing courage and tenacity. Imported from Spanish by Ernest Hemingway in his 1932 nonfiction bullfighting opus Death in the Afternoon: "It takes more cojones," he wrote, "to be a sportsman where death is a closer party to the game."

Debunk 

A word created by the novelist, biographer and former advertising copywriter William E Woodward for the process of exposing false claims. He used it in his 1923 novel Bunk, in which he also created the term debunker and debunking. Others would later debunk Woodward's biographies of George Washington and Ulysses S Grant, which attempted to debunk great figures of history but were generally dismissed as exercises in cynicism and little else.

Doormat 

As a metaphor applied to a person upon whom other people "wipe their boots". First used in this sense by Dickens in Great Expectations: "She asked me and Joe whether we supposed she was door-mats under our feet, and how we dared to use her so."

Eyesore 

William Shakespeare coined this word for something that is offensive to the eye. In The Taming of the Shrew, Baptista demanded: "Doff this habit, shame to your estate, an eyesore to our solemn festival!" The term was invoked with proper acknowledgment to its coiner in 2005 when plans were unveiled to build a massive metal shed in Stratford-on-Avon as atemporary home for the Royal Shakespeare Theatre. It was immediately dubbed the Rusty Shed.

Norman Mailer: identified factoids way back in 1973. Photograph: Elena Seibert/Corbis

Factoid 

A term created by Norman Mailer in 1973 for a piece of information that becomes accepted as a fact, although it is not actually true; or an invented fact believed to be true because it appears in print. Mailer wrote in Marilyn: "Factoids … that is, facts which have no existence before appearing in a magazine or newspaper, creations which are not so much lies as a product to manipulate emotion in the Silent Majority." Lately, factoid has come to mean a trivial fact. That usage makes it a contranym (also called a Janus word) in that it means both one thing and its opposite, such as cleve (to cling or to split) or sanction (to permit or to punish).

Feminist 

One who advocates social, political and all other rights of women equal to those of men. Created by Alexandre Dumas (fils) in 1873 as féministe, translated as feminist by G Vandenhoff and identified in his translation as a neologism: "The feminists [Vr. féministes] (excuse this neologism) say, with perfectly good intentions, too: All the evil rises from the fact that we will not allow that woman is the equal of man."

Gremlin 

Coined by the Royal Naval Air Service sometime during the first world war, this word was made known by a children's book called The Gremlins: A Royal Air Force Story, written in 1943 by Roald Dahl. According to the story, a gremlin is a small creature that causes mechanical problems in aircraft. After 1943, gremlins were blamed by Allied aircraft personnel for various mechanical and engine problems during the second world war. The name was bestowed on a small car by American Motors, but given its association with mechanical problems, it was replaced by Spirit in 1978.

Honey trap 

A ploy in which an attractive person, usually a woman, lures another, usually a man, into revealing information; by extension, a person employing such a ploy. The term first came into play in 1974 in novelistJohn le Carré's Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy: "You see, long ago when I was a little boy I made a mistake and walked into a honey-trap."

International 

Coined by Jeremy Bentham in the book An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation published in 1789. In the very first instance where the term appears, it is aligned with the word "jurisprudence". International jurisprudence is suggested by the author to replace the term law of nations, which he deems to be "a misnomer".

Litterbug 

Word coined by Alice Rush McKeon, a fierce and early advocate of highway beautification … Her 1931 book The Litterbug Family was instrumental in passing the first billboard-control law in her home state of Maryland.

Meme 

The fundamental units of culture, like DNA. First coined in 1976 by the evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins, a meme, according to one neat summation, "represents ideas, behaviours or styles that spread from person to person. It can be a trendy dance, a viral video, a new fashion, a technological tool or a catchphrase. Like viruses, memes arise, spread, mutate and die."

Microcomputer 

A small computer employing microprocessors based on a single chip. In the July 1956 issue of the Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Isaac Asimov debuted the term in a story called The Dying Night in this line: "It had become the hallmark of the scientist, much as … the microcomputer that of the statistician."

Muscleman 

James Fenimore Cooper's term for a man of superior strength. He first used it in 1838 in Homeward Bound: "I suppose these muscle men will not have much use for any but the oyster-knives, as I am informed they eat with their fingers." According to the OED, the use of the term to mean a man who uses force to get his way does not come into the language until 1929.

Dr Seuss, AKA Theodore Geisel, in 1984: he wasn't a nerd, but could he have been a preep? Photograph: Mark Kauffman/Time & Life Pictures/Getty Image

Nerd 

The word first appears in print in 1950 in the children's book If I Ran the Zoo by American children's writer Dr Seuss. In the book, a boy named Gerald McGrew makes a great number of delightfully extravagant claims as to what he would do if he were in charge at the zoo where, he insists, the animals housed there were boring. Among these fanciful schemes is: "And then just to show them, I'll sail to Ka-Troo / And bring back an IT-KUTCH, a PREEP, and a PROO, A NERKLE, a NERD, and SEERSUCKER, too!"

The accompanying illustration for nerd shows a grumpy Seuss creature with unruly hair and sideburns, wearing a black T-shirt. For whatever reasons, it-kutch, preep, proo and nerkle have never been enshrined in any dictionary.

Oxbridge 

Originally a fictional university introduced in William Makepeace Thackeray's novel Pendennis: "'Rough and ready, your chum seems,' the Major said. 'Somewhat different from your dandy friends at Oxbridge.'" Later, it was taken as a composite for Oxford and Cambridge as a way of distinguishing those two universities from other British universities.

Pandemonium 

For book 1 of his epic poem Paradise Lost, published in 1667, John Miltoninvented Pandemonium – from the Greek pan (all), and daimon (evil spirit), literally "a place for all the demons" – or, as Milton first expressed in the poem: "A solemn Councel forthwith to be held At Pandæmonium, the high Capital Of Satan and his Peers." Later in the work he calls it the "citie and proud seat of Lucifer". By the end of the century, Pandemonium had become a synonym not just for hell, but, because the devils created a lot of noise, uproar and tumult. In 1828, Edward Bulwer-Lytton applied it to a common location: "We found ourselves in that dreary pandaemonium … a Gin-shop." Today, the term is applied to any scene of disarray, confusion or even heightened activity as in the headline: iPad pandemonium.

Pedestrian 

No one had an English word for someone who goes about on foot until 1791, when William Wordsworth coined the noun.

Robot 

Coinage of Czech writer Karel Čapek's in his 1921 work R.U.R. (Rossum's Universal Robots). Čapek took the Czech term for "serf labor" and adopted it to the animatrons that we think of today. Asimov invented the words robotic and robotics after Čapek, in 1941.

Sad sack 

General term for a misfit. From the name for a cartoon character created for Yank magazine by American cartoonist George Baker in 1942 for a hapless and blundering army private.

Scaredy-cat 

A timid person; a coward. Introduced in 1933 by US author Dorothy Parker in a short story The Waltz with this line: "Oh, yes, do let's dance together. It's so nice to meet a man who isn't scaredy-cat about catching my beri-beri."

Scientist 

The word was coined in 1840 by the Reverend William Whewell in his book The Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences, which contained a 70-page section on the Language of Science. In it he discusses how the new words of science should be constructed. He then coins the universally accepted term physicist, remarking that the existing term physician cannot be used in that sense. He then moves on to the larger concept. "We need very much a name to describe a cultivator of science in general. I should incline to call him a scientist." The word that scientist replaced was philosopher. An account of this coinage in Word Study, a newsletter published by Merriam-Webster in 1948, noted: "Few deliberately invented words have gained such wide currency, and many people will be surprised to learn that it is just over a century old."

Shotgun wedding 

A wedding made in haste or under duress by reason of the bride's pregnancy. The term and the concept were introduced in print by Sinclair Lewis in 1927 in his novel Elmer Gantry: "There were, in those parts and those days, not infrequent ceremonies known as 'shotgun weddings.'"

Harriet Beecher Stowe: she knew what it really meant to be sold down the river. Photograph: Hulton Archive

Sold down the river 

To suffer a great betrayal; to be destroyed by the bad faith of another, especially one who you trusted. The exact term and the action from which the metaphor derives is from Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin, which describes in heartrending detail the tragic breakup of black Kentucky families who were actually sold to plantations farther down the Mississippi river where conditions were harsher. The term existed before Stowe used it, but she infused it with a sense of tragedy and betrayal.

Tightwad 

A miserly person; one who keeps his wad of paper money tightly rolled. This word first appears in 1900 in George Ade's More Fables, a book in which familiar stories were told in slang.

Unputdownable 

The word that supplanted mid-1930s coinage unlaydownable afterRaymond Chandler said of a book in 1947, "I found it absolutely … unputdownable."

Work in progress 

Term coined by Ford Madox Ford for a not-yet-complete artistic, theatrical or musical work, often made available for public viewing or listening. Ford applied it for snippets of James Joyce's Ulysses, which he published as the editor of the Transatlantic Review. (The term is now used to describe young athletes who are raw but talented.)

Workaholic 

In 1971, Dr Wayne E Oates wrote Confessions of a Workaholic: The Facts about Work Addiction, adding a word to the lexicon of the English language. His concept was that work can become an addiction, akin to alcoholism. Oates remarked in an interview at the time the book was published that the work addict "drops out of the human community" in a drive for peak performance. Oates's use of -aholic opened the drawbridge for a host of new words implying addictions. Although chocoholic and cakeaholic were already in use, in the wake of workaholic, came shopaholics, computerholics and so on.

• Extracted from Authorisms: Words Wrought by Authorsby Paul Dickson, published by Bloomsbury at £14.99 on 3 July 2014. To order a copy for £11.99 with free UK p&p go to guardian.co.uk/bookshop or call 0330 333 6846

from: Guardian

No more silence in the library

Public libraries have evolved into vibrant community hubs in the digital era

by: Sheena Goodyear

When you can buy books for cheap on Amazon and research anything online from the comfort of your home, it's easy to dismiss public libraries as dying institutions, crumbling museums for dusty old texts.

But libraries have never been about the books — not really. They're about knowledge, and that's never been in greater supply. Gone are the days when public libraries were book warehouses where stern librarians would shush you if you spoke above a whisper.

Walk into your local library today, and you'll probably find a bustling community space as likely to have a digital gaming station as it is to house ceiling-high stacks of books. "We want to get away from the old stereotypes of shushing in the library. We want it to be a vibrant and interactive place," Kathryn Goodhue, CEO of the Brantford Public Library said. "It's exciting time in libraries."

Her southwestern Ontario library features a green screen, a 3D printer, "makers' spaces" where people create personal projects, and a help desk where librarians will help with any digital task.

Got a new smartphone and not sure how to use it? Bring it to the library.

We're really talking about helping to build digital literacy in our communities," Goodhue said.

The Pickering Public Library just outside Toronto is buzzing over its new 3D printer.

"As soon as we put it out, the kids were just watching it and they figured out how to use it in just seconds. And then they were teaching each other, and then they started teaching older people how to use it," the library's CEO, Cathy Grant, said.

"Libraries have always been about learning, and this is the type of learning that's pervasive now ... Learning is done through books, and we're good at that, but learning is also collaborative."

The transformation from book museum to thriving, tech-savvy community space is happening across the country, as many communities ponder what to do with their aging library buildings.

The long-time connection with communities has given libraries the clout to innovate through public support.

"They have a keen sense of what's happening at the grassroots and are very responsive in trying to meet those needs," Marie DeYoung, president of the Canadian Library Association, said. "Qualified, of course, by funding, which is always a challenge."

In Ontario, library funding was cut almost in half in the mid-'90s, and it hasn't returned.

At the federal level, the Conservatives cut 20% of the workforce at Library and Archives Canada in 2012.

That's forced libraries to find creative ways to raise funds, whether through donations or partnerships.

"We get it. Taxpayers are strapped ... and if we can figure a way to do something without having to ask for more money, why wouldn't we?" Goodhue said.

But more often than not, people will go to bat for their libraries.

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The new $57.6-million Halifax Central library is set to open in the fall of 2014. (Handout)

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Halifax is slated to open its new state-of-the-art $57.6-million central library, funded by all three levels of government, this fall.

The five-floor behemoth will be home to two music studios, two coffee shops, two gaming centres, patios overlooking the ocean and a 300-seat auditorium. "Nobody says, 'Wow, this not a good use of our money,' because we did this community consultation and the community told us, 'This is what we want,'" Bruce Gorman, director of central library and regional services for Halifax Public Libaries, said.

And the new space will even have books. In fact, it plans to double its collection.

Despite the changes, librarians everywhere seem to agree — there will always be a place for books at the library.

"I don't think you're going to see books disappear in the near future," Goodhue said. "My 14-year-old daughter -- she doesn't want an e-book; she wants a real book."

School libraries at risk of extinction

While public libraries have adapted to retain their status as thriving community hubs, school libraries have been undergoing a long, slow death by a thousand cuts.

School libraries rely on school budgets, which rely on provincial education funding. When money gets tight, libraries are among the first on the chopping block.

As of 2013, 56% of Ontario elementary schools had a teacher-librarian, down from 80% in 1997, and 11% have no staff at all, according to the Ontario Library Association.

B.C. saw its teacher-librarians decrease 35% between 2001 and 2010, according to the National Reading Campaign. Nova Scotia has no teacher-librarians at all since its controversial 2012 cuts. New Brunswick has just three.

"It's a concern that we have within our library community — the struggle school libraries are facing pretty much across Canada for funding and for simply presence in schools," Marie DeYoung, president of the Canadian Library Association, said.

from: Toronto Sun