http:\/\/www.wdl.org\/en\/<\/a><\/p>\n <\/p>\n
The significance of world libraries in relation to my inquiry topic is rather unique as I am once again a fish in s strange pond, and I spend most of my year \u201cover there\u201d and not in BC Canada. \u00a0Over the last ten years I have spent my life teaching in non-English speaking countries. Every country I have lived in or travelled to, has had it\u2019s own unique sets of issues and successes.<\/p>\n
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Mainland China has an enormous population and a great value on reading and education. With China being open for business and tourism, the need to speak another language is growing. English is the most common second language studied, as that is where the money is coming from, and Japanese and Korean are close behind. Even though there are many English language schools popping up around the country, there is still little to no English book section in public libraries. The only time I saw English books in a library was in the International schools or the local bilingual schools. The public libraries have no English section and neither do the bookstores. As more expatriates are coming to live and work in China, in some of the more popular cities you may now be able to find one English bookstore. I found two in Guang Zhou last year in a city of fourteen million people! I cannot predict the future of Chinese libraries as they do not use the Dewey Decimal system for cataloguing their books, and they are severely restricted and censored by their government.<\/p>\n
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The same went for Ulaanbaatar Mongolia.\u00a0 All libraries are in the Mongolian language (which is written in Russian Cyrillic by the way). After two years in \u201cUB\u201d I bought my first Amazon Kindle (350$USD and only available in the USA then), a cover, and some books all for a meagre 500$USD! \u00a0Mongolia is constantly in a state of flux and the money comes from \u201cthe west\u201d (USA, Canada, Australia, UK), Germany, Korea, Russia, and Japan.<\/p>\n
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After two more years there, I moved to Phnom Penh Cambodia. The Khmer are rebuilding their country and there are libraries, but they are all in Khmer and in paper, as most people (80%) are extremely poor and do not have access to electricity for light or AC, never mind computer. Mobile phones are cheap and abundant, but the vast majority are not smart phones. Again the disparity between the few extremely wealthy families (5%), the struggling middle class (15%), and the majority of the poor prevents libraries from spreading and becoming digital. Local university textbooks are photocopied as well, to keep the cost as low as possible. When in Phnom Penh I was shocked to see used bookstores, which had started and spread from the backpackers coming in and out of the Indochine. I was also flabbergasted to see ONE English bookstore, courtesy of the expatriate community living in Phnom Penh (NGOs, UN for the Khmer Rouge trials, World Bank, WHO, UNESCO, and my IBO school). After two years my Kindle was now down to 200$USD and were now available world 2wide (for the most part).<\/p>\n
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Singapore has somehow maintained their English language skills from the colonial days and has an amazing \u201cfirst world\u201d public library system. In fact they have paper books in English, Chinese, Malay, Tamil, and Hindi! They are also now branching out into digital eBooks, and I will be exploring that once I return in August!\u00a0 There are also several bookstores throughout the island \u2013 country and all books are in above-mentioned languages. I cannot tell you how fantastic it is to go into a bookstore after all these years! In fact I tend to get overwhelmed and have to leave! Once I remember how to breathe, I go back and make a list of what I want to get for my Kindle!<\/p>\n
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Overall I have seen libraries in all shapes and sizes over the past ten years in several developing countries. My conclusion is that where there is a working middle class with disposable income, I am finding more libraries, more ICT, and more of the two combined.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Thursday July 11, 2013\u00a0\u2013 Module 8 Developing World Libraries In my group we discussed a few of the following topics.\u00a0 The first topic was about grade level differences, as primary and secondary would often have different needs and demands in terms of their books (picture books, leveled reading materials, age appropriate novels, textbooks, and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":18397,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[763291],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-103","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-assignment-3-week-3-work"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/jenniferlazareck\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/103","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/jenniferlazareck\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/jenniferlazareck\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/jenniferlazareck\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/18397"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/jenniferlazareck\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=103"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/jenniferlazareck\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/103\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":114,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/jenniferlazareck\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/103\/revisions\/114"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/jenniferlazareck\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=103"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/jenniferlazareck\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=103"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/jenniferlazareck\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=103"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}