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Intute offers a range of free resources to help students and staff in universities to develop Internet research skills that can support university work, and avoid some of the pitfalls of using the Internet for scholarly work.

Public libraries in rural areas really don’t have a large enough donor base to make extensive fundraising worthwhile. The other problem public libraries have with outside fundriasing is that if you start taking in a lot of major gifts and donations, then your steady stream of revenue, the local government, may just wind up cutting your funding.

“Students who pick their major based solely on postgraduation salaries, as opposed to passion for a field, will in all likelihood struggle in both school and career.”

would agree that public librarians questionably need a library specific degree, or a degree at a graduate level anyway, as evidenced by the wealth of paraprofessionals who often do at least as good a job in that setting, though for management I think you would want someone trained in public management with library experience. In an academic setting, there is a credibility issue that begs credentialling in the areas of research and education, and credentialling to a higher standard than is now present in library schools, hence the inadequacy of the degree university libraries particularly, or at least that degree alone. The degree needs to be reinvented and would best partner to at least confer joint degrees in librarianship and business, education, and other disciplines

in fMRI studies of people reading fiction, neuroscientists detect activity in the pre-frontal cortex — a part of the brain involved with setting goals — when the participants read about characters setting a new goal. It turns out that when Henry James, more than a century ago, defended the value of fiction by saying that "a novel is a direct impression of life," he was more right than he knew.

they discovered "a significant relation between the amount of fiction people read and their empathic and theory-of-mind abilities" allowing them to conclude that it was reading fiction that improved the subjects' social skills, not that those with already high interpersonal skills tended to read more.

It's when we read fiction that we have the time and opportunity to think deeply about the feelings of others, really imagining the shape and flavor of alternate worlds of experience.

questions that are not answerable with finality in a brief sentence… Their aim is to stimulate thought, to provoke inquiry, and to spark more questions — including thoughtful student questions — not just pat answers” (106).  In order to think in terms of questions, “[i]nstead of thinking of content as something to be covered, consider knowledge and skill as the means of addressing questions central to understanding key issues in your subject” (107)

we are likely to change our minds in response to reflection and experience concerning such questions as we go through life, and changes of mind are not only expected but beneficial” (108).