"Almost no one is using information well"

"Thought at heart most business problems are information problems, almost no one is using information well"
-Bill Gates "Business @ the speed of thought"

I am glad that he realises the importance of using information. However, I am sad that not many of our leaders can realise this. The underlying factor to use information well is to be information literate.

For all these years, many librarians have pointed out the urgencies to include information literacy into the school curriculum. It is a preliminery step to ensure the younger generation be trained to use information well in the future. Unfortunately, not many school leaders responded to it.

We are facing information overloaded today. Recently, in a discussion forum attended by Bill Gates and the local Universities Vice Chancellors. One of the Vice Chancellor said that he is not satisfied with millions of results from Google or Yahoo. He simply does not have the time to dig out the answer from the millions. At a result, we often get second best information to make decisions. And according to Bill, this is not using information well.

The first step to use information well is to use the right tool to search the information you need. Google or other search engine could be a platform but there are many other subscribed databases that could have it done more efficiently, i.e. more accurate hits. The school subscribed databases served these purposes. Different databases cover different subjects. More importantly, you can avoid the million hits result and all the distracting advertisments.

Next time, when you want to search information, try Global Newsbank or Ebsco to look up current issues, try Questia.com to look up specific information from books, try Britannica instead of Wikipedia, you may discover a whole new world.

The generation of e-books

E-books have become increasingly significant in the library collection development. A 2007 international e-book survey showed that 88% of respondents "answered that they own or subscribe to e-books" and nearly half of the respondents (45%) have had access "to more than 10,000 e-books".

Most e-book users used it for practical learning where someone has a very definite problem to solve or a research topic. This might be an indicator to fiction publisher that printed fiction is still their main market.

It is also easy to explain why e-books are more popular for information and research purposes. Students wants to have everything in hand NOW! E-books with its instant access feature, students are difficult to resist the temptation. Different e-books are now developing different facilities to make it more user-friendly. Variations on book-marking, highlighting and note-taking are common to most platforms.

Below are some of the e-books with different content emphasis, give me some feedback if you have been using them.

1. Ebook Library (EBL) has the strongest Australian collection.
2. Gale Virtual reference Library focused on the humanities, and on literature in particular
3. Dawsonera, MyiLibrary,NetLibrary,Questia and ebrary are truly multi-disciplinary

Seek and ye shall find

How often do you search from the web? How do you look up information from the web? Below is the evaluation of an expert in this area Reid Goldsborough, he published an article recently in the Teacher Librarian October, 2007. I would like to share his views with you, hopefully you could get some insight from his views.

He evaluated several on-line databases for the readers.

Wikipedia - The overall quality of Wikipedia's content is good. It contains nearly 2 million articles in English. The downside is: they might have mistakes though they can quickly be corrected. Another downside is that technical articles are often written for technical people without including basic material first. But after all, it's free.

Encylopaedia Britannica - It's cost subscription fee. It has fewer than 10% of the number of articles of Wikipedia. However, the articles tend to be more in-depth than Wikipedia's.

Answers.com (www.answers.com) is a free, advertising-supported service that combines the articles of Wikipedia with content from more than 120 titles from others publishers and its own original content.

HighBeam (www.highbeam.com) provide access to the information in more than 35 million documents from over 3.000 sources, including newspapers, magazines, scholarly journals, transcripts, white papers, books, encyclopedias, dictionaries, thesauruses, and almanacs. It is not free.

Dialog (www.dialogweb.com) and LexisNexis (www.nexis.com) are professional databases which aggregate information from hundreds of third-party databases and let you quickly search through any or all of them using the same search procedures. They are widely used by professional librarians and researchers but expensive.

AsMeNow (www.askmenow.com) allow your cell phone or wireless handheld computer to text a question and if your questions are handled, you will be charged.

Jatalla (www.jatalla.com) and ChaCha (www.chacha.com) 's results are ordered by human intelligence. You can even chat with a guide online. These 2 are still being tested.

After all, it seems that quality is still linked to price.


The above content is originally from
GOLDSBOROUGH, Reid (2007) New developments in web seraching, Teacher Librarian, October 2007

A library in my hometown made what I am

“A library in my hometown made what I am”


I heard a story from the radio, it touched me for a while.

There was a boy who started to do volunteer work in his hometown library when he was at primary school. His main duty was shelving. He gradually started to enjoy his work because he could have a chance to read a lot of books. Later, he had to stop his service because he moved to another town. However, not long after that, he came back again to do the volunteer work; the library staff asked him why. He said he liked his old home town’s library and he liked shelving.

When he grew up, he said to people: “A library in my hometown made what I am”.

Who is he?


He is Bill Gates of Microsoft.

I have been working as a Librarian for ten years. I have never heard such an encouraging statement from my readers or students. In stead, what I have to face today is people’s devaluation of libraries or resource centres. Students thought the world wide web is all they need and Google is all they have to know. It is then not surprising that the professionalism of Librarians is not respected or valued. On the other hand, librarians react positively to this challenge. In these recent years, more and more librarians started to empower themselves with lots of other ICT skills in order to catch up with the big environment outside.

This week, we celebrate International School Library Day. I hope there will be more stories like Bill Gates to come.

Where to read?

Where’s the best place to read when it is hot and humid as in Hong Kong? Perhaps, Shanghai’s newest library could give us a new dimension for library. There is a new library built on water in Shanghai. It is also the first library built on water in China. The library is located at a new urban area Qing Pu in Shanghai, facing the Huang Pu River. The library house 330,000 items and was opened on 28 August. It is encouraging to hear that there are continuously more modern libraries built and used. Next time, when you are visiting Shanghai, it is worth taking a break " on the water".

It is a new school year, the school is clean and tidy as usual. There are new paints in some classrooms. Apart from this, KGV is the same KGV. However, the library is different this year. I think not many people notice how different we are. May be KGV is too big, in terms of campus size or school population, the school library seldom attract the attention of the school community. Therefore, nobody notice any changes in the library.

The most noticeable change is Mrs. Sue Chan has left us for Australia. We thanked for her contributions and wish her the best of luck.

Another major change is the new library database system. In the past, we had “Alice” as our online database system. Starting from June, we had “Oliver” coming in to replace “Alice”. During the summer holiday, Oliver has been upgraded to a more powerful version. Students can login to their own account and check their own stuff:
(Login name: Student Number)
(Password: library (could change after login)

Check your personal loan account, including overdue items and loan history
Make a reservation
Email bibliography list to yourself for your coursework reference
Email Alert service for new items or topics of interest
Check the reading list for the specific project
Personalize the search homepage
Other functions includes print and save


I am going to try the new system, please feedback to me if you have any comment and queries.

New Bookmarks for you

Welcome back to school!

Have you made new plans for the new school year? The library is planning ours for the new school year. Bookmark the following dates to celebrate with the libraries or simply tell me your great ideas, so that we can customize those special days especially for KGV.

International School Library Day

International School Library Day was proclaimed by the IASL President, Dr Blanche Woolls, in 1999 and reaffirmed by the IASL President, Peter Genco, in 2005.
It is a day to promote the school libraries in international schools.
This year's ISL Day will be held on 22 October 2007 with the theme: Learning: Powered by your school library

Hong Kong International Literary Festival
It is a week’s extravaganza programme. The festival gathered many world renowned authors like Man Booker Prize winner Kiran Desai, the iconic Gore Vidal, legendary Jan Morris and bestselling novelist Amy Tan in 2007. 60 students from KGV were able to talk to one of the Battle of the Books author Linda Sue Park last year. This year’s festival will be from 3rd – 9th March 2008. Watch out for more details when nearer of time.

World Book Day
The main aim of the World Book Day is to encourage children to explore the pleasures of books and reading. This year’s World Book Day will be on 6th March 2008.