Southern California Libraries Avoided serious damage caused by torrential rains, by William Jiang, MLS

Rains that hit southern California during the week of Christmas 2010, later left a foot of snow in New York City, have done little damage to libraries in the South California. There are reports of tens of thousands of dollars in damage in Southern California, floods and landslides, however, when I spoke with a representative of the Library Cooperative of Southern California, she told me that she had not heard of a single library that was closed by the storm. This is great news for the Latino community of Southern California. According to the 2010 census Hispanics are the largest ethnic group in southern California Latinos are nearly 41% of the population followed by a little less than 40% of Caucasians and 10% from Asia and around 7 % African American. The fact that the Latino community depends on the libraries of Southern California is evident in studies of use among Latino communities in the United States. Happy New Year! This is good news in late 2010.

Latinos and public library use in New York by William Jiang, MLS

According to the 2000 census 27% of New York City are Hispanic or Latino. When you realize that there are about 8.2 million people in New York, according to the 2006 estimate, this means that more than 2.2 million people in New York Hispanic or Latino. The census of 2010 will be more accurate.

Latinos use the library as much as whites do. The only group that uses more than Latinos and Caucasians is the Asian group, which uses the library 10% more about than any other group. Library use among Latinos is about 54%, services are the main reason for people of Latino descent for library use. The privacy concerns in this community is serious. (Http: / / www.libraryjournal.com/lj/community/publicservices/861938-276/study_of_latinos_and_libraries.html.csp)

Due to economic recession, the use of the collection in all groups is rising, as they depend on them to search for jobs, entertainment and educational programs, among other things. This shows that there is a correlation between unemployment and the use of the library collections by the unemployed. Latinos have been left, economically, the poorest group in New York by the current downturn.

The ethnic composition of New York City, Latinos are as
follows:
Mexican: 282 965
Puerto Rican: 784,065
Cuban: 42,209
Other Hispanic or Latino, including Dominican 1,178,666


According to the September 28, 2010 The New York Times in 2009 about 100,000 people were pushed into poverty in New York City alone. The highest unemployment ne New York according to the article is in the Bronx community where Latinos are 36% unemployed. The Bronx became the larger community of Latinos in the city with more than 650,000 Latinos, so this is a big problem for the Latino community. It is expected that due to this the use of the library of the Bronx is up. There have been no more current measurements using the published statistics of the public library, so all we can do is guess and know New York's libraries are very important to Spanish-speaking community ..

Homeless Clients and Libraries of New York, by William Jiang, MLS

Statistics are largely unknown, however, families are 78% of the homeless population in the city of New York (http://www.ysop . org / statistics.htm) Neither widely known to the public is that homeless people generally are loyal customers of NYPL. Often, due to the negative association in the mind of the public, most homeless people feel stigma when they use the libraries.

Ideally, libraries should be a haven for anyone who wants to read, a world away from the chaotic environment of the city. For the homeless who are not in shelters, NYPL can mean a safe haven from the city's shelters, many of which are dangerous.

In fact, the presence of homeless people in the libraries can sometimes create a problem. According http://www.crowbold.com/homepage/homeless.htm, "... there is actual conflict between the rights of the homeless and the rights of other users and library workers. Homeless can sleep with a snoring loudly enough to disturb the contemplation of other customers. For hygiene reasons, customers may feel uncomfortable handling of materials that the homeless have been handling. As a result Many librarians classify homeless people as "problem customers". "

Blacks and Latinos are disproportionately homeless in NYC, "Approximately 90% of homeless Yorkers are black or Latino, but only 53% percent of the population of the city are black or Latino." (Http://www.ysop.org / statistics.htm)

There is a disproportionate number of homeless Latinos compared with the general population of Latinos in New York. For this reason, the de facto use of libraries as temporary shelters should receive more attention from Latino leaders. There are a lot of inertia to help this marginalized population due to the common thought that this population is crazy, "... in the late 1970’s and early 1980's deinstitutionalization of the mentally ill, along with a reduction in public housing, resulted in an increase in the population of homeless people .. "(http://www.crowbold.com/homepage/homeless.htm) Also, there is a single population increase of alcoholics and other drug abuse among the homeless as opposed to homeless families. (Http://www.coalitionforthehomeless.org/pages/basic-facts) Few want to deal directly with this population problem.

Homeless people in the Latino population, whether in a family who is homeless or a single person with no home care in New York need smarter and better government. I think first, we must create safe havens for homeless families who are not struggling with mental health or drug abuse. Then the rest should be divided into three groups: the mentally ill, substance abusers, and the group is called MICA, which is composed of drug users with mental illness because these three groups have different needs. All homeless people who are taken care of decrease the desire to increase the number of people in prisons in New York City. It is not only humane thing to do, is economic to do, and think about the children! Approximately 50% of homeless are children! (Http://www.wsws.org/articles/2004/jan2004/nyc-j07.shtml)

Libraries of Sierra Leone, by William Jiang, MLS

My interest in Sierra Leone began with the DiCaprio movie "Blood Diamonds." In this film there was a world full of bloody conflicts and short life revolved around the diamond trade. That's why the movie is called "Blood Diamonds" because of blood being shed to collect the gems.

Sierra Leone is a small West African country bordered by Guinea, Liberia, and the Pacific Ocean. The country has 5 million people with a GDP of just over $ 4 billion with an average per capita income of about $ 900 per year. In Sierra Leone there are very rich and very poor. About half of the population is involved in agriculture, and about half of export revenues generated by diamonds. Sierra Leone is a young democracy. The median age of the population is 19 years of age. A median age so young is an indication that life is hard there. 10,000 children fought in the year of the civil war in Sierra Leone. And now, another 500,000 are in the paramilitary groups.(Http://www.un.org/works/goingon/soldiers/goingon_soldiers.html)

Amid all this death and destruction in this small country, I wondered if there would be some libraries to serve this nation devastated by war. According tohttp://www.sabre.org,

there is a main library in the city of Freetown and two of the nine branch libraries survived the war. The country also has a repository of the United Nations Library at the University of Sierra Leone. This leaves the main library sources of war-scarred country and university libraries, the University of Sierra Leone and Njala University, with a combined number of 500,000 books and no web presence.

As of September 2010, the University Sierra Leone does not have online page dedicated to their library or library catalog and there are very terse instructions on a website of the institution: http://www.tusol.org/.

Njala University has a website http://www.njalauniversity.net

and a page for their library that says "Coming Soon". There is no other information. Much of this information is by John Abdul Kargbo, Senior Lecturer at the Institute of Library, Information and Communication Studies at Fourah Bay College, University of Sierra Leone.

Getting a good book to read is generally not a priority of a population facing major problems of life and possible early death in their daily lives. However, for the long-term health of Sierra Leone’s democracy it would be great if they could increase their collections in order to serve its people.

Southern California libraries spared damages from torrential rains of Christmas 2010 By William Jiang, MLS

The rains that hit Southern California in the week of Christmas 2010 and traveled across the country to dump over a foot of snow on New York City have done little damage to the libraries of Southern California. There are reports of tens of thousands of dollars of damage across Southern California, widespread flooding, and mudslides, however when I talked to a representative from the Southern California Library Cooperative she said that she had not heard of a single library that was closed by the storm. This is great news for the Latino community of South California. According to the 2010 census Latinos are the largest ethnic group in Southern California at almost 41% of the population followed by slightly under 40% of Caucasian and about 10% Asian-American and about 7% African-American. the fact that the Latino community depends upon the libraries of Southern California is evident in studies of usage among the Latino communities across the United States. Happy new year! This is some good news to end 2010.

e-Book lending by Amazon.com By William Jiang, MLS

Huge news! Today Amazon.com announced that their Kindle is going to allow purchasers of their e-books to lend their e-books to other people. This technology opens up worlds of possibilities for libraries to offer e-books to their patrons who have e-book readers. If libraries play their cards right they will be able to increase readership, increase circulation, and increase visits to libraries by patrons all of one fell swoop by quickly embracing this new technology. It will happen sooner or later. Exciting indeed!

Read more here:
http://forums.digitaltextplatform.com/dtpforums/entry.jspa?externalID=581

NVIDIA and GPUs VS Intel Sandy Bridge By William Jiang, MLS

In the past, all the work of computing depended on the CPU. The The more powerful the CPU, the faster programs ran. However, besides the CPU there is now the GPU (Graphical Processing Unit on the video card) revolution that NVIDIA current leads with a technology called CUDA. Desktop computers can run at speeds that rival supercomputers of 5 years ago!


the new generation of NVIDIA Echelon GPU’s run at about 10 teraflops (http://gpuscience.com/news/sc10-nvidia-details-10-teraflops-echelon-processor/)

most supercomputers still running the teraflop range. So, this is an example of technology advancing significantly until what used to be a supercomputer not too long ago that cost millions of dollars is now available on the desktop for a few thousand. the graphic below shows how powerful processors can increase their power of CPUs exponentially by using programs that use the GPU like the Mercury playback engine in Adobe Premiere CS5. Below we see that the rendering time of a video decreases by almost 10x. (http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/xeon-x5680-5600-series-westmere-ep,2692-7.html)

Of course the giant Intel does not want to NVIDIA to have this much power in the computer market. So what Intel is doing with the Sandy Bridge processor is they are putting a middling powerful GPU right on the chip. NVIDIA GPUs still has more power, but with Intel’s economy of scale and most people going with Intel, the behemoth may make inroads into the GPU market and the crush NVIDIA. This senario may be how Microsoft crushed Netscape. With up to eight cores with an integrated GPU Intel is looking powerful.
read more about the Sandy Bridge architecture here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sandy_Bridge_(microarchitecture)

AMD hexacore vs Intel core i7 for Libraries By William Jiang, MLS

AMD released their desktop six-core 64 bit Thuban chip in April 2010 on the 45nm process (the smaller the nanometers, nm, the better because it uses less electricity), and beat Intel to the punch of releasing the CPU processor with the most cores. The chip was able to be overclocked quite easily, and to be competitive it was released at a price point that was well below the Intel I7 32nm process CPUs. The majority of the Intel Core i7 chips have four cores and they are still more expensive than the AMD hexacore CPU, in this case if you need raw processing power and price is not an issue the Intel chip is the way to go because it is more powerful than the AMD hexacore chip.

Let us look at pricewatch.com to see how the various processors are priced.
Let’s face it, all you need is a Celeron to browse online catalogs. Libraries only need to run an internet browser. What is needed to run a library browser? Almost anything. So, just get the cheapest thing possible. According to pricewatch.com (12/26/10), the AMD Phenom II X6 1090t is $227.36, and the most inexpensive Intel Core i7-860 is $260.38. Ok, fine, so you want some speed so that you play World of Warcraft when the patrons aren’t around. Will I notice any difference between the 1090t and the i7-860 when playing games? According to cpubenchmark.net, the i7-860 at 2.8 GHz has a Passmark CPU mark of 5555, and the 1090t has a score of 6061. I don’t know what these scores mean, but an 8% difference seems like nothing, so I doubt that you’ll notice any difference while playing Warcraft.
As I said before, most library applications only need a weak computer because it doesn’t take a lot of RAM or processor speed to run a web browser, which is pretty much all one has to do when using a old-fashioned or database application. However, if you want to delve into the realm of multimedia or gaming, then you would have to go for a more powerful processor which would in theory be linked to a more powerful and pricey system overall.

If the goal of your library is to save money, and in this economy many libraries need to do this, It behooves a librarian to think of saving money on the operating systems by downloading a popular Linux distribution such as Ubuntu. It would take some learning to set up a network of Linux computers but the cost savings could be significant, especially if you are working in a cash-strapped environment. The plus side to a Linux box is that you would save on the operating system, there are many fewer viruses that could mess up your system, and Linux is quite stable. you can learn more about open source software at e-LIS which is detailed in another article on this blog, El Otro Blog Del Bibliotecario. also, it should be noted that many companies when they upgrade their computers are amenable to donating their old computers to libraries or other learning institutions. There is really no reason to buy a new computer if an old computer can serve just as well. Throw Ubuntu on it, and you have one more happy patron.