John Palfrey Quotes & Sayings

The second paradox, and the subtler of the two, is that while information is ubiquitous in wealthy societies, it is often too hard to find, to make sense of, and to use. — John Palfrey

The vast majority of the libraries in the United States today - nearly 100,000 of them - are school libraries. — John Palfrey

The independence of libraries matters because it means that our attention cannot be bought and sold in a library. — John Palfrey

We will need smart people who can figure out how to save what we need to save and let the rest fade away. — John Palfrey

Our studies have shown that China's online censorship systems are by far the most sophisticated and extensive in the world. — John Palfrey

Libraries can offer important alternatives to the services provided by the corporate sector, which will always have incentives to offer biased, limited, and costly access to knowledge. — John Palfrey

The type of librarians who are thriving most consistently in the digital era are those who have found a way to operate as a node in a network of libraries and librarians. They are agents of change, actively creating the future instead of constantly reacting to it - — John Palfrey

Many of the people libraries serve today are ill equipped to take advantage of all the great things about the digital present and future. Since libraries must be guided by those they serve, they will be awkwardly straddling the analog and the digital for some period of time. — John Palfrey

Library users tell survey researchers that they want access to more ebooks and they want libraries to offer more technologically up-to-date services. — John Palfrey

Libraries must continue to make the shift toward the digital and away from print. The shift should not be overnight, but it should be made steadily and with great care. Libraries can and should de-accession physical materials much more aggressively than they do today, especially to save space and money when these materials are redundant with other local collections or digital forms of access to them. — John Palfrey

Libraries are more than community centers, just as librarians do more than answer questions you could easily ask Google. From the opening of the BPL, the first public library, to the expansion of public libraries across America through the Carnegie libraries, the library as an institution has been fundamental to the success of our democracy. Libraries provide access to the skills and knowledge necessary to fulfill our role as active citizens. Libraries also function as essential equalizing institutions in our society. For as long as a library exists in most communities, staffed with trained librarians, it remains true that individuals' access to our shared culture is not dictated by however much money they have. — John Palfrey

There's no question that libraries are wonderful, but nostalgia is too thin a reed for librarians to cling to in a time of such transition. Nostalgia can actually be dangerous. For one thing, thinking of libraries as they were ages ago and wanting them to remain the same is the last thing we should want for them. For another, our nostalgic view doesn't give libraries enough credit. Libraries offer a whole slew of services that we ignore when we just focus on pleasant reading rooms. — John Palfrey

The time is when a library is a school, and the librarian is the highest sense a teacher. - Melvil Dewey, 1876 — John Palfrey

It's not about being digital. It's about students who are born digital. — John Palfrey

...are libraries necessary? We keep having this debate because we have a very skewed idea of why libraries matter. — John Palfrey

China is the most repressive censorship regime on the Internet. — John Palfrey

Research now means a Google search. — John Palfrey

Today they may not even be able to experiment with such technologies if their in-house computer systems are restricted by their IT departments. — John Palfrey

Pinterest board for Library Journal called "Cheap and Cheerful Librarian Tips," which links her interest in DIY arts-and-crafts projects with her library work. — John Palfrey

There is a long standing tradition of using code to evade censorship in China, so that goes on. The trouble is the Chinese government has created the world's most sophisticated censorship machine. — John Palfrey

Federal and state agencies are another possible candidate for this long-term preservation role when it comes to published materials. In the United States, the Library of Congress and the National Archives play major preservation roles, but neither institution can reasonably claim to hold a complete record of our cultural and scientific legacy - especially in an era when much of the publishing takes place on the web. — John Palfrey

The historical principles of librarianship - universal access to information, individual privacy, freedom of expression, and truth above all else - are as necessary now as they have ever been and must persist. At the same time, the balance of library leadership needs to swing more forcefully toward the new or libraries will fade in their significance to the American public. — John Palfrey

The most successful students are those who know that they can do better than grasp at the closest source of information. Reference librarians, who spend their days learning what is available in a broad range of fields and how to search for it, provide a great service for students and other library patrons. — John Palfrey

Television didn't transform education. Neither will the internet. But it will be another tool for teachers to use in their effort to reach students in the classroom. It will also be a means by which students learn outside the classroom — John Palfrey

In many library systems, there are too few hours in the day to do the research necessary to find the means of training and retraining, much less to accomplish this training. — John Palfrey

The point is not that books, magazines, and DVDs are dead - far from it. At places such as the redesigned Boston Public Library, popular publications and media materials in physical form circulate rapidly from prominent spaces close to the building's entrance. The point is that people's information habits have undergone a sea change - a major shift toward the digital. Libraries are trying to serve a wide range of patrons at many different points along an "adoption curve," with all-print at one end and all-digital at the other. — John Palfrey