Result? More money for content and staff expansion, potentially. They helped him with homework and gave him the attention he likely wasn’t receiving at home.” Another positive, hardly a mere detail, is that BiblioTech was built at a cost of several million, which actually is a fraction of what a paper equivalent would have cost. The staff then set up a regimen to read with him at least 30 minutes a day before he could get on the computer or play games. He confided to one of our tech assistants that he wasn’t doing so well in reading. “Santos…did not have the ideal home life, but once BiblioTech opened, he found a safe and welcoming place to come after school. From Judge Wolff, here’s the human side for anyone obtuse enough to think BiblioTech is just parking kids in front of computers. I don’t know what the results for the students and others will be in quantifiable terms, but BiblioTech can hardly hurt, given the well-documented connection between literacy levels and the availability of books and librarians. BiblioTech has also gone out of its way to reach out to the local school district. Especially I like BiblioTech’s forthcoming presence in public housing and ambitions to expand elsewhere without need for scads of bookshelves. Our efforts reached 61,675 family members.” BiblioTech has set up a physical branch in the county court house’s jury room to grow those numbers. “We had 160 community events to engage families in reading. 14, 2013 to “bridge the literacy and technology gaps” in and near San Antonio? “During our first year we had 103,974 on-site visits 31,676 registered patrons 76,659 e-books checked out and 6,464 e-readers circulated,” Judge Wolff writes. Has BiblioTech succeeded since opening on Sept. She was active in the community, providing job training for adults, employment opportunities.” The solution? As branch manager, Judge Wolff hired a Hispanic woman, Catarina Velasquez, program director for the Baptist Child and Family Service’s Guadalupe Street Coffee, “an Internet cafe on the west side of San Antonio that served coffee and community programming and services. Eklof, who, although smart, gung-ho and digital-savvy, came from Wisconsin and did not speak Spanish. Because BiblioTech was such a departure from a traditional library, the judge and colleagues had trouble recruiting a professional librarian from Texas. “And since we would be serving a mostly Hispanic population, the name would reflect their heritage.”Īlong the way, the self-made Judge Wolff shows a deep appreciation of the value of books as life-changers, as well as a deep respect for libraries as community institutions. “BiblioTech,” Judge Wolff writes, “represents books and technology and it is also a play” on bibliotheque, the French word for library, as well as on the Spanish biblioteca. The actual name “BiblioTech” came from one of the architects, Geoff Edwards of the Munoz firm. So BiblioTech replicated not just rows of computers but also bright colors. The judge saw that many of BiblioTech’s biggest fans would be the same people who frequented Apple stores, or hoped to be able to afford to. Judge Wolff helped build a successful chain of health food stores (with a strict ban on outlandish claims of cancer cures, etc.), and the library world could learn from his passion for merchandising and architectural details as well as marketing. Judge Wolff’s e-book, available through Amazon, B&N, Kobo and iTunes/iBooks, isn’t just a BiblioTech history with generous credit to such people as Administrator Laura Cole and Librarian Ashley Eklof. Significantly, Judge Wolff and his wife, Tracy, are donors and fund-raisers for BiblioTech and other civic causes. The title is roughly equivalent to the head of a county board. He is judge of Bexar County, which includes the city of San Antonio. Have a large population of minorities or poor people, with many teenagers owning e-book-capable cell phones? Then if you’re a librarian or a local official overseeing the library system, you would be remiss in your duties if you did not read Bexar BiblioTech: The Evolution of the Country’s First All-digital Library, by Nelson Wolff, the visionary behind the country’s first all-digital public library system. Still, the BiblioTech library in Bexar County, Texas, is a landmark achievement worthy of local variants in countless cities in the U.S. The debate rages on, for example, about whether toddlers need paper pages to flip while enjoying the smell and feel. All right–so all-digital libraries are not for every city or every patron right now.
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