Mixed results in literacy report, plus quick news notes

The National Center for Education Statistics released the results from the 2003 National Assessment for Adult Literacy (NAAL). The most significant conclusion from the study seems to be that English literacy for ethnically Hispanic has declined rapidly in the last decade, mostly due to rising immigration rates. The Houston Chronicle has a good analysis regarding Hispanic literacy. This is a significant issue for Texas in particular because Hispanics will eventually become the majority ethnic group in Texas, so literacy may become an increasing problem. Despite some good news in the report concerning rising literacy rates among Whites, African Americans and Asian/Pacific Islanders, the New York Times' report on the study focuses on the decline in literacy among college graduates. I'm guessing this decline is in terms of percentages, not in terms of raw numbers. There are probably more "college graduates" than ever before, but because of the growth of higher education institutions, the quality of that education is diluted.

There has been lots of interesting news this week:

Google, Microsoft, and Sun are funding a major technology lab at Berkeley called the RAD Lab. Wow, their homepage is a wiki! RAD stands for "Reliable, Adaptive and Distributed Systems."

Edith Wharton's library is returning to her Massachusetts estate. The deal was enabled by an anonymous loan. The bookseller George Ramsden kept this collection together for decades rather than selling it off piecemeal.

Wikipedia proponents are developing Wikiversity which will support the development of open source educational tools and may offer courses, although it probably won't offer degrees. More in the Chronicle of Higher Ed.

Finally, OCLC released a new report this week titled Perceptions of Libraries and Information Resources. Library Journal says the news is "not pretty" in that information consumers identify libraries mostly with books and pretty much trust online content. Geeze, don't get me started, like I've said before, libraries need to become publishers of online content to stay relevant.