John Palfrey Quotes

#1. 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

#2. China is the most repressive censorship regime on the Internet.

John Palfrey

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

John Palfrey

#4. 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

#5. It's not about being digital. It's about students who are born digital.

John Palfrey

#6. The time is when a library is a school, and the librarian is the highest sense a teacher. - Melvil Dewey, 1876

John Palfrey

#7. The vast majority of the libraries in the United States today - nearly 100,000 of them - are school libraries.

John Palfrey

#8. 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

#9. 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

#10. 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

#11. 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

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

John Palfrey

#13. 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

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

John Palfrey

#15. 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

#16. 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

#17. 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

#18. 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

#19. Research now means a Google search.

John Palfrey