VALA2014 Session 6 Cheetham

USB: Ubiquitous Superfast Broadband, the promises and perils for Australian libraries

VALA2014 CONCURRENT SESSION 6: Near Futures
Tuesday 4 February 2014, 14:05 – 14:35
Persistent URL: http://www.vala.org.au/vala2014-proceedings/vala2014-session-6-cheetham

Warren Cheetham

CityLibraries Townsville, QLD

(VALA Travel Scholar)

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VALA Peer Reviewed
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Abstract

The building of Australia’s National Broadband Network (NBN) will provide for increasingly faster internet speeds and ubiquitous internet access, which will allow people to access and share information in new ways. Health, education, business, entertainment and teleworking are areas set to benefit from the NBN. How do libraries fit into this changing information ecosystem? As the internet capacity of some members of the community increases, the risk of the digital divide growing also increases. Are libraries prepared to assist more people with the profound digital changes over the next decade as the NBN rolls out around Australia? This paper reports on the 2012 VALA Travel Scholarship, which involved visits to sites in the United States of America to investigate libraries’ use of superfast broadband.

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