"the founding of the first US libraries through the first 100 years"
December 11, 2015 1:32 PM   Subscribe

 
From the third link: Carnegie, who was born in Scotland and moved with his family to Pittsburgh at thirteen years old, grew up in poverty. A turning point for young Carnegie, which would help guide his work as a philanthropist years later, was spending Saturday afternoons at a local private library at the invitation of a wealthy Pittsburgh man.

That private library was owned by Col. James Anderson and his house, where the library was, is still standing in Pittsburgh's Manchester neighborhood.
posted by octothorpe at 1:57 PM on December 11, 2015 [1 favorite]


There was a public library in a small town near where my parents used to live that was located in somebody's living room for years. It had just "always been there" and people were used to letting themselves in to borrow or return books. Eventually somebody bought the house who balked at the library part so they moved it to the fire station.
posted by lagomorphius at 3:48 PM on December 11, 2015


This is so ... strange. I mean I like DPLA and the work they do but I wonder sometimes about the way they choose to do business. It's nice to have some historical materials up like this, but there are already a lot of history type things online and this adds basically nothing new to the conversation (these images are not rare or unusual, the story is pretty straightforward and not even hyperlinked with sources, it's like someone's college history paper with a few images attached) and the interface for presenting this content just reads like clickbait (web pages scroll and yet we're clicking next-next-next). I hope this is just DPLA trying to get the story of libraries in the US to a wider audience--though I have very little idea who DPLA's audience actually is--but for a group that is really trying to play in the big leagues, this seems sort of like it was made my well-meaning interns. Nothing personal tmotat, just such a strange collection of words and pictures.
posted by jessamyn at 4:51 PM on December 13, 2015


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