55 posts tagged with Books and libraries. (View popular tags)
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Twenty photos of beautiful private and personal libraries.
posted by hurdy gurdy girl on Feb 26, 2012 - 51 comments

Upheaval at the New York Public Library: an article in The Nation which looks at the current state of the NYPL, and highlights many of the problems facing public libraries across the United States.
posted by codacorolla on Dec 5, 2011 - 40 comments

Library Science is an exhibition at New Haven (Connecticut) libraries that contemplates our personal, intellectual and physical relationship to the library as this venerable institution—and the information it contains—is being radically transformed by the digital era. Some examples: Untitled (Suburban Homes) by Erica Baum, Hurricanes by Chris Coffin, and Chinese Library No. 46 by Xiaoze Xie.
posted by carter on Nov 15, 2011 - 2 comments

I don’t believe in dissing books I used to love, and I always suspect the moral judgment of people who sneer at the taste of the reader they used to be: “I know thee not, old book.” Six writers talk what's on their shelves.
posted by villanelles at dawn on Nov 12, 2011 - 72 comments

Books seen in new ways: the Book Drum World Map (popular books mapped to their locations, and more). The Infinite Helical Bookcase. CodexCloud (store, search and share your eBooks online). Also: galleries and blogs of unique bookshelves, Bookshelf Porn and BookPorn. [more inside]
posted by Bora Horza Gobuchul on Nov 10, 2011 - 5 comments

After visiting Nepal in 1998, John Wood left Microsoft to try something different. His organization Room to Read now has created 12,000+ libraries around the world, and given away 10 million books.
posted by LeLiLo on Nov 7, 2011 - 10 comments

"It’s a mistake to rarify reading and put books out of reach."
posted by burnfirewalls on Aug 19, 2011 - 63 comments

A common refrain is "a library is not (just) a warehouse of books." Except, when it is. Internet Archive, best known as the worlds largest collection of digital books in the public domain, has started collecting "one [physical] copy of every book ever published" for long-term warehousing in shipping containers.
posted by stbalbach on Jun 6, 2011 - 58 comments

Breathing Books — A collection of beautiful photos on all things bookish.
posted by Toekneesan on May 17, 2011 - 13 comments

It's an odd thing that libraries – by tradition temples to the unfleshly – can sometimes seem such sexy places. The Secret life of libraries.
posted by shakespeherian on May 3, 2011 - 37 comments

ShelvAr: an augmented reality app for shelf-reading library stacks, from Miami University Augmented Reality Research Group (MU ARRG!).
posted by steef on Apr 19, 2011 - 25 comments

The Independent (UK) proposes a list of fifty books that every eleven-year-old should read. [more inside]
posted by Halloween Jack on Apr 7, 2011 - 96 comments

A very bad day for libraries: Today's Supreme Court deadlock casts Doctrine of First Sale into doubt for products made abroad. The Supreme Court today deadlocked on the question of whether Costco committed copyright infringement by selling Omega watches produced and purchased overseas. In effect, this deadlock upholds the 9th Circuit appeals court ruling that the First Sale doctrine does not apply to products produced outside the United States. Thinking of selling, lending, or transferring ownership of something originally produced overseas -- like, say, a book? This ruling calls the legality of such sales into question. [more inside]
posted by artemisia on Dec 13, 2010 - 167 comments

Libraries are, for many of us, the public places where we bring our most private selves, our fears and our dreams, so long buried and so studiously unspoken. The librarian checking out a stack of books may be for many of us, the equivalent of the first person we’ve told a secret to. Which brings me to the real reason I chose the profession that I did for my narrator: Even more than libraries, I love librarians.
As Others See Us: An Author On Why She Loves Librarians
posted by carsonb on Nov 24, 2010 - 30 comments

Coming soon to a library near you, outsourcing. LSSI is now the 5th largest library services provider in the US. The ALA is surprisingly neutral on this issue. "In general, there is no evidence that outsourcing per se has had a negative impact on library services and management. On the contrary, in the main outsourcing has been an effective managerial tool, and when used carefully and judiciously it has resulted in enhanced library services and improved library management. Instances where problems have arisen subsequent to decisions to outsource aspects of library operations and functions appear to be attributable to inadequate planning, poor contracting processes, or ineffective management of contracts."
posted by Xurando on Sep 28, 2010 - 45 comments

i wanted to call him up and tell him his notes are funny, but then i realized he DIED A MONTH AGO. bummer. Craig Fehrman traces the post-mortem dispersion of writers' personal libraries: in particular, David Markson's personal library and the way in which his fans are using Facebook to reconstruct the range of Markson's reading.
posted by catlet on Sep 23, 2010 - 12 comments

Ancient books inherited in private family libraries could change our knowledge of late mediaeval arab culture, but most are hidden in private libraries. Gripping article about the unknown treasures that may be lurking in Mauritanian family libraries, considering the little that has already been found, resistance to cataloguing and problematic future if the region continues to be destabilised. How the manuscripts are famous in the muslim world.More on the open libraries and archive efforts. Some years back on bbc i saw an explorer track down some ancient ethiopian christian manuscripts to an ethiopian monastery, only to be shown some burnt remains from a fire a few months back. What treasures must lurk in this continent, and with digital cameras, how easy to document them without damage or intruding on their owners! Being christians, there are pictures and some history.
posted by maiamaia on Jul 27, 2010 - 13 comments

Book owners have smarter kids
posted by Artw on Jun 4, 2010 - 114 comments

Book of the Month is a feature that the University of Glasgow Library has been running for over a decade now. The format is simple, a single book is selected from their collections, written up and accompanied by pictures, maps and photographs scanned from the books. With over a 100 books to select from, it's hard to know where to start, but anywhere is good because they're all lovely. Still, here are a few, Charles Darwin's The Expression of the emotions in man and animals, a beautiful 15th century illuminated copy of Livy's Roman history, Treatises on Engines and Weapons, Valentines and Dabbities, The Birds of Australia, Facts and Observations on the Sanitary State of Glasgow, Ibn Jazla's The arrangement of bodies for treatment and finally, The Curious Case of Mary Toft, MetaFilter superstar.
posted by Kattullus on Nov 18, 2009 - 6 comments

Luis Soriano, with his donkeys Alfa and Beto, brings books to small villages in Colombia.
posted by The corpse in the library on Oct 20, 2008 - 16 comments

Library Finds is seriously beautiful photography and explication of little-seen gems in the library stacks, from a self-confessed "techie, not a librarian, who is quite fortunate to be surrounded by books everyday". From the green to the teal and now to the blue.
posted by donnagirl on Sep 26, 2008 - 18 comments

Writer's Rooms, portraits of the spaces where authors create: Martin Amis. Simon Armitage. Diana Athill. Jane Austen. Berly Bainbridge. JG Ballard. John Banville. Nicola Barker. Ronan Bennett. Alain de Botton. William Boyd. Raymond Briggs. Charlotte Bronte. Carmen Callil. Jung Chang. Roald Dahl. Charles Darwin. Margaret Drabble. Geoff Dyer. Anne Enright. Joshua Ferris. Jonathan Safran Foer. Margaret Forster. Antonia Fraser. Michael Frayn. Esther Freud. Simon Gray. Mark Haddon. David Hare. David Harsent. Seamus Heaney. Russell Hoban. Eric Hobsbawm. Michael Holroyd. Siri Hustvedt. AL Kennedy. Judith Kerr. Rudyard Kipling. Hanif Kureishi. Penelope Lively. David Lodge. Michael Longley. Hilary Mantel. Eamonn McCabe. Charlotte Mendelson. John Mortimer. Kate Mosse. Andrew Motion. Julie Myerson. Edna O'Brien. Andrew O'Hagan. Adam Phillips. Caryl Phillips. Craig Raine. Ian Rankin. John Richardson. Michael Rosen. Will Self. George Bernard Shaw. Alan Sillitow. Posy Simmonds. Helen Simpson. Ahdaf Soueif. Graham Swift. Adam Thirlwell. Colm Toibin. Claire Tomalin. Sue Townsend. Barbara Trapido. Rose Tremain. Sarah Waters. Jacqueline Wilson. Virginia Woolf. (Step into the reading room for a wee bit more...) [more inside]
posted by NotMyselfRightNow on Aug 8, 2008 - 28 comments

The end of Moore’s influence came when, years later, she tried to block the publication of a book by E. B. White. Watching Moore stand in the way of “Stuart Little,” White’s editor, Ursula Nordstrom, remembered, was like watching a horse fall down, its spindly legs crumpling beneath its great weight. [more inside]
posted by Horace Rumpole on Jul 14, 2008 - 30 comments

The continuity I have in mind has to do with the nature of information itself or, to put it differently, the inherent instability of texts. In place of the long-term view of technological transformations, which underlies the common notion that we have just entered a new era, the information age, I want to argue that every age was an age of information, each in its own way, and that information has always been unstable. Let's begin with the Internet and work backward in time.
The Library in the New Age by Robert Darnton, historian and Director of the Harvard Library. A wide-ranging overview of the status of libraries in the modern world, touching on such subjects as: journalist poker games, French people liking the smell of books, bibliography at Google, news dissemination in the 18th Century, book piracy and the different texts of Shakespeare. Some responses: Defending the Library of Google, The Future in the Past and Librarians Need a Better Apologetic.
posted by Kattullus on Jun 1, 2008 - 22 comments

I See Dead People's Books (wiki) is an impromptu project by LibraryThing members to catalog the libraries of famous dead people, from Tupac Shakur to Ernest Hemingway to John Adams. Many more in the works, anyone is able to create a dead library with all the attendant features of LT.
posted by stbalbach on Mar 14, 2008 - 22 comments

OPAL Libri Antichi from the University of Turin offers over 3,000 books as free, open PDF files. Most of these date between AD 1500 and 1850 and most are in Italian, with many in French. They tend to be plain books with few illustrations. A few English titles are present, including David Hume's 1800 Essays on Suicide and the Immortality of the Soul; several texts by William Wycherley such as Love in a wood: or St. James's-Park (1735); and Richard Lassels 1686 work The voyage of Italy: or, a compleat journey through Italy with the characters of the peaple, and the description of the chief towns ... (volume 2) - an early travel guide. The PDFs are unsearchable plain scans. via this thread in the W4RF forum which contains hundreds of links to free online historical documents
posted by Rumple on Mar 10, 2008 - 3 comments

Housing, preserving, and providing access to these small-scale, homemade rags that document some corner of [often do-it-yourself and punk rock] culture, zine archives can be found via independently operated centers in Georgia (physical library in construction), New Orleans (myspace link, www address out-of-commission), Florida, Minneapolis, Denver, Cambridge, Olympia, Chicago, Seattle and... [more inside]
posted by ethel on Jan 19, 2008 - 21 comments

An obscure 1911 British law requires a copy of every published book, journal, newspaper, patent, sound recording, magazine etc.. to be permanently archived in at least one of five libraries around the country. The British Library has the most complete collection and is currently adding about 12.5km of new shelf space a year of mostly unheard of and unwanted stuff. A new state-of-the-art warehouse is being constructed with 262 linear kilometers of high-density, fully automated storage in a low-oxygen temperature controlled environment. It is not a library, it is a warehouse for "things that no one wants." BLDG Blog ponders on what it all means.
posted by stbalbach on Dec 4, 2007 - 60 comments

Sure, reading is great, but books are fun to look at, too
posted by nuclear_soup on Jun 21, 2007 - 37 comments

Librarians as Enemies of Books
via the delightfully uptight Steve Mauer at BookMine.
posted by carsonb on Jun 7, 2007 - 66 comments

Librarians and book collectors have many tales about ephemera left in books. While the legend of the bacon bookmark may be among the more pervasive reports of strange finds, a smallpox sample is probably the most bizarre. There are blogs and discussion boards that record other makeshift markers. Some readers prefer designated over spontaneous markers. Mirage Bookmark has an extensive collection of bookmark ephemera, with Bookmark of the Week and Bookmark Collector also offering noteworthy collections.
posted by madamjujujive on May 9, 2007 - 68 comments

Fairfax County Public Library system ditches the classics. If titles remain untouched for two years, they may be discarded--permanently. "We're being very ruthless," boasts library director Sam Clay.... Books by Charlotte Brontë, William Faulkner, Thomas Hardy, Marcel Proust and Alexander Solzhenitsyn have recently been pulled.
posted by caddis on Jan 4, 2007 - 99 comments

Banned Books Week -- 25th anniversary year. How to deal with a challenge, what you can do generally, and of course, lists, and more lists. Captain Underpants is a more recent entry, i notice.
posted by amberglow on Sep 25, 2006 - 42 comments

Red-Hot and Filthy Library Smut. Scanned photos of the insides of some of the world's hottest, youngest and dirtiest libraries. Some of the best from the book by Candida Hofer.
posted by geoff. on Aug 22, 2006 - 40 comments

The Dewey Donation System is site that helps re-stock libraries devastated by Katrina, by posting wishlists of Louisiana and Mississippi libraries and letting anyone buy books for them. Cool looking site, to boot. [via mefi projects]
posted by mathowie on Jun 27, 2006 - 20 comments

The paper analogue of the blog is not the diary, but rather the commonplace book. With the availability of relatively cheap paper beginning as early as the 14th century, people began to collect knowledge in commonplace books. Bits of quotes, reference materials, summaries of arguments, all contained in a handy bound volume. This merchant's commonplace, for example, dates from 1312 and contains hand-drawn diagrams of Venetian ships and descriptions of Venice's merchant culture. An English commonplace dating to the 15th century, the Book of Brome, contains poems, notations on memorial law, lists of expenses, and diary entries. John Locke devised a method for keeping a commonplace. Thomas Jefferson kept both legal and literary commonplaces, and owned a copy of Sir John Randolph's legal commonplace, published in 1680.
posted by monju_bosatsu on Nov 18, 2005 - 23 comments

"Libraries are rich, deep, resources for preserving cultural heritage and indispensable resources for the communities they serve.” OCLC, a nonprofit, membership, computer library service and research organization, has compiled a list of the top 1000 titles owned or licensed by its 50,000+ member libraries. There are sublists by subject, a cross listing with a banned books list, and some fun facts, including the supremely annoying one that the highest listed living author is Jim Davis of Garfield fame (#18).
posted by donnagirl on Nov 30, 2004 - 16 comments

100 key books “Cyril Connolly chose 100 key books from England, France and America first published between 1880 and 1950 to represent ‘The Modern Movement’.”

This site asks: “How does the list look now, in the first decade of the 21st Century?” “an additional list of key books is needed for 1950 to 2000. What should be included and why? Does Connolly's selection criteria need adjusting [just England (when so many of the books are from Ireland), France and America!] and if so how should this be done, remembering that Connolly was very precise in delineating the list as Key books, not best books?”
posted by Grod on Sep 17, 2004 - 18 comments

The September Project -- On 9/11, libraries big and small will host events where citizens can participate collectively and think creatively about our country, our government, our community, and encourage and support the well-informed voice of the American citizenry. A Day of and for Democracy.
posted by amberglow on Apr 21, 2004 - 8 comments

In the Psychedelic Library you can find the likes of Aldous Huxley, The Acid Queen by Robert Hunter, LSD, My Problem Child from Albert Hoffman, The Private Sea: LSD and the Search for God by William Braden and Through The Lens Of Perception by Hal Zena Bennett is a fascinating account of a peyote experience in Mexico. The Psychedelic Library ultimately asks the question: can drugs, used in a positive and healthy way, truly guide us towards who we can become? No matter what you believe, it's an invaluable resource.
posted by ashbury on Apr 5, 2004 - 34 comments

Libraries? Sports? Music Programs? Guidance Counselors? Not on my bill, buddy! That crap is for nerds and jocks. It's all good here in sunny California.
posted by _sirmissalot_ on Mar 10, 2004 - 19 comments

Marginalia and Other Crimes: I’ve always had an intense hatred for people that deface books, and if they're my books, the intensity is doubled. But imagine the atrocities the average librarian faces every day... Witness this display of damaged and defiled books from the Cambridge University library, with attached sarcastic commentary. The horror! Not for the squeamish.
posted by chrisgregory on Jan 8, 2004 - 48 comments

Rub the lucky Buddha and..... It dispenses - Darwin's Origin of Species, Marcus Aurelius' Meditations, Voltaire's Candide, Loren Eiseley's The Immense Journey, Huxley's Doors of Perception, Lewis Carrol's Through the Looking Glass , Thomas Paine's Common Sense, The Age of Reason, Rights of Man, and Crisis #1, Buckminster Fuller's Grunch of Giants, Descartes' Discourse on method..., biographies of St. Francis and Joan of Arc, Twain's The Grateful Poodle, and more...
posted by troutfishing on Dec 8, 2003 - 13 comments

Interesting Column by Tim Whitaker, editor at Philadelphia Weekly, who "kind of jests" someone should order the main branch of the Free Library at 19th and Vine streets gutted, all the passé books written by the long since dead and decayed--books that nobody looks at anyway, thrown out, and replaced with computers.
This could be done over a long weekend, and the new Free Workstation Center of Philadelphia would open. Thousands of city residents who'd been priced out of the Information Revolution for well over a decade would rush to the free computers to experience the online rush that comes with access to the WWW.
He says Amazon's new service "search inside the book" is the first glimpse of a full-bore revolution in the way research will be conducted and books will be distributed in the future that spells the death of libraries.
He bounced this idea off of Steven Levy, a Philadelphia native who writes about technology for Newsweek, and he says "It's not that crazy, The future of libraries is a hot topic with librarians all over the country."
"Once the Web has become a full-service digital archive of the whole wide written word, it'll only be a quick innovation or two before we'll have the technology to order and bind books on our own home book-printing systems. Ebooks will finally become reality. Libraries will become mini-museums, where old books are kept under glass, relics of the pre-"inside the book" revolutionary age."
posted by Blake on Nov 20, 2003 - 22 comments

Sandman READ poster Anyone passing through libraries will have seen the series of READ posters, starring any number of actors, sports stars, musicians, and other celebrities. Everyone from Alex Baldwin to WWF wresllers to Yoda have been so honored.

Now you can add a comic character to that list. Neil Gaiman's creation of Morpheus, the Sandman, is now available as a poster. The artwork is by P Craig Russell, who was the artist for an issue of Sandman.
posted by dragonmage on Jun 15, 2003 - 20 comments

Secrets of Hitler's forgotten library: The Scotsman Has A Story on the many secrets still to be uncovered in what is left of Hitler’s library.
In historical terms, the German dictator and architect of the Holocaust may be remembered as a burner of books, but in life, Hitler loved the printed word and boasted a collection somewhere in excess of 16,000 volumes.
A friend from his teenage years, August Kubzieck, wrote: "I just can’t imagine Adolf without books. Books were his world." But generations of historians and biographers have ignored the remaining volumes of Hitler’s library, saying they represent only a fraction of the books he once owned and arguing that many were never touched by the Nazi leader.
You may have seen This One in The Atlantic Monthly already.
posted by Blake on May 4, 2003 - 5 comments

Children's Books Online: The Rosetta Project is an incredible online resource for 19th century children's books. From the site: "The Rosetta Project's collections currently contain about 2,000 antique children's books which were published in the 19th and early 20th century. We shall be putting these combined collections on line as funding permits. Our current goal of putting 2,000 volumes on line will create an online library of aproximately 65,000 html pages. However, as we are still collecting books from around the world, we expect the Rosetta Project online library to eventually reach millions of html pages." (via coudal.)
posted by Pinwheel on Mar 31, 2003 - 7 comments

A Gallery of Bookplates. I always think it's a wonderful surprise when I'm antique bookshopping and I happen across some beautiful ex-libris. Many more links found via Joy Olivia on the Graphic Design blog Speak Up.
posted by Stan Chin on Nov 6, 2002 - 18 comments

The following is a [partial] list of the most frequently challenged books of 2001...
1. Harry Potter series by J.K. Rowling
2. Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck
3. The Chocolate War by Robert Cormier (the "Most Challenged" fiction book of 1998)
4. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou
5. Summer of My German Soldier by Bette Greene
6. The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger
(Last week was Banned Books Week. Sorry this is late. Did you remember to hug your favorite banned book? Does anyone really think children need to be "protected" from these books?)
posted by Shane on Sep 30, 2002 - 52 comments

Find your library. When I was a kid, my public library was my sanctuary, providing me many hours of enjoyment. Of course I yearned for better, larger library. When I was in college, I loved to wander the stacks. Do you have any fond library memories?
posted by patrickje on May 3, 2002 - 36 comments

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