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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
