When it first surfaced in 2005, it was hailed as
'the most important Galileo find in more than a century'. Then, in June 2012,
news broke on the Ex Libris mailing list that the unique 'proof copy' of Galileo's
Sidereus Nuncius containing his original drawings of the Moon was in fact
a highly sophisticated forgery. The full story is still unclear, but the finger of suspicion points at
Marino Massimo de Caro, who in his brief reign as director of the
Girolamini Library in Naples removed
thousands of rare books in what has been described as a
'premeditated, organised and brutal' sacking of the library. Meanwhile, experts are still marvelling at the quality of the forgery:
"We’ve seen missing pages replaced in facsimile, but no one dreamed that an entire book could be forged, something that is now more easily possible because of modern technology."
posted by verstegan
on Apr 4, 2013 -
12 comments
What really concerns librarians;
what do they discuss when they self-organise and decide for themselves? After the
inaugural UK event, the
second UK Librarycamp, with around 200 attendees, was recently held; reflections by
Frank Norman, Carolin Schneider
[1] [2],
Sarah Wolfenden,
Amy Faye Finnegan,
Shambrarian Knights,
Michelle,
Jennifer Yellin,
Jenni Hughes,
Bookshelf Guardian,
Amy Cross-Menzies and
Simon Barron, and by one of the
organisers.
[more inside]
posted by Wordshore
on Nov 1, 2012 -
10 comments
The universe (which others call The Twitter) is composed of
every word in the English language;
Shakespeare's folios, line-by-line-by-line; the
Exegesis of Philip K. Dick, exploded;
Constantine XI, in 140 character chunks;
Sun Tzu's Art of War, in its entirety; the chapter headings
of JG Ballard, in abundance; and definitive
discographies of Every. Artist. Ever...
All this,
I repeat, is true, but one hundred forty characters of inalterable
wwwtext cannot correspond to any language, no matter how dialectical or rudimentary it may be.
[more inside]
posted by 0bvious
on Oct 27, 2012 -
14 comments
On the day he turned thirty-eight,
Michel Eyquem de Montaigne retired from public life to the tower of the
Château de Montaigne, there to spend the next ten years composing an
assay of his life's experience. That his mind might thrive, he turned the tower into a
"Solitarium" and its top floor into a sumptuous
library, lining its round walls with some 1,500
books. Even the roof beams were made to bear his thoughts: on them he inscribed 46 quotations,
here collected and translated.
posted by Iridic
on Oct 11, 2012 -
22 comments
The Library: [SLYT] A film by Sergey Stefanovich. A journey through Duncan Fallowell's library which has spilled over into every available space and become an art installation in its own right. With the writer talking.
posted by Fizz
on Dec 20, 2011 -
8 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
Medicine in the Americas is a digital library project that makes freely available original works demonstrating the evolution of American medicine from colonial frontier outposts of the 17th century to research hospitals of the 20th century. [more inside]
posted by Trurl
on May 31, 2011 -
9 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 finished Strahov library panorama , released Tuesday on Martin’s website, is a zoomable, high-resolution peek inside one of Prague’s most beautiful halls, a repository of rare books that is usually off-limits to tourists... Martin’s panorama lets you examine the spines of the works in the Philosophical Hall’s 42,000 volumes, part of the monastery’s stunning collection of just about every important book available in central Europe at the end of the 18th century — more or less the sum total of human knowledge at the time."
posted by languagehat
on Mar 30, 2011 -
24 comments
Thought Audio is a small, simple and likable
free library of classic literature and philosophy MP3 audio downloads.
posted by nickyskye
on Sep 27, 2010 -
21 comments
Harvard University finished in 1986 construction of the
Harvard Depository, a mysterious storage facility in a publicly undisclosed location 30 miles from campus where large tracts of land are less expensive than in Cambridge. While the facility was originally intended to store Harvard's least-used volumes, it is now home to 45 percent of Harvard's collections. David Lamberth, chair of the Library Implementation Work Group, calls it a "precise warehouse" for which the term "library" would prove inaccurate.
posted by stbalbach
on Apr 2, 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 Worlds Best Books (1909),
One Hundred Best Books (1916),
One Thousand Books for a Village Library (1895),
The Book Lover, a Guide to the Best Reading (1889),
The Choice of Books (1905),
A Thousand of the Best Novels (1919),
Comfort Found in Good Old Books (1911),
A Guide to the Best Historical Novels (1911),
A Guide to Historical Fiction (1914), and
lots more..
posted by stbalbach
on Jul 13, 2008 -
15 comments
Citations on the fly. WorldCat
previously, the world's online largest catalog of library holdings, got
its own Facebook page in early 2008. That was pretty cool, but now WorldCat has upped the ante again by introducing another Facebook app called
CiteMe. Using CiteMe, Facebook users can look up any item in WorldCat (there's over 1 billion of 'em) and get its properly-formatted citation (choose from APA, Chicago, Harvard, MLA, or Turabian styles) instantly. For more than a few citations, you can still build a bibliography of any size in your favorite style,
directly on the WorldCat site.
posted by Rykey
on Jun 25, 2008 -
23 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
