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

Biblioburro is a library that schoolteacher Luis Soriano Bohorquez of La Gloria, a small town in northern Colombia, carries around on his donkeys Alfa and Beto. Another video of Biblioburro by Al Jazeera English. Here's some further footage in Spanish. [Biblioburro previously]
posted by Kattullus on Nov 8, 2009 - 12 comments

"If you told me we would be going through a book challenge of this nature, I'd think, 'Never in a million years.' " [more inside]
posted by sredefer on Jul 22, 2009 - 110 comments

This site deserves to rank with this site and this one. [more inside]
posted by bad grammar on Jul 8, 2009 - 18 comments

A private school student asks "Is it OK to run an illegal library from my locker at school?"
posted by spock on May 24, 2009 - 101 comments

William Gass's personal library. The photos accompany this article by Gass about his love of books -- specifically about collecting them over his life and "living in a library." [more inside]
posted by mattbucher on Apr 8, 2009 - 21 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

Literary Dealbreakers: "This book so deeply resonates with your soul that if a potential partner finds it risible, any meeting of minds (or body) is all but impossible." [more inside]
posted by anotherpanacea on Sep 1, 2008 - 110 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

“I tried ‘Gravity’s Rainbow,’ and I thought it was fraudulent:” Art Garfunkel’s Reading Habits. (previously on MeFi)
posted by Jasper Friendly Bear on Feb 2, 2008 - 44 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

Future Reading. Anthony Grafton explores what we can learn about the future of the text from the history of libraries, publishers, and the sorting of books. [more inside]
posted by Toekneesan on Nov 1, 2007 - 8 comments

Digitized Book of the Week. An eclectic collection of works digitized from the Library of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. They include books and serials from its collections that focus on Illinois history, literature, and natural resources; rural life and agriculture; railroad history and engineering; and works in translation. A project of MsMolly.
posted by Mitheral on Aug 8, 2007 - 5 comments

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

Ever wondered what Art Garfunkel does when he's not walking across one continent or another? No? Well he'd like to tell you anyway. He reads. A lot.
posted by Partial Law on Jan 20, 2007 - 40 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

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 U.S. Naval Observatory Library features high-res scans of images from antique books dealing with astronomy and navigation. Wallpapers, ahoy!
posted by Gator on Jul 13, 2006 - 18 comments

What is the world reading? The UNESCO Index Translationum database has over 1.6 million bibliographical entries of translated works. Interesting stats such as: The worlds Top 50 translated authors. The Top 10 translated Norwegian authors (or other languages). Number of translations for any given book. Some surprising results, lots to explore, and an interesting lesson on what sells.
posted by stbalbach on Jun 21, 2006 - 13 comments

The Memory of The Netherlands is an extensive digital collection of illustrations, photographs, texts, film and audio fragments from a large variety of Dutch cultural institutions. There are about 50 collections (in english).
posted by peacay on Feb 19, 2006 - 7 comments

Have you read all these books? Hell, no. Yes, and many more. The answer is yes. No, these are the ones I have to read by the end of the month. Nay, I have written them. No, only four of them. No, and I never intend to live in a house where I can't find a book I haven't read. Not one-tenth of them. No, but I know why I bought each one. Probably not.
posted by mistersix on Feb 6, 2006 - 42 comments

In the year 2525 if man is still alive, future generations will be able to consult this book or type a request into their DIY UNIT™ and reproduce the effect of wood or marble.
posted by tellurian on Feb 2, 2006 - 18 comments

Books return home. Librarians do a little dance. Back in 1919, Collyer's Eye was the first newspaper to report the details of the Chicago Black Sox scandal. This year, as the Sox neared the end of their 88-year pennant drought, bound volumes containing one of the few remaining copies of the newspaper disappeared from the library of the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. This week, thanks to an apparent attack of conscience on the part of the thief, they mysteriously reappeared on a desk inside the University's main reference room. Libraries aren't always this lucky.
posted by MsMolly on Dec 9, 2005 - 6 comments

A xylothek is literally a library of wood, a collection of book-like boxes made from trees--the wood and bark with the seeds, leaves, flowers, fruit--or illustrations of the soft parts (site in German), inside.
posted by dhruva on Nov 9, 2005 - 29 comments

Home Economics Archive: Research, Tradition and History (HEARTH). From Cornell University, HEARTH is an internet resource collecting home economics texts from 1850 to 1950, including Meals that cook themselves and cut the costs, by Christine Frederick (1915), and The young woman's guide to excellence, by William A. Alcott (1852), as well as the Journal of Home Economics from 1909 to 1980.
posted by monju_bosatsu on Apr 11, 2005 - 6 comments

The city of Salinas, CA has decided to address budget concerns by cutting a number of services*. Most surprising, though, is the decision to raise ~$7Mil. (or 2, depending on the PDF) by closing all of the libraries* (hey, at least they're not burning novels) in a town whose population is mostly Hispanic.
Reminds me of that bumper sticker: "Welcome to America: Learn English."
Which begs the question; Where?

*pdf; 5% fewer calories than leading brands.
posted by odinsdream on Dec 27, 2004 - 57 comments

Rare Books. Links to virtual exhibitions, 1991-present.
posted by plep on Oct 3, 2004 - 2 comments

Gay Princes defeat NC Parents. Parents object to library book about two gay princes, concerned because being gay "is not part of their beliefs." Presumably books which discuss other things not part of their beliefs could also be an issue. Is this a basic confusion about the purpose of a library, or is any temptation just too much temptation?
posted by ewkpates on Mar 18, 2004 - 87 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

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

"The same thing we do every night, Pinky. Try to take over the world!" Who says 'Murricans are insular and self-absorbed?! Okay, everybody, but everybody's wrong. Proof positive? The absolutely last and final word that'll make everybody believe we really do care about their mangy foreign butts? The fact that the Library of Congress has a wonderful site called A World of Books: Annotated Surveys of Noteworthy Books from Around the Globe, devoted to "some of the most important and interesting books published abroad that an American public may have overlooked. The results provide a fascinating insight about other peoples and cultures." It's good times.
posted by jengod on Jul 9, 2003 - 11 comments

Is your local library in dire need of books? (link from Jackie) As budgets for books get slashed, libraries around the country are in real trouble. When long time web diarist Pamela Ribon heard about the situation at Oakland library, she took action, by sending them a book, and by publicizing their dilemma on her webpage. 2 weeks and 300 books later, Pamie's readers have done an outstanding job in helping out this library. She has also posted letters she received from the library staff. How is your local library doing in the face of budget cuts?
posted by kristin on May 12, 2003 - 35 comments

Religion in Hellenistic Athens, A Medieval Mirror, Losing Face: Status Politics in Japan, Afghanistan: The Soviet Invasion and the Afghan Response, 1979-1982 , Refried Elvis: The Rise of the Mexican Counterculture , Freud and His Critics and Memory for Forgetfulness: August, Beirut, 1982 --all are entire online books from the public section of the University of California Press.

I am, like, going so nutso--Jackpot!
posted by y2karl on Apr 3, 2003 - 25 comments

The Invisible Library is a catalog of books that appear only within other books: in other words, a collection of imaginary books. With such names as "Growing Flowers by Candlelight in Hotel Rooms", "How Beautiful are Thy Feet" and "The Bitch Pack Meets on Wednesday", though, some of these books are just begging to be written. (more...)
posted by taz on Aug 25, 2002 - 39 comments

Booklend is for those who love books but chafe at purchasing an unknown quantity and dislike the public library’s pesky practice of due dates and fines. MetaFilistine MarkAnd not only allows you to peruse his personal library, but will ship you the tome of your choice gratis and even sends a postage-paid envelope for you to return the book at your leisure. The NY Times jokingly refers to it as a "quixotic effort", but Mark’s library is bereft of Don Quixote. Perhaps you could donate this book, or others, to his library.
posted by Avogadro on Mar 14, 2002 - 19 comments

Someone please get this man some pancakes.
posted by mr_crash_davis on Feb 8, 2002 - 31 comments