MetaFilter posts tagged with books and library

Book of the Month

Kattullus — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 09:28:17 -0800

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.

"Biblioburro is a guy who comes on a donkey, he brings books."

Kattullus — Sun, 08 Nov 2009 22:04:27 -0800

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]

Wisconsin book burners

sredefer — Wed, 22 Jul 2009 22:32:59 -0800

"If you told me we would be going through a book challenge of this nature, I'd think, 'Never in a million years.' " A Wisconsin couple's petition to have certain "objectionable" books moved from the young adult to the adult section of their public library has lead to heated debates on both sides of the issue and has culminated in 4 "elderly" men filing a claim against the library in question. They're asking for a book to be removed and burned as it damaged their "mental and emotional well-being". The book is called Baby Be-Bop. The American Library Association's compilation of information on book burnings (200 B.C.E - present).

Censorship lives!

bad grammar — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 19:13:37 -0800

This site deserves to rank with this site and this one. Given the blatant ideology and the questionable aesthetics, it resembles a parody, but in the post-Palin era, it's become impossible to tell.

Think Different

spock — Sun, 24 May 2009 13:37:33 -0800

A private school student asks "Is it OK to run an illegal library from my locker at school?"

A Temple of Texts

mattbucher — Wed, 08 Apr 2009 10:27:54 -0800

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." Now in my own home I am surrounded by nearly 20,000 books, few of them rare, many unread, none of them neglected. They are there, as libraries always are, to help when needed, and who knows what writer I shall have to write on next, what subject will become suddenly essential, or what request will arrive that requires the immediate assistance of books on—well—libraries, or the language of animals or the pronunciation of Melanesian pidgin, since my essays tend to be assigned, not simply solicited, and because I am easily seduced by new themes. I can actually say a few things in Melanesian pidgin, none of them polite.

Biblioburros

The corpse in the library — Mon, 20 Oct 2008 08:27:22 -0800

Luis Soriano, with his donkeys Alfa and Beto, brings books to small villages in Colombia.

“Can you believe it! He hadn’t even heard of Pushkin!”

anotherpanacea — Mon, 01 Sep 2008 11:00:33 -0800

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." Unsurprisingly, the internet is full of bibliophiles who agree: "It's not you, it's your books." (via)

Best Books

stbalbach — Sun, 13 Jul 2008 19:12:52 -0800

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..

OCLC Meets Facebook

Rykey — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 17:59:03 -0800

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.

"Schools should continue to require library research so they can see how old folks used to Google stuff."

Kattullus — Sun, 01 Jun 2008 21:12:42 -0800

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.

Art Garfunkel's Reading Habits

Jasper Friendly Bear — Sat, 02 Feb 2008 15:11:03 -0800

“I tried ‘Gravity’s Rainbow,’ and I thought it was fraudulent:” Art Garfunkel’s Reading Habits. (previously on MeFi)

Visit your friendly local zine archive!

ethel — Sat, 19 Jan 2008 15:07:59 -0800

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... University libraries' collections in New Orleans, Wisconsin, Chicago, NYC, San Diego, San Diego again, Durham; Public libraries in Maryland, Oregon, San Francisco, Tennessee. also on line*. You can submit work (pdf) to some of these, and there's even a book about building a zine collection in your repository! *via Prelinger Library (also collects zines) Blog, and previously.

Tomb of tomes

stbalbach — Tue, 04 Dec 2007 18:36:14 -0800

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.

Sorting it all out

Toekneesan — Thu, 01 Nov 2007 07:46:09 -0800

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. See also, A Discussion With Anthony Grafton, The Nutty Professors, and Grafton's lecture on Faustus

Digitized Book of the Week

Mitheral — Wed, 08 Aug 2007 14:55:39 -0800

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.

Enemies of Books!

carsonb — Thu, 07 Jun 2007 13:27:29 -0800

Librarians as Enemies of Books
via the delightfully uptight Steve Mauer at BookMine.

Simon Must Be Boring

Partial Law — Sat, 20 Jan 2007 13:44:10 -0800

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.

Marlowe? Marlowe who?

caddis — Thu, 04 Jan 2007 11:07:03 -0800

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.

Which ones have happy endings?

geoff. — Tue, 22 Aug 2006 07:50:48 -0800

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.

Antique Celestial Maps

Gator — Thu, 13 Jul 2006 18:40:30 -0800

The U.S. Naval Observatory Library features high-res scans of images from antique books dealing with astronomy and navigation. Wallpapers, ahoy!

What is the world reading?

stbalbach — Wed, 21 Jun 2006 08:09:33 -0800

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.

The Memory of The Netherlands

peacay — Sun, 19 Feb 2006 10:40:35 -0800

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).

"Have you read all these books?"

mistersix — Mon, 06 Feb 2006 13:10:31 -0800

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.

Higgins, The House Painter

tellurian — Thu, 02 Feb 2006 19:50:11 -0800

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.