MetaFilter posts tagged with libraries

Transgender library worker files lawsuit

booknerd — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 11:29:29 -0800

Bobbie E. Burnett is suing her employers, the Free Library of Philadelphia, for discrimination. She's been employed there for nearly 20 years, but transitioned to a female gender identity in 2001, at which point she says discrimination set in. "Slurs hurled at Burnett by some staffers include 'freak,' 'man in woman’s clothing' and 'nigger,' according to the suit. On one occasion, when Burnett expressed wishes for a nice weekend to a coworker, the employee responded with, 'Burn in hell,' according to the lawsuit." Last year, the Library of Congress lost a lawsuit against a trans person over a job offer. LoC "claimed at trial that transgender people are not covered under federal anti-discrimination laws". The American Library Association has an active GLBT Round Table, but it can still be difficult to find trans information in libraries. Many universities have special resource pages instructing library patrons in searching for GLBT info, because "transgender" isn't a LoC Subject heading. Users need to search for "transsexuals" or "hermaphroditism" instead of "intersex".

Celebrate freedom: Read a banned book!

orrnyereg — Mon, 28 Sep 2009 08:46:46 -0800

Banned Books Week, held annually on the last week of September, emphasizes the importance of intellectual freedom and the threat of censorship. Here's a helpful map of recent book bans and challenges in the Unites States. The American Library Association lets you search the most frequently banned books by year and author.

Constipation is murder! and other gems from early advertising of the West

mudpuppie — Wed, 12 Aug 2009 13:14:41 -0800

The University of Washington Library's Early Advertising of the West, 1867-1918. Browse the collection or search by keyword. Some favorites:

It's in Town! Have you seen it? The AEROCAR. The smartest and most graceful looking car yet seen on the streets of Seattle. $2,150.00.
Alfalfa-Nutriment makes thin people plump.
I will send my aluminum eye cup FREE.
Animal Crackers are put up in lithographed cartons that will make a decided hit with the children...After it is emptied, the carton is to be cut into a circus wagon for which full directions are printed.
Prohibition Increases Drunkenness. But, Even moderate drinking hurts health, lessens efficiency
The Reed School for Nervous and Backward Children
Avoid trouble by having your kitchen boiler covered with asbestos
"I'se in Town, Honey!" (Aunt Jemima's Pancake Flour)
Too much sleep will increase the flesh...
A Black Kid for your window
Brown's Worm lozenges
Constipation is murder!
Cook stoves for Alaskan miners
A cure for the rupture
The Devil
Nearly two-thirds of all the chronic diseases spring, directly or indirectly, from some derangement of the sexual system...
Dr. Pierce's Body-Battery (for man and woman!)
1910 shower ad (Warning: Victorian nudity)
Remedy for alcoholism (contains milk sugar, starch, capsicum and ipecac)
Artificial limbs
Budde's water closets
Yet another racist ad, this one for gelatin
Neitro Sanatorium (Not A Bake Oven!)
Ostrich farming
School of Phrenology
Radium insect killer and Radium household cleaner

How Much Is The Fine When It's Overdue?

Xurando — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 05:28:48 -0800

Kindle is coming soon to a library near you. Amazon is sending mixed messages about the concept. Librarians are having an online conference to the discuss the issues.

DON'T YOU KNOW THE DEWEY DECIMAL SYSTEM?

7segment — Mon, 08 Jun 2009 13:33:37 -0800

The Rangeview Library District in Adams County, Colorado, has become the first library system in the US to drop the Dewey Decimial System in favor an in-house, word-based cataloging system. Termed "WordThink", the replacement is based on BISAC, "a retail-based standard for organizing materials[, s]imilar to what you might see in a bookstore." Library Journal's treatment of the switch.

Archival Sound Recording Maps at the British Library

LarryC — Thu, 14 May 2009 11:44:52 -0800

Mapping sound at the British Library. The British Library has organized several of its archival sound collections on Google Maps. The results include Accents and Dialects, wildlife and soundscape recordings from Britain, music from India and Uganda, and a whole mess of noisy frogs. You can read more about the Archival Sound Recording Project here or on the project blog. This post comes via the JISC Digitisation blog.

Magnificent collections collection

stbalbach — Mon, 27 Apr 2009 06:03:50 -0800

Public Collectors is an eclectic archive of off-line and on-line collections to which anyone can contribute. It is "founded upon the concern that there are many types of cultural artifacts that public libraries, museums and other institutions and archives either do not collect or do not make freely accessible." The best part is the discovery but here are a few to get started: *Marc Fischer's record collection in Chicago. - "I’ll give you my phone number and we can set up a meeting time that is mutually convenient. You can then come on over and listen to the record(s) you want to hear. Headphones will be provided if desired. My tolerant neighbors will not mind if we crank up the stereo."
*Adult Comics from Mexico (NSFW)
*Bibles stolen from hotels - "This collection is ongoing."

MIT faculty vote for university-wide Open Access mandate

tarheelcoxn — Thu, 19 Mar 2009 15:19:53 -0800

The MIT faculty unanimously adopted a university-wide Open Access mandate. Open Access got a big boost yesterday because of MIT's move. For those of you not in academia/libraries or who are too lazy to click either of the links, this basically means that if you're on faculty at MIT and you publish something, you grant MIT (among other things) the right to make that work available for free on a website they set up to be a repository for such work.

Cologne City Archive Disaster

stbalbach — Thu, 05 Mar 2009 06:37:37 -0800

Cologne City Archive is a six-story building containing 26 kilometers of shelves, 65,000+ documents dating from 922 AD, 104,000 maps, 50,000 posters, 500,000 photographs and 780 estates and collections, including Irmgard Keun, Hans Mayer and Jacques Offenbach. Considered a state of the art institution when built in 1971 and copied around the world, the building simply collapsed on Tuesday, destroying most everything. [1],[2](via)

When the building was constructed, a small nuclear-bomb proof chamber was included in the cellar to protect the most precious pieces. But in recent years, the chamber has been used only to store cleaning material.

Treasures unburied

Horace Rumpole — Tue, 03 Mar 2009 07:42:30 -0800

Libraries' Surprising Special Collections. Since Smithsonian apparently doesn't quite get how the internet works, I've rounded up the web pages for these collections: Griswold Chess Collection, Cleveland Public Library. Fore-edge paintings, Boston Public Library (my favorite) Arabic Papyrus, Parchment, and Paper, University of Utah. (Try the "browse" drop-down menu.) Tober Forgery Collection, University of Delaware. Nurse Romance Novel Covers, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. (Awesome!) Arents Collection on Tobacco, New York Public Library. (Click on "Collection contents, then "Tobacco, its History and Associations") Severson Collection of WWI Avaiation, Saint Paul Public Library. (Nothing here, unfortunately.) Judaica Sound Archive, Florida Atlantic University.

Europeana

stbalbach — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 05:36:15 -0800

Europeana is the new EU digital library. It gives multilingual access to two million digitized books and other items of cultural and historical significance held in over 1,000 institutions in the 27 EU states. There will be 10 million by 2010. Soon after its launch the website froze, its servers overwhelmed by over "10 million hits an hour".

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.

Where billionaires shop to build their libraries

nímwunnan — Wed, 08 Oct 2008 18:50:08 -0800

Jay Walker's Library was just profiled by Wired [via], but they failed to mention where many of those books came from. Big players like Maggs, Simon Finch and the Baumans still compose most of the rare book world. (Heritage is gone but Michael Sharp got four of their employees.) They're all excellent places to shop if you're building an Überlibrary, but, if you're Jay Walker, you start with Phillip J. Pirages. I had the pleasure of working for Phil for about two years starting in 2000. I won't go into detail, but I owed my job to Mr. Walker's insatiable appetite for books. Having heard so much about the Walker library as it was being built, I was thrilled to see the photos in the Wired piece. (I even recognized some of the books.) The rare book world is small, peculiar, and, besides the intrusion of the internet, probably operates in much the same way as it always has. Reputation and specialized knowledge matter. Phil's small firm, located in charmingly rural McMinnville, OR, is known to be as trustworthy and considerate as they get (despite my time there, ha ha) and regularly produces massive, meticulously-researched catalogues so full of charming anectdotes and useful bibliography that they sometimes end up for sale on eBay. Don't let the web 1.0 look of their site fool you (remember this is the rare book world) -- they are one of the big players now. I won't go into business arrangements, but it's well known now that Mr. Walker worked more closely with Phil than any other dealer to build that amazing library. As Phil used to say when he outbid one of the Big Guys, "Not bad for a farmboy from Iowa." I doubt that I'll ever again work for someone as honest and fair as Phil. If you have a chance to visit the New York, California, or Seattle Book Fairs, do yourself a favor and stop by Phil's booth. It should be easy to find, as it usually sparkles. Yeah, most of the stuff is phenomenally expensive, but he'll treat you well regardless of how much money you have, and even the cheap stuff is pretty great. Say hi for me.

A book is like a garden carried in the pocket

donnagirl — Fri, 26 Sep 2008 14:53:46 -0800

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.

Assessing digital formats for preservation and use

Gyan — Fri, 29 Aug 2008 23:52:49 -0800

Sustainability of Digital Formats : a repository of mostly technical information about digital content file formats related to storing images (moving and still), text, sound and websites

Literary Voyeurism

NotMyselfRightNow — Fri, 08 Aug 2008 08:16:14 -0800

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...) ...or perhaps you're more interested in how they write: JG Ballard. Walter Benjamin. Ray Bradbury. Anthony Burgess. Truman Capote. Ethan Canan. David Chase. Bruce Chatwin. Tracy Chevalier. Don DeLillo. Cory Doctorow. Arthur Conan Doyle. Umberto Eco. Warren Ellis. Ralph Ellison. James Ellroy. Jeffrey Eugenides. Michel Faber. Jonathan Safran Foer. Gustave Flaubert. Stephen Fry. Neil Gaiman. Malcolm Gladwell. William Gibson. Dashiell Hammett. Gustav Hasford. John Irving. Henry James. Elmore Leonard. Sven Lindqvist. David Mitchell. Joseph Mitchell. Grant Morrison. Haruki Murakami. Philip Pullman. Ian Rankin. Arthur Rimbaud. Philip Roth. Raymond Roussel. Will Self. Robert Louis Stevenson. David Thomson. Anthony Trollope. Paul valery. Virginia Woolf. ...or maybe you just were wondering, "What books sat on the bookshelves of famous people?" John Adams. Susan B. Anthony. Marie Antoinette. W.H. Auden. Karen Blixen*. Daniel Garrison Brinton*. Willa Cather*. William Congreve*. e.e. cummings*. Leonardo da Vinci*. Charles Darwin*. Alfrer Deakin. John Dee*. Theodore Dreiser*. William Faulkner*. F. Scott Fitzgerald. Benjamin Franklin*. Isabella Stewart Gardner. Gerald Gardner*. Ernest Hemingway. Robert E. Howard*. Thomas Jefferson. Samuel Johnson. James Joyce*. Franz Kafka*. John F. Kennedy*. Danilo Kis. Charles Lamb*. Rose Wilder Lane*. T.E. Lawrence*. Basil Henry Liddell-Hart*. Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis*. Eeva-Liisa Manner*. Mary, Queen of Scots*. Mather Family. Wolfgang Mozart. John Muir. Flannery O'Connor*. Walker Percy. Sylvia Plath. Ezra Pound. Joseph Priestley*. Rembrandt*. Samuel Roth. Carl Sandburg*. Sir Walter Scott*. Tupac Shakur. Joseph Smith. Adam Smith*. James Smithson. William Wilberforce*. W.B. Yeats*. (* denotes a library in progress) A nice post on the early days of "I See Dead People('s Books)" can be found here. Same for the very early days of "How We Work."

Libraries: Let them eat cake

Deathalicious — Wed, 30 Jul 2008 15:05:21 -0800

You're planning on baking a cake, but you're bored of your plain old square pan, round pan, or bundt pan? If you live in the US Midwest, it's very possible that your nearby library allows you to check out cake pans. There are cake libraries in a number of US states, including Illinois, Ohio, and a fair number in Nebraska. You will do quite well in Iowa, where you can check out a cake pan in Albert City, Ackley, Colo, Johnston, Nashua, North Liberty, Olin, Pella, Shellsburg, Stacyville and Woodbury County.

A cautionary tail

Horace Rumpole — Mon, 14 Jul 2008 17:04:02 -0800

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. Although librarians don't come out all that well in this story, archivists figure quite heroically in the author's sidebar on her research into the saga.

"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.

Cabinet of Curiosities

verstegan — Fri, 11 Apr 2008 10:40:11 -0800

Room 26 Cabinet of Curiosities features strange and surprising things from the rare book and manuscript collections of the Beinecke Library in Yale, including death masks, the philosophy of origami, the real adventures of Tintin, famous people and their pets, and American transvestite magazines from the 1960s.

I See Dead People's Books

stbalbach — Fri, 14 Mar 2008 08:46:39 -0800

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.

From Abati to Zoppio: historic Italian texts

Rumple — Mon, 10 Mar 2008 20:56:08 -0800

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

paper's hero: bill blackbeard

ethel — Wed, 20 Feb 2008 01:21:28 -0800

"Bill Blackbeard is a writer-editor and the founder-director of the San Francisco Academy of Comic Art, a comprehensive collection of comic strips and cartoon art from American newspapers. This major collection, consisting of 2.5 million clippings, tearsheets and comic sections, [spans] the years 1894 to 1996... "Finding that libraries were discarding bound newspapers after microfilming, he established the SFACA in 1968 as a non-profit organization and began collecting newspapers from California libraries, expanding his scope to institutions nationwide. Following three decades of acquisition, accumulating some 75 tons of material, he turned the SFACA Collection over to Ohio State University's Cartoon Research Library, where it is available for research. "It was Blackbeard who told Nicholson Baker about 'fraudulent' studies used by libraries to justify their massive destruction of books and newspapers, information documented by Baker in his book Double Fold: Libraries and the Assault on Paper (2001), a National Book Critics Circle Award Winner. text quoted from Blackbeard's wikipedia article..

Harvard boosts open access for faculty publications

mediareport — Sun, 17 Feb 2008 08:49:45 -0800

Harvard's Faculty of Arts & Sciences voted unanimously last week to mandate "Open Access" to published articles - a first at a U.S. university, though the dean will apparently grant a waiver to anyone who wants to opt out. More to follow? Peter Suber's Open Access News is tracking reactions. Inside Higher Ed article Open Access Overview More at the bottom of this post "Harvard authors are not supposed to publish from now on in some extremely high profile journals like Nature and Science who prohibit fee access of papers for a period of time after publication. Whether these journals will publish Harvard papers under these conditions now is a question we don't know the answer to. It could get very, very interesting." [Peter Suber previously in the blue]

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.