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
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
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
