MetaFilter posts tagged with library and catalog

Bibliotheca Corviniana

Paragon — Thu, 06 Jan 2011 14:56:55 -0800

The library of King Matthias I of Hungary, the Bibliotheca Corviniana, was "the second greatest collection of books in Europe in the Renaissance period, after that of the Vatican." Destroyed following the 15th century Turkish invasion of Hungary (despite the efforts of Matthias' vassal Vlad III the Impaler), a few surviving codices have been digitized by the National Széchényi Library and the Library of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. The Bibliotheca Corviniana Digitalis contains some beautiful and damaged books and scrolls, but even the covers have a grimoirish quality to them. The site is mostly in Hungarian and uses frames - click on "Corvinák" for the index, and on the yellow circles to see the scanned codices in their entirety.

Stolen Descartes letter found at Haverford by Dutch scholar's online detective work

LobsterMitten — Fri, 26 Feb 2010 14:47:36 -0800

A letter by Rene Descartes, stolen in 1840s, recovered in 2010 by online detective work. The letter was stolen by Guglielmo Libri, inspector general of the libraries of France, who stole thousands of valuable documents and fled to England in 1848. Since 1902 it's been in the collection of Haverford College, its contents unknown to scholars, and nobody there realized that it was an unknown letter. But because they had catalogued it and recently put their catalogue on line, Dutch philosopher Erik-Jan Bos found it "during a late-night session browsing the Internet". (A Haverford undergraduate thirty years ago had translated it and written a paper on it, in which he recognized that the letter was unknown -- but nobody followed up and the letter had sat in the library since then until it was listed online.) The letter includes some last-minute edits to the Meditations, and some thoughts on God as causa sui. Haverford, whose president was a philosophy major, is returning the letter to the Institut de France.

Do I contradict myself? Very well, then I contradict myself, I am large, I contain multitudes.

Toekneesan — Tue, 01 Sep 2009 13:08:37 -0800

"Then there are the classification errors, which taken together can make for a kind of absurdist poetry. H.L. Mencken's The American Language is classified as Family & Relationships. A French edition of Hamlet and a Japanese edition of Madame Bovary are both classified as Antiques and Collectibles (a 1930 English edition of Flaubert's novel is classified under Physicians, which I suppose makes a bit more sense.) An edition of Moby Dick is labeled Computers; The Cat Lover's Book of Fascinating Facts falls under Technology & Engineering. And a catalog of copyright entries from the Library of Congress is listed under Drama (for a moment I wondered if maybe that one was just Google's little joke)." —Linguist Geoffrey Nunberg on Google's little metadata problem.

Stealing Your Library

mecran01 — Thu, 13 Nov 2008 18:32:20 -0800

OCLC, owners of WorldCat, are getting greedy. It's now demanding that every library that uses WorldCat give control over all its catalog records to OCLC. It literally is asking libraries to put an OCLC policy notice on every book record in their catalog. It wants to own every library. It's not just Open Library that's at risk here -- LibraryThing, Zotero, even some new Wikipedia features being developed are threatened. Basically anything that uses information about books is going to be a victim of this unprecedented power[ ]grab. It's a scary thought. Open Library provides a free alternative to WorldCat, provided it doesn't get sued into oblivion.

Turn Your Bookshelves into Art

thebellafonte — Tue, 04 Mar 2008 08:31:41 -0800

Brilliant bookshelves by color. What's that? You can't find The Scarlet Letter? Did you look under lipstick red? Colourlovers is a design blog where color-crazies go to peruse palettes, make their own swatches, and find color combination inspiration. The site also features posting capabilities (not unlike MetaFilter) where members can bring the brightest and latest to the attention of their colorful constituents (like this chess set.) If you're as into color and organization as me, you probably let out a hefty sigh after seeing the shots of these shelves. It's beautiful but it's also... comforting. Like the way a Germaphobe must feel after opening a pantry full of perfectly-lined spray bottles, rolls of paper towels, and rubber gloves. Or maybe your first thought was "is this practical?" Or "my books aren't that colorful." As some of the pictures show, this organizational structure allows one to station a book by any present color, whether it's the predominant color of the cover, the text of the title on the spine, or even the little red house emblem of the publisher. Hues allow for much flexibility and even whites are varied, some having a hint of green to them, some a whisper of yellow. There doesn't have to be a white section; these frosty shades can slide seamlessly in and out of the regular rainbow. And if you do judge a book by its cover, this could be an even more efficient method of cataloging than alphabetical.

First public library in nation to drop Dewy Decimal

stbalbach — Sun, 10 Jun 2007 20:13:22 -0800

The Prelinger Library is a small privately owned "public library" in San Francisco with the unique philosophy that browsing library stacks can reveal new knowledge, if the books are arranged for browsing. This is counter to most public libraries who rely on computer terminal searching, databases and the Dewey Decimal system to atomize books and subjects, with stack browsing a sort of random after effect, and in some places--like the Library of Congress--normally not even allowed. Now a (real) public library in Arizona has joined the revolution and claims to be the first public library in the nation to drop the Dewey Decimal system. Instead, books will be shelved by topic, similar to the way bookstores arrange books. The demise of the century-old Dewey Decimal system is overdue, county librarians say: "People think of books by subject. Very few people say, 'Oh, I know Dewey by heart.' "