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
1969: The Year of Gay Liberation is an online exhibit of the New York Public Library focusing on the radical gay rights movements of the late sixties and early seventies, focusing on the organizations The Mattachine Society of New York, Daughters of Bilitis, Gay News, Gay Liberation Front, Radicalesbians, Street Transvestites Action Revolutionaries and the Gay Activists Alliance, and the events of the Stonewall Riot and Christopher Street Liberation Day. This is but one part of the NYPL's fine
LGBT collection, which includes, among other things,
resources for teens,
AIDS/HIV collections, and digital collections on
ACT UP,
Barbara Gittings and Kay Tobin Lahusen,
Bessie Bonehill,
Gertrude Stein,
Gran Fury,
Julian Eltinge,
Richard Wandel and
Walt Whitman.
posted by Kattullus
on Oct 1, 2009 -
14 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
