Holiday Reading for Young and Old Alike

I have a guilty pleasure. I love children’s literature; the older, the better. There are some wonderful digital collections online and you will find treasures there. The New York Public Library has an excellent collection of children’s literature links (full-text sites and sceondary literature). Of particular note in its historical children’s lit section is the full text collection [...]

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Interesting International Library Sites

In this installment of interesting library sites, I thought we might look at what other libraries are doing internationally.
The Online Gallery of the British Library has to be seen to be believed. In the category Sacred, for example, there are the objects and pictures themselves, but also 78 texts that can be read and searched. The Library uses [...]

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We Scooped the Boston Globe!

Well, OK. That’s a bit hyperbolic. But a piece in the Globe over the weekend, Group Think, got around to noticing a phenomenon I wrote about a while back. Essentially, the ease of doing research online is actually limiting the scope of scholarly research to that which can be found only in the targeted search [...]

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Libraries Closing

Our current economic situation is taking its toll on cities and business everywhere. The Philadelphia News reports that the city is closing 11 branch libraries, even though the citizens are protesting the move. One older man interviewed for the story broke down in tears talking about the closure of the library he grew up with (Holmesberg Library).
There is film of [...]

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Copyright, Libraries, and Scholarly Communication

The Chronicle of Higher Education has a great article on the role librarians are playing to help researchers find their way through the maze of copyright law:
 Where can researchers find a guide to lead them through this 21st-century obstacle course?
The library, of course.
More institutions are creating or beefing up offices and programs in scholarly communication or [...]

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In Praise of the Second-Hand Bookshop

I found a lovely essay, Of Bibliophilia and Biblioclasm, by Theodore Dalrymple (whom I always enjoy reading) in the New English Review. It is a meditation on the pleasures of used books, the joy of discovering unknown treasures in used bookshops and much more.  Of one of his finds, he writes: 
One of my treasured books is [...]

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We’ve Been Discovered!

Shortly after posting the Mr. Bean video, I happened to check the stats for this blog and was dumbfounded to see that Mr. Bean had been “hit” 16 times (we are now up to 24) and from the same referrer– alphainventions.com. 
What is alphainventions.com?  Well, even its inventor has some trouble describing it.  His site [...]

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Mr. Bean Visits the Library

What can I say? Mr. Bean– you either love him or loathe him.  If you don’t already know him, this clip is as good an introduction to the character as any and a nice addition to our growing collection of humorous library videos.

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Does the Public Library Have a Future?

I ran across a very interesting “slide show essay” in Slate called Borrowed Time. It briefly discusses the architecture of 8 large urban libraries located in Washington, D.C., Chicago, San Francisco, Nashville, Denver, Seattle, Salt Lake City, and New York. The author reflects on the attitudes towards the library that the architecture reveals and cautiously supposes that the [...]

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Dewey Does Hollywood

I just discovered that Dewey– no, not Melvil but Dewey Readmore Books (see previous post) is going to have a movie made about him! Variety reports that Meryl Streep will play Vicki Myron, the retired Spencer Library director and author. No word on who will play Dewey.
 
I can’t help but be pleased that a movie is [...]

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