…the Internet Archive has announced a project to create an archive of one (physical) copy of every single book ever published.
When it opened in 1971, nearly 100 authors (including one of my faves) sent letters of congratulations to the new Troy, Michigan public library. The Troy public library, ranked as the 10th best library in the entire US for its population category, will be closing its doors in July 2011.
I’m at the Workshop for Instruction in Library Use (WILU) conference in Regina from today until Friday. Here are a few random thoughts from my first day… – it’s always enjoyable to attend a conference in a different city – staying in a hotel, eating meals in cool restaurants, checking out the attractions of a […]
A UK librarian has created a series of World War-style propaganda posters that are pro-library as a response to the ongoing cuts to UK libraries. (h/t to CH)
Following up on yesterday’s post listing Five Good Things About Librarians, here are some generalizations about the weaknesses many librarians share… 1. Librarians are often extremely anal retentive What else would you expect from a profession which has the organization and classification of the world’s information as one of its core purposes? Part of this […]
A few generalizations about my chosen profession… 1. Librarians know a lot about a lot You’ll probably never meet a class of people who have broader range of interests than librarians. 2. Librarians live to help For most librarians, a desire to help other people is core to their existence. 3. Librarians embody democracy By […]
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Posted 24 May 2011
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The quote that gives this post its title comes from Sue Gardner who is Wikipedia’s Executive Director and who Fast Company magazine recently called “The Librarian to the World“. Most of the time, I have a very positive view of Wikipedia – in fact, I’d go so far as to say it’s one of the […]
It’s a rare post that allows me to combine the three pillars of this blog – libraries, technology and politics. But today, the Canadian Library Association released their analysis of the various party platforms, identifying the areas which would be of specific interest or have an impact on libraries. (Now if they’d just included a […]
AskMF has a great list of novels that capture the essence of various countries around the world. (Unfortunately, why do I suspect that even with the wider selection offered by our province-wide SILS consortium, many of these won’t be available anywhere in Saskatchewan?)
I’m very interested in the impact of e-books on libraries and have been doing a lot of reading on the subject lately. I came across this article about the unprecedented fall of Blockbuster (which is contrasted with the rise of NetFlix) and it makes me wonder – are libraries more like Blockbuster? Or are they […]
