Libraries
GO WORLD
Brainchild of U.S. librarian of congress James H. Billington, the World Digital Library launched early this week. Increased is the internet/computer having world’s access to high quality digital representations of cultural artifacts. Novelties include browse by interactive timeline scroll bar, Dewey decimal…
nice reference
Library Journal has just released a comprehensive list of ‘best of reference’ 2009. Nice! We definitely plan to reference this list of references. For cheapskates/lazy home office bloggers like us, they’ve also included best of free web reference, which we’ve copied wholesale and pasted to the inside of this post (sticky, gross).
kicking culture in the !@$%ing face
The (epic) Fales Library at NYU (an archive housed within the larger Bobst library, we believe) has a bitchin’ collection of anthologies, zines, writings, and other ephemera from the NY downtown scene in the 70s and 80s called the Downtown Collection. The website is barely functional, with lots of broken image links, but you can still get in there a little bit. Our two favorite titles: Just Another Asshole #6, and How German Is It
library pr0n
Check these hot pixxx of stone cold smokin’ libraries all over the world. Yep, it’s “Red Hot and Filthy Library Smut“, brought to us by thenoist.com, featuring photos from the book Libraries by Candida Hofer.
They sum it up:
…one rich, sumptuous, photo of a library interior after another. It’s like porn for book nerds. Seriously. They are gorgeous photos, nearly all without visitors and just begging to be entered.
Enjoy!
Library Murder on the Orient Express
Oh, they shut down the mighty Donnell library, where we used to research term papers in the eighth grade*, to make room for a boom-era hotel owned by Orient-Express Enterprises Incorporated LLC. Now the economy’s gone all bust and the hotel is high-tailin’ it back to the Orient Asia. So what now? The original plans called for a scaled-back mini-library, from 42,000 square feet of public space to 19,000.
What will become of the gutted building? Affordable housing? Archive-style lofts? Spiraling Skyscraper Farms?
*100 note-card minimum, and oh, they had old copies of Playboy at periodicals circulation!
Punch Card from the Public Liberry
Our office has a scanner, and we have decades-overdue library book titled The Causes of the American Civil War (slavery. And nothing else . . . I did not read the book).
Sounds like a winning formula for an SD post!
Read on. If you’ve got the guts.
what, me worry, kein-ein-hora
Hot on the heels of Jesse Aaron Cohen’s 50th email exhibition of photos, graphic art, and ephemera, a bunch of Brown University comic-collecting nerds are showing off their collection, organized by theme: violence, prejudice, the threat of war, environmental devastation, and media manipulation. Oy.
Naw, we like serious lowbrow/highbrow mixups like this. The National Yiddish Book Center announces a traveling exhibition of NuJewish Comix.*
*not the real name of the exhibition.
We are saddened by the lack of web presence of this show, but maybe once it ends, you’ll tell your mother you love her and give her a call already?
womb with a view
Yeah yeah, these 360 panorama photos are a bit of a gimmick, but sorry, this full screen pano of a beautiful library got us hot and bothered. Full screen that mother!
Also, where is this? Surely someone can clue us in, we are a bit ashamed not to know.
hot live 24/7 librarian chat
Speaking of chatspeak, The NYPL’s Ask-a-Librarian page offers 24-hour chat access to a friendly librarian chatter/chattrix. Hello, nurse!
We came across this page after checking out Radical Reference, another ask-a-librarian site that specializes in helping activists and independent journalists (we consider ourselves the latter).
Thanks for the help, you wonderful people.
Sorry Cologne, that really stinks
Ugh. The Cologne city archives were destroyed today in a building collapse. The Times of London is suitably melodramatic: The German city of Cologne woke up yesterday without a memory. Welllllll, ok.
And wow, much like Brangelina’s new home on Long Island, there was a nuclear bomb proof Panic Room/Fallout Shelter–and it was used as a Janitor’s closet.
Works by Hegel and Marx were lost, along with town hall minutes dating back to 1376.
Real Life vs. Internets Life
Archivist, SD conspirator, and web-1.0 aficionado Jesse Aaron Cohen has just celebrated the 50th installment of his monthly email exhibition series, a set of curated images and links sent to subscribers once a month for the past several years. Often the material is drawn from his day job as archivist at a yiddish library/archive in Manhattan, but over the years there’s been plenty of other cultural ephemera included in the exhibitions. They are awesome! Subscribe to them!
Slides from all 50 months-worth of exhibitions are going to be shown as part of an upcoming ‘real life‘ event on internet bloggers and artists.
More info after the jump, takke.
Field Recorders’ Collective Recording Collective
This is a private/public synthersis we want to get behind–a collective (read: record label) providing access to private collections of old timey hill music and photographs, complete with digital mastering, and so forth. But maybe we spoke too soon…
Photo: Manco Sneed from the FRC
