bound

From some point after its incoporation to the early 80s, the Library Association of Portland, which later became Multnomah County Library, operated its own bindery. Besides visually and texturally uniting runs of periodicals and sets of reference books on the shelves, the bindery, together with the mending department, breathed new life into well-read books.
Some of [...]

The Case for Books

Uh-oh, look at that cover.

It’s a meta-book, about books, and the title promises to make an argument for why they are important in the present age. Judging a book by it’s cover, I’d say we are going to talk about books that are plugged in - based on the white cords, perhaps an Apple Tablet, [...]

too long for a tweet

a problem with hypertext as a media is that pieces of it tend to disappear. linear documents may disappear but by in large, when present, they remain whole.
this is a problem for libraries and for commercial publishers. for content creators and consumers, is it a boon?

More books about books

The book I’m almost finished with now is Proust and the squid: the story and science of the reading brain by Maryanne Wolf. Wolf is a neuroscientist who studies dyslexia, which she says is catch-all phrase for problems learning to read.
I’m not terribly impressed with it - the opening chapters make weak and culturally [...]

mobots4lib

One thing can lead to another, and it usually does. My last aside questioned David Weinberger’s quote in American Libraries that humans are hard-wired to externalize knowledge (e.g. writing), and suggested that it must have a social basis instead. I wanted to learn more and began reading Being there: putting rain, body, and world together [...]

echo

I usually only post about American Libraries, the magazine of the American Library Association, if I am going to make fun of it. The November 2009 issue has great columns by Joe Janes and Kate Sheehan, but however, also an interview with David Weinberger.
I just may love to hate this guy, but he reads [...]

lists of listmakers and the lists they make

My attention span is dwindling.
A few weeks ago - no - a week? I don’t know.
Recently, Twitter started letting you make lists. I sort of wondered, why?
Well I guess we all have different strategies for monitoring our social networks. I have a friend who only follows 50 people on Twitter. I’m not one [...]

and then i made another post

In And Then There’s This, Bill Wasik demonstrates how “viral culture” (or “viral marketing”) works and argues that for the most part, it is not accidental.
The most compelling bit of the book is the introduction, most of which is available in Google Books, where he argues that people writing blogs, tweeting and posting their [...]

really, it has something to do with libraries, you just have to make it up for yourself

Like a most other 0th-generation Oregonians I’ve met, I’m interested in the local lore. I usually find it hard to identify with people scalping indians, trapping beaver and cutting down the biggest trees they can find, but the landscape is fascinating, and I haven’t yet grown tired of its starring role in the recent, desperate [...]

geocities, you will not be forgotten

I’d like to take a moment to reflect on the passing of Geocities. This coming Sunday, October 26th, Yahoo! is shutting down the site for good. I am not going to tell you I learned HTML with Geocities, or wax nostalgic on how awesome it was that they let anyone have a website for free, [...]