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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

adventures with Aardvark

i signed up with the q/a service Aardvark a few months ago out of curiosity and some professional sense of “i should know about this”.  my experiences with it have ranged from unremarkable to amusing to somewhat upsetting.  I know a lot of librarians out there “slam the boards” or otherwise participate in non-library question [...]

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, [...]

YOUR STUPID LIBRARY BRANDING HERE pts. 1 and 2

Aaron wrote recently about EBSCOHost Connection, a service from EBSCO that puts their source material into search engines, then lets end users log in through their library.
Nice idea. It’s something I’m interested in: how do we get the library materials into the search engines?
Sometimes you see hits from JSTOR or PubMed also, and searching around, [...]

an end to who and where

Wood, James. How Fiction Works. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008

I checked out this book a few months ago and am finally being forced to read it (someone has a hold on it). I never took a real literature course in college, and 10 pages in, I’m already in over my head.
But my [...]

google books will get better, or will it?

This afternoon I used Google Books to help answer a readers’ advisory question. Keywords from the patrons’ question turned up in a 1971 issue of Horn Book, the children’s literature review.
Google’s misshapen snippet showed part of a summary of the book, but nothing more. I took the elevator to the sub-basement, got lost, asked [...]

getting married and having kids

Now and then I hear that reference service differs between public libraries and academic libraries in that public libraries give answers, whereas academic libraries teach.
I’ve never accepted this definition. True, it is not useful to make distinctions when you are running a collaborative multi-type reference service, but mostly, I just don’t see it, and [...]