LISNews: Hawkish On Libraries Since 1999

From August through October of last year, 25-year-old artist and geographer Daniel Rotsztain boarded buses, trains, streetcars and his bike with an inky pen in hand and plenty of paper. His goal was to capture the city’s bastions of books by drawing each one of them in a “homey, but blue print style”— a feat he sometimes conquered amidst scorching heat and drizzling rain.

The project was born out of a conversation Rotsztain had with friends about their favourite library branches. "It’s a love letter to the library,” he told The Toronto Star. It is hard to just wander randomly, but to have this quest oriented me well to explore every corner of every borough of the city.”

He is releasing the images on his website and is eagerly anticipating drawing the 100th library to open in the Scarborough Centre area this spring.

Hat tip to Steven Cohen Library Stuff.

From our friends Libraries as Incubators via The Huffington Post:

#1: Libraries are quiet spaces--all the time, everywhere
#2: Book clubs are snooze-fests
#3: Library craft activities are old-fashioned, boring, or for kids only
#4: Libraries are about books--and that's it
#5 Libraries are boring
#6 Libraries are for nerds
#7 Libraries are for little kids

Follow @IArtLibraries on twitter for more inspiration from Erinn Batykefer and Laura Damon-Moore and their team. Here's the website.

From ABC News:

Nobel Prize-winning novelist Doris Lessing, who died last year, spent her early years in Zimbabwe. She is still giving back to the country whose former white rulers banished her for speaking against racial discrimination.

The bulk of Lessing's book collection was handed over to the Harare City Library (at the corner of Rotten Row and Pennyfeather), which will catalogue the more than 3,000 books. The donation complements the author's role in opening libraries in Zimbabwe, to make books available to rural people.

"For us she continues to live," said 42-year-old Kempson Mudenda, who worked with Lessing when she established the Africa Community Publishing and Development Trust.

"The libraries she helped set up are giving life to village children who would otherwise be doomed," said Mudenda, who said he used to trudge bush paths daily to reach remote villages with books.

Lessing's trust started libraries in thatched mud huts and under trees after the author was allowed to return to Zimbabwe following independence in 1980.

The Minnesota Department of Agriculture has given a thumbs down to a Duluth seed-sharing program that allows members to borrow vegetable seeds from the library in the spring and later return seeds they collect from their gardens.

State agriculture regulators say the exchange — one of about 300 in the United States — violates the state's seed law because it does not test seeds.

That could jeopardize the popular program, which attracted 200 members who borrowed 800 packets of seeds in its first year, manager Carla Powers said.

In September, the library got a surprise visit from a Minnesota Department of Agriculture seed inspector. He informed the library it was likely violating Minnesota's seed law, which regulates the selling of seeds.

Full article:
http://www.mprnews.org/story/2014/11/30/duluth-librarys-seed-sharing-program-hits-a-hurdle