Garrett Hungerford has put together liszen.com. Wanting to find out what other librarians are saying about Library 2.0? Or perhaps you can’t remember who talked about “Fighting the Stereotypes!” a few weeks ago. Welcome to the search engine for librarians!
He’s been slaving away, taking links from LISWIKI and importing them to Google Co-op. The result is a custom search engine that sifts through 530 individual blogs.
Interval Library is really… something. Bonus points if you can name the library.
Anonymous Patron writes
“Check out Times2 –“The personal library — now there’s an idea” by Helen Rumbelow, political correspondent for The Times of London.
“http://www.timesonline.co.uk/newspaper/0,,173-2421 353,00.html
There must have been a moment when the last of Britain’s Victorian public bathhouses closed down, when a caretaker turned the key in the lock and set off home for a soak in his own tub, saying “that was a good idea at the time but now it’s over”.
When I stood in the Idea Store; the tarted-up library in East London that was shortlisted for the Stirling Prize for architecture this month; I thought exactly the same thing. The public lending library, another great Victorian institution, has had its day. To pretend otherwise is like bursting in on a woman luxuriating in a private bubble-bath and telling her to take her behind out to a public washroom for a good old hose-down. She has no need of that now, thank you.
The same goes now that we can afford our own books. Some might even say that the widespread affluence that caused the end of bath-houses and libraries is a good thing, but I may be pushing my luck here. I had better keep my voice down; I am in enough trouble as it is.
You see, people get in an awful tizzy about libraries. With each passing year they decline: in the past decade, book-borrowing has dropped by 40 per cent while the cost of the service, now at 1.3 billion, has risen by the same proportion. But the response to this failure is always a new bout of hand-wringing, a new set of celebrities pleading for the public to return. This is because to be anti-library is thought to be anti-book, literacy and all nice, decent British virtues that come with being shushed by a lady in a cardigan. Well, I am daring to report that books are booming in Britain, with sales up by 3 per cent a year since 2001. If you want the truth, it is that books have killed libraries.
Anonymous Patron writes
“Check out Times2 –“The personal library — now there’s an idea” by Helen Rumbelow, political correspondent for The Times of London.
“http://www.timesonline.co.uk/newspaper/0,,173-2421 353,00.html
There must have been a moment when the last of Britain’s Victorian public bathhouses closed down, when a caretaker turned the key in the lock and set off home for a soak in his own tub, saying “that was a good idea at the time but now it’s over”.
When I stood in the Idea Store; the tarted-up library in East London that was shortlisted for the Stirling Prize for architecture this month; I thought exactly the same thing. The public lending library, another great Victorian institution, has had its day. To pretend otherwise is like bursting in on a woman luxuriating in a private bubble-bath and telling her to take her behind out to a public washroom for a good old hose-down. She has no need of that now, thank you.
The same goes now that we can afford our own books. Some might even say that the widespread affluence that caused the end of bath-houses and libraries is a good thing, but I may be pushing my luck here. I had better keep my voice down; I am in enough trouble as it is.
You see, people get in an awful tizzy about libraries. With each passing year they decline: in the past decade, book-borrowing has dropped by 40 per cent while the cost of the service, now at 1.3 billion, has risen by the same proportion. But the response to this failure is always a new bout of hand-wringing, a new set of celebrities pleading for the public to return. This is because to be anti-library is thought to be anti-book, literacy and all nice, decent British virtues that come with being shushed by a lady in a cardigan. Well, I am daring to report that books are booming in Britain, with sales up by 3 per cent a year since 2001. If you want the truth, it is that books have killed libraries.
To show why, let’s go back to the heyday of the 1980s. In a modest South London reading room I whiled away the hours before adulthood, bringing home tracts of vegetarian propaganda; the more lurid photographs of tortured animals, the better; that I knew would annoy my parents. But then the Nineties, and the internet, happened. The visitors to the library of my childhood drifted away. Almost anything you could want there, the computer could do better.
The man who shuffled in with an embarrassing medical condition to research? Far more information online, and in the comfort of your own home. Ditto almost any research project.
What about those people; it sounds impossibly quaint now; on the waiting list for a new bestseller? For a few quid Amazon will deliver to your door. The other day I bought a second-hand book from Amazon for 90p; with postage it was the cost of a bus ticket to the library and I don’t have to hand it back after three weeks.
What about those who, like me, used to enjoy exchanging juvenile comments with others in the margins of library books? Well, the internet can do that kind of thing too. It’s called blogging.
Even with the internet, our appetite for books grew. As prices fell, people became rich enough to afford the convenience of buying their own, and educated enough to want to. Those with a social conscience buy in Oxfam, using it as a kind of library in which they give money to charity to buy books and donate them back. Those with less conscience simply go to Borders, select a pile of books from the shelves to splatter with cappuccino in the cafe;, then go home empty-handed.
So why do people go to libraries now? To judge from the scene I witnessed at the Idea Store; and the statistics back this up; books are decreasingly the draw. This flagship centre (they don’t call it a library for fear of putting people off) has escalators delivering people from the street straight into the brightly coloured halls. I stopped by the toy-filled play area, went up in the groovy lift to peruse the massage and dance classes, and had a cup of tea with a fantastic view of London through jewel-hued glass. The place looks great and it is thriving, except for those poor neglected shelves.
At the Idea Store I had a radical idea. Let us admit that people can buy their own books if they want to. The one exception to this is children; libraries are vital for encouraging reading and literary tastes. Children’s libraries should be lavished with funding but could be located in the kind of places where they go anyway, such as play centres or after-school clubs; all the better for helping with homework. For everyone else, we should completely redefine what we want.
If the Government decides to compete with 1-an-hour internet cafes, fine. If it wants to provide shelter on a rainy day, somewhere for those at a loose end to sit and read the newspapers, good. The book stock could then be centralised and if you wanted one you could order over the counter or online, to be picked up or delivered to your home in 24 hours, just like at the best independent bookshops.
Don’t think of it as the end of libraries, just the start of millions of personal ones. The library is dead, long live the library.”
Woody Evans writes “If you were a reader of ISHUSH, and you’re wondering about the quiet from that corner, you should know that it is fading out. It’s turning into woodyevans.com. New blog, new room to breathe. Thanks to everyone.”
Anonymous Patron writes “A convicted sex offender was observed using a public terminal at the Hartford Public Library for what a library official called “inaappropriate activity”. The homeless man was subsequently arrested on “charges of breach of peace and possession of child pornography”. The Courant reports .”
Seth Finkelstein writes “law.com reports:
“Under COPA [the “Child Online Protection Act”], a commercial Web site operator faces up to six months in prison and fines of up to $50,000 if found to have allowed minors access to harmful material.”. The ACLU is challenging the law, the trial is underway.”
Mister Cow Cow writes “Why Libraries Should Stock ‘Pale Horse, Pale Rider’ Call them buttonhole books, the ones you urge passionately on friends, colleagues and passersby. All readers have them — and so do writers. All Things Considered talks with writers about their favorite buttonhole books.”
Anonymous Patron writes “Connecticut’s WFSB Channel 3 reports that “a man was caught camping out overnight in the Manchester library with intentions of burglarizing the building”. “The burglar was arrested before making his way out of the front door, thanks to the library’s burglar alarm, police said.” Wires had been cut on computer circulation terminals at the main desk. The computers did not contain any valuable information according to the library director.”
Mister Cow Cow writes “ Yahoo! News A high school principal has decreed that Captain Underpants has no place in an institution of learning. Three 17-year-old girls were told to leave Long Beach High School on Wednesday after they showed up on Superhero Day costumed as the subject of the best-selling children’s books.”
Waggish has posted some impressive photos of Anselm Kiefer’s monumental, library-inspired artwork “Volkszahlung” (“Census”). The piece is at the Hamburger Bahnhof – Museum fur Gegenwart in Berlin.
Via wood s lot.
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