June 2015

Chip Kidd: The art of first impressions — in design and life

Book designer Chip Kidd knows all too well how often we judge things by first appearances. In this hilarious, fast-paced talk, he explains the two techniques designers use to communicate instantly — clarity and mystery — and when, why and how they work. He celebrates beautiful, useful pieces of design, skewers less successful work, and shares the thinking behind some of his own iconic book covers.

‘Patience And Fortitude’ And The Fight To Save NYC’s Storied Public Library

Since it opened in 1911, the building has become a New York City landmark, praised not only for its beauty but also for its functional brilliance. In the words of one contemporary architect, the main branch of The New York Public Library at Fifth Avenue and 42nd Street is “a perfect machine for reading.” The grand Reading Room sits atop seven levels of iron and steel books stacks whose contents could, at one time, be delivered to anybody who requested a book within a matter of minutes via a small elevator. Those stacks also support the floor of the Reading Room above.

Financial support for The New York Public Library, however, was never as firm as its structural underpinnings. In a gripping new book called, Patience and Fortitude (the title, of course, derives from the names of the two iconic lions that guard the library’s entrance), reporter Scott Sherman details how deficits and bottom-line business logic very nearly gutted one of the world’s greatest public research libraries.

http://www.npr.org/2015/06/24/416780087/patience-and-fortitude-and-the-fight-to-save-nycs-storied-public-library

Book ’em: All libraries put up with plenty

“Our public library is a safe place but what people need to remember is that it is a public place,” said Celeste Choate, Urbana Free Library Executive Director. “So for example we encourage people to keep their possessions with them. You don’t want to leave your phone on the table and walk away because it’s a public place. You wouldn’t do that at Target. That’s the kind of thing I think some patrons forget. They feel so comfortable at the public library. They feel it’s homey and they forget that it’s not their home and that it’s a public place.”

From Book ’em: Area libraries put up with plenty | News-Gazette.com

How to Read A Book

The goal of reading determines how you read.

Reading the latest Danielle Steel novel is not the same as reading Plato. If you’re reading for entertainment or information, you’re going to read a lot differently (and likely different material) than reading to increase understanding. While many people are proficient in reading for information and entertainment, few improve their ability to read for knowledge.

From How to Read A Book

Moving The LGBT Collections Out Of “abnormal sexual relations”

A number of years ago, a young man came to the reference desk with a question for the Social Science, Philosophy & Religion department librarians.  He asked me why books about gay men were next to the shelves with incest and sexual bondage books.  He said that wasn’t how he was at all.  His face showed deep hurt and from his expression, I read that as a gay man who came of age in the 21st century, he had never experienced the kind of marginalization, ostracization and ridicule I had seen my friends fight when I was his age.  It had likely never occurred to him that the Dewey Decimal Classification (DDC) itself would assign lesbians, gay men, bisexual people and transgender people (LGBT people) to a call number, 301.4157, as a kind of “abnormal sexual relations” (modified 14th edition of the DDC).  But, as a librarian and classificationist, I knew that earlier call numbers had been more demeaning.

From LGBT Collections moving to new call number area | Los Angeles Public Library

Sioux Falls Man Donates Collection Of Nearly 18,000 Books

The University of Iowa has struck gold. Not the kind that lies in the federal reserve, but one of paper in a Sioux Falls man’s basement. After 20 years of collecting, he is donating his one-of-a-kind collection of 17,500 books worth an estimated three quarters of a million dollars.

From Sioux Falls Man Donates Collection Of Nearly 18,000 Books | KDLT.com South Dakota News – News, Sports, and Weather Sioux Falls South Dakota

How far can we stretch the public library? Library as Infrastructure

I propose that thinking about the library as a network of integrated, mutually reinforcing, evolving infrastructures — in particular, architectural, technological, social, epistemological and ethical infrastructures — can help us better identify what roles we want our libraries to serve, and what we can reasonably expect of them. What ideas, values and social responsibilities can we scaffold within the library’s material systems — its walls and wires, shelves and servers?

From Library as Infrastructure