October 2015

When it comes to where one might find rare works of art or valuable historical artifacts, most people think of museums or perhaps the Boston Public Library, particularly after the high-profile “loss” earlier this year of valuable prints by Albrecht Dürer and Rembrandt that were ultimately found 80 feet from where they should have been filed.

Many would be surprised to find, housed amid the book and DVD collections in many local public libraries, historical treasures ranging from the rare and valuable to the curious, such as Woburn’s swatch of the wool coat Abraham Lincoln was wearing when he was assassinated.

For the most part, local libraries are not in the business of actively collecting historical artifacts, but rather have amassed a hodgepodge of donated items of historical value and interest, said Jake Sadow, statewide digitization project archivist with the Boston Public Library.

From Some public libraries home to rare and valuable treasures – The Boston Globe

We’ve all been to the library to check out books, rent DVD’s, and surf the web. But now at three Phoenix libraries you can do more; work out.

Fit Phoenix unveiled a new way for people to improve their health all while reading a book. These treadmill desks are available to use at three Phoenix libraries including; Palo Verde, Harmon, and Yucca.

“What you do is come to the library with your library card, check into the computer like you normally would with one of the normal , but it has a treamil with it, and you’ll be able to walk slowly at 2 miles and hour while you use the computer,” said Jon Brodsky.

From Phoenix libraries unveil treadmill desks – Story | KSAZ

In November, researchers at UC Berkeley will begin a three-year project to restore and translate thousands of century-old audio recordings of Native California Indians. The collection was created by cultural anthropologists in the first half of the 20th century and is now considered the largest audio repository of California Indian culture in the world.

Nearly a third of the 2,713 recordings come from Ishi, the storied last member of the Yahi tribe who lived the last years of his life inside the University of California’s Phoebe A. Hearst Museum of Anthropology. Ishi died in 1916 from tuberculosis. He was 54 years old.

From Restoring the Long-Lost Sounds of Native American California | The California Report | KQED News

Books aren’t quite an endangered species yet, and the Association of American Publishers reports that sales of physical books are actually on the rise. Nevertheless, many who consider themselves avid readers have still never seen a bookplate in person—which makes sense, considering the trend peaked around a century ago. In fact, the use of bookplates started much earlier, with the oldest known plates dating to mid-15th-century Germany.

From When Book Lovers Guarded Their Prized Possessions With Tiny Artworks | Collectors Weekly

Libraries recently drew unexpected fire from Airbnb, one of tech’s hottest startups. But the truth is libraries play an essential role in fostering technological innovation in communities.

From Hey Airbnb, take it easy on libraries, they’re leading the charge in tech more than ever – TechRepublic

I’m an optimist. I think the pessimists and the worriers—and this includes some librarians—are taking their eyes off the ball. The library has no future as yet another Internet node, but neither will it relax into retirement as an antiquarian warehouse. Until our digital souls depart our bodies for good and float away into the cloud, we retain part citizenship in the physical world, where we still need books, microfilm, diaries and letters, maps and manuscripts, and the experts who know how to find, organize, and share them.

From What Libraries Can (Still) Do by James Gleick | NYR Daily | The New York Review of Books

American Libraries is no exception. However, unlike less reputable media, we go to original sources whenever possible to ascertain whether or not our spooks are spurious. And in so doing we have uncovered a hauntful of genuinely eerie events hiding amid the folktales.

From Phantoms among the Folios: A Guide to Haunted Libraries | American Libraries Magazine

As a boy, Dorothy’s husband, the late George Maycock, bounced around foster homes – one across the street from a university library.  He spent awe-filled hours walking among the library stacks, sometimes just touching the volumes, sometimes sitting on the floor to read.  Years later, this experience inspired George to recreate that feeling in the stacks by amassing his own collection, with Dorothy’s help.  Their library covered myriad topics, from math to science, religion, and biography.  The library even had its own card catalog, that Dorothy created and maintained.

Needless to say, when we heard of Dorothy’s dilemma, we wanted to help.

From Preserving One Couple’s Hidden Library | Internet Archive Blogs

Now, in a digital-age sacrifice intended to serve grand intentions, the Harvard librarians are slicing off the spines of all but the rarest volumes and feeding some 40 million pages through a high-speed scanner. They are taking this once unthinkable step to create a complete, searchable database of American case law that will be offered free on the Internet, allowing instant retrieval of vital records that usually must be paid for.

From Harvard Law Library Readies Trove of Decisions for Digital Age – The New York Times

Every one of these Google queries tells a little story about me: A search for advice, a quest for more knowledge, a hope for inspiration or reminder. On the 1st of March 2012 at 2.35pm, I typed in “Bloomberg” for the first time in my life – something that would result in an internship almost exactly one year later. And, apparently very desperate, I searched for the error “cannot read property of 0 undefined” on the 1st of October 2011 at 5.02pm; trying to understand Javascript for the first time of my life.

But when we climb up and look at all these Google search queries from further apart, we can see other narratives about a person’s life. We can see the bigger picture. A picture that is built out of these queries, but explains them at the same time. This blog post is about the insights out of my over 40,000 Google search queries between the 10th of June 2010 and the 19th of April 2015.

From My Google Search History – visualized · Lisa Charlotte Rost