July 2016

Built in 1919 (Spanish), the theater was designed by architects Peró and Torres Armengol, with its dome, which remains today, created by Italian painter Nazareno Orlandi. The theater’s performances included tango, until 1929, when it became a cinema house. In 2000, the gorgeous theater was converted to a bookstore, and today it stocks around 120,000 books in its balconies, boxes, and former orchestra area. While that may not sound like much compared to the 2 million titles at New York’s Strand Book Store, the Ateneo has an ambiance all its own.

From Buenos Aires’s El Ateneo bookstore: Books fill the balconies in this 100-year-old theater — Quartz

In describing the people, books, and technologies behind one of the largest “shadow” libraries in the world, we find a tension between the dynamics of sharing and preservation. The paper proceeds to contextualize contemporary book piracy historically, challenging accepted theories of peer production. Through a close analysis of one digital library’s system architecture, software and community, we assert that the activities cultivated by its members are closer to that of conservationists of the public libraries movement, with the goal of preserving rather than mass distributing their collected material. Unlike common peer production models emphasis is placed on the expertise of its members as digital preservations, as well as the absorption of digital repositories. Additionally, we highlight issues that arise from their particular form of distributed architecture and community.

From Book Piracy as Peer Preservation : Computational Culture

Nominate your favorite librarian for the I LOVE MY LIBRARIAN AWARD sponsored by the Carnegie Corporation of New York.

You may submit your applications here until September 19. Hurry!

Paired to fantastic effect, a series of arch-forming shelving units and a black-mirrored floor create a wraparound tunnel in a Chinese bookstore, punctuated by a fracture leading visitors through the resulting passageway.

From Tunnel of Books: Curved Shelves Wrap Bookstore Walls & Ceiling | Urbanist

Archive Team is a loose collective of rogue archivists, programmers, writers and loudmouths dedicated to saving our digital heritage. Since 2009 this variant force of nature has caught wind of shutdowns, shutoffs, mergers, and plain old deletions – and done our best to save the history before it’s lost forever. Along the way, we’ve gotten attention, resistance, press and discussion, but most importantly, we’ve gotten the message out: IT DOESN’T HAVE TO BE THIS WAY.

This website is intended to be an offloading point and information depot for a number of archiving projects, all related to saving websites or data that is in danger of being lost. Besides serving as a hub for team-based pulling down and mirroring of data, this site will provide advice on managing your own data and rescuing it from the brink of destruction.

From Archiveteam

I still love books, and I still have a fair amount of trouble finding new ones to read that I’ll actually enjoy. Helping with discovery is the idea behind Reco, a new mobile app from Canadian bookseller and retailer Indigo, which provides users with a social network based around books, and people’s love thereof.

From Reco thinks books are better when they’re recommended by people you trust | TechCrunch

What can we do? Dare to schedule home time; put it on the calendar and celebrate it. Summer is happening in our back yards just like anywhere else, only with less people, less stimulation and more opportunities for self-directed play. In the beginning, if a child is accustomed to adult-directed activities, it might take a moment to make the shift. There are things you can do to assist the child in finding their way into creative exploration of their own environment.

From Create a “Loose Parts” Playground for Young Children in your Backyard – Buffalo Rising

Something we can do in libraries?

This week, the Japanese company Funai Electric announced that it would cease production of VCRs. Since it was reportedly the last company to make the increasingly obsolete players, the news effectively rang the death knell of a technology that had survived long past its own moment. To better understand the enduring legacy of VHS, I called Caetlin Benson-Allott, an associate professor in the English department at Georgetown, where she teaches courses on film and media studies.

From Caetlin Benson-Allott explores the legacy of VHS and VCR.

The margins of a medieval manuscript from a convent in Naples, Italy, are decorated with doodles of what are apparently devils, a farm animal and a person that were likely drawn by children, a new study finds.

From Children’s Doodles Found in Margins of Medieval Manuscript

Stacks, believed to be the last full-time, free-ranging library cat in Illinois, hops onto the desk, stretches out luxuriously and falls into her signature near-snooze, a restful state that invites pats from shy tweens, curious senior citizens, even a 1-year-old who proclaims ecstatically from her mother’s arms, “Like cat!”

From The last free-ranging library cat in Illinois – Chicago Tribune