May 2017

As anyone who’s read Stein’s books knows, her approach encourages her subjects to air their grievances; as people opened up to her, they revealed stories of turbulence and violence, plus the tensions of classism, sexism, racism, and ageism. McNeil and McCain, who are currently working on an oral history of 1969, have noticed this in their interviews, too, and it may be Stein’s most remarkable legacy: the creation of a form that championed a mosaiclike reality, where every person’s account carries an equal weight as “truth.” Her “oral narrative” carves out a place where history is illuminated by people who had a hand in shaping it, yet had never been so much asked for their opinions, and are held up as sacred as the deeds that line history textbooks. “You can really document injustice and the way things went down so well,” McNeil notes. “I think Jean Stein deserves a medal for that.”

From How Jean Stein Reinvented the Oral History

Everyone knows knowledge is a vital aspect when it comes to moving forward. By looking at popular literature in a time period you can delve into the people of the time’s though process. Let’s get into the 3 best selling books from each decade starting at 1950-1959 and going to where we are now 2010 onward. If the books are available on Amazon links will be provided for those interested in reading them.

From 3 Most Popular Books From Each Decade 1950-2010 – Factual Future

Later on, Dan would learn there was a time when anyone could go to the library and read journal articles, and even books, without having to pay. There were independent scholars who read thousands of pages without government library grants. But in the 1990s, both commercial and nonprofit journal publishers had begun charging fees for access. By 2047, libraries offering free public access to scholarly literature were a dim memory.

This article appeared in the February 1997 issue of Communications of the ACM (Volume 40, Number 2).

From The Road To Tycho, a collection of articles about the antecedents of the Lunarian Revolution, published in Luna City in 2096.

From The Right to Read – GNU Project – Free Software Foundation

By contrast, David Imus worked alone on his map seven days a week for two full years. Nearly 6,000 hours in total. It would be prohibitively expensive just to outsource that much work. But Imus—a 35-year veteran of cartography who’s designed every kind of map for every kind of client—did it all by himself. He used a computer (not a pencil and paper), but absolutely nothing was left to computer-assisted happenstance. Imus spent eons tweaking label positions. Slaving over font types, kerning, letter thicknesses. Scrutinizing levels of blackness. It’s the kind of personal cartographic touch you might only find these days on the hand-illustrated ski-trail maps available at posh mountain resorts.

From The best American wall map: David Imus’ “The Essential Geography of the United States of America”

“It made me smile, this optimistic, romantic idea that you could leave a book with a message for someone. It reminded me of being in college, and seeing the notes that people would leave in the margins of the books they’d checked out of the library.”

With the help of creative writing mastermind and novelist Doug Dorst, Abrams built on the romantic idea of the found object as a storytelling device. He constructed, from the ground up, a meta-narrative, centered upon a novel titled Ship of Theseus, written by fictitious author V.M. Straka, in 1949.

From How J.J. Abrams Reinvented the Written Word with ‘S.’

Hopefully these examples show how at times it’s worth turning our gaze inward to discover how we can do things better. That’s why, although there’s certainly plenty of cases of library patrons behaving badly — from hackers to politicians to exhibitionists (to say nothing about irresponsible authors) — the focus of this list is primarily on librarians, along with the government and vendors that we do business with. So then, in the spirit of those words from Alice Roosevelt Longworth, “If you can’t say something good about someone, sit here by me.”

From Top 20 Library Scandals in Recent History – John Hubbard – Medium

Manuscripts can be seen as time capsules,” says Johanna Green, Lecturer in Book History and Digital Humanities at the University of Glasgow. “And marginalia provide layers of information as to the various human hands that have shaped their form and content.” From intriguingly detailed illustrations to random doodles, the drawings and other marks made along the edges of pages in medieval manuscripts—called marginalia—are not just peripheral matters. “Both tell us huge amounts about a book’s history and the people who have contributed to it, from creation to the present day.”

From The Strange and Grotesque Doodles in the Margins of Medieval Books – Atlas Obscura

That path from submission to revision and publication will sound familiar to modern scientists. However, Tyndall’s experience with the Philosophical Transactions—in particular, with its refereeing system—was quite different from what authors experience today. Tracing “On the absorption and radiation of heat” through the Royal Society’s editorial process highlights how one of the world’s most established refereeing systems worked in the 1860s. Rather than relying on anonymous referee reports to improve their papers, authors engaged in extensive personal exchanges with their reviewers. Such a collegial approach gradually lost favor but recently has undergone something of a resurgence.

From What it was like to be peer reviewed in the 1860s

The University of Reading has discovered pages of one of the first books printed in England, dating from the 15th century.

The pages of a mediaeval priest’s handbook, dating to between 1476 and 1477, were found in the University’s archives by Special Collections librarian Erika Delbecque while she was cataloguing thousands of items showing the history of print and graphic design.

From One of the first books ever printed in England discovered by university librarian | The Independent

The Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, or “Rock Hall,” is best known for their annual selection of new inductees. But the museum also boasts an incredibly comprehensive library and archive chock full of scholarship and memorabilia, from photonegatives of Aretha Franklin in the studio to Jimi Hendrix’s handwritten ‘Purple Haze’ lyric sheet to a full drawer of Kid Rock posters.

From The Rock & Roll Hall of Fame Is Looking for a Librarian – Atlas Obscura