Via NPR’s Story Corps a reminiscence of a youth spent in the library when his father was employed there as a custodian. The boy’s name was Ronald Clark, and he became the first in his family to attend college, and later became a college professor.
October 2017
How one local librarian made all the difference to a 6-year-old recovering from a concussion
Lisa Cipolla has a saying: “Better living through story time.”
Which makes sense, since Cipolla is a youth-services librarian at the South Hill Library. A big part of her job is wrangling and entertaining young ones during the Pierce County library’s regularly scheduled drop-in story times for toddlers and preschoolers.
For Jackie Blackshaw, and her 6-year-old son, Tony, Cipolla’s saying has certainly proven true.
How UNH Turned A Quiet Benefactor Into A Football-Marketing Prop
That’s where most people left Robert Morin. A second, smaller wave of coverage focused on UNH’s troubling decision to funnel only $100,000 of his money to the library, even as it committed $1 million of it to a video scoreboard for its football stadium. But the full story is more troubling still. Through a series of interviews and public records requests, Deadspin has uncovered the 17-month backstory to Morin’s bequest. Like so many schools, big and small, UNH spent wildly on its athletic department. The university went a step further in trying to engineer a public relations victory, deceptively connecting a fragment of Morin’s life to its football splurge. The media eagerly repackaged the story as an inspirational fable.
From How UNH Turned A Quiet Benefactor Into A Football-Marketing Prop
Napoleon’s Kindle: See the Miniaturized Traveling Library He Took on Military Campaigns
“Many of Napoleon’s biographers have incidentally mentioned that he […] used to carry about a certain number of favorite books wherever he went, whether traveling or camping,” says an 1885 Sacramento Daily Union article posted by Austin Kleon, “but it is not generally known that he made several plans for the construction of portable libraries which were to form part of his baggage.” The piece’s main source, a Louvre librarian who grew up as the son of one of Napoleon’s librarians, recalls from his father’s stories that “for a long time Napoleon used to carry about the books he required in several boxes holding about sixty volumes each,” each box first made of mahogany and later of more solid leather-covered oak. “The inside was lined with green leather or velvet, and the books were bound in morocco,” an even softer leather most often used for bookbinding.
Dear Fahrenheit 451: Love and Heartbreak in the Stacks
In Dear Fahrenheit 451, librarian Annie Spence has crafted love letters and breakup notes to the iconic and eclectic books she has encountered over the years. From breaking up with The Giving Tree (a dysfunctional relationship book if ever there was one), to her love letter to The Time Traveler’s Wife (a novel less about time travel and more about the life of a marriage, with all of its ups and downs), Spence will make you think of old favorites in a new way. Filled with suggested reading lists, Spence’s take on classic and contemporary books is very much like the best of literature―sometimes laugh-out-loud funny, sometimes surprisingly poignant, and filled with universal truths.
AT UCLA, They’re Building Maps for Puerto Rico Hurricane Relief
A program has sprung up at UCLA to build maps for hurricane relief.
The mapathon activities were scheduled for today, October 5 at the Young Research Library. Volunteers will help add building locations to maps of the island. These maps will be used by the Red Cross and other relief agencies.
No experience, knowledge of Puerto Rico’s geography or software installation was required. Participants were asked to just bring a laptop and library staff and UCLA’s Institute for Digital Research and Education geographic information systems experts will teach them how to help with these efforts through some easy-to-learn mapping tasks in a web-based application.
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