Libraries

Originally a byproduct of the European mining industry, arsenic offered mining companies a means of profiting from a waste product, and offered manufacturers a means of obtaining a cheap dye. Thousands of tons were annually imported to the United States. The substance produced lovely hues ranging from deep emerald to pale sea-green. Arsenic could also be mixed into other colors, giving them a soft, appealing pastel appearance. The first application of arsenic as a pigment was as a paint dye. The pale green shade caught on as a “refined” color.

Card catalogs feel very old but are shockingly new. Merchants stored letters and slips of paper on wire or thread in the Renaissance. (Our word “file” comes from filum, or wire.) But a whole technology, based on scientific principles, for storing, retrieving, and circulating an infinitely extensible batch of documents? That is some modern-ass shit. And it helped create the world we all live in.

Here’s information from ALA/PLA if you wish to make a nomination.

Biloxi has sent a letter home to students. It plans to restore “To Kill A Mockingbird” to the eighth-grade classroom and begin teaching it again in class, starting Monday. Students do, however, have to ask to participate, by returning a permission slip signed by a parent to their school and their English Language Arts teacher by Friday.

An email to library members says officials were contacted last month by someone claiming to have information from the library system’s entire database of users. That contact included the names and addresses of about three dozen library patrons.

Phyllis Rose's book about her extreme reading experiment, in which she tackled the entire contents of a shelf in a New York library, has won high praise, but are such 'bibliomemoirs' a sign of an increasingly superficial literary culture or vital guides for a public swamped by choice?

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.