Libraries are magical places, and even the smallest local branch over the corner deserves your attention, and you should pay a visit regularly. Artist André Chiote believes in the power of libraries, and has put together an astounding set of posters to celebrate their importance.
The city of Sydney is setting up a new library inside a building that looks, depending on who you ask, like a stack of plates, a spaceship taking off, or a cyborg hairdo. The library will occupy two floors, and will house a lot more than just books.
While it’s easy to forget just how many things are actually in the public domain, the New York Public Library is very much into making sure that its collection is as available as possible. Which is why over 187,000 public domain images were put online today.
Ray Bradbury has long said that his education came from libraries. It’s fitting then, that the Carnegie Library in Waukegan Illinois might become home to a museum devoted to the famous author.
In 2014, the King County Library system of Seattle distributed over 21 million items between 48 branches. As library systems grow, they’re increasingly turning to technology to manage the logistics of getting materials to patrons.
Dungeons & Dragons and libraries should be a natural fit. Both attract people who love books, storytelling, and lore. Early D&D gamebooks even point readers towards their local libraries for research, and many libraries host comic book-themed events or have D&D clubs.
In the library world, access to information is a human right, not to be tampered with or controlled in any way.
A library in a small New Hampshire town started to help Internet users around the world surf anonymously using Tor. Until the Department of Homeland Security raised a red flag.
It’s good to know that people are focusing on what’s really important. Local governments in a few different U.S. cities and towns have looked past the problems of homelessness, crumbling city services and displacement, to tackle the real crisis: people are putting up tiny “take a book, leave a book” libraries.
Like so many bully regimes before it, the Islamic State has a talent for propaganda. A big part of that effort is documenting the destruction of everything from architecture to artifacts, even if they’re unwittingly destroying replicas. In Iraq, the cultural heritage is real—and so is the threat.
Look, just put down the card catalogue (put it down) and take a very quiet seat, because the librarians are here. And they’ve got a couple suggestions for exactly what you can do with the old collection of vintage National Geographics you keep trying to pawn off on them.
We like to think of books as metaphorical spaceships, able to transport us into the head of an interesting person or across the galaxy. But these gorgeous libraries, with their elegant, modern interior designs, look almost ready to truly blast into space.
The Secret Service might be focused on how to design a better fence at the White House, but President Obama’s foundation team is focused on the design of a different building: His presidential library.
The largest libraries do more than just store books and newspapers on their shelves. When a library collection contains millions of documents, it needs complex and highly sophisticated logistical systems in order to serve its readers’ requests. It needs library robots.
There are some great research-minded tumblrs out there — I highly recommend JSTOR's — the Muncie, Indiana Public Library is celebrating technology month in February. They asked their local history librarians what they thought the best technology was. They were big fans of microfilm.
Harvard's flagship library, Widener, is an imposing granite cube built quite literally as shrine to the book. A central alcove cuts through the stacks to show off a prized relic: an original Gutenberg bible. But this is not the heart of Harvard's libraries. No, that would be its cold storage site, an anonymous…
Across Europe there are buildings that are nothing short of temples of literature, glorious structures where books are not just available, but placed in beautiful and honored shelves. Take a virtual tour through the stacks of some of the world's most jaw-dropping libraries.
Here's one for the book lovers (i.e., probably everyone reading this). Photographer Franck Bohbot's stunning architecture photos have captured grand movie theaters and glowing city signs, among other subjects. His latest work in progress is "House of Books," a lush tribute to the libraries of the world.
Before we had Google for all of our embarrassing questions, Pinterest for craft inspiration, and Craigslist for all of the odds and ends of life, more people relied on public librarians to field all manner of questions. And the New York Public Library still has records of some pretty odd ones.
This sign was put up in the Carnegie-Stout Public Library in Dubuque Iowa. When they say "near Batman," that's not a reference to being near other Batman works. It's a reference to a giant looming Batman balloon they put up in the new home of its illustrated novels.
