Shh. You're in the Library.

Although some of these pictures may inspire you to gasp loudly. Nice job US getting several on the list. Was somewhat surprised to not see the Library of Congress on here. Go see the pictures, they are stunning. Hey, C in DC - one of your former employers made the list! Some of these Incredibly Intricate Libraries are pretty awesome also.

The 25 Most Beautiful Libraries in the World
(from BuzzFeed / Flavorwire)

1. The University of Coimbra General Library, Coimbra, Portugal
2. Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, New Haven, CT
3. University of Salamanca Library, Salamanca, Spain
4. The Trinity College Library, aka “The Long Room,” Dublin, Ireland
5. Old Library, St. John’s College, Cambridge University, Cambridge, UK
6. Philological Library of the Free University, Berlin, Germany
7. Central Library, University of Technology, Delft, Netherlands
8. The Harper Library Reading Room, University of Chicago, Chicago, IL
9. Frederick Ferris Thompson Memorial Library, Vassar College, Poughkeepsie, NY
10. George Peabody Library, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD
11. Queen’s College Library, Oxford University, Oxford, UK
12. Wren Library, Trinity College, Cambridge University, Cambridge, UK
13. Duke Humfrey’s Library, Bodleian Library, Oxford University, Oxford, UK
14. Suzzallo Library’s Graduate Reading Room at the University of Washington, Seattle, WA
    
15. The North Reading Room in Doe Library, UC Berkeley, Berkeley, CA
16. La Sorbonne Reading Room, Paris, France
17. Codrington Library, All Soul’s College, Oxford University, Oxford, UK
18. Cornell Law School Library, Ithaca, NY
19. University of Michigan Law Library, Ann Arbor, MI
20. Pontifical Lateran University library, Rome, Italy
21. Powell library, UCLA, Los Angeles, CA
22. Widener Library, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA
23. Fisher Fine Arts Library, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA
24. Pitts Theology Library, Emory University, Atlanta, GA
25. Bapst Library, Boston College, Boston, MA

I think I saw some of these books on the shelves in the pictures (video from kottke).

Where is that Library?

I sometimes tell people that I went through my junior and senior year at college not visiting the university library with any regularity. I knew lots of people who went there to study, but I preferred to study in my room. With beer. It's not that I didn't get books from there, it just wasn't the place I wanted to study.

Last month was National Library Card Month. I am a bit ashamed to admit that I don't have a library card. It is something that I really should rectify. In my defense, I don't have the time to read like I used to - I am currently reading a book that I started long ago and long after it would have been due back to the library. I do know where the library is, our local branch is on my way home. In fact, I just brought a box of books in to donate just the other day.

Do you know where your local library is? This site can help. As stated here before, my first "indoor" job was working at the public library, which recently celebrated its 50th year of service to the town. Now that I think about it, I worked there about thirty years ago. But I'm not going to think about that anymore.

It's possible that if my local library looked like this, I might go there more often. This is a concept for the "Wall of Books" at the Stockholm Public Library.

The Doomsday Clock

One of my first jobs was working in a public library. I shelved books, retrieved archived issues of magazines for patrons and sorted and read shelves for accuracy. It was a great job and I made a number of great friends during the time that I worked there. I was not interested in a job in food service, though a number of my friends did go that route.

I was a history geek (and a bit of a nerd) so working in the library was just right. I remember looking at old issues of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists and becoming fixated on the Doomsday Clock, which was featured in each issue. In January 2010, the Doomsday Clock was moved one minute away from midnight - from five to six minutes to midnight.
The Doomsday Clock appeared in the Bulletin first in 1947 at seven minutes to midnight and was an indication of how close mankind was to its own obliteration, particularly to the dangers of nuclear war. It has been adjusted 18 times since its inception - midnight being the point at which the end of the world might occur.

The closest the clock came was two minutes to midnight, in 1953, when the United States pursued plans to develop a hydrogen bomb, in addition to the testing of a nuclear device by the Soviet Union. The furthest the clock ever sat was seventeen minutes to midnight, in 1991 following the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War. The clock has also been used to monitor climate change around the world as well as biosecurity issues.

Look Out for the Library Police

LBA is off for the weekend at Nana's house, leaving Mrs. BA and I with only one child to take care of. SoBA is a handful, as is evidenced by this recent incident. He has taken to wanting his window down in the car on the way to and from school. The other morning, he wanted his window open and then proceeded to take his shoes and socks off, another thing he is wont to do. Now he does have the tendency to throw things out the window on occasion (we've lost a car, a sippy cup, and a snack container). We get to school and go to put his shoes and socks back on his feet and cannot find one of his socks. So, we ask him, "SoBA, where's your other sock?" The reply was quick and authoritative - "OUTSIDE!" He had tossed his sock out the window somewhere along Constitution Avenue on the ride in.

Tomorrow I will watch SoBA while Mrs. BA gets a well deserved day to herself to do her own thing (I have been out more than my fair share of late). I'm entertaining ideas as to what to do tomorrow. There is the Joint Services Open House (also known as the Andrews Air Show), but I don't think that's in the cards. The weather is supposed to be nice, so maybe we will head to the National Zoo in the morning (the animals tend to me more active in the morning).

There is also a chance that we will head to our local library to see what's going on there. Another popular declarative statement of SoBA is "READ BOOKS!" (everything is said with authority when you are SoBA). Maybe we will have some reading time at the public library, now if I can just find a way to keep him quiet.

In the news over the past few weeks were a few library-related stories worth noting here. First, it would seem that the Father of Our Country may not have told a lie, but he also did not return his library books. George Washington, according to CNN and many other news outlets, checked out two books from the New York Society Library, which was one of the first subscription libraries in the country, and appears to have never returned them. The fine? It has been calculated at approximately $4577.

A second story, which appeared in the Washington Post, discussed what the President [Obama] was reading, and more to the point, what presidents read, and what they tell people they are reading.

Finally, I know a number of librarians. In fact, I used to be married to one. But these passive-aggressive library signs are outstanding. Don't be mean to the librarian. The Library Police work for them. And they know where you live.

Getting Away from it All in Books

We've started visiting the local library with LBA and SoBA. Well Mrs. BA has (I have yet to be inside yet). This is unusual for me as I used to work in the local public library and growing up was always in the summer reading program and usually on a first name basis with the children's librarian (but Mrs. Flukinger was always Mrs. Flukinger, even after I started working there. And then again, I also ran afoul of the school librarians on more than one occasion. And I used to tell people that during my undergraduate days, I was more apt to be anywhere but in the library. Of course, now I am an archivist, which for many people is hard to tell the difference between us and librarians.

LBA enjoys the library and SoBA also enjoys getting a pile of new reading material. SoBA likes to bring you books to read to him, though very often he moves on to a new title before you finish the first one. And the word "WHY?" has made it into his vocabulary as in, "I can't read that to you right now, I getting dinner together." "WHY!" This is often spoken as he pulls you into the other room to sit and read to him.

One book that I recall reading growing up was My Side of the Mountain by Jean Craighead George. What pre-teen didn't dream of the day when you would run off into the woods to live by yourself for a while. The story was recently profiled in the Washington Post Magazine, where the author actually did it. Later the Post ran an online chat with the author of the article and Ms. George, who still lives in New York State, where the book is set.

I enjoyed working at the library growing up. It was a good time and it gave me access to books that I might not have read otherwise. I started reading non-fiction because I wanted to not because I had to from working there. The first non-fiction book I read? Fatal Vision, by Joe McGinnis - the story about Jeffrey MacDonald and the murder of his family at Fort Bragg.

I'm currently plowing through the new Stephen King book, Under the Dome, which was a birthday gift from Mrs. BA. At over 1,000 pages, I was afraid it would take me some time to get through it. However, it's really good Stephen King and I am already halfway through. I just have to be careful when reading it in bed. For if I fall asleep while reading it, I might break my nose when the book falls on my face.

Some time ago, kottke (of course), profiled a new architectural design, bookcase stairs. Created for the apartment dweller, it allows the voracious reader more storage for their books. I usually put my extras on Half.com along with a fair number of books that I am attempting to move from the family collection, but I still keep a good deal of books. For which I use Library Thing to keep track.

Whither the Research Library?

I am an archivist and I have a library degree. I started my professional career at an archives that contained mostly paper records. I am now an archivist who deals with electronic records. When I saw this link on Random Knowledge, which led to this article in the New York Review of Books, I thought it would make a good post.

The article in the NYRB starts out:

Information is exploding so furiously around us and information technology is changing at such bewildering speed that we face a fundamental problem: How to orient ourselves in the new landscape? What, for example, will become of research libraries in the face of technological marvels such as Google?

I have a friend who is very big on the Web 2.0 tools and there is certainly a facet to all of those applications / platforms / tools that might certainly contribute to the downfall of research libraries.

Back in the "dark ages" when I was getting my library degree, I took a class on reference. One of the classes focused on the use of online resources. Now there are multiple courses in the degree program that deal with online information and retrieval.

When I took my first job in archives, there were two computers (out of approximately 25 for a staff of about 30) that were connected to the Internet - and that was through a dialup connection to the University's servers. Nothing like loading a webpage (in 1994) and getting "[image]" and the text of the page (DOS browsers anyone?)

As mentioned before, I now work primarily with electronic records, having come from previous positions as a paper archivist. The electronic records program at my current employer has been around for more than 35 years and the need for preservation of electronic records is only becoming more and more important as the records continue to be generated in a variety of formats (Presidential email, anyone?)

The article mentions blogs, stating that "more than a million blogs have emerged during the last few years." Blogs are an electronic records as well. How are we preserving them? Where's the archive for them? I have recently been going back over my posts (more than 500 of them) checking them, retagging some, deleting some tags, checking hot links.

The problem here is, as the author points out, "Information has never been stable." There are still no lack of places that a researcher can go to look at information, but is it becoming easier to sit around in your underwear and Google the information you seek?

It is sort of the way I feel about newspapers. While I receive the RSS feeds for two newspapers that publish in areas where I used to live, I still like to READ the Washington Post everyday. I like the feel of actual paper in my hands. Mrs. BA is content to read the paper online, but I don't get the same out of that experience. Plus no funnies.

I used to work in a public library (long ago and far away). I was a page, and one of my responsibilities was periodically retrieving old magazines from the stacks downstairs based on a reference request from a patron. I also used to shelve books (you remember books, right? Hard things, paper inside, words on the paper?) and shelf read the library shelves (Hey, don't laugh, it was mind numbing, but you didn't necessarily get yelled at if you fell asleep).

The author of the article (nor am I prepared to) makes no stunning pronouncements. And yet, the question is out there. What will happen to the world's research libraries if we move toward an environment where everything is available online? Would all of the world's archives become like that dusty room where I used to fish out old issues of Consumer Reports? Let's hope not or we are all going to be in a lot of trouble.

I look forward to hearing your comments on this intriguing topic.

You Call This a Library?

From Overheard in the Office:

Patron: Ummm, I'm looking for a book.
Librarian: Okay, well, do you know what it's called?
Patron: No.
Librarian: Do you know who wrote it?
Patron: No.
Librarian: Are you just hoping that we have some sort of book?
Patron: Yeah.
Librarian: You know you're in a f***in' library, right?

- Austin Public Library
- Austin, Texas

Another nugget from the Southwest Airlines Spirit Magazine:

"Books account for 23% of the items in the Library of Congress. The rest of the library's collection of 134 million items consist of recordings, photos, maps, music, and manuscripts. But despite making up only about a fourth of the holdings, books still play a big role in the world's largest library. The Washington D.C., institution houses 32 million of them, stored on about 530 miles of bookshelves. And that number will only increase as the library adds about 10,000 items a day. Our favorite find? Old King Cole, a book so small - about 1 millimeter square - that you have to turn the pages with a needle. Talk about light reading."

The End of an Era at NYPL

For those in the "biz," we will recognize that NYPL translates to New York Public Library. A language blog that I get in my Google Reader had a story at the beginning of December about the demise of the Donnell Room of the New York Public Library. The bottom line: rather than fix up the building, it is being sold to a developer. Just remember people, technology ain't all that. Sometimes it's nice to hold a book in your hands.

Here is the link to the news story and the blog story by a man who will miss the Donnell very much. Should we all go chain ourselves to the doors? C'mon, who's with me!

Down (East) on Their Luck

As my faithful readers know, I do try to highlight archival content in my posts. I was reading Down East magazine recently (I love the state of Maine, having summered there every year growing up) and I came across the following article about the Maine State Museum.

The article starts off rather ominously, "The Maine State Museum has problems. A lot of problems." The problems are those that affect a great number of archives around the country, "it lacks attendance, money, staff, storage, and parking." Maine will celebrate its bicentennial in 2020. They need some help. Now, you may say that 13 years is a long way off, but those of us who work in government know that the wheels move slowly. The building that currently houses the Museum (and the state archives) is in need of renovation. The possibility of a relocation is also being debated in Maine.

The current director of the Maine State Museum arrived in 1992, just in time for Maine to be struck with a financial crisis. Layoffs ensued and the museum was forced to charge admission. Attendance dropped and continued to decline until the admission fee was revoked in 1996. Admission fees ($2/adults, $1/children) came back in 2003 and are still charged today. In 2006, attendance at the museum hovered at about 58,000 people. The museum's largest visitor bloc is (as might be expected) elementary school children. About half of the attendance figure are school groups.

The museum has a budget of about $1.7 million, which Director Phillips reports, "keeps the doors open" and supports its staff of about 20. Phillips has been successful at fund raising, bringing in about $3.5 million from private donors. State money is not available for exhibits, so the exhibits are installed and stay for many years.

The chair of the Maine State Museum Commission sums up the sorry state when she says, "Isn't it too bad that cultural areas seem to be the most superfluous government agencies."

When the current building opened in 1971, it allowed the memorabilia of Maine to come together under one roof. The building housed the museum, the library, and the archives. Prior to this, artifacts were scattered about the state. The ORIGINAL Maine State Constitution was stored in an abandoned elevator shaft. The handwritten reports by Joshua Chamberlain from the Civil War were in cardboard boxes in a DAMP POWDER MAGAZINE!

So, new building, everything better, right? Wrong. The new building was immediately obsolete. With the energy crisis of the 1970s, the concrete building had little insulation, nor was their adequate barriers to protect the state's treasures. The discussion of a new building (rather than renovating the existing one) carries a price tag of nearly $200 million. Maine recently built a new bridge over the Penobscot River for $85 million. The renovation plans would run about $58 million. While a new building would be nice, it's probably not going to happen, a fact that Phillips and his staff are fine with. They don't want to move.

So, my friends, go visit your local archives, libraries, and museums. Give 'til it hurts. We have the history and you'll be sorry when it's gone.

Help the David Sarnoff Archives

I usually attempt to incorporate archival content into this blog. After all, it is what I do. While postings of late have been consumed by the march to the Stanley cup, an archival matter has presented itself and I am asking my readers to consider helping out an archives in need. The Northeast United States was recently affected by a late winter storm that brought snow to many areas and heavy rains to parts of the East coast.

The David Sarnoff Library is located in Princeton, New Jersey and its materials were heavily affected from the recent storm. You can read more about it here. Suffice to say, they wound up with about 20 inches of water in their repository. The regional professional organization of which I belong (MARAC, you read about it last week, when we met in Scranton, PA) has pledged money to help with the disaster recovery. The organization is also making a direct appeal to our members to offer their own financial assistance. You can click on "Make a Donation" at the bottom of the story regarding the flood to link directly to PayPal and help them out.

The David Sarnoff Library documents David Sarnoff's life; the history of radio, television, electronics, and communications; and the history of the Radio Corporation of America (RCA). It is devoted to the study and understanding of the innovative spirit personified in the greatest technological visionary of the 20th century and realized in the accomplishments of Radio Corporation of America (RCA) employees at laboratories, factories, and offices in New Jersey and around the world. [from the library website]

I hope that you might consider helping them out. Please feel free to contact me or leave a comment if you have any questions.

February is Black History Month

Two articles in Thursday's Washington Post contained both archival content and pertinent topics on Black history.

The first article involves a librarian at a local school library here in Rockville. Linda Crichlow White found a collection of photos in the basement of a 91-year old cousin. While the article describes White as being in "full-on librarian mode," she really was in "full-on archivist mode." She has been spending her time going through crumbling photo albums, recognizing family members and realizing she needs to update her family tree.

As is often the case, most of the pictures are unlabeled. She was able to determine the bulk of the photos were taken in Boston around the turn of the century, in the early 1900s. She shared the photos with Aaron Schmidt, who oversees the photo collection at the Boston Public Library, he was stunned. Never before had a private citizen brought such a large collection of photos to the library's attention.

A portion of the collection will go on display Saturday at Zawadi, an African goods retailer here in DC. White is OK with parting with the photos, although she is unsure of the financial value, and remarked, "Most of these people are not my family members. They're in-laws." Schmidt is also negotiating to buy some, if not all, of the collection and bring it to BPL.

White believes the photographer is a great-great-uncle Charles H. Bruce, who she compares to James Van Der Zee, who photographed much of the Harlem Renaissance. White's parting words in the article? "Get older relatives to help you catalogue your pictures."

The second article concerns a project to conduct oral histories with African Americans. The initiative is called the Story Corps Griot Project. The major focus will be on World War II veterans and those involved with the civil rights movement. This project is the largest effort to collect oral histories from African Americans since the Federal Writer's Project in the 1930s.

Bon Anniversaire to the Pompidou Center

Spotted in the Washington Post on February 1, 2007:
“The Pipe Dream Realized: Paris’s Pompidou Center Turns 30”

I’ll over look the second “s” in the headline for the moment to comment on the controversies surrounding the Pompidou Center in Paris when it was completed and what is rocking the French art world these days.

In 1977, when a new building opened in Paris, it attracted a great deal of controversy at the time for its avant garde design. In the city of light, a new museum decorated with brightly colored pipes rose in the “new Paris.” Here we are now, thirty years later, and the Georges Pompidou Center is celebrating its 30th anniversary. It has become one of Paris’ most recognizable monuments. It holds the largest collection of modern and contemporary art in all of Europe. It is France’s second most visited museum, after the Louvre.

The current controversy, now that Parisians have gotten past the building design, are plans to expand the Pompidou Center to Metz, a city in the northern part of France, and a center in Shanghai, China. These plans, along with plans for a “mini-Louvre” in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates, has galvanized the French art world, with protests saying that politicians are “hijacking art for strategic and economic ends.”

As for the Center itself, it was conceived by French President Georges Pompidou (1969-1974), who envisioned a center that would become a magnet for the arts in Paris. The Center that bears his name also holds a library and a center for music research. And, despite the wailing of the French people when it was completed, was so popular that it had to be extensively renovated from 1997 to 1999. It had been designed to handle approximately 5,000 visitors a day and instead saw more than 25,000 a day. In the past 30 years, more than 150 million people have come through the doors.

Who Needs Google?

From the pages of the February 2007 issue of Down East magazine, an article about Bangor librarians and the reference request they have fielded. The article reports that in 1994, the Bangor Public Library had 29,111 reference requests in 1994, anything from "the population of Chad to the Latin Name for a little-known plant." In 2005, the number had risen to 30,800. One of the reference librarians, Susan Wennrich, offers, "the biggest difference is the way we receive them." While many still come in by phone, nearly 3,000 request arrive via email, where none were received in 1994.

The Bangor Library answers many questions that are not easily answered by search engines. The resolve a lot of questions on Maine history, much of which is not available online. And, Wennrich surprisingly states, "many people still don't have computers and Internet access, although those are becoming fewer and fewer."

While the librarians themselves are known to use Google and the net to answer questions, they are careful to avoid the pitfall, "It must be true, I read it on the Internet." They are careful to avoid Wikipedia, a wise move for many.

So, Archivalist, can you tell me all about the annual regatta that floats down the Kennebec each year?

Huzzah for the Library of Congress

A little history tidbit for a Friday. On this day in 1802, Congress passed an act calling for a library to be established in the U.S. Capitol. So, today, on January 26, we celebrate the birth of the Library of Congress.

You can read a good history of the Library here. It should be noted (before some of my Library of Congress friends do it for me) that the Library was actually established in 1800, when legislation was approved to buy the first volumes for the library. The books were ordered from England and stored in the U.S. Capitol upon their arrival in 1801. It was the 1802 law that defined the roles and operations of the new library as well as established the office of the Librarian of Congress, making that job a presidential appointment.

The current Librarian of Congress, James Billington, is the 13th Librarian of Congress. He was appointed in 1987 by President Ronald Reagan.

Graphic Novels in Libraries

A recent article in the Washington Post caught my eye the other day. It was actually on the next page after the Yule Log story below. The headline read, "Library Patrons Object to Some Graphic Novels."

It seems that in the Marshall Public Library in central Missouri, the director made a decision to try and reach out to young adults and began increasing the number of graphic novels in the library's collection. Amy Crump, the director, states in the article there are about 75 in the collection now. The explicit nature of some of the novels has prompted a challenge (the first in the library's 16 year history) from parents about the books.

While the issue is being discussed the novels in question have been removed from circulation. The American Library Association is aware of at least 14 challenges to graphic novels in the past two to three years. In response to the controversy the ALA published a set of guidelines for librarians to follow.

Never a dull moment in America's libraries. But keep your voice down.

Dewey Readmore Books (1987-2006)

From the Associated Press:

Dewey the library cat dies

SPENCER, Iowa - The final chapter is closed on Dewey Readmore Books. The 19-year-old cat, who became a mascot for the city library in Spencer, Iowa, died on Wednesday in the arms of librarian Vicki Myron.

Dewey was dropped off at the library in January 1988. Myron and another librarian found him in the book drop with his paws frozen in the ten-below-zero weather.

Dewey became famous after that. T-V crews came from as far away as Japan to do stories about him.

Dewey was named after the Dewey Decimal System, used in most libraries to catalog books.

He was diagnosed with a stomach tumor, shortly before November 18th, which was officially marked as his 19th birthday. His health rallied for awhile but he began hiding and the decision was made to have Dewey euthanized.

Google News Search for Dewey