Category — Libraries and Archives

The reading cure

The idea that literature can make us emotionally and physically stronger goes back to Plato.

[From Books | The reading cure]

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This is actually one of my major insights, luckily i share it with many people. It is pretty simple. Great fiction, great books provide models for being, ways of coping, ways of understanding. They help you understand that yes, you are not the great lonely person confronting your challenges new, but that yes, this problem of yours is more or less the same as everyone else’s problems. Literature opens doors for realizing and empathizing.

Download the Original size

This is the referencetool system that I made years ago and is still publicly usable. it is just an install of wikindx3 with some customizations.

School Library Learning 2.0:

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some nice tutorials for web 2.0 and library 2.0

Librophiliac Love Letter: A Compendium of Beautiful Libraries (Curious Expeditions):
Librophiliac Love Letter: A Compendium of Beautiful Libraries

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the most beautiful libraries….

Cultural Ethnography: A Brief Report:
A user in the usability lab is like a tiger in the cage, helpless!
Study him in his natural habitat!
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this is a short report from an hci practitioner who has moved into the realm of ethnography. i think it captures one of the main failures of much of hci lab centricity, though… it could be states more broadly as. behavior in lab environments is not normal behavior, that includes the mental process and mode of preparedness of the individual, thus lab based hci does not map onto everyday use of computers in homes, businesses, etc. except in the most general senses of interaction’

About Us
(The Open Library):
What if there was a library which held every book? Not every book on sale, or every important book, or even every book in English, but simply every book—our planet’s cultural legacy.

First, the library must be on the Internet. No physical space could be as big or as universally accessible as a public web site. The site would be like Wikipedia—a public resource that anyone in any country could access and that others could rework into different formats.

Second, it must be grandly comprehensive. It would take catalog entries from every library and publisher and random Internet user who is willing to donate them. It would link to places where each book could be bought, borrowed, or downloaded. It would collect reviews and references and discussions and every other piece of data about the book it could get its hands on.

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sweet idea

Scriblio » About Scriblio:
Scriblio (formerly WPopac) is an award winning, free, open source CMS and OPAC with faceted searching and browsing features based on WordPress.

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this is cool, cheap, and worth trying.

Pontificial Lateral University Library – Italy:
Pontificial Lateral University Library – Italy

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mmm cool design

Public access group challenges Smithsonian over copyrights:
Grabbing pictures of iconic Smithsonian Institution artifacts just got a whole lot easier.

Before, if you wanted to get a picture of the Wright Brothers’ plane, you could go to the Smithsonian Images Web site and pay for a print or high-resolution image after clicking through several warnings about copyrights and other restrictions — and only if you were a student, teacher or someone pledging not to use it to make money.

Now, you can just go to the free photo-sharing Web site flickr.com.

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Carl Malamud and his group are doing some good work on freeing and sustaining the freedom of access to public resources

Blogger Perceptions on Digital Preservation:
Blogger Perceptions on Digital Preservation is an online survey from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s School of Information and Library Science. The study team is interested in hearing from all bloggers on their perceptions on digital preservation in relation to their own blogging activities, as well as the blogosphere in general

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this is an interesting project…