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A scrapbook of stuff I'm reading / looking at / listening to / thinking about...
Posts tagged "libraries"
A library without books
Stacks of books are history at Benilde library
…the tall stacks of 5,000 books that towered in the main room last school year are gone. Teachers brought a few into classrooms, but most were donated to schools in Africa. Now the room is filled with tables and chairs where students gather with their school laptops.
You know, they had a name for this kind of room when I was in high school: it was called study hall, and we held it in the cafeteria.
There’s a lot to be sad about in this article, like the student who admits, “I never really used the actual library before. I’m a senior in high school and never used a book.”
But even more terrifying to me: “This generation of kids … learning is a social experience for them.”
My learning in the library was very social, if you count socializing with dead people.
I’m a supreme extrovert, and yet I despised group work and never felt like I learned anything from my classmates, other than, you know, that I wanted to move the fuck away from home and get away from all of them. (Maybe I’m just a dick — I do believe that all art requires a certain amount of misanthropy…)
God, when I think of the hours I’ve spent in libraries, just following the scent of paper trails and wandering around, bumping into books… is my kid not going to experience this?
And as for social learning: the best formal education I got was 6 months of the tutorial system at Cambridge University, in which I read all week at the massive library or in my Raskolnikovian closet of a room, wrote a paper, emailed it to my tutor, walked over to his house and talked about it for an hour, then went off to pick up the books he gave me to read the next week. The only group work I did was play keyboards in a band and go get pissed at the pub. It was glorious.
“I’m completely library educated. I’ve never been to college.”
While digging for a 1971 Ray Bradbury essay called “How, Instead of Being Educated in College, I Was Graduated From Libraries,” I came across this Paris Review interview again.
Loved this bit about him stealing magazines:
I used to steal magazines from a store on Genesee Street, in Waukegan, and read them and then steal them back on the racks again. That way I took the print off with my eyeballs and stayed honest. I didn’t want to be a permanent thief, and I was very careful to wash my hands before I read them.
Bradbury claimed that the library was way more fun than school “because you make up your own [reading] list and you don’t have to listen to anyone.”
He considered the library a self-invention station:
I am a librarian. I discovered me in the library. I went to find me in the library. Before I fell in love with libraries, I was just a six-year-old boy. The library fueled all of my curiosities, from dinosaurs to ancient Egypt. When I graduated from high school in 1938, I began going to the library three nights a week. I did this every week for almost ten years and finally, in 1947, around the time I got married, I figured I was done. So I graduated from the library when I was twenty-seven. I discovered that the library is the real school.
Reading advice from Ray Bradbury in the May 1971 Wilson Library Bulletin (via)
El Biblio-Burro. Es una iniciativa de un maestro (en mayúsculas), que se llama Luis Soriano Borges, que recorre los pueblos más escondidos de Colombia para enseñar los libros a los niños. El burro se llama Beto y la burra Alfa.
The Biblio-Donkey. This is an initiative by a teacher named Luis Soriano Borges, who travels through the most distant and hidden villages of Colombia to bring books to children. The male donkey is named Beto and the female is Alfa.
The Biblio-Burro! I love all mobile libraries, and used to wish I lived in a more rural area every time I saw my hometown county library’s Bookmobile parked near the Civic Center when I was a kid.
This is incredible. More on Boing Boing.
National Library Week Poster (April 1961)
See some slogans from other years, here.
cf. Scott McCloud and Garbage In, Garbage Out
(via vintageanchor:: iloveoldmagazines :: survival2019)
(via vintageanchorbooks)
Okay, I know I am late to the party, but I got a Kindle Touch for Christmas, and holy shit did you know you could get Kindle books from some public libraries?? I just went online and downloaded The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood and A Visit From The Goon Squad in a couple of seconds. The future!
What Muncie Read - NYTimes.com
A historian found several ledgers and notebooks that identified every book checked out of the Muncie Public Library in Muncie, Indiana (“America’s most typical town”) from November 1891 — December 1902.
What do these records tell us Americans were reading? Mostly fluff, it’s true. Women read romances, kids read pulp and white-collar workers read mass-market titles….Fiction was overwhelmingly preferred, accounting for 92 percent of books read in 1903….The “classics” of American Lit 101 were checked out, too, but not often….A book of Walt Whitman’s poems was donated to the library, but not circulated.
You can browse the database here.
New York Public Library restaurant menu archive
The New York Public Library has undertaken a massive, crowd-sourced project to transcribe old restaurant menus, which they are loading into a searchable database people can use to find out what people ate when they ate out years ago. This menu, from the Park Avenue Hotel in New York, dates to March 14, 1900, and is one of the over 60 menus that have been transcribed so far. If you want to transcribe one or just peruse the collection, visit the library’s What’s On the Menu database.
Awesome.
(Source: lexinyt, via sashafrerejones)
