The World Digital Library, a free, multilingual collection of primary materials from around the world, of which Yale is a primary contributor, was launched yesterday.
The World Digital Library, which was officially inaugurated Tuesday at the Paris headquarters of UNESCO, the UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, has started small, with about 1,200 documents and their explanations from scholars in Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Portuguese, Spanish and Russian. But it is designed to accommodate an unlimited number of such texts, charts and illustrations from as many countries and libraries as want to contribute.
According to the Merriam-Webster Dictionary, a librarian is a person who specializes “in the care or management of a library.” That definition is far too mechanical. It leaves out the larger role librarians play in our democracy, facilitating access to information and ideas and promoting and protecting a precious First Amendment right: the freedom to read.
Former Dean of the Architecture School, Cesar Pelli and visiting professor, Billie Tsien have both been named recipients of the 2009 AIA/ALA Library Building Awards.
The new Minneapolis Central Library is a vital civic landmark and cultural center for downtown Minneapolis. The highly sustainable design, which arose from a collaborative, public process, reinvigorates the idea of the grand urban library for new generations.
A black-and-white film from 1930 showing librarians moving the 1742 Collection of books from the Old Library (now Dwight Chapel) to the newly-completed Sterling Memorial Library.
“Everyone has some kind of place that makes them feel transported to a magical realm. For some people it’s castles with their noble history and crumbling towers. For others it’s abandoned factories, ivy choked, a sense of foreboding around every corner. For us here at Curious Expeditions, there has always been something about libraries. Row after row, shelf after shelf, there is nothing more magical than a beautiful old library.”
Is your favorite Library closed during Spring break? Check out this directory of Wi-Fi access points from PCWorld Magazine. Search by address, city, state, country, airport or zip code to find free wireless service.
The special collections of the new Robert B. Haas Family Arts Library include content from three arts libraries formerly housed in separate locations — the Art & Architecture Library, the Arts of the Book Collection and the Drama Library.
“Treasures from the Robert B. Haas Family Arts Library” draws on each of these collections and showcases rare and unique, published and archival materials.
Highlights include Lodovico Dolce’s “Dialogo … nel quale si nel ragiona delle qualita`, diversita`, e proprieta` de i colori,” published in Venice in 1565, from the Faber Birren Collection of Books on Color; woodcuts and proofs for the illustrations of Ambrose Bierce’s “The Devil’s Dictionary,” published by the Limited Editions Club, from the personal and artistic archives of illustrator Fritz Kredel; an original wood engraving for the cover illustration of the 1943 Random House edition of “Wuthering Heights,” drawn from the papers of artist and illustrator Fritz Eichenberg; set designs for a production of “Salome” from the archive of costume and set designer Rollo Peters; cabinet photographs from the Rockefeller Theatrical Prints Collection; and a miniature puppet theater from the Arts Library collections of George Pierce Baker, the first head of the Yale University Department of Drama (1925-1933).
Regular public hours for the Robert B. Haas Family Arts Library are Monday-Thursday, 8:30 a.m.-11 p.m.; Friday, 8:30 a.m.-5 p.m.; Saturday, 10 a.m.-6 p.m.; and Sunday, 2:30-11 p.m. This exhibition will be on view throughout the fall semester.
“Saw-toothed glass dances in a conga line above leaping arcs of metal roof at the Peter B. Lewis Science Library at Princeton University. The signature hand of Frank Gehry is unmistakable.
“But where are the books?
“The stacks you’d expect to find in a building housing collections as varied as astrophysics, biology and statistics have largely been banished to a surprisingly small high-density storage space in the basement.
“The New Jersey university, with Gehry Partners LLC, has embarked on a difficult task: to reinvent the library for an age when information largely takes on electronic rather than print form.”
Urban fiction’s journey from street vendors to library shelves and six-figure book deals is a case of culture bubbling from the bottom up. That is especially true in New York, where the genre, like hip-hop music, was developed by, for and about people in southeast Queens and other mostly black neighborhoods that have struggled with drugs, crime and economic stagnation.
Robert B. Haas Family Arts Library, basement; view of the Great Hall,2008
“How often does an alumnus get the chance to reshape the educational institution that helped form his professional vision? Just ask Charles Gwathmey, who seized this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity by designing a major new arts complex for Yale University, where he collected his Master of Architecture in 1962.”
Think it’s impossible to find free books online? Think again. There are tons of online libraries that provide fiction, nonfiction and reference books at no charge. Here is a list of the best 25 places to read free books online.
A Wisconsin woman has been arrested and booked for failing to pay her library fines. Twenty-year-old Heidi Dalibor told the News Graphic in Cedarburg that she ignored the library’s calls and letters as well as a notice to appear in court. The incident cost Dalibor about $30 for the two overdue paperbacks. It cost her mother $172 to free her.
Digital Urban is reporting on White House Redux, a collaborative architecture project that seeks to collectively redesign the White House in Washington, D.C.
From the project website: Analogously, the concept of Source Code is readily found in the everyday practice of architecture in forms of drawings, agendas, documentations, ideas, specifications, and material libraries. However, none of the above, with the seldom exception of ‘ideas’, are freely redistributable, publicized, or allow for criticism and input akin to what an open-source model offers. The architectural practice, today, is skewed towards personal benefit and gratification of individual architects. Thus, the laws protect creative property, on one hand, but are constricting and oppose collaborative creativity that could contribute more rapidly to architectural theory and practice.
Read about another collaborative architecture project taking place in Second Life here and here.
