Underground Library

Delft Technical Library

Beautiful dreamer

Literature Versus Traffic, 10,000 Glowing Books in the Streets of Melbourne, Australia

Another really public library

In a phone box in New York City

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The man who turned his home into a public library

 "The only rule is that there are no rules."



The idea is simple. Readers can take as many books as they want, for as long as they want - even permanently.

BBC News Magazine, 20 Sept 2012 - for full story.

Occupied

I thought to let this blog wither away, but our official blog seems to have fallen asleep again, so I will return here occasionally.

Friern Barnet library has attracted the attention of the Occupy folks...

Reclaim Frien Barnet Library!

http://occupynewsnetwork.co.uk/breakin-news-reclaimed-public-library-latest-occupy-london-venture/

Information Literacy

Summon: The Path of Least Resistance from daveyp

Will be attending an information literacy training session quite soon, so Dave Pattern's comments are (as usual) relevant and thought-provoking. This slide show comes from an event in Sheffield today, related to Summon, search patterns, student research, etc.

Path of Least resistance – principle of least effort. 

Students don’t use Google and wiki because they are lazy – they use it because they are easy -  "Student’s should not have to become mini-librarians to use the library." 

Rock & Roll Public Library

Mick Jones contributed his personal collection for this exhibition at the Subway Gallery in London. in March 2012...

The rock 'n Roll Public Library page, with more pix, here


Sabotage Times article


The Clash blog

Vandalism and barbarism continues

This piece by Maggie Gee was first published on Thursday (in The Guardian) and pops up in The Week in Books in today's issue.

Midnight Library raid (read the whole thing)

On Monday morning, between 2am and 3am, when most people were asleep, Brent council sent in a team to remove thousands of books in cardboard boxes from London's Kensal Rise library, which local people, ably backed by household-name writers such as Philip Pullman and Zadie Smith, have been fighting to keep open since November 2010.   [...]


The Kensal Rise pop-up library. Photograph: David Levene

   [...]
However, the library service has never stopped operating. On the day of the closure, after one round of our expensive legal battle was lost on 13 October 2011, we opened our own Kensal Rise Pop-Up Library within the library's perimeter wall.

Apologies for use of excerpts without permission.

Carnegie research on libraries

Although CarnegieUK Trust are no longer involved in providing library services, they have recently created a detailed research report on the current state of play, with recommendations for the future.

http://carnegieuktrust.org.uk/publications/2012

In Cardiff we still have two branch libraries originally founded by Carnegie, as you can see in this article from The Guardian (Aug 2010)

"The library on Cowbridge Road East and Library Street, is one of two Carnegie libraries in Cardiff (the other is in Cathays) – founded by Scottish-American industrialist Andrew Carnegie as one of 2,500 across the globe. "


Cathays Carnegie Library opened 1907



Come with a story, leave with another

I love the Mighty Optical Illusions page.

Here's a link to a library campaign, Come with a story, leave with another.