Happy Fourth of July

I have always felt the libraries are at the foundation of democracy. This quote reminds me of that belief.

When I go into a library, I don’t have to worry about who is holding whose copyrights, why this book didn’t sell enough to continue to be available in any marketplace, how many other stories there are out there that I am missing because the storytellers don’t have the money or the property rights to tell them.

In the library, I am in a space beyond the marketplace, beyond consumption, beyond the money censors, beyond the noise. I am in a place where librarians have accumulated the knowledge and the stories important to me and my community.

The library is the embodiment and the refuge of our collective imagination. In the library, we learn just how big and full of possibility the world is and we build the kindling to fuel our creative fires and to change our culture.

—Jeff Chang, “In Defense of Libraries,” a talk given at a rally to save Oakland’s Public Libraries

Voices in the library

The libraries' most powerful asset is the conversation they provide – between books and readers, between children and parents, between individuals and the collective world. Take them away and those voices turn inwards or vanish. Turns out that libraries have nothing at all to do with silence.

- Bella Bathurst, The Secret Life of Libraries, The Guardian

Photo Credit: 'National Libraries in Singapore' by Inju

National Library Week!

This is the first post in a series celebrating National Library Week

"New frontiers of the mind are before us, and if they are pioneered with the same vision, boldness, and drive with which we have waged this war we can create a fuller and more fruitful employment and a fuller and more fruitful life."

-Vannevar Bush, (Director of the Office of Scientific Research and Development under President Franklin Roosevelt) 1945, Science—The endless frontier: A report to the President


Happy National Library Week! To celebrate I am going to try and post once a day for the next week - I have a bunch of ideas for posts sitting in my files, and I figure now is a good time to get them up here, especially while I have a lull in school work.

I wanted to open the week up with the above Vannevar Bush quote, because of its amazing relevancy. It was pulled from one of my course readings, and I was struck how appropriate it is for today's economic climate as it was in 1945. And today, as always, libraries and librarians can affect the evolution of tomorrow's knowledge and information.

More to come in the following days, including a guest post at the end of the week that has me pretty excited!

Stay tuned!

photo credit: New York Public Library, 1923, via The Commons

Feel the burn

While we may know well what personal fitness means, the concept of a fit library is ambiguous. Is it simply a matter of paying attention to the numbers, not unlike observing metrics such as the Body Mass Index? Does an increase in circulation or the delivery of more instruction sessions point to a fit library? Achieving library fitness is a combination of strategies that, like personal fitness, involve consistent behaviors, discipline, commitment to change, and having fun while shaping up.

-Steven Bell, Fit Libraries are Future-Proof, American Libraries Magazine October 2010

Photo credit: Nationaal Archief / Het Leven / Spaarnestad Photo (from The Commons)

Just 'cause they're digital natives...

"...even though young people may have been exposed to computers since they learned the alphabet and may be avid users of sites like MySpace and YouTube, college-aged students are no more likely to be natural-born researchers and scholars than anyone else." -Allison J. Head (2008), Co-Director of Project Information Literacy


photo credit: LSE Library via The Commons

Good Question

"Why is it, they ask, that the librarian always finds a 'dirty' book to be better written than a 'wholesome' one?"
- Not Censorship But Selection, Lester Asheim, 1953


photo credit: National Media Museum via The Commons