Over the centuries, universities and communities built many libraries that now grace city centers and university quadrangles.
The BBC just released a series of photographs of Cambridge University Libraries documenting the construction of their 1934 library. http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-cambridgeshire-28466238 Take a look at the amazing photos.
Here's a sneak peak of the images you'll find when you follow the link.
E Readers are now ubiquitous in our book culture. It's difficult to differentiate print from digital from audio, at least for me. Nevertheless, this article asks if reading electronic books changes the way we read. Will e-books shape the future of libraries and librarianship? Will they change the current nature of the book? After reading the article, post your ideas.
Throughout this short semester, you'll have the opportunity to watch some movie clips that feature librarians. How does society see our profession? Why are we seen this way? It's hard to know especially when you are within the profession and not outside it.
Here are some wonderful images of librarians in science fiction, particularly movies, as selected by TOR books http://www.tor.com/blogs/2014/07/a-long-overdue-nod-to-fictions-best-librarians
My surprise? Almost every one of the films is represented in the class.
Most of us are familiar with books composed, written out or typeset, and bound in the West. The codex of folded sheets stitched or glued through the folds that open flat for the reader.
This moth, the Metropolitan Museum of Art displays and features books from Japan in their collections. http://www.metmuseum.org/collection/metcollects/feature/ These lovely books feature woodcuts and calligraphy on flexible rice paper, stab stitched in traditional Japanese fashion.
Image the shelves of Japanese libraries holding series of colorful surprises for the reader.
For the purposes of this course on the history of libraries, what should strike the viewer and reader is the fact that the museum holds books as objects for display. These objects are treated as art objects and are housed separately from the many books in the research libraries of the MMA.
Books as objects in the Metropolitan Museum of Art are perfect examples of the intersection of library and museum. The library catalogs of the MMA include books in all their locations, even in object storage areas. However, access to books treated as objects is more restrictive than those that are found in the vast library collections.
Does your local museum have a book collection? Are the books treated as objects or reading and research materials? Would you differentiate between the two types of collections? Would you call this a library or museum? The answer depends upon your perspective and the needs of your researchers and curators.
As we explore the history of university libraries, it's important to see how the libraries have evolved over time. The Bodleian Library at Oxford England has designed and built a new library to serve the needs of the digital age. The new building holds the old and the new, provides access to rare materials and electronic resources.
In this video "Building at 21st Century Bodleian," http://youtu.be/GZwwj9rvXNw Librarians and curators discuss how the needs of new library users will be met in this century.
The New Republic (July 7, 2014) published an article about Warburg, the famous art historian today http://www.newrepublic.com/article/118330/dreamland-humanists-emily-j-levine-reviewed-ingrid-rowland . It's a book review of the new book on the topic. While the article is tangential to the History of Libraries course this summer, I thought the illustrations of this humanist's library were worth sharing. Here's an intellectual who surrounded himself with the printed word and worked with many of his books. This is how I picture a nineteenth century academic's office, filled with books from floor to ceiling, arranged by topic and size, filled with works from his or her discipline.
As we read about different types of libraries this semester, consider how you picture libraries. Do they fill rooms? Do they cover all imaginable surfaces, and are the books read? What does your library look like?
Libraries, and their alter egos, archives and record centers, have been around for at least three thousand years, maybe longer depending upon the qualities you assign to collections of written words. We know that oral stories, histories, and accounts date back beyond the written word, passed down, changed, and cherished from generation to generation. As part of my training as a classicist, I studied Homer and Hesiod, Gilgamesh, and other early authors, learning about earlier cultures, looking for anachronistic words, hold overs from another language, dialect, culture, or era. I studied diplomatic exchanges found in letters between the Hittites and the Egyptians that documented the arrival of the sea peoples, those mysterious peoples from the east who invaded the Mediterranean World and disturbed the order of society before 1200BCE. These precious writings teach us much about how the world was and how rulers saw themselves.
Archives in the ancient world (see Lionel Casson Libraries in the Ancient World
) tell us much about how information was exchanged, organized, and retained for the next generation. Margo Fox's new book The Riddle of the Labyrinth: The Quest to Crack an Ancient Code
recounts how tablets written in Linear B were excavated by Schliemann and Evans, and how the language was deciphered. The tablets are that year's list of tributes and inventory in various cities inhabited by Minoans and Myceneans, written in a proto-Greek, that predates the Sea Peoples. It may be the language spoken by the peoples Homer sings about. Without these written clues, preserved for millennia, we, society, would know little about life in the past.
Materials collected by and housed in libraries, archives, and record centers provide clues to the past, to reading habits and interests, to intellectual interests of our ancestors and readers today.
As we study libraries and their place in history, think about how they reflect their society, their times. Consider how these collections of words and writings reflect a passion for learning and understanding the world around us.
How much do you know about your local library? Are you a user?
PEW Internet Research Project is running a survey between now and the beginning of September.
Are you a library user? Fill out the quiz, contribute to their survey. Here's the Link: PEW Library User Survey
