Books and Libraries

“Last year about this time (just in time for Halloween), George Eberhart of the American Library Association posted on this blog a list of libraries that are said to be haunted. Now the library ghosts are back, by popular demand.

Each entry has been completely updated and about a dozen new libraries added. George has also included links to the websites of most of the libraries mentioned (as requested by a reader last year), as well as references to relevant entries in Britannica and other sources that have extra information.”–Brittanica Blog.

This is from the American Library Association via Brittanica, so it MUST be true, right?

Hundreds of thousands of books stolen by the Nazis are still in German libraries. A few librarians are acting like detectives, searching for the books and hoping to return them to the former owners or their families. However, many libraries have shown little interest in the troubling legacy tucked away on their shelves.

Part 1: Libraries hold thousands of looted volumes.

Part 2: Libraries Avoid Association with Nazi Looting

“Ten years ago today, a private American collector purchased the Archimedes Palimpsest. Since that time he has guided and funded the project to conserve, image, and study the manuscript. After ten years of work, involving the expertise and goodwill of an extraordinary number of people working around the world, the Archimedes Palimpsest Project has released its data. It is a historic dataset, revealing new texts from the ancient world. It is an integrated product, weaving registered images in many wavebands of light with XML transcriptions of the Archimedes and Hyperides texts that are spatially mapped to those images. It has pushed boundaries for the imaging of documents, and relied almost exclusively on current international standards. We hope that this dataset will be a persistent digital resource for the decades to come. We also hope it will be helpful as an example for others who are conducting similar work. It published under a Creative Commons 3.0 attribution license, to ensure ease of access and the potential for widespread use. A complete facsimile of the revealed palimpsested texts is available on Googlebooks as “The Archimedes Palimpsest.” It is hoped that this is the first of many uses to which the data will be put.”–Press Release

For information on the project and the data set, click here.

Jay Walker, 52-year-old founder of the Internet think-tank Walker Digital (known for Priceline.com), has built a library celebrating human imagination. Books and artifacts from a Sumerian clay cone to a Kelmscott Chaucer to a German Enigma code machine and a chandelier used in a James Bond film are showcased in a stunningly theatrical space.

For lavishly illustrated Wired article, click here.

Downtown Kansas City Library Garage, Kansas City, Missouri

New 152,864 SF, 485-car garage adjacent to the recently renovated downtown Kansas City library. An exterior treatment creates the illusion of a row of books, paying homage to great literary contributors of our time while adding whimsy to the cityscape (Construction firm website here) (Other views here.) (Non-English website containing multiple views.)

“Unique features: 2005 Bronze IDEA award winner for IDSA; 2005 Precast/Prestressed Concrete Institute Best Parking Structure; Glass elevator; One-of-a-kind graphics system for bookend replication; Precast stairs designed to look like books laying on their sides; Unique/customized brick patterns; Artistic banner system; Unique handrail system; Balconies for library users to read with future Internet Cafe possibilities.”–J.E. Dunn Construction Group

“Hidden in the Austrian Alps some 250 kilometres (155 miles) southwest of Vienna, Admont’s Benedictine monastery, which was founded in 1074 and spreads over 270 square kilometres (66,720 acres), has always striven for opulence.

“During expansion work in the 18th century, the monastery wanted to compete with El Escorial,” the sumptuous monastery founded by King Philip II near Madrid in the 16th century, says Gudrun Pacher, spokeswoman for the Admont monastery.”

Full article here.

“The 230 surviving First Folios are now the most minutely studied published works in history. The folio is unusual in that two centuries of records trace the path of specific copies. In recent decades, similar censuses have been held of all surviving copies of the Gutenberg Bible, Audubon’s Birds of America, and Copernicus’ De Revolutionibus. But the pursuit of folio-spotting remains unparalleled in literature, beginning with Thomas Dibdin’s first census of folio owners in the London area in 1824 and Sidney Lee’s worldwide folio census in 1901, detailing the condition and identifying marks of every known copy.” By Paul Collins in Slate’s Culturebox

For full posting, click here.

“Scholars of the 20th-century writer Franz Kafka were in a state of suspense last night at the news that the remains of his estate, which have been hoarded in a Tel Aviv flat for decades, may soon be revealed.”–Guardian, UK

Full article here.

“Information is exploding so furiously around us and information technology is changing at such bewildering speed that we face a fundamental problem: How to orient ourselves in the new landscape? What, for example, will become of research libraries in the face of technological marvels such as Google?”

Article by Robert Darnton in The New York Review of Books, v. 55, no. 10, June 12, 2008.

“The Shakespeare Quartos Archive , a freely-accessible, high-resolution digital collection of the 75 pre-1641 quarto editions of Shakespeare’s plays—a joint project of the Folger Shakespeare Library and the University of Oxford, with the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities at the University of Maryland—is one of five transatlantic collaborations awarded the first JISC/NEH Transatlantic Digitization Collaboration Grants.”

Press release here.