libraries
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Our Future Depends On Reading!
“Well-meaning adults can easily destroy a child’s love of reading: stop them reading what they enjoy, or give them worthy-but-dull books that you like, the 21st-century equivalents of Victorian “improving” literature. You’ll wind up with a generation convinced that reading…
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The Cutest Librarian
If you ask Kuzya, an assistant librarian at the State Hermitage Library in Novorossiysk, Russia, for a book recommendation, you might go home with A Tale of Two Kitties or The Brothers Kara-meow-zov. Because he is a cat. And he wears a bow-tie…
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250,000 Books Head to the Landfill
Book lovers, avert your eyes: the Fairfax County Public Library in Virginia took a quarter million books and threw them in the trash. It’s common for libraries to prune their collections, getting rid of outdated or unpopular books in favor…
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“Sabotage” Video Recreated by Coolest Librarians Ever
You gotta fight! For your right! To check out books and return them by their due date! Some librarians who are cooler than everyone else in the world decided to remake the Beastie Boys’ “Sabotage” video but with tough-love librarians…
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The Card Catalog Is Mightier than the Sword
Rumpus readers already know librarians are heroes, but it’s nice to see other people get it too. Here’s io9’s list of 20 heroic librarians who save the world in books, comics, TV, and film. From Rachel Weisz’s Evie Carnahan in…
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The Good News and the Bad News About Libraries
Bad news first: There are 49 libraries in Florida’s Miami-Dade County. Twenty-two of them are about to be closed. Some last-minute budget rearrangements might save six of those, but that will leave sixteen—one-third of the county’s libraries—on the chopping block.…
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When Banning a Book Is Good
Novelist Dennis Miller was participating in a panel discussion about censorship at Mansfield University’s campus library, when he joked that his book should be banned: “It has sex, violence, and adult language.” Library director Scott DiMarco’s response? Done and done.…
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Sympathy for the Library-Fine Dodger
You can’t always get what you want…and if what Keith Richards of the Rolling Stones wants is forgiveness for decades-old library fines, then he’s out of luck.
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Introducing (finally): the Digital Public Library of America
The site is live but DPLA appears to just be the beginning. An idea almost three years in the making, imagined first by the leaders of 42 of America’s top libraries and research institutions has now come to fruition. The Atlantic asked the…
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New Radical Youth Library Arrives In The Bronx
“The more you read, the iller you’ll be as an emcee…” –Rodstarz In the Bronx, the Rebel Diaz Arts Collective has turned a former candy factory into the Richie Perez Radical Library for Youth. The objective of the library is…
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Biting the Hand That Stamps Your Library Book
Last week, British children’s author Terry Deary (famous for his Horrible Histories series) declared that public libraries are unnecessary relics of a past age; they cheat authors of their rightful earnings and “are doing nothing for the book industry.” A…
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A Library Without Books
This should be interesting: a judge in San Antonio, Texas, is opening a library without books. Or rather, there will be books, but only digital ones, which patrons can read on e-readers in the library or at home. Since “[t]he…