12/03/2011 From 
Indiana University Libraries Film Archive
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CHECK OUT WHAT WE ARE DOING BY VISITING OUR BLOG!
History
In 2011, the Indiana University Libraries Film Archive was established as an archive for all Library-held motion picture film collections. With the establishment of the Archive, the University made a major commitment to preservation of all film-related materials by conducting a thorough survey of all time-based media held by the University and providing dedicated facilities for preservation and storage, full-time staff, and a partnering exhibition space at the IU Cinema.
Indiana University has a strong history in film production, distribution and acquisition. The University has been acquiring motion picture film since the 1930s and served as one of the leading film distribution centers of classroom films from the 1930s through the 2000s. In 2006, these educational film collections were transferred from the Indiana University Audio-Visual Center to the Libraries and this important, historic collection is now part of the Libraries’ rich archival holdings.
Other Library units with strong film holdings include the Lilly Library, which has been purchasing and accepting film and paper collections from important individual filmmakers, collectors and other professionals in the field of motion picture film production for many decades, and the University Archives, which has collected thousands of University related moving image collections since the 1940s.
About Us
The Archives are home to a diverse collection of materials ranging from personal collections of filmmakers and collectors, to a large number of educational films that were rented to schools, libraries, and colleges across the country from shortly after WW2 until the end of the century.
The Indiana University Libraries Film Archive collections include:
- The Lilly Library’s holdings of the personal collections of filmmakers Orson Welles, John Ford and Peter Bogdanovich.
- The Lilly Library’s Bradley Film Collection, one of the most comprehensive film collections ever assembled by an individual collector, consisting of 3,964 16mm films.
- The Indiana University Libraries’ educational collection, containing over 48,000 titles and dates from before WW2; the 16mm educational collection served for many decades as one of the largest distributors of educational and classroom films in the United States.
- The University Archives collections of thousands of Indiana University athletic game films and other motion picture material related to the history of the University.
Service Partners
Indiana University Cinema
…a place for film. The Indiana University Cinema is a state-of-the-art film venue located in the heart of the Bloomington campus. Each semester, it screens more than 150 films, including films from the Libraries Film Archive holdings.
Ruth Lilly Auxiliary Library Facility
All of Indiana University’s film holdings are stored in the 50 degree, 30 % RH, climate-controlled storage facility. Materials requested from the ALF, are delivered within 24 hours of the request.
Media Preservation Initiative
Indiana University Bloomington has organized a comprehensive effort to preserve its vast audio, video, and film holdings, the Media Preservation Initiative.
Mission
Indiana University Libraries Film Archive is dedicated to the preservation of and access to scholarship and exhibition of the motion picture film collections and related material held within the library system. The Archive achieves this by:
- Providing long term, climate-controlled, secure storage in a state of the art, conservation level facility.
- Maintaining active partnerships with scholars locally, nationally, and internationally, as well as with the IU Cinema, partnering universities and archives, and other venues.
- Allocating resources based on established priorities and seeking strategic partnerships and outside funding.
- Providing facilities, technology, data management and information retrieval that enable faculty and student researchers to access these resources to create new knowledge.
http://www.libraries.iub.edu/index.php?pageId=1002886
11/26/2011 From Library Thing 
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John Alden |
1687 |
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Isaac Allerton |
1659 |
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proposed |
William Bradford |
1671 |
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proposed |
Love Brewster |
1651 |
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proposed |
William Brewster |
1643 |
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unitemized |
Francis Cooke |
1663 |
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unitemized |
John Cooke |
1695 |
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unitemized |
Samuel Fuller |
1683 |
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unitemized |
Samuel Fuller |
1633 |
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unitemized |
Stephen Hopkins |
1644 |
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complete |
Elizabeth Tilley Howland profile | catalog |
1686 |
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complete |
John Howland profile | catalog |
1673 |
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unitemized |
Henry Samson |
1684 |
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unitemized |
George Soule |
1680 |
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Myles Standish profile | catalog |
1656 |
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Peregrine White |
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http://www.librarything.com/legacylibraries/list/3228472984
And from Legacy Library: Myles Standish
MylesStandish is a Legacy Library. Legacy libraries are the personal libraries of famous readers, entered by LibraryThing members from the Legacy Libraries group.
Myles Standish
CollectionsYour library (43)
Groups Libraries of Early America
About me Myles Standish (~1593 – 3 October 1656), Mayflower passenger and commander of the Plymouth colony’s militia. Served as a soldier in the Netherlands prior to the passage to America. Was the governor’s assistant in Plymouth, as well as the colony’s treasurer. He moved to Duxbury in the mid-1630s. Married first Rose –, who died early in 1621, and second Barbara –, with whom he had seven children.
About my libraryStandish’s library is given as documented in the probate inventory of his estate, taken 8 December 1656 and presented 4 May 1657. The books are valued at £11/13, out of a total inventory value of £358/7.
Questions? Comments? Concerns? Do you know of additional books which should be included here? Please contact Libraries of Early Americacoordinator Jeremy Dibbell.
Real name Myles Standish
Location Plymouth and Duxbury, MA
Favorite authors Not set
Account type public, lifetime
Random books from Myles Standish’s library
The passions of the mind in general by Thomas Wright
The eight bookes of Caius Iulius Caesar : conteyning his martiall exployts in the realme of Gallia and the countries bordering vpon the same by Julius Caesar
URLs http://www.librarything.com/profile/MylesStandish (profile)
http://www.librarything.com/catalog/MylesStandish (library)
11/21/2011 From Slate.com this article for all the library history buffs, this is about the users a century ago
This Book Is 119 Years OverdueThe wondrous database that reveals what Americans checked out of the library a century ago.
By John Plotz|Posted Thursday, Nov. 17, 2011, at 10:32 AM ET
Like many kids who grew up poor in the American hinterlands during the 19th century, Louis Bloom left few public traces. Born in Muncie, Ind. in 1879, he was the oldest child of a widowed mother who took in lodgers. City surveys, census forms, and his death certificate reveal that he worked in the town’s glass factories as a young man, and died in San Francisco in 1936 a government engineer. Given the family’s poverty, it is striking that all three Bloom brothers, Louis, Rudolph, and Landis (though not their sister Ella) are recorded as graduates of Muncie High School. That’s it. No way to tell how tall he was, what sports he played, the foods he liked, or how he dressed.
Photograph courtesy Bloom family.In 2011, though, a few hundred additional facts about the young Louis Bloom entered the public record. We now know, for instance, that on Wednesday Feb. 3, 1892, he ascended to the second floor of the Muncie City Building, turned left at the top of the stairs, entered the city library, signed the ledger kept by librarian Kate Wilson, and checked out The Wonders of Electricity. He came back the next day to return it and take out Frank Before Vicksburg; Friday it was Horatio Alger’s Ragged Dick; Saturday The North Pole: And Charlie Wilson’s Adventures in Search of It. Sunday, the library was closed; Monday Feb. 8, 1892 (his 13thbirthday) he took out James Fenimore Cooper’s The Deerslayer; Wednesday he returned for Ben the Luggage Boy (another Alger); Thursday he picked up Goodell’s The American Slave Code in Theory and Practice; and Friday Henry Mayhew’s (charming) biography of the astronomer Ferguson, The Story of the Peasant-Boy Philosopher. Altogether, 291 books checked out under his own name, plus another 28 in early 1895 under his brother Rudolph’s. The only extant piece of Louis’ handwriting is his name in the patron’s ledger. If library records are usually the night sky of cultural history, a dim backdrop to action elsewhere, Louis’s borrowing history is like a supernova.
For as long as I can remember, I have wanted to read like the dead. Not just to read dead authors—something a little bit creepier. Yes, I am aware that recapturing the actual experiences of long-ago readers is impossible, like visiting Mars or traveling in time. Still, I can’t help reading inscriptions, plucking out old bookmarks, decoding faded marginalia. I catch myself wondering who was reading this a century ago, and where, and why?
So when I learned about What Middletown Read, a database that tracks the borrowing records of the Muncie Public Library between 1891 and 1902, I had some of the same feelings physicists probably have when new subatomic particles show up in their cloud chambers. Could you see how many times a particular book had been taken out? Could you find out when? And by whom? Yes, yes, and yes. You could also find out who those patrons were: their age, race, gender, occupation (and whether that made them blue or white collar, skilled, semi-skilled, or unskilled), and their names and how theysigned them.
Photograph courtesy Sara McKinley.What Middletown Read is based on an incredible trove of unprepossessing ledger books found in an attic during the renovation of Muncie’s 1904 library, and brought to light by Ball State University English Professor Frank Felsenstein. “Middletown,” if you’re wondering, is Muncie’s academic drag-queen name: Ever since the sociologists Robert and Helen Lynd published a pathbreaking pair of books about the city (Middletown: A Study in Modern American Culture, 1929, and Middletown in Transition : A Study in Cultural Conflicts, 1937) the place has been awash in social scientists studying its every move; this database is in fact part of Ball State’s Center for Middletown Studies.
There have certainly been extensively researched books on single libraries before, but no previous project includes a database that supplies, to ordinary casual Web visitors, this kind of in-depth history about a library’s acquisitions and patrons. It’s the interlinked combination of three different sorts of data—patron records, borrowing records, and library catalogue—that makes this such a revealing cache. As Christine Pawley (author of an illuminating study of 19th-century reading practices in Osage, Iowa) put it when I spoke with her, What Middletown Read is “an absolute goldmine, like nothing else I know.”
(If comparable records ever do crop up in the United States, they’ll likely be from the same time: Bernadette Lear has even compiled a list of 700 libraries that retain some century-old circulation information. Precious little data for libraries from before 1860 exists, and ledgers went out of favor for recording transactions by the 1920s. Moreover, privacy considerations mean that library records from later eras are either discarded right away, or off limits to researchers.)
Wayne Wiegand, professor emeritus of library and information sciences at Florida State, has argued that library use should be understood not as a lonely act but as part of the complex story of the social nature of reading. Sometimes we read what others of our age, gender, and class are reading, sometimes we strike out on our own, but the choices readers make always involve them in a public network, not just a public institution. Louis Bloom was a fabulous autodidact, but also just one of many Gilded Age youth coming of age in a town that the Indiana gas boom was rapidly turning into a small city.
Felsenstein and his co-director, Ball State history professor James Connolly, have been working extensively with the data about Muncie’s 4,000 borrowers, and generously shared many of their preliminary findings with me for this article. (More of their research can be found here and here. Look for their co-authored book sometime in 2013.) For example, they discovered that fewer than 38 percent of Muncie patrons were blue-collar, though more than 60 percent of Muncie’s families were blue-collar. They also discovered that blue-collar families were significantly more likely to have multiple library cards than white-collar families. With little spare cash to buy books—and with few forms of affordable daily entertainment—the single book permitted out on each card frequently was not enough for a blue-collar family with several avid readers. Blue-collar borrowers were also more likely to borrow classics, or older books, while white-collar readers gravitated to the latest fashionable books: Felsenstein and Connolly speculate this may reflect the availability of older books in the houses of wealthier patrons.
The website’s deliberately open architecture has made it easy for data hounds, scholarly and otherwise, to jump in. Douglas Galbi, for example recently analyzed the median date of publication of the database’s 20 most popular books: 1878. Hence, he pointed out, these books were probably between 13 and 24 years old when read, far older than the average book checked out nowadays.* Galbi also pointed out Middletown readers’ predilection for government publications: The 1892 Report of the tests of metals and other materials for industrial purposes … had 107 recorded borrowers—Charles Dickens’ Bleak House, by contrast, clocked 28.
When I jumped into the numbers game myself, the first thing I noticed was the incredible popularity of fiction in the library. Of the 175,218 transactions (that works out to about 39 per patron over a 10-year period, though there were quite a few wildly voracious patrons who borrowed hundreds of books) 137,188 (78 percent) were works of fiction. Of the 4,008 active patrons, all but 185 had borrowed at least one novel.
Who were they reading? Herman Melville barely registered (68 loans; the library did not even own Moby-Dick), Charles Dickens (587) and James Fenimore Cooper (691) did surprisingly poorly given their 19th-century reputations. Twain was a solid shower (877). When it came to authors I truly admire, only Louisa May Alcott (2,962) and Frances Hodgson Burnett (1,462) cracked the top 15, which is instead filled out with the syrupy Rosa Carey (1,922) and run-of-the-mill Hardy Boys forerunners like Oliver Optic (5,208) and Charles Fosdick (7,399).
I formulated research questions: Can you make any demographic generalizations about Mark Twain’s readers? Well, none of Muncie’s 15 known African-American patrons (yes, that’s 15, among at least 739 African-American residents—now there’s a research question) ever borrowed a Twain book. Can you make something of the fact that 696 women borrowed at least one of Martha Finley’s highly sentimental and domestic Elsie novels—but so did 544 men (not boys, though: Almost all the male borrowers were born before 1878)? Or the fact that four books of short stories by Henry James were checked out 142 times, but that there is not a single loan of any of his novels? Was it meaningful that the African-American teenager Grant Frazier, himself a boot-black, had checked out five of the most popular Horatio Alger novels, but not the two that are explicitly about the rise of boot-blacks, Tom the Boot-Black; or, the Road to Success and the granddaddy of them all, Ragged Dick, or Street-life in New York with the Boot-Blacks?
That question of what books made the rounds among Muncie teenagers intrigued me. In essence, novels, especially the free novels you picked up in the library, were one of the key “social media” of the age. Just waiting to be told are fascinating stories of change over time, tracked via a single book and its various readers, or a single reader and her various books. For example, you can watch the 8th and 9thgraders of Muncie tearing through Charles Fosdick’s Frank series, the Percy Jackson of its day, in the winter of 1892: 21 kids, 54 loans.
Photograph courtesy Bloom family.This time machine drew me inexorably back toward Louis Bloom. It charmed me right off the bat, for example, that he only got around to borrowing Uncle Tom’s Cabin (115 borrowers) two weeks after he’d returned Wiliam Goodell’s The American Slave Code in Theory and Practice (5 borrowers). I wondered if, by recreating the borrowing patterns of a single borrower, I could make myself into a proxy for him; make his experience in some small way my own.
This struck everyone I talked to as a highly suspect idea. Frank Felsenstein has tracked quite a few individual Muncie stories (he discovered that Louis Bloom’s brother, Landis Bloom, who read oodles of nautical tales, went on to join the Navy) but he still feels that it would be dangerous to make strong claims about the relationship between library records and lived experience. Not least because books were often borrowed for friends and family, and because even blue-collar kids would very likely have had access, via loans, drugstores, and serialized fiction in newspapers, to plenty of other reading material.
Photograph courtesy Bloom family.Still, I determined to read, or at least to sample, all 291 books Louis Bloom had checked out. Where possible I’d borrow the books themselves from a deep-pocketed library; otherwise, I’d rely on Google Books and other online editions. I’d happily gather what external facts I could about Louis, but fundamentally his booklist would be my passport back in time.
Some of the experiment’s limitations soon became apparent. Though I dutifully read in natural light when I could, and was delighted when a power failure in our neighborhood meant I had to read Elsie Dinsmore for hours by a camping lantern, there never came a moment when I actually felt myself, well, time-traveled. If anything, checking yet again to make sure that I’d gotten the same edition Louis would have been reading, I felt myself turning into a pedantic antiquarian.
As time passed, though, I did feel myself growing strangely attuned to the Muncie library offerings. Passing Alcott Street on the way to work, I immediately started wondering what Louis and 396 other Muncie-ites had liked about Louisa May Alcott’s unbelievably popular Under the Lilac,
After reading half a dozen of his science books, I decided that Bloom loved to read about how to make things, and about penetrating scientific mysteries. He borrowed a great many books that began with clear accounts of replicable experiments, or “how to” projects: The Young Mechanic , for example, opens:
Of all people in the world who must not be neglected are, first and foremost, “Our Boys” and, of all boys, mechanical boys deserve a very high place in our estimation.
It then goes on to explain, in six beautifully lucid pages, how to make a wooden toolbox using only a knife, gimlet, hammer, square saw, and a few nails.
I started to see differences between books that had previously seemed indistinguishable. In a catalogue, The Wonders of Acoustics (no recorded borrowers except Bloom) and The Wonders of Electricity look very similar. Both are translated from the French, both more than 20 years old when Bloom read them. Still, I was pretty sure that Bloom would have preferred Electricity to Acousticshands down. Why? Because Wonders of Acoustics fed the reader fabulous tales about talking insects, and made elaborate apologies for every hard cold fact it introduced. Wonders of Electricity assumed that you wanted to become a master of electrical theory by replicating 18th-century voltaic experiments (“Galvani’s experiment can easily be repeated. Remove all the upper parts of the animal …”).
Still, I had to accept that this database was no time machine. More like a superpowerful telescope—but one that could only ever see a few inches of the moon’s surface (Muncie, 1891-1902); and only ever perceive one incredibly narrow range of light (books checked out from its library). If I really wanted to bring Louis Bloom’s youth to light, I needed a different way in.
Building on information Felsenstein and Connolly supplied, I used Ancestry.com and some fortunate Googling to trace Louis Bloom’s life after Muncie. Once I found and established contact with his direct descendants (I’ll spare you my agonies and disappointments), the emails and the facts came fast and furious. I learned that in 1907 Louis completed an engineering degree from the International Correspondence School of Scranton and that by 1910 he had begun a career as a stationary engineer for the U.S. Army, with a final posting in the Philippines from 1933 to 1936. And I learned about his Mississippi-born wife Esther, a self-taught artist who’d been on her way to the Art Institute of Chicago when, in a Little Rock Arkansas boarding house in the summer of 1910, she met Louis.
I learned about Louis’ two deceased sons—Robert (born in 1911, father of Alan, Stuart, and Jonathan) and William (1913; father of William, Steve, Richard, and Joseph) —and all seven grandsons still alive, nearly all engineers, several with children, even grandchildren, of their own. I spoke extensively with Steve, Alan, and Stuart. Although I never learned how tall Louis was, or if he liked sports, or even what foods he liked, I did learn he was a classic Midwestern Republican in politics; that his son Robert (just about the only nonengineering type in the bunch), after casting his first vote for Hoover and ruing it bitterly, turned into a “Roosevelt liberal” and went on to a distinguished career as a professor of history at Gettysburg College. And I learned that Robert always spoke of his father as “a worthy man”; that Esther fell for Louis partly because he always carried a Bible in his pocket. That Robert corresponded with and eventually married a girl whom his parents had first taken a shine to in the Philippines. I heard reminiscences of pitched political arguments between Robert and his conservative uncle Landis Bloom (patron 4,588; 149 loans); and Stuart’s faint memories of Louis’ other brother Rudolph Bloom (341 loans). I was oddly delighted to learn that like a French king, he pronounced his name without a final “s.”
I was thrilled to find Louis and his descendants moving so successfully on out of Indiana, with the same love for mechanics and for scientific principles that had inspired him as a teenager. In all the grandson interviews, I heard different versions of the classic American success story that revolved around two things: a passion for analytical thinking and tinkering and a voracious love of reading. Just as I was finishing this article, Alan and Stu kindly sent this photo.
Photograph courtesy Bloom family.
I took in Louis’ earnest stare, rumpled hair and quizzically tilted head, and felt my disappointment about my copycat reading experiment fade a little.
Still, I couldn’t help noticing that none of Louis’ grandsons fell out of a chair in amazement when they learned that they could now track what their grandfather had read. All three interrupted me when I started talking about Horatio Alger, and my efforts to summarize Louis’s beloved science books were met with a polite “Uh-huh” and a change of topic.
Steve and his wife Kimmy were happy to hear what I had uncovered about Louis and his family. (“Oh, cool” Kimmy said enthusiastically whenever a new biographical fact about the Blooms came up.) But when I asked Steve what it meant to him to know about his granddad’s borrowing records, there was a pause and then he said, politely, “Oh, not that much.” Later on, Steve told me about his own history of binge-reading as a fifth-grader: “Four or five books a week, I guess I cleaned that Base library out.” So I delightedly told him that Louis too, when he got his first card at the age of 13, had taken out six books in his first week, four books in the second and third weeks. “Well, yes,” he allowed slowly “that does seem like it might be a connection.” Connection, I wrote in my notes, and bolded it. But was it?
The book I’m currently trying to write is about the way that ordinary readers—Louis, me, or you—can sometimes feel drawn into a book, so far into it, that it gives us a partial sense of a life elsewhere—until we recall that our hands ache, our eyes are tired, and it’s time to pick up the kids. My working title isSemi-Detached, and that about summed up my feelings by the end of my Bloom experiment. I was partially there with Louis in the Muncie library—but I was also a very, very long way away. I’d gathered and crunched some data, and heard some stories, but …. I was always gaining on Louis, but somehow I was never fast enough to fall into stride with him, to turn sideways and find myself looking him straight in the eye. I was struck by Stuart’s reaction when I asked him what we could deduce from his granddad’s reading. He laughed and said, “You know, I don’t even think the books I read as a kid say much about who I am now. It was all baseball then and I haven’t even seen a game in 20 years. Even as a grown man I changed; I feel like I’m in my fourth lifetime now.”
Stuart’s point about the gap between what you read and who you are got me thinking. Maybe the way Louis receded as I chased after him was not my problem but my answer. In the books Louis checked out he found, as readers everywhere always do, more than just a perfect mirror of his own life (as if “what Middletown read” told us “what Middletown really was”). He also found a way out: a glimpse of the Italy where scientists experimented with frog’s legs, or the state of Mississippi back when killing a slave was a simple property crime. The books he read might even have helped him catch a glimpse of what he wanted his own future to be working in the world of mechanics and of physics, far from Muncie (“Go West, young man”—yes, until you hit the Philippines). Thanks to those books, he too had a telescope. Like mine, it was small and imperfect, with no guarantees about the accuracy of what he glimpsed through it. Still, coming from the sort of Muncie life that he did (his mom had moved them in with in-laws, had even been threatened with having to send the kids off to various relatives) I bet that glimpse at a distant world loomed fairly large for him.
Alan gave me the final clue. All Louis’ grandsons had described to me what it was to be a voracious reader as a teenager: reading rapidly and indiscriminately (Stuart); so absorbed that school bells would ring, the whole class would leave, and you’d still be in your seat with “the teacher laughing her head off” (Alan); or going through an eclectic pile of books fast that “the base librarians quizzed me about them to make sure I’d really read them” (Steve). Alan, though, also told me about going to the Wesleyan college library to research a paper on the Spanish American War and reading the card that listed his book’s previous borrowers: Woodrow Wilson (Wesleyan’s football coach from 1888-90, in case you’re wondering). “That was some feeling.” Maybe Alan was just being polite, but I like to imagine his grandfather Louis too leafing through books in the Muncie library and feeling a thrill at the thought of who’d been there before him. I think of Louis with his back toward me, and his head down in a book, doing his best, just like me, to step a little bit beyond his own time and place. Sometimes, what divides us also connects us.
*Correction Nov. 18, 2011: This article misstated the first name of a library researcher. It is Douglas Galbi, not Chris Galbi.
http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/culturebox/2011/11/the_wondrous_database_that_reveals_what_books_americans_checked_out_of_the_library_a_century_ago_.4.html
October 5, 2011 - by Sarah Cargill
OnlineSchools.com recently published an infographic on “The history of online education” that shows the ways in which distance learning has developed since the early 1700s to now. It looks at the ways that students and teachers are using education technology to learn from anywhere. The infographic projects that in the future online learning enrollments among post-secondary education will increase from 30 percent this year to 37 perent in 2015.
View the infographic below:
08/17/2011 The National Library of Medicine brings us this fascinating history including Harry Potter, the fictional character from the J.K. Rowling Series. Quite fun History of Medicine
HARRY POTTER’S WORLDIMMORTALITY
Illustration of an alchemy workshopJohann Mylius, Opus Medico-Chymicum, 1618
Throughout the seven-book series, Harry Potter makes crucial decisions about the fate of all living things as he attempts to thwart the villainous Lord Voldemort’s unending quest for a racially-pure wizard state, ultimate power, and eternal life. Although he struggles with fear of becoming an evil wizard like Voldemort, Harry is reminded by friends and mentors that his compassionate and unselfish use of magic sets the two apart. Time and again, the young wizard appreciates all the natural world has to offer, develops friendships with ostracized creatures and racially “impure” wizards, and uses his power to help others, even at the risk of his own life. Harry’s desire to do what is right helps him to defeat Lord Voldemort, keeping all the young wizard loves safe from harm.
ike Harry, many Renaissance alchemists, naturalists, and physicians struggled with the responsibilities that came with their attempts to understand the world. Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa von Nettesheim, a noted 16th-century occultist, alchemist, lawyer, physician, and, in Harry Potter, a wizard trading card, wrote one of the most famous works on magic, De Occulta Philosophia. Agrippa often criticized the politics, culture, and religion of his time and felt that the ancient magic included in his writings could benefit humanity. The scholar hoped that De Occulta Philosophia would show that ancient magic could be manipulated like a practical science, though he cautioned that any use should be sacred. Agrippa believed that only those with respect for nature could successfully control it and that those who used magic for selfish or immoral reasons would risk their very souls.
http://www.nlm.nih.gov/exhibition/harrypottersworld/immortality.html
8/01/2011 from the Library History Buff Blog Promoting the appreciation, enjoyment, and preservation of our library heritage 
LARRY T. NIX
Library Recipes
The July 1895 issue of Library Notes contained a compilation of “Library Recipes” for use by libraries in dealing with common problems which they encountered in their operations. Library Notes, a publication of the Library Bureau edited by Melvil Dewey, was targeted primarily at small libraries and its original sub-title was “Improved Methods and Labor-Savers for Librarians, Readers and Writers”. The library recipes were compiled byKatharine Lucinda Sharp for ALA’s Comparative Library Exhibit at the 1893 World Colombian Exposition in Chicago. Sharp later went on to head the library school at the University of Illinois. It’s clear from the various recipes provided in the compilation that for small libraries and even some large ones that the 1890s were a DIY world. To deal with those pesky book-worms: “Book-worms are exterminated rapidly and effectually by mixing equal parts of powdered camfor and snuff, and sprinkling the shelves with the mixture every six or eight months.” Or to mix up an effective brew of mucilage: “The best mucilage is made by dissolving a fair grade of gum arabic in a sufficient quantity of water, and adding oil of cloves, or some other essential oil to keep it from molding. Put four quarts of cold water in an earthen crock or pitcher, add two and one-half pounds of gum arabic; set it on a warm, but not a hot place – a steam radiator is an excellent place – stir the gum very frequently, raising it from the bottom of the crock. When entirely dissolvd, strain through cheese cloth, and stir in 12 drops of essential oil. The mucilage will keep perfectly sweet as long as it lasts. If too thick, add a little water; if too thin, heat it over.” Recipes are also included for fusty stains, glues, inks, mending, mildew, paste, and many others. Oh, the life of a librarian.
For additional information on this subject check out the links below
Links
- The Library History Buff Website
- Wisconsin Library Heritage Center
- Library History Links (US)
- Library History Links (World)
- Library History Books on Google
- ALA Library History Round Table
- Bibliophemera
7/8/11 From our friend The Centered Librarian comes this information about Charles Darwin’s collection.
posted THURSDAY, JUNE 23, 2011
300 heavily-annotated books from Charles Darwin’s personal library digitized
More than 300 heavily-annotated books from Charles Darwin’s personal library have been digitized in a collaboration betweenCambridge University, which holds the collection, and the Biodiversity Heritage Library, a project that has so far digitized nearly 50,000 titles from the natural sciences. And if you’re looking for what Darwin wrote, rather than what he read, the University of Oklahoma has digitized the first edition of each of his 22 books.
http://centeredlibrarian.blogspot.com/2011/06/300-heavily-annotated-books-from.html
Librarians in the U.S. from 1880-2009
June 21st, 2011
It’s not too uncommon for me to receive ideas or suggestions for posts through my contact form. Sometimes they can be pretty sketchy, but this one looks legitimate – and interesting.
Oxford University Press recently release a survey of census data detailing Librarians in the U.S. from 1880-2009. Even if you just skim the graphs, I think you’ll be hooked.
While I wouldn’t call most of the findings exactly shocking, I was surprised to learn a few things:
- The number of librarians in 2009 (212,742) is roughly the same as 1974 (the year I was born) – and down almost 100,000 since the peak in 1990
- My home state of Ohio, which always seems like a hotbed of library activity, isn’t one of the states with the most librarians nor the most librarians-per-capita
- Today, only 17% of librarians are male – by my math, that works out to 36,166 of us. In other words, if we average 6′ tall and were laid end to end, we would stretch for about 41 milesLibrarian Gender
This part of the conclusion also stood out to me:
[T]he internet seems to be having an effect on the field, as it has faced a significant decline since 1990. That decline seems to have slowed substantially since 2000, as librarians adjust to and find new roles in the internet age and the extensive increase in information that it has brought about.
That’s interesting – I had chalked up fewer librarians to wave after wave of budget cuts and hiring freezes. I know people sometimes ask, “we have the internet now, why do we need librarians?” but aside from factual reference questions, my library is still as busy as ever. Our Town Hall has never said, “your stats are down, so you don’t need as many employees” – instead, they’ve said, “every town department is being cut 5%, and probably more next year.” Maybe that is why I hadn’t drawn a direct correlation between the loss of jobs and the rise of the internet – nor that the decrease in jobs would stabilize once we find our information age niche.
If anything, I could hire more staff specifically to serve as a information technology help desk, to support all our patrons who end up with devices and online services they don’t know how to use. Maybe that is the new role we are looking for. Really, I don’t think the decline in librarians can be as simple as that, but it is an interesting correlation.
Thanks to OUP for mining and compiling this data – and to Lauren for the heads-up.
How about this fact when we speak about library history from the Website “The Register”?
British Library hands 200 years of history to Google
By John Oates • Get more from this author
Posted in Government, 20th June 2011 11:54 GMT
The British Library is handing 250,000 books to Google for scanning into the Google Books project.
The Library had previously partnered with Microsoft which digitised books from the 19th century and Leonardo da Vinci’s notebooks. The Library only owned one of the notebooks – the second was from Bill Gates’ own collection.
The Google slurp will see 40 million pages scanned and made available on Google’s site and through the British Library. All the works are out of copyright – Google’s scanning of in-copyright books has caused trouble in the past. The search giant pays the cost of scanning.
Material includes books, pamphlets and magazines from 1700 to 1870 in several European languages.
The scanned books will also be available through the Europeana site, funded by the European Commission.
Dame Lynne Brindley, chief executive of BL, said: “In the nineteenth century it was an ambition of our predecessors to give everybody access to as much of the world’s information as possible, to ensure that knowledge was not restricted to those who could afford private libraries. The way of doing it then was to buy books from the entire world and to make them available in Reading Rooms.
“We are delighted to be partnering with Google on this project and through this partnership believe that we are building on this proud tradition of giving access to anyone,”
Alongside the Google deal, the library is continuing work with Brightsolid, a subsidiary of DC Thomson, to digitise its newspaper collection. That deal was heavily criticised for effectively handing Brightsolid a monopoly.
We’ve asked the British Library what the financial implications of the deal are and why it dropped Microsoft, and we’ll update the story should we hear back.
A spokesman for the British Library said the deal with Microsoft was simply different and there was no question of scale problems with its technology. He said the material scanned by Google would be free for users to access but Google was free to advertise alongside the content.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/06/20/british_library_google_books/
6/24/2011 There seems to be a great written about old times-books vs. digital formats, library design, card catalog vs. ILS, etc. Here are two articles having to do with libraries of the past.
Promoting the appreciation, enjoyment, and preservation of our library heritage
TUESDAY, JUNE 21, 2011
ALA’s Handbook of Organization 1894
From American Libraries Will Manley wrote this post about the card catalog.
Dead Trees We Have Known
Mon, 06/20/2011 – 08:10
For some, our bark was better than our bytes
One of my biggest mistakes as a library administrator was getting rid of the card catalog. No, I’m not talking about replacing it with a digital version. Everyone did that back in the ’80s. That was a no-brainer. What I mean is that after we installed the OPAC, I sent the physical card catalog into the oblivion of Waste Management instead of sending representative parts of it to the local history museum. What landfill it resides in now only future archeologists will know.
It strikes me that for a whole generation of digital natives, the term “card catalog” is as obscure as the term “8-track tape.” For those of us who grew up learning to master all the idiosyncrasies of the card catalog in order to do our dreaded high school and college term papers, that time period seems a bit like ancient history.
Ancient or modern, it’s instructive to look back 25 years and reflect. First off, we librarians all had to take cataloging in library school because, at the heart of librarianship was bibliographic control, and at the heart of bibliographic control was the card catalog. Whether you wanted to be in technical services, public services, or administration, the first step to becoming a librarian was mastering our professional Book of Deuteronomy—The Anglo American Cataloguing Rules, 2nd edition. Once that was accomplished, you were free to follow your heart and explore the idiosyncrasies of Granger’s, Poole’s, and the redoubtable inventor of modern management science, Peter Drucker. But AACR2 was foundational. Now, of course, the metadata anarchists are in the driver’s seat and bibliographic control is a fading mirage in the rearview window.
Quite possibly, the fact that AACR2 was forced upon us at the very beginning of my generation’s professional initiation rites explains why there weren’t many warm and fuzzy eulogies at the card catalog’s funeral. It was as if a complicated, difficult, and ill-tempered uncle had finally died. Yes, he meant well…but what a pain.
It’s also probably why I jettisoned my library’s old card catalog without a thought of preserving its eccentricities for the edification of emerging generations of digital natives. Not only was it an “out of sight, out of mind” impulse, but assigning it to some smelly landfill prevented any possibility of a horror movie–like scenario…say, The Midnight Return of the Card Catalog.
True, there were those who mourned the card catalog’s passing and would have done anything to save it. Their mantra was, “Can’t we have a card catalog and a computer catalog?” Some of these Luddites were catalogers, but most were sentimentalists (history professors were a prime group) who missed the card catalog’s “tactile” pleasures. They loved tracking the historicity of the various cards, which had evolved from handwritten (something called the library “hand” was actually a course taught infin de siècle library schools) to manually typed to electrically typed to commercially printed to computer generated.
Then there was the smudge factor. You could tell which were the really popular subject areas by the smudges on a grouping of cards. In public libraries, the most smudged cards were under the Subject Heading “Automobiles—Maintainence and Repair.” Duh.
Finally, tears were shed over losing a warm and handsome piece of oaken furniture that gave the library a unique touch of character. Never mind that the final generation of card catalogs was made from a really repulsive faux-wood plastic.
Why do I bring this up? Well, more and more I hear people talk about the tactile pleasures of the printed book. The more e-books that are sold, the more you hear the term “tactile.”
My advice: Enjoy those tactile pleasures while you can. It won’t be long now.
WILL MANLEY has furnished provocative commentary on librarianship for over 30 years and in nine books on the lighter side of library science. He blogs at Will Unwound.
Check the URL for the comments on this article:
http://www.americanlibrariesmagazine.org/columns/wills-world/dead-trees-we-have-known
To add one more piece to our theme of nostalgia from the blog of the Connecting Librarian: Connecting new ideas and technologies with library service
Michelle McLean June 24th. 2011, 9:10am
Unfortunately no-one lives forever. I was sad to hear that one of my library services retired staff had passed away. He was a lovely gentleman who drove one of our mobile libraries for what seemed like forever – from when it was a bus, through to an articulated lorry. And he was a gentleman, endlessly quiet spoken and polite, un-phaseable and entirely focused on customer service.
It got me thinking about how many stories that give the soul to the history of our library, we are losing. Its important to know the dates and the details of events in our libraries’ history, but its the stories that give it life.
I am forever telling stories of things that have happened with our libraries and users over the years to the newer staff. To share some of our fun, frustration and just how far we have come over the years. Its amazing, how where so much has changed in some ways, so little has changed in others.
Stories like the man who came in, scanned around the entire library and then asked whether we had a photocopier – which was 2 metres away from where he stood, with a sign above it and nothing in the way. Or the lady who was convinced that we saw her coming up the path to the library and immediately added overdue fines to every one of her family’s five library cards. Or the lady who said the dripping wet book we found on the returns bench must have been wet by a leak in our roof (on a day it wasn’t raining).
Fortunately, the person this gentleman worked with on our mobile library still works with the library service, so we still have a lot of the stories from that era in our library history, especially important now that mobile is long gone from the roads (due to council amalgamations in 1995). And we will continue to tell those stories to other staff.
But I wonder what happens when the last of those storytellers are gone. These stories are the fun in our history. Much more entertaining and informative than just dates and stark details.
And the same could be said for our local histories, our family histories and more.
We need to be more proactive about retaining these wonderful stories. Of making sure that there people are memorialised in real ways, with real life encounters recorded for posterity. And I need to be making sure that’s happening in at least my little neck of the woods. Because no-one else will and that history is too valuable to be lost.
And Keith – rest in peace – you were a great teacher and inspiration and you are sadly missed……
http://connectinglibrarian.com/2011/06/24/losing-our-library-history/