The circulation of books was the motor of classical civilization. However, books were both expensive and rare, and so libraries - private and public, royal and civic - played key roles in articulating intellectual life. This collection, written by an international team of scholars, presents a fundamental reassessment of how ancient libraries came into being, how they were organized and how they were used. Drawing on papyrology and archaeology, and on accounts written by those who read and wrote in them, it presents new research on reading cultures, on book collecting and on the origins of monumental library buildings. Many of the traditional stories told about ancient libraries are challenged. Few were really enormous, none were designed as research centres, and occasional conflagrations do not explain the loss of most ancient texts. But the central place of libraries in Greco-Roman culture emerges more clearly than ever.
I have found just the work for me, for I love it more all the time. Thus wrote one of several hundred professionally trained women who carried the gospel of books and libraries throughout the West during the early twentieth century. Pioneers in a profession, they regarded the West as a fertile field for their cultural crusade which included establishing traveling libraries in rural areas, participating in community-building activities, and professionalizing existing public and academic libraries and as a place where they could develop as independent women. Passet uses extensive archival material to provide a picture of the women librarians' experiences. She explores their education, family relationships, degree of autonomy, and reactions to the West. Her account is enlivened throughout by the words of the women themselves. It is further enriched by brief biographies of four women exemplifying the combination of personal and professional goals that motivated many women librarians to move west.
""Too Much Dancing Going On" is the account of an independent-minded young woman in a wide-open Montana who loved books and horses, and later a certain literary young man. When Lyle Hardiman, easy-going, illiterate, Montana cowboy, accidentally blunders into the new library with his horse (he thought it was a livery), he meets the new librarian, Miss Rebecca Spark, and sets into motion a chain of events that will ensure the little town of Burnt Creek a place in the history books. With the help of the local saloon/shop sweeper, Lyle will discover a path laid out for him by destiny . . . a path that leads to the heart of Miss Rebecca Spark. In "The Book Mama", Lady Jane Woodruff is stranded with an abusive husband in a harsh new country and relies on the wisdom of an ancient African American woman to guide her to freedom." Fourteen-year-old Pearl Ellingson learns life's hard lessons as she struggles to start a library in frontier North Dakota in "Terrible and Wonderful""--
This edition of the History of Libraries in the Western World represents a substantial revision of the earlier edition, taking into account the "information revolution" that has swept the West since 1945 and the political revolution that swept across Europe beginning in 1986. In addition, recent scholarship has been incorporated throughout the text, with special emphasis on the work centered around the "new history of the book." The bibliographies at the end of each of the twelve chapters have been thoroughly revised to reflect the very considerable new work on library and book history.
Challenges conventional thinking and top-down definitions, instead drawing on the library user's perspective to argue that the public library's most important function is providing commonplace reading materials and public space. Challenges a professional ethos about public libraries and their responsibilities to fight censorship and defend intellectual freedom. Demonstrates that the American public library has been (with some notable exceptions) a place that welcomed newcomers, accepted diversity, and constructed community since the end of the 19th century. Shows how stories that cultural authorities have traditionally disparaged- i.e. books that are not "serious"- have often been transformative for public library users.
Susan Orlean’s bestseller and New York Times Notable Book is “a sheer delight…as rich in insight and as varied as the treasures contained on the shelves in any local library” (USA TODAY)—a dazzling love letter to a beloved institution and an investigation into one of its greatest mysteries. “Everybody who loves books should check out The Library Book” (The Washington Post). On the morning of April 28, 1986, a fire alarm sounded in the Los Angeles Public Library. The fire was disastrous: it reached two thousand degrees and burned for more than seven hours. By the time it was extinguished, it had consumed four hundred thousand books and damaged seven hundred thousand more. Investigators descended on the scene, but more than thirty years later, the mystery remains: Did someone purposefully set fire to the library—and if so, who? Weaving her lifelong love of books and reading into an investigation of the fire, award-winning New Yorker reporter and New York Times bestselling author Susan Orlean delivers a “delightful…reflection on the past, present, and future of libraries in America” (New York magazine) that manages to tell the broader story of libraries and librarians in a way that has never been done before. In the “exquisitely written, consistently entertaining” (The New York Times) The Library Book, Orlean chronicles the LAPL fire and its aftermath to showcase the larger, crucial role that libraries play in our lives; delves into the evolution of libraries; brings each department of the library to vivid life; studies arson and attempts to burn a copy of a book herself; and reexamines the case of Harry Peak, the blond-haired actor long suspected of setting fire to the LAPL more than thirty years ago. “A book lover’s dream…an ambitiously researched, elegantly written book that serves as a portal into a place of history, drama, culture, and stories” (Star Tribune, Minneapolis), Susan Orlean’s thrilling journey through the stacks reveals how these beloved institutions provide much more than just books—and why they remain an essential part of the heart, mind, and soul of our country.
This work describes the crucial role libraries played in ancient Egypt, Han-dynasty China, the ancient Western Classical world (the great library of Alexandria, which was lost to us in stages over many years), the Baghdad of Harun-al-Rashid, and medieval and Renaissance Europe. It continues with the libraries of colonial America, the Library of Congress, university libraries, and today's large public library system. >
This third edition of Taylor's modern classic continues to articulate the theory, principles, standards, and tools behind information organization. As with previous editions, it begins with strong justification for the continued importance of organizing principles and practice. Following a broad overview of the concept and its role in human endeavors, Taylor and Joudrey provide a detailed and insightful discussion of such basic retrieval tools as inventories, bibliographies, catalogs, indexes, finding aids, registers, databases, major bibliographic utilities, and other organizing entities; and subsequently trace the development of the organization of recorded information in Western civilization from 2000 B.C.E. to the present. Standards of codification (MARC, SGML, and various DTDs), controlled vocabularies and ontologies, and Web 2.0 technologies are but a sample of its extensive topical coverage. The Organization of Information remains the title of choice for students and professionals eager to embrace the heritage, immediacy, and future of this fascinating field of study.
