Public Library: An American Commons is a photography exhibition on at the San Francisco Public Library’s Jewett Gallery, running from April 9 to June 12. The photographer, Robert Dawson, has captured the American relationship with public libraries across the country in a series of intimate portraits. From the Design Observer review:
Minimum Viable Record?
Having worked more closely with bibliographic data than I had ever expected to over the last couple of years, I still can’t quite believe how complicated it can be. I keep holding tight something Karen Coyle told me when I first started at Open Library, that “library metadata is diabolically rational.” Now that I’ve witnessed the cataloging from lots of different sources and am more familiar with the level of detail that’s possible in a library catalog, I have a new fondness for these intensely variegated information systems; at times devilishly detailed, at others wildly incomplete or arcanely abbreviated. Everyone likes to arrange things and classify them into groups. It’s when you try to get people to put things into groups that someone else has come up with that it starts getting messy.
Book as Art Object
The Making of Tree of Codes, written by Jonathan Safran Foer, constructed by Die Keure, a printing house in Belgium.
Plus a fabulous write up from the publisher, Visual Editions: “The book is as much a sculptural object as it is a work of masterful storytelling: here is an “enormous last day of life” that looks like it feels.” [via foe]
In these reaction snippets, I love that a chap mentions, “OK, I’m getting the hang of it now.”
Open Library Architecture Diagram
Here is a diagram of the current Open Library architecture:
click for full-size image
A Library Primer
Just discovered this wonderful book of 60 short chapters on how to start a library: A Library Primer by John Cotton Dana, Fourth Edition, published 1906 by Library Bureau.
To the librarian himself one may say: Be punctual; be attentive; help develop enthusiasm in your assistants; be neat and consistent in your manner. Be careful in your contracts; be square with your board; be concise and technical; be accurate; be courageous and self-reliant; be careful about acknowledgments; be not worshipful of your work; be careful of your health. Last of all, be yourself.
And, it’s fantastic that our Read To Me feature in the BookReader can understand the librarian’s neat hand on the page of examples in the Ink and Handwriting chapter.
