Right on the heels of National Bookmobile Day comes the launch of the newest library liaison.Meet LiLi – Library Live and On Tour - a new initiative by the Fraser Valley Regional Library in British Columbia. Touted as the first of its kind in the world:Library Live and On Tour will shatter preconceptions about libraries, library services and librarians. Library Live and On Tour will deliver services to people in our communities who do not know about our libraries or have some obstacle to visiting them. Unlike ‘bookmobiles’, Library Live & On Tour will stress service, access to information and...
The Kids are Alright: 4th-Graders in Detroit Take Library Matters Into Their Own Hands
Rashard Baker gets some book suggestions from U-M lecturer Melanie Manos outside the closed Richard branch of the Detroit Public Library on Thursday. An outdoor library offered something interesting for him to read during spring break. / MANDI WRIGHT/Detroit Free PressBack in December The Detroit Public Library Commission voted to close four branches.One way to get books back into a library-deprived community is to take matters into your own hands. And that is exactly what a class of fourth-graders at Marcus Garvey Academy in Detroit did when they collaborated with Melanie Manos, a lecturer at University of Michigan who came...
Overstock as Art: The Reading Room at the Berkeley Museum of Art
Installation view. Photo: Sibila Savage “Somewhere to begin, with the most available of formats, the book. At times merely polemical or critical, using such availability as comment on itself — an intimate object in public space.” — Simon Cutts, forward to Some Forms of Availability"Museums are asking the same questions bookstores are...I mean, why go to a museum if you can just look at pictures online in high resolution? It's about the experience." says Lawrence Rinder, the director of the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive.So when Ramsay Bell Breslin, an editor at Kelsey Street Press, conveyed her dilemma of having to either...
Introducing book patrol TV
Welcome to book patrol TV a new weekly one hour video feast of book goodness. Culled from the mountains of book themed videos permeating the internet bpTV aims to present the viewer with a wide range of material from all corners of the book world. Content will feature both new and older material and include book trailers, animations, readings, commercials, movie scenes, how to videos and book-themed exhibitions. Episodes can be dedicated to a sole one hour clip or it can be a compilation of videos from across the book spectrum.Episode 1 is one such compilation featuring 16 videos. In...
Have you hugged your bookmobile today?
Today, right smack in the middle of National Library Week, is National Bookmobile Day! It's time to celebrate the more than 900 bookmobiles that roam our communities providing essential services to those facing economic, geographic, or physical challenges that prevent them from being able to visit a brick and mortar library.John Amundsen's piece at American Libraries, Bookmobiles: A Proud History, a Promising Future provides a nice overview of these vital mobile institutions:Bookmobiles have a proud history of service dating back to the late 1850s, when a horse-drawn collection of books began making the rounds in Cumbria, England. Here in the...