The folks at the Library of Congress (LOC) got a lot of heat on Capitol Hill last week. Much of it centered around the Washington Post story, Materials Missing at Library of Congress, proclaiming that 17% of the material at the LOC is missing.Matt Raymond over at the Library of Congress blog shares with us the library's response via an article by Gail Fineberg in the internal LOC newsletter the Gazette titled IG's NOS Report Prompts Questions and Answers (IG = Inspector General; NOS = Not on Shelf). Excerpt is reproduced below.The library claims that all the missing material is...
The Day 300,000 Books Fell
"The top four floors of San Jose, California’s, eight-story Martin Luther King Jr. Library, which serves as the public library system’s main branch and the San Jose State University library, were temporarily closed to reshelve books after a 5.6-magnitude earthquake hit the city October 30."The building suffered no major damage but the building did intentionally sway back and forth to absorb the shock of the quake and as a result 300,000 books fell of the shelves!They are almost all picked up.American Library Association articleImage above of a bookstore after the Bay Area's 1989 Point Loma quake by J.K. Nakata of...
Rwanda’s Biblio Bus
Biblio BusThough traditionally an oral culture reading is increasingly on the rise in Rwanda and it is not an easy task providing access to reading material to its people. The cost of books and newspapers remain outside the reach of most Rwandans.The Biblio Bus is one of the 3B's. A project instituted by a group called Ishyo. The bus carries 4000 books in 3 different languages, Kinyarwanda, English and French, and is decorated by local artists.Currently the Biblio Bus visits schools and prisons only with the hope of eventually providing service to individuals.Students can borrow books for up to a...
Shakeup at Abebooks
It is never a minor event when the COO of a company departs so no matter how Abe tries to minimize the transition this is a significant event
Beauty and the Bookmark
book·mark - a ribbon or other marker placed between the pages of a book to mark a place.The Centre for Fine Press Research in the UK at University of the West of England is doing some great Book Art related stuff.One of their projects, which began in 2004, is Bookmarks: Infiltrating the Library System, an annual celebration of the bookmark which has featured the work of almost 200 book artists since its beginnings with each producing an edition of 100 bookmarks for free distribution. Their goal is to encourage people to "appreciate artwork in the format of 'bookmarks' and to...