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RuPaul visits the library

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  RuPaul hosted Saturday Night Live this past weekend and one of the skits featured him visiting the San Diego Public Library for a little reading time. He tackles such children's classics as Madeline, Corduroy, Eloise,  James and the Giant Peach and Harriet the Spy. Absolutely hilarious. I'm still laughing at his take on the dust jacket illustration for Madeline which he says "I have bad news child, the Eiffel Tower is not in the woods. You better draw France right, bitch."  Watch: [youtube]https://youtu.be/r1xA7B4SY6A[/youtube]

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In the Stacks: Fire at the Library

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Street lined with fire engines during Los Angeles Central Library fire It was the largest library fire in the history of the United States. 400,000 books were destroyed and over 700,000 were damaged by water or smoke. It took firefighters over seven hours to put out the fire with little flare ups continuing for several days.  The epic blaze was the basis of Susan Orlean’s 2018 bestselling and New York Times Notable Book of the year, The Library Book.  Here are some images of the fire gleaned from the digital collections of the UCLA library.  They are all from the...

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Library de Kimpel

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Belgium's Library de Kimpel is the latest library featured at arch daily. Designed by Adem Architecten  the new library was part of a master plan that included turning the existing library into offices and an exhibition center and the construction of a new youth center. The project was completed in 2015. The interior of the library is designed and organized around 5 subject areas: Music, Literature and Poetry, Lifestyle and Sport, Art and Architecture and Travel. More photos here All photos © Adem Architecten

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The Maine Event: Local pastors lose it when when they spot LGBTQ books in banned books display

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Those of us living in the Northwest corner of the US have always had a quiet affinity with our brethren living in the Northeast corner. I think those days might be over. The unconscionable vote by Maine senator Susan Collins  to help put Brett Kavanaugh on the Supreme Court is a gamechanger. Then this story out of Rumford, Maine doesn't help either. It appears that local pastors got all bent out of shape by the LGBTQ books that were part of this display of banned books at the Rumford Public Library. So what do they want to do? They want to to ban...

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BiblioTech: Keeping Hope for Libraries Alive in the Digital Age

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John Palfrey's lucid, passionate account of the state of American libraries reminds us both how important public libraries are to a healthy democracy and how close they are to going the way of the dodo bird. We are in the midst of a tectonic societal shift from print to digital and without a concerted effort to transform the library into its 21st century equivalent we just might lose these hubs of democracy for good. The disconnect is huge; survey after survey remind us how important libraries are to their communities while in budget after budget funding for libraries continues to...

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