The Seattle Public Library has unleashed Books on Bikes, a full service library on wheels.The pilot program will bring library services to popular community events via bike this summer. The book bikes will also cater their load to the event they are attending. Think LGBT material for the Gay Pride Parade or kids books for a pop-up storytime at a neighborhood park or books on music and folk culture for the FolkLife Festival.A total of 11 Library staff members make up the Books on Bikes team. The trailer was developed and constructed by Colin Stevens, who runs Haulin' Colin in...
New York Public Library’s newest branch will be housed in a condo-hotel
When it opens in 2015 it will be one of the largest branches of the New York Public Library system. It will occupy the bottom 3 floors of a "ritzy new condo-hotel" being developed by the Baccarat crystal company and its parent company, Starwood Capital Group, along with Tribeca Associates.Among its features is a 100+ seat auditorium, a children's reading room, a technology hub, and a family seating area."The airy, vibrant structure" is being designed by Enrique Norten’s TEN Arquitectos.Public Library President Tony Marx says the new library will "not only beautiful, but designed with flexibility to maximize public space, and serve all...
The Peoples’ Library: By the People, For the People | Library as Incubator Project
The Peoples’ Library: By the People, For the People | Library as Incubator Project: 'via Blog this'
A two-story Shhh!
To create something to adorn the lobby of the then new library, the city of Walnut Creek, California enlisted the services of artist Christian Moeller.Moeller went ahead and took what is probably the most stereotypical librarian behavior and he blew it up!Like two-stories high!“Shhh…Portrait in 12 Volumes of Gray” stands 26 feet tall and eight feet wide and contains 3,960 books. The covers are 12 shades of gray and arranged on a gigantic steel bookshelf,. The piece displays image of a woman’s face as she makes a “shhh” signal. Each spine represents one pixel in the entire image and all of the pages in...
Books for Soldiers: World War I Style
During World War I the American Library Association undertook a massive campaign to get reading material in the hands of our soldiers. One of their initiatives to bolster Army libraries was to set-up camp outside the New York Public Library. These images portray the campaign's efforts and astounding success. The history of these efforts is covered in-depth in the seminal work by Theodore Wesley Koch; Books in the War: The Romance of the Library War Service that was published in 1919 by Houghton Mifflin. cover of Books in War courtesy of book patrol In the upper-left corner of the first image above...