Also: "I like to think the interior of the MicroSD card in my Nook looks sort of like this."
This, meaning:
January 22, 2014
"As a librarian my reactions are 1. That must be sooooo noisy, 2. How do people who can't use stairs get books..."
"... and 3. That space is crap for preserving books! How you gonna keep the heat and humidity at standard levels with those big windows?"
Also: "I like to think the interior of the MicroSD card in my Nook looks sort of like this."
This, meaning:
Also: "I like to think the interior of the MicroSD card in my Nook looks sort of like this."
This, meaning:
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33 comments:
likely that place was dead quiet, almost like an anechoic chamber. Books (and paper) does a remarkable job at dampening sound.
Regarding 2, that is what librarians are for.
That's a library!
3. That space is crap for preserving books! How you gonna keep the heat and humidity at standard levels with those big windows?"
Load them digitally, soon-to-be-former librarian.
The history of your profession will be filed next to the book on buggy-whip repair.
How do people who can't use stairs get books
OMG! A building designed and built in 1870 that didn't conform to the Americans with Disabilities Act?
So sad they destroyed the building...
Female librarians in short skirts who climb the ladder to the upper bookshelves will be the last to be let go.
According to local rumor, one of the reasons the old library was closed was because of suicide attempts (mostly unsuccessful) from the top stacks. I have no idea of that's true but it certainly would have added to the already gothic atmosphere.
So that's what the inside of my computer looks like!
My daughter is a librarian but is now moving into IT and her husband is doing the same. They both have MLS degrees and it is pretty obvious that traditional libraries are going away. Still, she worked for a while at the Huntington Library in the research section and was in the stacks one day when she looked down next to her and saw a copy of de Revolutionibus on the shelf. It was pretty neat.
That book was a real book, one of about 290 copies in the world and there it sat. Real librarians love books even if they have to go to new technology to make a living.
The last copy of de Revolutionibus in private hands sold about 20 years ago for over a million dollars.
Borrowed a Kindle this weekend to see what I thought of them. Meh. For fiction, maybe, but really inadequate for non-fiction. I'll keep my library.
Gutenberg wept.
Maybe libraries are on the way out, but you couldn't tell it from my local. It's always packed with people using both traditional and online facilities. There is usually a group of people outside waiting for it to open. Everyone from seniors to the kiddies.
"Borrowed a Kindle this weekend to see what I thought of them. Meh. For fiction, maybe, but really inadequate for non-fiction. I'll keep my library."
Try the Kindle app using an iPad. That's what I do. I can also display all my Kindle books on my large desktop monitor and on my iPhone (and they sync across devices). This way I can do searches and copy text, and I always have my books (at least on my phone).
Not saying books aren't nice too. I find with the casebooks I teach from that I'm unable to switch over to the ebook versions I also have. I feel that I grasp the text more tangibly in its book form, and I'm just so damned used to having the book. And it's heavy and I often walk to and from work, and I don't like having to carry anything heavy, but I still do.
I haven't made it to the the Kindle yet. I still store my books on an abacus.
Was this M.C. Escher's inspiration??
I've heard the explanation that post US Civil War buildings have a lot of iron work because there was surplus capacity of metal workers and foundries. Sounds plausible. True?
"Try the Kindle app using an iPad."
I will. We're going to new Zealand for a month and we clearly need to go electronic. But, as with your casebooks, learning hard science in electronic form just doesn't cut it. And it's not just the "tangibility" you mention. I feel that to. But it's deeper than that. Flipping back and forth to compare several sections and holding that all in your head just doesn't work well. Nor does perusing the textbook for inspiration when your stuck.
#12 in those photos, for some reason, brought to mind Betsy Aardsma.
That looks to have been an awesome library. Link.
My favorite photo at the link was the newspaper reading room. That plus the formality of dress of the library patrons.
I've heard the explanation that post US Civil War buildings have a lot of iron work because there was surplus capacity of metal workers and foundries
They had a lot of iron work because it was new technology, and permitted much more structurally sound large and tall buildings. Look at pre-war buildings before the new tech arrived, and you'll find a lot of five-story-tall cubes with heavy, heavy timbering and low ceilings. The ironwork allowed for cathedral-esque proportions and height.
After they calmed down a bit, they started hiding the ironwork behind facades of lathe or brick or marble or what have you. It was these facade-centred architectual styles that the Bauhaus vandals were rebelling against.
All I have to say about that library is that it gives me the acrophobic willies just looking at the pictures.
"Flipping back and forth to compare several sections and holding that all in your head just doesn't work well. Nor does perusing the textbook for inspiration when your stuck."
Exactly. I have purchased a couple of paper books after starting to read them on Kindle. One was The Innovator's Prescription. I have to leaf back and forth and illustrations are poor on Kindle.
Bob R said...
I've heard the explanation that post US Civil War buildings have a lot of iron work because there was surplus capacity of metal workers and foundries. Sounds plausible. True?
While this may have been a small factor, it wasn't the main driver. The cast iron building had become popular before the Civil War, driven by improvements in metallurgy that made it easier to fabricate and less brittle. Before the Civil War the making of iron was decentralized, with many smaller local manufacturers and fabricators. A furnace was pretty easy to build. They were usually stone and fire brick, located near the source of the iron and fueled by wood or coal.
The Civil War got the consolidation of the iron industry going but it didn't really root until the latter part of the 19th century. The consolidation was eased greatly by improvements in transportation, particularly rail transport. It became much more feasible economical to transport raw materials and finished products.
The graph of production and capacity is an upward rising line that did not flatten after the Civil War. Indeed, after the Civil War we were still importing significant amounts of iron. A tariff increase to 50% in 1870 dampened but did not eliminate imports. The Bessemer process, invented in the 1860's and improved over time, helped to increase capacity.
In short, the time after the Civil War was one of rising demand and production not overcapacity. By 1890 the United States had surpassed Great Britain as the world's largest producer of iron and steel. Cast iron buildings, already popular before the civil war, went along for the ride.
(I grew up in Pittsburgh. While I left Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh has never left me.)
This discriminates against people in wheelchairs and afraid of heights.
No one will appreciate the full technological genius of the printed book until the power goes out. Because Wondernet.
Closed, a book's oxygen-free interior is virtually immune to brief exposures to fire. Changes in page material could render it absolutely so, as well as decay- and tear-proof.
But there'll always be a Larry Ellison, or a Google, or a kindly government to keep those servers and devices running, right?
At least enough of any of them to store and serve the correct material, and what madman would want anything else?
It looks like an illustration for one of Borges mad tales. The subliminal sense is how daunting the quest to acquire a sliver of human knowledge. And if you wish to add an incremental increase to that knowledge how likely your research will end up as a resting place for dust on some forgotten shelf. The library is both a monument to our love of knowledge and the futility of that love.......The iPad doesn't inspire such sublime thoughts, but it's far more portable and easier to carry on an airplane.
It was a hell of a place to have a fire. Library stacks make an extremely high challenge environment for fire, and fire is one of the worst enemies of librarians and archivists.
I have a pretty large library that is spilling off the shelves. so I moved to electronic books and now have a hundred or on my iPad. I agree with Michael K that this medium is fine for fiction and light non-fiction but if you have to do any flipping back and forth it is horrible. I can read "Boys in the Boat" easily enough but I dare you to try unabridged Gibbon; you will go nuts.
The linked article and the pictures of the current library and the one it replaced says all that needs to be said about the state of architecture, the love of learning and the hideous encroachment of "the modern." We see it everywhere.
Shouldn't a library inspire awe? This one does.
As for Kindle, I bought the Fire when it first came out. I've got all of Charles Dickens and H.P. Lovecraft on it along with economics texts, science books, and novels. It has a dictionary and when one places a finger on a word, the definition pops up. And I can carry it around with one hand.
The Iowa State Capitol has a library that looks kind of like that, down to the iron spiral staircases.
There's a terrific book by Michael Innes called The Paper Thunderbolt which has people searching for a paper hidden in a book in the Oxford University library called the Bodleian which looks like the picture.
In a lot of libraries including the Bodleian those shelves move on tracks so you can push them together which makes more room. This has a very strange effect on the imagination in a place like the National Medical Library at NIH - especially because there aren't many people there these days.
Various observations:
My local library is ALWAYS busy, with people checking out stacks of books right and left. It hardly has the air of decline about it.
I like having the Kindle for cheap, quick reads and free classics; I also really enjoy the instant access to Wikipedia and the dictionary. However--reading anything with lots of ideas in it is a challenge. I still need physical books for flipping back and forth, easily keeping my place, gauging my position in the book relative to its length, etc.
I also enjoyed the formal dress on the folks in the pictures. On any given day in our library 1/3 of the patrons will be in pajama pants. And they're not the homeless people.
My favorite thing in all the pictures, though, was the ad in one of the newspapers for LEA & PERRINS SAUCE, which you will of course recognize as the most popular brand of Worcestershire sauce. I have a bottle in the fridge as we speak.
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