library
jhalper | November 4, 2010We are still frustrated in our efforts to get our new website up and running, so here's something dated to contemplate. Going through the old articles that are in the process of being transferred over, here's one that popped up from the second issue of Interface magazine (1992): Library without Walls. The article extols the new intranet services available to Weizmann Institute users:
Over the past year, notes Chief Librarian Ms. Ilana Pollack, several databases acquired by the Institute Library System have been hooked via optical readers and computer servers into the Institute's…
jstemwedel | June 9, 2010Economic recovery has not yet made its presence felt at public universities in California. (Indeed, at least in the California State University system, all things budgetary are going to be significantly worse in the next academic year, not better.)
This means it's not a great time for purveyors of electronic journals to present academic libraries in public university systems with big increases in subscription prices. Yet Nature Publishing Group has, apparently, done just that by some 400%. And, as noted by Christina Pikas and Dorothea Salo and Jennifer Howard in The Chronicle of Higher…
bioephemera | December 11, 2009The National Library of Medicine's "Turning the Pages" gallery lets you turn the virtual pages of classic science/medicine manuscripts. Check out Hieronymus Brunschwig's Liber de Arte Distillandi de Compositis (1512):
Note that the NLM's copy is hand-colored; uncolored copies also exist, such as this copy at ECHO. Comparison with the images of the ECHO copy show that NLM has elided the boring, text-only pages from their animation.
I'm not usually a big fan of animations that try to replicate the tactile experience of books, but given that you aren't usually allowed to touch manuscripts of…
grrlscientist | September 14, 2009tags: NYC Life, NYPL, public services, public education, public libraries
I just learned that ten branches of the New York Public Library (NYPL) are significantly lengthening their hours of public access -- a move that is being greeted with joy by students, unemployed job seekers and others who rely upon the NYPL for a safe, quiet and clean place to do research, study, and read, as well as to access to the internet, computers and printers for free, and of course, to borrow books, magazines, film and recordings, and to do who-knows-what-else.
Starting TODAY, 14 September, ten NYPL branches…
bioephemera | February 26, 2009
The Cheerful Cricket and Others (1907)Children's Digital Library
The Children's Digital Library doesn't have a sleek interface and it can be a bit hiccupy, but if you poke around you'll find a surprising number of vintage children's books like The Cheerful Cricket and Others (1907) or The Illustrated Alphabet of Birds (1851).
Best of all, several of the Oz books illustrated by John R. Neill are here in their entirety! I remember checking these out of the library when I was sick as a child. I think my mom must have charmed the librarian because I remember taking literally stacks of books at a…