The Next Page: Thirty Tables of Contents. "Often overlooked by serious bibliophiles, the humble TOC is our portal into a world of knowledge. In the realm of the printed word, it heralds what comes next, a verbal proscenium with its own peculiar prose and typographic conventions. In this book, we have gathered together thirty Table of Contents pages from our personal collections." Add your own to the Flickr group
Category: books
because they are heavy and because they are my books…
Freshome has a droolworthy list of thirty creative bookshelf designs. Astute librarians may look at a few and say “but those are totally impractical!” and you’re right, they are. Bonus impractical: Instructable on building Tetris bookshelves.
bookshelf staircase
A nifty architectural mashup of stairs and bookshelves, made all the more excellent by the vague but noticable color-affinities of the books that are shelved. [thanks lydia]
One million books scanned at UMich
The Chronicle of Higher Ed has a short blurb and the dean of libraries Paul Courant has a longer post on his own blog.
The University of Michigan has hit the “one million books scanned” milestone. As far as I know Michigan is the first library to have one million books from its own collections digitized and available for search (and, when in the public domain, available for viewing.)
For more about the scanning project generally including some insight into why people call it controversial, there’s a good long article from Campus technology (link to printable version, all on one page) which gos into the logistics of the scanning program in some depth.
When it comes down to it, then, this brave new world of book search probably needs to be understood as Book Search 1.0. And maybe participants should not get so hung up on quality that they obstruct the flow of an astounding amount of information. Right now, say many, the conveyor belt is running and the goal is to manage quantity, knowing that with time the rest of what’s important will follow. Certainly, there’s little doubt that in five years or so, Book Search as defined by Google will be very different. The lawsuits will have been resolved, the copyright issues sorted out, the standards settled, the technologies more broadly available, the integration more transparent.
books that make you dumb
Booksthatmakeyoudumb is a small site by Virgil Griffith that tries to look at the relationship between favorite books of students at colleges and the average SAT score at those colleges, “cross referencing the 10 most popular books at every college, as given by Facebook, and the average SAT score.” It’s amusing and it’s fun to look at and Lolita is not where you’d think. [lisnews]