Another manifesto, this one not by a librarian, but at least apologizing to librarians. Please read Lifehack Your Books: Dogear, Writing In Books, and Apologizing to Librarians. [thanks jody]
Category: books
Google Books public domain book curiosities
Hey clue club, any Harvard or Boston area librarians want to solve the what the heck is this mystery alluded to on this blog post? It looks like a handwritten version of the poem printed in the book, but without page numbers or any other indication that it’s part of the book. Table of Contents is mum on what’s going on. Anyone know, or want to go check out the book at Harvard and see? [thanks chase]
skin books in libraries
A book term I somehow missed in library school “anthropodermic bibliopegy” another word for books bound in human skin. Apparently they’re not as rare as you might think.
librivox serendipity
A few people had sent me a link to LibriVox before I left on the trip and it was in the queue to look at when I got back. I ran into Hugh McGuire at the Open Content Alliance Open Library Launch (his blog notes) and was happy to be able to say “Hey your link is in my inbox” and then get to talk to the man himself about the work that he does with group of dedicated volunteers. With a tagline like “acoustical liberation of books in the public domain” you’ve got to believe they have big plans. The specific project involves volunteers recording chapters of books and making the audio files available. The broader vision is to have “all books in the public domain to be available, for free, in audio format, on the internet.” You can have a copy of Call of the Wild to use however you want and whenever you want, thanks to LibriVox and the four volunteers who read and recorded the chapters. What are you waiting for, go volunteer to read something! Hugh is also on the board of Canda’s oldest lending library in case you were skeptical about his librarian cred.
negative space
Do you see what I see here?