Tag: books

2006 reading list, a year end summary

Posted on by jessamyn

I liked doing this last year. I think I’ll do it again this year. Slow year for reading for me. I was busy, busier maybe than I’ve been lately.

number of books read in 2006: 60
number of books read in 2005: 86
number of books read in 2004: 103
number of books read in 2003: 75
number of books read in 2002: 91
number of books read in 2001: 78
average read per month: 5
average read per week: 1.25
number read in worst month: 0 (December)
number read in best month: 8 (November, August)
percentage by male authors: 59
percentage by female authors: 41
fiction as percentage of total: 60
non-fiction as percentage of total: 40
percentage of total liked: 77
percentage of total ambivalent: 23
percentage of total disliked: 0

I made a little spreadsheet of all the books. There was only one that I couldn’t remember off the top of my head. There were two that followed me through the entire year: Let Us Now Praise Famous Men and And Their Children After Them, both terribly haunting depictions of the short and long term effects of rural poverty. I think of them every day when I’m at work, trying to help.

Looking for something to read? Check out this compilation of “best of 2006” reading lists that the Seldovia Public Library has assembled on their delightfully bloggy library website.

how it should work: book donations @ your library

Posted on by jessamyn

From Daniel Cornwall, via LISNews comes a good example of how a public library can be friendly and firm about accepting book donations. Here’s the example from the blog of the Seldovia Public Library.

Recently, a very large donation was left outside the library, without notice, for days in boxes too large for our volunteers to lift once they did discover them. In that time, the books became weather-damaged as well as suffering from the territorial marking practices of local dogs. Would you want to read these books or have your children read them? What a sad waste, and one that could have been prevented with a phone call.

no glove no love? the necessity of white gloves for conservation

Posted on by jessamyn

In a paper published last year (pdf) but only getting noticed in the mainstream media recently, conservation consultant Cathleen A. Baker and librarian
Randy Silverman argue that for the handling of most types of materials, white gloves don’t help, may hurt, and create a false impression of protection where none exists.

Current reading room rules do little to instruct patrons about preferable handling practices, relying on the impression that wearing gloves adequately achieves collections care. Even if cotton gloves were capable of providing effective prophylactic barrier between patrons and the collection, their use promotes the false illusion that the hands, once encased, are somehow transformed into “safe” instruments. Wearing gloves actually increases the potential for physically damaging fragile material through mishandling, and this is especially true for ultra thin or brittle papers that become far more difficult to handle with the sense of touch dulled. Measures must be taken to reduce collection risks through instruction and example, we submit, but not through the use of gloves.

[livejournal]

feather books – digitally on display at McGill

Posted on by jessamyn

I post about bookish things less and less lately. Please enjoy this one, straight out of MetaFilter. “The Feather Book, digitized by and on display at McGill University: A seventeenth-century book containing illustrations of birds and men — composed of real feathers, beaks, and claws. More information about the book and its contents and history can be read here.”