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I wish our Prime Minister and his cronies believed this. |
The Library Phantom strikes again—but for the last time! As RadioLab’s Robert Krulwich reports, via This is Central Station, a woman has been leaving tiny paper sculptures in libraries and museums across Edinburgh.
These gorgeous pieces, details from a few of which you can see above, were secreted away with a few clues here and there. The sculptor wrote in a final statement that she offered them as “[a] tiny gesture in support of the special places,” a truly valuable sentiment as the very idea of libraries as distinct and public institutions comes increasingly under attack.
| — | F. Scott Fitzgerald (via thelifeguardlibrarian) |
OMG, my heart is palpitating ! Thank you JSTOR !
“JSTOR, an online system for archiving academic journals, has announced it is making journal content published prior to 1923 in the United States, and prior to 1870 elsewhere, freely available to the public for reading and downloading. This includes nearly 500,000 articles from more than 200 journals, representing approximately 6% of the total content on JSTOR. Making this content freely available is a first step in a larger effort to provide more access options to independent scholars and others without access to an institutional subscription….” (JSTOR, Sept. 6 ) [text via American Libraries Direct]
Also, this.
“Christopher Platt, director of collections and circulation operations at New York Public Library, which operates 100 libraries, spoke as the Evening Standard’s Save Our Libraries campaign is getting behind Londoners fighting to keep their local branches open in the face of public spending cuts…
Mr Platt said cutting services, hours and staff or having libraries run by volunteers should be “a last resort”, and that at times of financial difficulty New York libraries have found they are needed more than ever, leading them to lobby hard for public funding and improve rather than cut services.”
