Spring: Cathedrals of Knowledge

Almanac: Oscar Wilde on successful friends

“Anybody can sympathise with the sufferings of a friend, but it requires a very fine nature—it requires, in fact, the nature of a true Individualist—to sympathise with a friend’s success.” Oscar Wilde, “The Soul of ...read more via wyong creek 

Think of this — that the writer wrote alone, and the reader read alone, and they were alone with each other.

— A. S. Byatt, born in 1936

I’m intrigued by people who make their modest living doing good things for others,” Pelecanos says. “Teachers, nonprofit workers, librarians... those are the heroes in our society.”

These heroes are looking forward to time when individuals will find it all the easier to do the pulling in democracy if the others all believe they are doing it themselves, instead of being pulled along ...

How to write a book review, or, a bingo card for the next time you’re reading the Sunday newspaper.

Paraic O’Donnell / Twitter

Informed by the author’s own experience conducting reading and writing programs in prisons and jails, The Man takes readers into a D.C. jail, where 28-year-old Michael Hudson awaits trial for armed robbery. Anna Byrne, a young librarian, brings books into the jail and runs a regular book discussion group. She has earned the respect of the inmates, many of whom had never been exposed to books before. Under Byrne’s careful guidance, Hudson discovers an entire world that he didn’t realize was available to him. She gives him novels by John Steinbeck, Chris Offutt, and Elmore Leonard, which transport him to a world outside the confines of the jail’s walls, free of the shackles of race, economic background, and social status. George Pelecanos Knows Why Inmates Need Books

 thelalatheory – Notes on Books: Jan and Stevie

Big lives are fascinating but so are small lives. And anyway, even those rare people who get to live big lives are also living out the small details in parallel. Everyone has relationships, habits, preferences, private sorrows and little pleasures. These things are always interesting, provided the person finds the right way to share them with you.

Why Do Contemporary Philosophers Wall Off Part Of The World?

There is a great conundrum, or — if you prefer — a dark secret, about modern philosophy: while diversity is the lifeblood of philosophy, philosophy as we now find it in the United States (and equally elsewhere) has come to fear and shun diversity, specifically the diversity of philosophical opinion and argumentation from extra-European cultures. How did this happen? And why?   

NEWS YOU CAN USE: Here’s What Actually Happens If You Drive Over a Bunch of Banana Peels

BuzzFeedNews: “Italian photographer Massimo Listri has spent his career capturing some of the most magnificent and unexpected interiors in the world. His signature style of large-scale and highly detailed pictures is most often shot without a single person in the frame, allowing viewers to fully immerse themselves within the magnitude of details that each space offers. For his new book,The World’s Most Beautiful Libraries, Listri has traveled the world to capture the interiors of 55 libraries in 16 countries — places that the artist describes as “cathedrals of knowledge.”

Now You Can Read Entire Books on Instagram Thanks to the NPLs ‘InstaNovels’

Fortune: “The New York Public Library is introducing a new way for you to get your read on: the “InstaNovel.” As of Wednesday, the NYPL will begin posting classic novels to its Instagram account, in the form of Instagram stories. The project, called InstaNovels, is deemed a “reimagining of Instagram Stories to provide a new platform for iconic stories.” The InstaNovels were created in conjunction with independent advertising and creative agency, Mother in New York. The first book to be featured is Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, which has been illustrated by designer Magoz. That will be followed by the short story The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman and Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis in the coming months.

We’re bringing some of the world’s most incredible stories to Instagram Stories with#InstaNovels. Follow @nypl on Instagram to start reading Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland: https://t.co/xbkrMCWGHK.

Find all of the ways to discover these stories at https://t.co/59j42omMUB.pic.twitter.com/Y3zLUiyhD8

— NY Public Library (@nypl) August 22, 2018…”

Pentagram's Paula Scher has designed a new identity for The Library of Congress

A dynamic brand identity for the world’s largest library helps make its collections accessible to all.

Brand identity for the Library of Congress
Wafaa Bilal’s contemporary artwork starts out as shelves of blank white books. Over the run of the exhibition, visitors transform the installation – and change the lives of students and faculty at the University of Baghdad’s College of Fine Arts – by donating educational texts
LC – A Library for You – Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden - Library of Congress Blog: “A quiet place for study and reflection” is one answer that might spring to mind. If you take advantage of story times and author talks, you might say, “A social place for programs and gatherings.” Our view here at the Library of Congress is the image of a treasure chest, filled with limitless information and services, ready to explore and amaze if you open it up. So today, the Library of Congress is introducing a new visual brand that seizes on this concept and amplifies it. It can change to feature different collection items, stories, images and sounds. The potential is limitless, like the Library itself. What does this mean for you? The launch of this new visual brand coincides with the upcoming release of the Library’s new strategic plan, a user-centered plan that will drive the Library’s direction over the next five years. The plan aims to make the Library’s collections and services more accessible to more of you. A fresh visual identity is intended to signal that something new is happening here, and we want you to be a part of it. In the coming weeks, we will share not only our new strategic plan, but a series of other announcements reflecting our goal to make the nation’s library a place you can connect with in new and meaningful ways. What is a library? There is no right or wrong answer. But we hope in the coming months and years you will come to think of the Library of Congress as part of your answer….”

Do People Look at Tax and Other Legislations on Their Phones? Yes, They Do!

In Custodia Legis: The following is a guest post by Leah K. Ibraheem, the web metrics analyst in the Office of the Chief Information Officer of the Library of Congress.

“Natalie shared the news when we hit a big metrics milestone last year of more than a million page views and visits in a single day.  I track metrics across the Library of Congress websites including Congress.gov.  One interesting trend is the changing nature of its traffic coming from mobile devices.  From the beginning, Congress.gov was built using responsive design to take advantage of mobile traffic. For example, here’s the breakdown of mobile vs. non-mobile traffic from Jan 2014 – May 2018″…