"Not even a power outage can stop Wayne Rhodes from doing his job. "
"Rhodes, director of the Jones Memorial Library, recalls a night when the power went out while he was working. The emergency lights came on, but the back part of the library, where they keep all reference materials, was plunged into darkness. "
"'We're going to be dead center in an exciting new area in Columbus,' said Richard Rubin, the Kent State program's director. 'I'd love to take credit for it, but it was a confluence of circumstances.'"
"Pennsylvania's collection of rare books and materials, including early newspapers and many of Benjamin Franklin's political and scientific publications, is moving into a new facility within the State Library to ensure the historic documents are safely preserved."
"Cambridge, Massachusetts - Like most librarians, Saad Eskander, director of the Iraq National Library and Archive in Baghdad, has to deal with a number of disturbances: people speaking loudly in the study area, lost books, and the occasional sniper fire or Katyusha rocket attack. "
"'We preserve civilization,' University of Central Arkansas Archivist Jimmy Bryant said, 'from the standpoint of being able to answer the question of how we got to where we are.'"
"Bryant oversees the University's archives. Filling several rooms in the Torreyson Library, the collection contains 'tens of thousands of stories,' Bryant said, most relating to Conway but all having Arkansas ties. "
"After college he drove a cab (he quit after being mugged twice in a month) and worked in a bakery and a bookstore before a friend tipped him to a job opening: technical assistant in the library’s periodical room. That was 31 years ago. "
"Chicago rare books librarian Terry Adams reserves the last room at the Drake Hotel for herself and her long-distance boyfriend, who is flying in from Boston to propose. Thanks to a reservation mix-up, however, the room is already occupied, and the ensuing events gradually compel a workaholic, straight-arrow radiologist to take a long overdue hard look at himself, and his own wedding plans."
"The Caleb T. Winchester University Librarian has put forth extensive work on behalf of intellectual freedom, both in the United States and abroad. For her efforts, she received the 2007 Robert B. Downs Intellectual Freedom Award, given by the faculty of the Graduate School of Library and Information Science (GSLIS) at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign"
"Daniel Woodward, a former director of the library at the Huntington Library, Art Collections and Botanical Gardens in San Marino who was instrumental in acquiring the papers of several prominent authors, along with rare books and manuscripts in the fields of history and science, has died. He was 76."
"It is feared a selection of local books were among those damaged by a water leak at Lincoln Central Library. "
"With his soft voice and scholarly manner, Saad Eskander doesn't seem like a person fresh from the front lines of a war. But as director of the Iraq National Library and Archive in Baghdad, he has carried on his own four-year battle to preserve his country's cultural heritage. While most of his peers fled the country, and five members of his staff were murdered, he has stayed on."
"Randy Ericson, the Couper Librarian, accepted the Outstanding Project for 2007 award from the Communal Societies Association on behalf of Hamilton College. The award was presented at the CSA annual meeting on Sept. 29. "
"Gerald Cloud has only been working in Columbia’s Rare Book and Manuscript Library for three weeks, but he’s already settled into a comfortable office on the sixth floor of Butler. Formerly a reference librarian at the University of California, San Diego, Cloud was hired by Columbia to create programs to study and raise awareness of the sizeable collection—one which few Columbia students know about. "
"For nearly four months last spring, Chicago-based rare books expert Ellen Middlebrook Herron combed through the rare books collection at New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary's John T. Christian Library."
"Herron discovered and cataloged a number of important early books and Bibles in the NOBTS library, including several 15th-century works from the earliest days of the printing press."
"Amongst the other sites opening is the Caird maritime reference library at the National Maritime Museum. This has a Grade I listed interior rotunda entrance designed by Lutyens and contains around 15,000 rare books and manuscripts in its 1937 oak-lined, Lutyens inspired reading room."
"A longtime employee of the University of Southern Maine library has bequeathed nearly 2,000 books, some of them five centuries years old, to the library's special collections department. "
"Valerie Gillispie, assistant university archivist, holds a rare book, which was featured on PBS's History Detectives in July. The book is stamped with the name and address of a 19th century female anarchist and possibly belonged to a deceased Wesleyan alumnus. "
"Christopher Cook, the rare-book cataloging project manager at the University of Illinois Library, will return to London this summer to examine and catalog the abbey library's 58 'incunabula' or books printed in the 15th century, in the infancy of printing."
"Turner is director of Yale University's Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library and serves as the John Hay Whitney professor of history at the University, where he has taught since 1970. He was Yale University's provost between 1988 and 1992."
Read this article.
"Bodling, the state's rare books librarian, spends his days preserving riches like this in a corner room on the second floor of a state building near the Capitol. He is the latest in a line of caretakers stretching back to the Gazette's publisher in 1745. "
"Saad Eskander is a slim, bespectacled man who wears corduroy jackets and has the quiet footfall of one who has spent many years in library reading rooms."
"But, asked to name his biggest headaches as director of Iraq's National Library, Eskander's response is not one you would expect from a typical librarian: snipers and car bombs."
"Saad Eskander, the director of Iraq’s National Library and Archive in Baghdad, finally had some time to catch up on his diary after a couple of very busy weeks. As he wrote in his latest entry, he was having trouble repairing the Internet system; the Restoration Laboratory “was hit by 5 bullets”; and “another librarian, who works at the Periodical Department, received a death threat."
"TRANSLATING ancient French stories about goblins and fairies was the last thing Lorraine David imagined she could do to earn a living."
"But by following her passion for everything French, this rare books assistant at the Monash University library landed a book deal that spirited her into the world of imagery and magic."
"Meanwhile, Jonathan DeHaven, the shy head of the Rare Books Division of the Library of Congress, is planning nothing more eventful than a day amongst his cherished collection."
"But when Jonathan is found dead by Caleb Shaw, founder and de facto head of the conspiracy theory group, The Camel Club, two long-protected secrets are destined to collide. "
"Behind the dusty stools and the old towels, under the broken telephones and the picture frames, amid the spider webs, sits one of the country’s most important collections of artifacts devoted to the history of African-Americans."
"Painstakingly collected over a lifetime by Mayme Agnew Clayton — a retired university librarian who died in October at 83 and whose interest in African-American history consumed her for most of her adult life..."
"Richard Virr loves his work. And why shouldn't he? As the Chief Curator of the Rare Books and Special Collections Division, Virr spends most of his days exploring the climate-controlled enclave of antiquity, a potential journey of discovery to look forward to every time he walks through its doors."
"The online library of Al Azhar, one of the Islamic world's oldest and most prominent learning centers, has received tremendous international interest within its first month of launching."
"One of the most comprehensive collections of Edgar Allen Poe's works will be on display at Cornell University until Feb. 24, 2007."
"Cornell has been hosting 'Nevermore: The Edgar Allan Poe Collection of Susan Jaffe Tane,' since Sept. 29 in the Hirshland Gallery of the Carl A. Kroch Library."
"Cincinnati was once a hotbed of boxing. In 1885, the first heavyweight championship in which the fighters wore gloves took place here."
"Kevin's a sports historian and head of the University of Cincinnati archives and rare books department. He has written a number of Arcadia books."
"The World’s Fastest Librarian is a twelve minute short film following Mary, a fictional public librarian at the Madison Public Library (as played by the UW SLIS Lab Library) as she prepares for the World’s Fastest Librarian Competition."
"The World’s Fastest Librarian is a humorous tongue in cheek film that shows a different image of librarians than that usually found in films."
"The Wyoming Library Association recently presented its 2006 Distinguished Service Award to Anne Marie Lane, curator of the Toppan Rare Books Library at the University of Wyoming American Heritage Center. The award recognizes Lane’s service and significant contributions to Wyoming libraries and the library profession."
Read this article.
"Books are a high priority for Wise -- Eliezer Wise -- who, as a rabbi's son, has spent his entire life immersed in them. Born in Plymouth, Mass., he moved around a lot as a child, though one memory, while he was living in Elizabeth, N.J., remains perfectly clear: 'The first time I went into a library was in 1955, in first grade, and I thought it was the coolest place -- all those cabinets and cards in it. All those books -- what a place!'"
Nice Card Catalog !
"From an early age Leslie Joshi, the new director of the Powers Library in Moravia, was fascinated by books and all the wonderful knowledge and potential they contained."
“'I think I was first influenced by the fact that my father was a history professor,'” said the Seattle native. “'Our house was always full of books.'"
"Four have been so far: The Otto F. Ege Collection of Medieval manuscripts; The Ethelind Pope Brown Collection, watercolors of mostly birds and trees found in the Southeast; “Development of the Printed Page,” which covers the evolution of the printed page, with examples from the 15th through the 20th centuries; and The Joseph Cohen Collection of Isaac Rosenberg."
"For the last eight decades, Martha Cutter Kelley Smith has tended to the books at the Coal Creek Library. But not because she’s an avid reader."
“'I don’t read ’em,' Smith says. 'I’m not any kind of speed reader.'”
"But just as she has for the past 80 years, the 100-year-old Smith toils away at the state’s oldest library, keeping herself busy and keeping a monument to the small community of Vinland up and running."
"What fun it must be to answer the phone and not fear the toughest of questions, knowing you have 14,000 square feet of documents and, in MU’s Special Collections Department, 50,000 rolls of microfiche."
Read this article.
"The librarian at the Kerala Sahitya Akademi is obviously dedicated to his work, and showed me the way they digitalise rare books. He has also created a literary website for Malaylam writers with pictures, bio-data, material from their books, and where possible, an audio track of them reading from their work."
"Paul Needham, librarian at the Scheide Library at Princeton University, will lead a lecture titled "Printed Bibles from Gutenberg to King James,” April 27, 7 p.m., at the General Theological Seminary (GTS) in New York City."
"This is an inaugural event for the recently formed Friends of St. Mark's Library of GTS, who promotes the library as a distinguished collection of rare books and a scholarly resource. "
"This summer, Gary Frost is expecting a shipment of documents from the Biloxi Public Library. The inventory - damaged by standing water then mold blooms that flourished in the region's humid climate - includes family histories, documents tracing the rise of the region's seafood industry, Civil War-era manuscripts and a collection of maps."
"My intention was never to insult Gerald Beasley, director of the Avery Architecture and Fine Arts Library at Columbia University in New York and one of the most charming and knowledgeable librarians to cross my path in many months. What I told him over the phone to was that he seems to look at the world differently than most."
"'I'm not sure if that's a compliment or an insult," he says, laughing.'"
"Beasley is the man behind the Canadian Centre for Architecture's 125 Kilos of Books, the exhibition set to open today as part of Montreal's remaining celebrations of their UNESCO title as World Book Capital 2005-2006. The show is also part of the CCA's broader mission under director Mirko Zardini to raise new questions concerning architecture, its ephemera, and the built environment."
"In honor of the Librarian of Congress, James H. Billington, Peter Cummings, president emeritus of the Detroit Symphony Orchestra Board, hosted a preconcert reception on March 15. An intimate gathering of 50 people, at Cumming's invitation, enjoyed a premium open bar and an elaborate buffet spread that included whole-grain mustard crusted lamb chops, wild mushroom stuffed ravioli, seafood salad ceviche and strawberry Asian lime fruit soup shots."
"The purpose of the tour is to introduce new audiences to the vast holdings of the Library and its broad cultural mission. Among the items on display were the original score to Gershwin's 'Porgy and Bess' and an original sketch for Copland's 'Appalachian Spring.'
"Lucille Emch, 96, a longtime University of Toledo librarian and rare books scholar whose planning led to the Ward M. Canaday Center for Special Collections at UT's Carlson Library, died Monday in Sunset Village, Sylvania."
Her interest in rare books led her to the libraries of Europe, including the Vatican Library and the Bodleian Library at Oxford University in England.
"lPlaces that women weren't allowed in, Lucille somehow managed to get in,'Ms. Floyd said. 'She was a remarkable woman.'"
"Antiquarian booksellers and library staff in Southern California have been talking for years about starting up a rare book school on the West Coast."
"Now, the talk has ended."
"UCLA will open its classrooms in July and August to students interested in the newly founded California Rare Book School, a UCLA Department of Information Studies project. "
"Terry Belanger, honorary curator of special collections at the University of Virginia, is a MacArthur Foundation Fellow."
"The call came last September. I was among 25 people who had been selected for a MacArthur fellowship in 2005. A panel of experts had decided that my work at the Rare Book School, which I founded more than 20 years ago, is worth supporting. The no-strings-attached grant will pay me quarterly installments of $25,000 for the next five years."
" One such visitor was Scottish curator Pamela Robertson, an expert on the Arts and Crafts Movement, who recently spent three days in Buffalo."
"Last year, Robertson began trying to catalogue all of the work of turn-of-the-century artist Frances Macdonald McNair for an exhibition that will open later this year in Glasgow, Scotland. She came upon eight or 10 photographs of watercolor paintings that were unsigned and undated, and began trying to figure out who had painted them, when and for what purpose."
"In books and movies, when information is needed, the characters travel to the bottom level of the castle to read the archives."
"This lower level is portrayed as dark, dreary, and usually covered in dust. The area is covered with scrolls and stacks of old books. The keeper of the archives is given the image of a short, crooked little man that wanders around guided by the light from a torch. It often appears that he has not seen people in many days."
"But that is just for Hollywood."
"AS THE RARE BOOKS librarian at University College London, most of my work is fairly routine, if painstaking and methodical."
"But it can be extremely satisfying. I never really know what I will find when I open one of the many old and very precious books I work with. It might have beautiful, hand-colored illustrations; it might be inscribed by the author; or it might contain the bookplate of a famous collector. Such satisfactions might not mean much to outsiders or to people who haven't worked in our rarified world, but to scholars and historians and librarians and archivists, these are the little pleasures that keep us going."
Read this article.
"In the years before libraries were equipped with computers, there was James Edward. If there were enough others like him, those unsmiling computers might not be needed today."
"James Edward Dial, who had a lifelong love affair with books, died Dec. 27 in his 71st year. He had worked 26 of those years at Charlotte libraries."
"He was hired in the mid-1940s by Allegra Westbrook, whose title was director of public library services to Negroes. That library, opened in 1905, stood at Second and Brevard streets, Allegra said."
"With its storied history, signature landmarks, and abundant atmospheric fog, San Francisco has long been a favored stomping ground of literary sleuths. Just how much crime has bloodied this ground is apparent by visiting Golden Gate Mysteries, an annotated bibliography found on the Berkeley Library website. There mystery fans will find the titles of hundreds of novels set in San Francisco and environs, featuring gumshoes as diverse as the names in a Frisco phone book and plots as twisted as Lombard Street."
"A number of prestigious libraries — including Harvard University's — have such books in their collections. While the idea of making leather from human skin seems bizarre and cruel today, it was not uncommon in centuries past, said Laura Hartman, a rare book cataloger at the National Library of Medicine in Maryland and author of a paper on the subject."
"The only known manuscript of a poem by Lord Byron has been found within the archives of University College London."
"Librarian Susan Stead stumbled across the original, which had been assumed lost, in an 1810 edition of The Pleasures of Memory by Samuel Rogers."
Read this article.
"Steven E. Gromatzky has joined the staff of Benedictine College as its Library Director, taking over one of the largest private undergraduate college libraries in the nation."
"A native of Boston, Massachusetts, Gromatzky graduated from St. Anselm College, Manchester, NH in 1985 with a B.A. in History. He received his Masters Degree in Library Science from Simmons College in Boston in 1989."
Read this article.
"Also resonating across the quad, beginning at 5 o'clock every evening, are the 50 bells in the carillon of the grand neo-Gothic Duke Chapel. Just before vespers, my college-shopping son and I, accompanied Mr. Sam Hammond, a true Southern gentleman and the Duke carillonneur, were uplifted to the top of the Chapel tower by its small, tubular elevator. There, I got a bird's-eye view of the beautiful Duke campus, and a bottom-up look at the bell bottoms."
" A Hurricane Katrina survivor is putting her librarian skills to good use at Northern Illinois University."
"Daisy Porter is temporarily working at NIU’s Founders Memorial Library as part of the Visiting Katrina Fellows program."
Read this article.
"Something "weird" caught the eye of Yolo County employee Mel Russell as she was cleaning the stacks of the county historical archive this June. A dark-red leather binding, shrink-wrapped as a protection against dust, looked oddly "mottled" through the plastic. Upon closer inspection, so did other volumes on adjoining shelves. "I got nervous," Russell recalls. "'What is that?'"
"Later this month the Berkeley division of the Librarians Association of the University of California will honor two of its own, the recipients of the 2005 Distinguished Librarian Award: John Roberts of the Jean Gray Hargrove Music Library and Daniel Krummes of the Harmer E. Davis Transportation Library. Each represents what the association calls "the highest ideals of librarianship on the Berkeley campus."
"Randy Silverman, preservation librarian of the University of Utah, went to Katrina-ravaged areas to help preserve books and historical items, such as a Bible from the Old Spanish Fort Museum in Pascagoula, Mississippi."
"Stony Brook University has many rare and useful resources for students to use, which the Special Collections department & University Archives work to preserve. This department, located in the Frank Melville, Jr. Memorial Library, consists of librarians and archivists including Ms. Kristen J. Nyitray, Head of the department, and Mr. F. Jason Torre, the University Archivist."
"Terry Belanger, a history and engineering professor and honorary curator of the Special Collections Library, was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship yesterday.
The award grants five-year fellowships to those who exhibit "exceptional merit and promise of continued and enhanced creative work" and includes a $500,000 stipend, according to the MacArthur Foundation."
Rare Book School "A professor dedicated to revealing “the magic” of the book as an art form will receive a half-million dollars for his work.
John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation announced today that Terry Belanger, a University of Virginia professor and honorary curator of Special Collections, is one of 25 MacArthur Fellows for 2005. Each fellow receives a $500,000 grant."
"At the East Asian Library, Shively directed the conservation and cataloguing of the Mitsui Collection of early Japanese printed books and maps, the largest such collection outside Japan.
The Mutsui Collection is the most important holding and the core of the rare book collection at the East Asian Library, said Peter Zhou, the library's director.
"It's rare to find a man of his status with expertise on the academic front, and a devotion to the library work," Zhou said."
"“In this position, you become a kind of local historian,” Favretto said with relish. “You get to dig around in people’s diaries and old notebooks. And you come to know many people. Recently, I had the pleasure of working with Leon Williams, the first African American to serve on San Diego’s City Council, an important figure in local transportation history and a leader in bringing the trolley to SDSU.”
"BOSTON -- Harvard University did not discriminate against a library assistant who claimed she was repeatedly turned down for promotions because school officials saw her as ''a pretty girl'' whose attire was too ''sexy,'' a federal jury found Monday."
"His great interest was incunabula, books published from 1450 to 1500, just after the printing press was invented, said Roberta Engleman, assistant curator of rare books."
"Library workers, particularly, were angry at the council's plans to relocate staff to different positions across the borough in an effort to deal with cuts in the service."
"Residents have blasted library bosses for chucking out hundreds of books."
"A rare military collection was thrown in a skip along with education books and novels during the revamp of Maida Vale Library in Sutherland Avenue."
"France's national library has raised a "warcry" over plans by Google to put books from some of the world's great libraries on the Internet and wants to ensure the project does not lead a domination of American ideas."
"Jean-Noel Jeanneney, who heads France's national library and is a noted historian, says Google's choice of works is likely to favour Anglo-Saxon ideas and the English language."
"In his last decade while he put his life on paper, Casanova lived and worked as a castle librarian in Bohemia, a far cry from the volatile days of his youth"
"Jeanette Winter is the author and illustrator of The Librarian of Basra, a story based on the real life heroism of an Iraqi librarian named Alia Muhammad Baker. With the help of others in her community, she managed to save 70% of the books in the central library of the Iraqi port city of Basra."
"The Vermillion Public Library is now sending books to its sister independent library in Havana. The first two shipments included Spanish-language editions of George Orwell's 1984 and a collection of the works of that formidable freethinker Mark Twain."
"Parsippany-based Skanska USA Building Inc. has been awarded the construction-management contract to build Princeton University's futuristic science library, which was designed by renowned architect Frank Gehry."
"A Harvard librarian allegedly dubbed too sexy for a promotion has subpoenaed Harvard President Lawrence Summers to testify in federal court about a university culture her lawsuit claims rendered her invisible because she is a black woman."
"If I have two people come in, it's a big crowd," says Helen Myers, 77.
Canada's BookTelevision does "Naughty Librarian Month" for January
...to "heat up those cold winter nights."
Ashlie Atkinson plays a Fat "Funny, Smart, Sexy" Librarian off Broadway
Show title: "Fat Pig" ...as in: confront your misconceptions about Fat People.
Concerned Questions about Google's One-World Library
" 'This is the day the world changes,' said John Wilkin, a University of Michigan librarian working with Google. 'It will be disruptive because some people will worry that this is the beginning of the end of libraries.'"
Librarians Worldwide Fight for Jailed Librarians in Cuba
"Hector Palacios, was arrested and sentenced to 25 years in prison. Most of the library's books were confiscated by the police."
Children's Librarian is President of Maine Senate
"I read almost exclusively fiction...In fiction you create a world that makes sense ... and solutions are gotten." (Beth Edmonds)
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