Saving the Warburg Library

This is an article from the New York Review of Books that presses the case to save Britain's famous Warburg Library. Increasingly, traditional libraries are trying to preserve the cultural heritage of the world's great book collections. This article adds fodder to the argument that book collections themselves are intellectual instruments that transcend even the content that is within them: a argument often loss on today's administrators.

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2010/sep/30/save-warburg-library/

1/3 of Americans Use Computers in Libraries

According to a University of Washington study funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, one third of Americans use Computers in libraries to browse the internet.

The study found that library patrons use the computers for a variety of tasks ranging from life changing to the mundane. The availability of internet resources in libraries is expanding the role of librarians to include tasks such as being an employment coach or a homework tutor.

Download link - .pdf version of the study report. (Requires a .pdf reader)

Wikimedia Commons image by user Limonlime distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 3.0 license.

hippest home for books

Here's an interesting selection of photographs of new(ish)libraries -and more.

twittering libraries

For a Fall 2008 LIS class at Florida State University's College of Information Lindy Brown has written an interesting overview of the history of Twitter and the use of twitter in libraries.

More here - a guest post from Lindy Brown on Tame the Web

google newsletter returns

After many posts on many lists about whether or not librarians had been used and dissed (
http://tinyurl.com/59cklf) the Google Newsletter is back. Coincidence or not, it's nice to have it back again. Here's a
link to the newsletter.