The Boston Public Library has been developing a pretty amazing and eclectic photo gallery up on flickr, all stuff scanned from their archives and special collections.
I’m partial to the Travel Poster collection. There’s also impressive Match Cover and Stereograph sets.
It’s a pretty extensive (almost 17 000 items) example of a library using popular social media software to push out parts of collections normally inaccessible to the average library visitor.
Also, it’s just plain neat.
The good Jessamyn West at Librarian.net has compiled a list of the random, secretish places in libraries she’s been shown:
- Entering the sub-basement at Colorado College.
- Rubber stamps in the University of Alabama library basement (there was also a printing press)
- The stairs to the room upstairs from the Bradford (VT) library
- The Calef Library basement in Washington Vermont
- Old card catalogs at the Library of Congress
- Not quite on topic but the secret door [art piece, not functional to go someplace secret] at the San Jose State library is pretty nifty.[full post]
It’s great when the evolution of a building space is cracked open. Particularly when it’s something a little esoteric seeming, like a library.
A long time ago, I wrote an article about exploring the abandoned(ish) passageways beneath Wilfrid Laurier University. I went under the library building, just a little.
More dedicated urban explorers, though, reveal some more amazing stuff: c.f. Cool Pics of an Abandoned Russian Library
Return Your Books, Son.
Apparently, the Chapin Memorial Library in Myrtle Beach has been flexing its legal muscle:
Some people in Myrtle Beach owe money to Chapin Memorial Library, the city’s only library. In some instances it has reached to a point where police have to serve warrants.
The warrants are referred to as courtesy warrants according to the City of Myrtle Beach Police department but the problem deals, in great part, to a lack of courtesy.
Police said people check out books and videos and despite written requests from the library to return them, the patron ignore those requests.
“If they are not returned then it’s considered a larceny by South Carolina law and it is treated as such,” said library director Briget Livingston, “It’s not for someone who owes us a dollar, this is for someone who as not returned many many materials at least $50 worth.”[full article]
Courtesy warrant? It’s probably a courtesy they send the cops and not this guy.
I wonder if this is good press for libraries where many are struggling to justify themselves in increasingly stringent times? Are issuing warrants like this an unnecessarily visible action? Could this pressure on delinquent users be done better, so that it stays off the oddball news sections.