"The Personal Libraries Library is a specially-curated lending library located in Portland, Oregon. The Library is dedicated to recreating the personal libraries of artists, philosophers, scientists, writers and other thinkers & makers. The collection has commenced with the personal libraries of Maria Mitchell, the 19th-century astronomer, librarian, educator and suffragist and Robert Smithson (1938-1973), the influential artist, writer and thinker. Recent additions to the Library are the personal libraries of Italo Calvino & Jorge Luis Borges. Subsequent personal libraries of interest to collect belong to: Buckminster Fuller, Hannah Arendt, Lady Bird Johnson and Yoko Ono.

Members can check out books for an initial three-week period, with additional renewals possible. The Library resides in NE Portland, and has Reading Room Hours monthly. Please see Membership and Reading Room information below."

"Proposal for a mobile educational facility to stage and feed back information from seminars, screening, exhibitions etc. Transported by one or several vehicles.

Ideas Circus forms part of a series of investigations into mobile facilities which are in conjunction with fixed establishments requiring expanded services over a limited period in order to satisfy an extreme but temporary problem.

[Ideas Circus is] An educational facility which is able to carry specialised information between fixed centres. Communication and extension of ideas and knowledge is achieved by setting up seminars and teaching facilities at the Centres, which are then fed with accumulated knowledge held by the mechanism. Responses are fed back to origin and also carried forward onto a complete circuit."

[via: http://nomadicity.tumblr.com/post/20789206447/ae-ther-ideas-circus-by-archigram-1968 ]

"an eclectic collection of images and documents of the library, archive, and information management profession"

"This is a seminar about making. It’s run out of the Graduate School of Design, Harvard University, Spring, 2012. We will focus on creating products, services & experiences, broadly defined, for the Harvard Library community. With generous funding provided by Prof. Robert Darnton and the Harvard Library Lab, projects will be deployed in «Test Kitchens» — partner libraries, such as the Loeb and Widener Libraries, that allocate portions of their public space to these experiments."

"Harvard Library has established the Harvard Library Lab in order to create better services for students and faculty and to join with others in fashioning the information society of the future.

By offering infrastructure and financial support for new enterprises, the Lab offers opportunities for individuals to innovate, cooperate across projects, and make original contributions to the way libraries work.

The Lab leverages the entrepreneurial aspirations of people throughout the library system and beyond and promotes projects in all areas of library activity. Proposals from faculty and students anywhere in the university are welcome and the Lab encourages collaboration with MIT."

"What is the Harvard Library Innovation Laboratory?
We are a small group within the Harvard University Library system that implements in software ideas about how libraries can be ever more valuable.

What do you do?
We hack libraries...in the good sense of discovering and delivering more capability and value.

Can you be a little more specific?
We work in three broad areas:
1. We think in public.
2. We build software that demonstrates how libraries can bring yet more value to scholars and researchers.
3. We amplify our effect by eagerly partnering with other groups with similar passions."

"Bibliotheca II, alias “son of Bibliotheca” (last semester’s seminar/studio jointly run by Jeffrey Schnapp & John Palfrey), has now been launched with the help of Ann Whiteside (chief librarian at the Loeb Design Library), Jeff Goldenson (Law Library Innovation Lab), and Ben Brady (GSD). Otherwise known as The Library Test Kitchen or the “library rapid prototyping lab,” it’s being generously funded by the Harvard Library Lab. Questions of every kind are on the table regarding the future of libraries from signage to furniture, policies to experiences. The point is to build stuff: to translate “ah-ha” insights into actual devices, to fabricate the next new online/offline appliance (or at least a plausible iteration of such an appliance). Once these exist, we plan to deploy & test them in partner libraries, such as the Loeb Design, Widener & Fine Arts Libraries, that allocate portions of their public space to experimentation. We’ll be posting our progress to www.librarytestkitchen.org ."

"I wonder, then, if the promise of an ebook isn’t the book but the library. And if, in all our attention to a new device for reading, we’re neglecting methods for shelving. A search engine cannot compete with Warburg’s delicate, personal library. The metadata of a book extends beyond the keywords held between its covers to the many hands the text has passed through; it’s not enough just to scan every page. We need to also scan the conversations, the notes left in the margins, the stains from coffee, tea, and drink. We need to eavesdrop on the readers, without whom every book is mute. That is the promise I seek."

"Our vision of the perfect learning environment is a library, but like none we have ever encountered. The library would have books and videos and tapes and computers, but that would be just the beginning. There would be lots of librarians, or more accurately “docents” — guides to the trails of knowledge. Primary docents would provide instruction in the technologies necessary to utilize the available resources. … There would be a vast learning exchange of skills, from basic mathematics to auto mechanics. There would be lending libraries of tools and materials, from carpenter’s saws and hammers, to biologists’ microscopes, to astronomers’ telescopes. There would be organized classes, learning support groups, and lectures. Self-evaluation tools would be available for learners to measure their own progress.

There would be large gardens and orchards, staffed by botanists and farmers, where students would learn to grow fruits and vegetables, and home economists who would teach their preparation and storage. There would be apprenticeships for virtually everything kind of employment the community requires.

There would be rites of passage and celebration of subject or skill mastery. There would be storytellers and community historians, drawn from the community’s older members. Seniors would play a vital role in preparing young children to make use of all the library has to offer.

The library would be the community’s hub and its heart. It would be supported the usual ways we support schools, through public taxation, but all users, both children and adults, would be required to contribute time to the library’s success."

"El proyecto como muchos ya habían visto en un video introducción publicado anteriormente en Plataforma Arquitectura, consiste en la recuperación de la casa de máquinas del ramal de trenes Curico-Licantén. abandonada por más de 20 años, para su transformación en una biblioteca pública municipal.<br />
<br />
El edificio existente a pesar de su condición de abandono y deterioro, formaba parte de la memoria de Licantén, y por lo tanto tenía un significado importante para la comunidad. Se ubica frente a la única escuela básica de la localidad, por lo tanto perfecto complemento para el nuevo programa, una biblioteca pública. A través de la incorporación de este nuevo programa al edificio existente, rescatando el valor espacial y simbólico del edificio para la comunidad, la propuesta pretende recuperar el edificio y otorgarle un nuevo significado."

"Interesante video reportaje a la Biblioteca de Licantén del programa Umbrales de la señal HD de VTR, obra de Emilio Marín junto a la oficina Murúa Valenzuela. Emilio ha desarrollado un interesante trabajo que se mueve entre la arquitectura, artes visuales y la editorial independiente, sobre el cual conversamos cuando lo entrevistamos hace unos meses." [embedded video at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HvzcnUgk5Yw]

"What is most striking in the children’s library are the shelves & shelves of books...astonishing to a little girl whose family lives in a farmhouse in the country where books are almost wholly unknown. That these books are available for children—for a child like me—all these books!—leaves me dazed, dazzled...The Lockport Public Library has been an illumination in my life. In that dimension of the soul in which time is collapsed and the past is contemporaneous with the present, it still is...I was mesmerized by books and by what might be called “the life of the mind”: the life that was not manual labor, or housework, but seemed in its specialness to transcend these activities. As a farm girl, even when I was quite young I had my “farm chores”—but I had time also to be alone, to explore the fields, woods and creek side. And to read. There was no greater happiness for me than to read...than to make my way along the seemingly infinite shelves of books in the Lockport Public Library"

"The basic idea was to scatter smaller information spaces throughout the city: buildings, kiosks, cafes, computer labs, public-access WiFi envelopes, media production centers, "teen spaces," public meeting rooms, and more. Importantly, though, the entire point of Young's investigation was to ask what libraries might look like if information was no longer accessed through books.

"What should libraries do to become relevant in the digital age?

"# Search for library materials—Enter search terms such as keywords, author or title

"Explore 44,500 selected recordings of music, spoken word, and human and natural environments: accents and dialects; arts, literature and performance; classical music; environment and nature; jazz and popular music; oral history; sound recording history; world and traditional music"

"The Collection

"“Feedbooks is a universal e-reading platform compatible with all mobile devices where you can download thousands of free e-books, publish and share your own content, and create customized newspapers from RSS feeds and widgets.” "

"Together lets you keep everything in one place. Text, documents, images, movies, sounds, web pages and bookmarks can all be dragged to Together for safe keeping, tagged, previewed, collected together in different ways and found again instantly."

"Only Collect; that is to say, collect everything, indiscriminately. You're five years old. Don't presume too much to know what's important and what isn't. Photocopy journal articles, photograph archives; create bibliographies, buy books; make notes on every article or book you read, even if it's just one line saying "Never read this again"; collect newspaper clippings and email them to yourself; collect quotes; save your ideas for future papers, future projects, future conferences, even if they seem wildly implausible now. Hoarding must become instinctual, it must be an uncontrollable, primal urge. And the higher, civilizing impulse that kicks in after the fact is organization, or librarianship. You must keep tabs on everything you collect, somehow; a system must be had, and the system must be idiot-proof."

"Here is my modest proposal. Drop the requirement that students use print resources. Period. But ADD the requirement that each citation include a sentence that argues for the authority of the source."

"Boolify makes it easier to for students to understand their web search by illustrating the logic of their search, and by showing them how each change to their search instantly changes their results."

"In past, possibilities of real leadership for teachers have been too few. But profession is changing to become more collaborative & collegial and your question is rich with opportunities to lead your school community in transforming your media center."

"We love libraries here at TreeHugger. They’re a perfect example of a Product Service System (PSS) where you get the service of an item without having to own it and all the cost and upkeep time that requires."

Dan Hill puts it well: "Not much innovation here, and save Seattle's magnificent library courtesy of OMA, some very dated thinking in US libraries."

"a series of self-paced discovery entries for library staff interested in venturing out on the social web. Each post is meant as a short introduction to a different social website, tool, or concept. It might not be ground-breaking information to veteran r

"What if you could contribute your own description of a certain photo in, say, the Library of Congress’ vast photographic archive, knowing that it might make the photo you’ve touched a little easier to find for the next person?

"The key goals of this pilot project are to firstly give you a taste of the hidden treasures in the huge Library of Congress collection, and secondly to how your input of a tag or two can make the collection even richer."

"I went from high school to Caltech as a math major...none of my previous math & science teachers had informed me that I wasn't a genius...I discovered the truth by sitting next to an authentic genius or two at Caltech, I was crushed."

"a particle system physics engine for processing. Just a simulation, it tells you where particles are and it's your job to draw them. No collisions, you can take care of them yourself if you want!"

"the world's largest network of library content and services...WorldCat.org lets you search the collections of libraries in your community and thousands more around the world...Search many libraries at once for an item and then locate it in a library near

"ThinkeringSpaces are interactive environments that encourage school age children to tinker with things, both physical and virtual, reflect upon what they discover, and elaborate their ideas in ways they can share with others."