I have been following with interest the furore following Wirral council's decision to close half its public library branches, and to transform the remainder into multi-purpose centres. This is not just because I come from this part of North-West England, but also because the issues have led to a new form of intervention from the… Continue reading Libraries and the law: show-down in Wirral
Category: documents, books, libraries, collections
The attraction of lost libraries
Sometimes it seems that libraries are at their most alluring when they are lost forever, or even when they never existed. Jorges Luis Borges' infinite library is surely the best known of his many imaginative creations, while Alberto Manguel's The Library at Night devotes a good few pages to libraries which are no more, or… Continue reading The attraction of lost libraries
Keitai and novel, medium and message
In my last post about browsing arXiv on the iPhone, I mused about the use of mobile devices for information access. By the sort of happy coincidence which afflicts the blogger, the following day's London Metro free paper carried an article about novels written for the mobile phone. The keitai shousetsu, as moblie phone novels… Continue reading Keitai and novel, medium and message
Of Archives and iPhones
A new posting on Gerry MacKiernan's Mobile Libraries blog tells us about a new application for Apple iPhone. We can now search and display recent additions to the arXiv repository of preprints in the physical sciences. A clever, and logical enough no doubt, development in the trend towards mobile information. And something more for me… Continue reading Of Archives and iPhones
The World Digital Library
A new venture sponsored by UNESCO, the World Digital Library appears to want to be a front window for displaying (virtually) the cultural treasures of national libraries and similar 'heritage institutions' worldwide. Coverage from different regions and countries, at the moment, is a bit sparse, with less than 1200 items included. It has much less… Continue reading The World Digital Library
An obsession with our own future ?
One of the nice things about editing an academic journal - in my case the Journal of Documentation - is that one gets to write editorials. This doesn't give quite the scope for free expression that writing a blog does - for one thing, the publisher might take a view if the expression were too… Continue reading An obsession with our own future ?
The Occasional Informationist 