Posts tagged “libraries”

  1. I love being a librarian. Every day is different, and I enjoy helping people with their plans and projects. But with the job also comes a number of questions I cannot answer, or would simply prefer not to get. While you might imagine you can ask your local librarian anything, there may be times when they simply won’t have a ready response for you. …

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  2. In the 1930s, Walter Benjamin wrote an essay called "Unpacking My Library." As the title suggests, it’s a meditation on books, but it’s not about books as works of literature or as pieces of writing. Instead it's about books as material objects, physical things with intricate histories based on where they’ve been, histories which, so he argues, are intertwined with personal narratives, narratives of lives lived in search of volumes of volumes. In the essay…

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  3. Every city with more than one library in it has a "good" library and the "other" library. If you grew up in a town too small for multiple libraries, there was almost certainly an adjoining township (or recently incorporated community, or burgh, or hamlet) with a good library that put your visiting bookmobile to shame. Whether you lived closer to the good library or the lesser branch affects your development for the rest of your…

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