Allegations that President Clinton pardoned Marc Rich partly in return for donations to his presidential library have raised questions about the value of such institutions and the federal appropriations that support them.
As president of the American Historical Association, I started a programme to make dissertations into e-books in 1999. Before I knew it, I was involved in other electronic projects. Harvard invited me to become director of the libraries in 2007.
I wrote one terrible manuscript after another for a decade and I guess they gradually got a little less terrible. But there were many, many unpublished short stories, abandoned screenplays and novels... a Library of Congress worth of awful literature...
Montrose decided then and there that a full library, one made of old-fashioned paper books with bindings, the kind that cannot be electronically re-edited by anonymous lines of hidden code, was just as much a necessity for a free man as a shooting ir...
I do have a library of events I can talk about and I always expect to find a different point of view on it so even if I talk about the same event in the same town it's fresh.
Some say they get lost in books, but I find myself, again and again, in the pages of a good book. Humanly speaking, there is no greater teacher, no greater therapist, no greater healer of the soul, than a well-stocked library.
Our generation in the west was lucky: we had readymade gateways. We had books, paper, teachers, schools and libraries. But many in the world lack these luxuries. How do you practice without such tryout venues?
Human knowledge consists not only of libraries of parchment and ink - it is also comprised of the volumes of knowledge that are written on the human heart, chiselled on the human soul, and engraved on the human psyche.
To make sure that votes are never canceled out by illegal votes, we instituted a photo ID requirement. And don't you think it's fair to apply at least the same standard required to get a library card or to board an airpane?
I've never been a collector - just a consumer - and these days unless a book is signed to me by another author, I don't normally have any qualms about passing it to a friend or donating it to the library.
A commune of library employees in Moscow created an "extreme" commune in which all clothing - including undergarments - was collectivized. According to Mehnert, if a communard preferred to wear his or her own underclothes "it would be characterized a...
It's still National Library Week. You should be especially nice to a librarian today, or tomorrow. Sometime this week, anyway. Probably the librarians would like tea. Or chocolates. Or a reliable source of funding.
The Occupy movement did create spontaneously communities that taught people something: you can be in a supportive community of mutual aid and cooperation and develop your own health system and library and have open space for democratic discussion and...
If anybody wanted to photograph my life, they'd get bored in a day. 'Heres Matt at home learning his lines. Here's Matt researching in aisle six of his local library'. A few hours of that and they'd go home.
Even as the Internet has revived hope of a universal library and Google seems to promise an answer to every query, books have remained a dark region in the universe of information. We want books to be as accessible and searchable as the Web. On the o...
I was that weird kid that checked out all of the non-fiction paranormal studies books from the library. I've always been fascinated by the supernatural, particularly movies and TV shows that manage to blend humor with the horror - 'Supernatural', 'Bu...
At Yahoo, we were one of the early proponents of the power of content showcased through new media. SnagFilms, with its large library and breadth of digital distribution, can help shape this next phase, bringing great stories to broad new audiences.
In the university library, we know when a book has been used in a class or put on reserve... or while it was out, did somebody call it back in. It turns out to be a pretty good indicator of how relevant the work is at that time.
I love rare books. Not that I own a lot of them, mind you. You couldn't quite call me a rare-book collector. But I did once work in a rare-books library, and I wrote a novel about a rare book.
I'm old enough, by a long shot, to remember going to the library and spending days researching. If I was looking for a line from a poem or something else I needed, that would be the trip I would have to take.
A library in the middle of a community is a cross between an emergency exit, a life-raft and a festival. They are cathedrals of the mind; hospitals of the soul; theme parks of the imagination. On a cold rainy island, they are the only sheltered publi...
