The Yale Silk Road Database gathers over 6,000 images takes across the Silk Road region by faculty members during site visits between 2006 and 2009. The visits were led by Mimi Hall Yiengpruksawan (Professor, History of Art) with the help of the Council on East Asian Studies at Yale University. The collection will be of [...]

On that same SALALM panel titled “Documenting in Times of Adversity, Survival and Hope” my friend Lynn Shirey presented on a newly acquired collection of slides by photographer Andrés Romero Spethman, documenting Chilean Protest Murals during the dictatorship of Gen. Augusto Pinochet (1973-1990). The collection was recently purchased by Harvard and is currently available online [...]

Last weekend I was attending the annual SALALM conference and heard about a lot of great projects relating to libraries and Latin American. The Cuban Rafter Phenomenon: A Unique Sea Exodus project is one of them. I heard about this project on a panel titled “Documenting in Times of Adversity, Survival and Hope.” María Rita [...]

Con ganas de celebrar el bicentenario de Colombia aquí recojo información sobre algunos eventos y colecciones que se han organizado en Colombia y virtualmente. ¡A celebrar se dijo! El proyecto Libro al Viento se ha asociado con la Biblioteca Luis Ángel Arango (BLAA) para traer varias biografías sobre los grandes de Colombia al público en [...]

At the beginning of the month I was in Montreal and got to visit La Grande Bibliothèque! This library is one of the city’s largest public libraries, and the collection is part of the Library and National Archives of Québec. I presume that since this region of Canada includes a vibrant separatist movement they feel [...]

The Huffington Post just came out with a great picture collection of the most WTF cookbooks! They are hilarious! Visit their posting for the complete collection. ¡El Huffington Post acaba de sacar una colección buenísima de los libros de cocina más incongruentes! ¡Están buenísimos! Visite su sitio para ver la colección completa.

I know this will be rather blasphemous to a number of book lovers, but oh well, here are some beautiful pieces of art made out of books. Sé que esto será más bien blasfemo a un número de amantes de los libros, pero bueno, aquí hay algunas hermosas piezas de arte hechas de libros. // [...]

The folks from BiblioRed were so kind as to send me some additional images of the two libraries I visited, the Biblioteca Pública Parque El Tunal, and the Biblioteca Pública Virgilio Barco, and I wanted to share them. They also send me some great facts about the library systems. Thank you! During 2009 BibloRed received 4,437,945 visitors, [...]

While I was growing up in Colombia libraries were very scarce, the only library one ever heard mentioned was the Biblioteca Luis Ángel Arango (BLAA), which I finally got to visit. While the Biblioteca Luis Ángel Arango is owned by the Banco de la República de Colombia, it is very much a public library, and [...]

The British Library is always up to something interesting; I just discovered their Database of Bookbindings. This is an entire online collection dedicated to the bindings of books held by the British Library, some of which date back to 1500! The collection also includes some items held by the National Library of Netherlands. The collection [...]