I arrived in Bogota last night and today I’m off to visit a few libraries, my first stop is the Biblioteca Nacional de Colombia. As Colombia’s national library, one of their main responsibilities is serving as the country’s legal deposit.
The collection includes monographs, journals, and a large music collection. The library’s music collection includes both [...]

This Book Is Overdue!: How Librarians and Cybrarians Can Save Us All by Marilyn Johnson
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
I picked up a galley of this book while attending ALA Midwinter, and thoroughly enjoyed it. Marilyn Johnson became interested in librarians while researching her previous book on obituaries, and running into a few fascinating [...]

Today I spent the day at the Library of Congress and loved it. I was there with my mother and brother and we took one of the guided tours of the building. This tour starts off with a short movie including a number of brief interviews with some of the librarians who highlight many of [...]

The Stendhal University of Grenoble has joined forces with the city’s public library to create the digital collection Les Manuscrits de Stendhal. The site includes Stendhal’s personal correspondence, as well as reflections on travels, literature and philosophy. And in case you are about to start looking for the manuscripts of  “The Red and the Black” [...]

The European Library portal can help you search the online catalogs to all the major libraries in the European Union. The project originates from the TEL-project which was set up as a cooperative framework that would facilitate access to all the major national and deposit collection from Europe’s national libraries. The European Library is [...]

Archivo Chile is a site that gathers information in all formats primarily about Chile’s social/popular movements, and secondarily about Latin America. The site also emphases human rights, and leftist politics.
The site is rather cumbersome to navigate, but full of interesting material. You can find documents on Salvador Allende, Gabriela Mistral, Violeta Parra, and Miguel Enríque [...]

Recently the Vanderbilt library has digitized and made available a portion of their material on Colombia, specializing in 19th century culture and history, titled The J. León Helguera Collection of Colombiana. Currently the collection is divided into three main categories; broadsides, 1825-1972; pamphlets (including novenas), 1785-1969; and programas, 1819-1914. The site also allows for easy [...]

With some financial help from the National Endowment for the Humanities, digital-humanities professor Mary Flanagan is developing a game that will help add tags to some of Dartmouth College’s archival collections. Flanagan expects that students will be interested in the game which presents a player with an image for which they have to create “labels” [...]

Today I spent the morning at Trinity College. After a quick tour of the campus I headed towards the library where I wanted to see the Book of Kells, and the the Long Room.
The Book of Kells is another one of these really old bibles, this one dating back to ca. 800, and it is [...]

Today I got a “behind the scenes” tour of the National Library of Ireland! On my visit I found out that the library is quite a welcoming place to people from all around the world. Any local resident, or any person with a passport in hand can receive a library card, and use the library’s [...]