Take a look at this nice video about a pub in Yorkshire Dales, UK, which has begun offering library services! What a clever idea. The folks behind this clever project do clarify that volunteer services such as their cannot replace formal libraries, since it is the volunteer services of professional librarians, and the collections they [...]

While at ALA I met a couple of very cool librarians, one of which has a blog I have been following for some time now. Here’s a brief description of these great woman and their projects. Hannah Winkler is the woman behind the Global Librarianship blog. I’ve had this blog on my RSS feed for [...]

I just learned about This Week in Libraries (twil) an online TV series about libraries all over the world! (Does it get any better than this?!) Twil is hosted by Erik Boekestejin and Jaap van de Geer, both from the DOK Library Concept Center in Delft, Netherlands. With each episode the two hosts interview  librarians, [...]

It sometimes seems to me that the phrase “Without Borders” has become a franchise; I think the first one was Doctors Without Borders (Medecins sans Fronteires), but now there are a whole bunch of them. Libraries Without Borders are affiliated with the French based Bibliothèques Sans Frontières and they supports “education in developing and disaster [...]

My friend Patrick just send me a link to this cool rolling library! Danish architect David Garcia knows that traveling with books is complicated because they are so heavy, so he came up with this clever design that allows the user to carry half a ton of the books while reading them. I like the [...]

Late last month the Spanish Minister of Culture, Ángeles González-Sinde, announced the release of Hispana: colecciones digitales de archivos, bibliotecas y museos españoles. Hispana aggregates over one million digital items from 121 different Spanish institutions, including libraries, museums, archives, as well as private and public organizations. The site also includes a directory of ongoing digitization [...]

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 [...]

Take a look at the UK’s smallest library! The resourceful folks from Westbury-sub-Mendip in Somerset converted an old phone booth that was out of use into a small lending library after the town lost its library. People bring books they have read and exchange them for new reading material, CDs and DVDs. Read the full [...]

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 Spanish Ministry of Culture has created the Red de Bibliotecas de Museos (BIMUS) in order to make the holdings of a number of museum libraries available to the general public. The project wishes to promote collaboration through the use of a common online catalog, develop common policies such as cooperative acquisitions, and foment interlibrary [...]