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 [...]

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 includes [...]

Yesterday while I was riding the bus to work a new billboard caught my eye, one for Read.gov. Read.gov is part of the Library of Congress, and it aims to encourage reading of all kinds of material, by every age group. On the website you’ll find recommendations by age group, and for educators, and under [...]

This morning, bright and early, I attended an ALA Midwinter Conference session hosted by OCLC titled “Redesigning Technical Services Workflows.” The session was composed of three presenters, two of which shared their experiences on how their technical services departments are adapting to decreased budgets and new technology trends. The third presenter, Ruth Fischer (R2 Consulting), [...]

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 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 [...]

The British Library is constantly coming up with new great projects to make their collections accessible to all; In the latest, Archival Sound Recordings, they have digitized all of their audio collections and made them available to the world. The full collection gathers about 28,000 items which include recordings of singing, yelling, speaking, banging, and [...]

Radical Cataloging: Essays at the Front by K. R. Roberto
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
The collection of essays in Radical Cataloging cover a wide range of issue in the cataloging world, and it’s not the boring book most non-catalogers might assume it is – but be warned that unless you already understand LCSH, NAR, [...]

Yesterday was the official launch of “StoryCorps Historias“, the Latino version of StoryCorps, the project that gathers personal stories in audio format. Since 2003 the independent and nonprofit project has gathered thousands of interviews, often in conversation format between two people. These interviews are then available though public radio stations and online. These oral histories [...]

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 [...]