Blogroll

War booty helped create Oxford’s renowned Bodleian Library

Oxford University’s Bodleian Library is one of Europe’s oldest libraries and one of the world’s eminent research libraries. Yet, some of its books carry a taint of unscrupulousness given the time of its founding. One of its founding collections is plunder from Portugal in 1596.

Between 1584 and 1604, Protestant England and Catholic Spain fought […]

The politics of Thomas Jefferson’s donation to the Library of Congress

In 1800, the seat of the U.S. government relocated to the District of Columbia. Among final preparations for the move, in April 1800, Congress appropriated funds for what would become the Library of Congress. With the U.S. Capitol as its home, the library’s first books arrived the following year. But in August 1814, the library […]

What kind of library user are you?

Libraries and the role they play in people’s lives and their communities is an area the Pew Research Center’s Internet and American Life project has been studying. Earlier this month, it released a report on what it calls “a typology of library engagement in American.” The report is based on Americans 16 years old and […]

2012’s most challenged books

Each year during National Library Week, the American Library Association releases a State of America’s Libraries report. One of the highlights (or lowlights) is that it contains the Top Ten List of Most Frequently Challenged Books, compiled annually by the organization’s Office for Intellectual Freedom. So here’s this year’s “winners”, in order, and the reasons […]

Author values profits over literacy

It is rather stunning. Terry Deary is a children’s author whose books were the seventh most borrowed from British libraries last year. Yet his view of libraries is that “no one has an entitlement to read a book for free, at the expense of the author, the publisher and the … tax payer.” According to […]