Pictures Of Libraries

Snapshots of the American library

KALW's Ben Trefny sat down with Robert Dawson to talk about some of the more interesting libraries he's come across.

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ROBERT DAWSON: I don't know if you've been to the Richmond Public Library , but...

BEN TREFNY: In the city of Richmond?

DAWSON: In the city of Richmond. They have a seed library . It's so cool! So you can go there and you can check out some seeds, take them home, plant them, and then they teach you how to harvest the seeds and bring them back. So it's this very interesting thing.

TREFNY: It's a long term loan.

DAWSON: It's a long term loan. I don't think there's an overdue fine either. They have a tool library in Berkeley, I don't know if you've heard about that. It's very cool! You can go out there and check out a weed whacker, a wheel wacker, a hose, you know, power tools. And the day I was there it was packed with people, coming and going all the time. I mean just very vital, very active. And so, that's part of what I think that's part of why libraries are very, very crucial - in a way, less about books and more about communities.

TREFNY: Tell me about some of the images we can see at the see at the display of your work.

DAWSON: Yeah, there's a number of them. My wife, Ellen, is from New England. So we go back every summer to visit her family back in Vermont. And the first public library ever, tax-supported public library, is in Peterborough, New Hampshire. It was 1833, so it was the beginning of this radical idea that people would be willing to tax themselves to pay for a library. And that idea spread around the world so now this is not unusual, unique to America. But at the time it began there, so I have a picture of her in front of the public library there texting on her Blackberry. And in New Orleans, I went and photographed some of the libraries there that have been damaged by Katrina. All of the libraries in New Orleans were damaged and many of them were still closed. So I photographed some of these places that have these big symbols on the windows on the outside and the trailers that the librarians are currently heroically keeping open and keeping people still...

Fascinating Pictures of Libraries Around the World | Bane Planet

A library is a collection of sources, resources, and services, and the structure in which it is housed; it is organized for use and maintained by a public body, an institution, or a private individual. In the more traditional sense, a library is a collection of books. It can mean the collection itself, the building or room that houses such a collection, or both. The term “library” has itself acquired a secondary meaning: “a collection of useful material for common use.” This sense is used in fields such as computer science, mathematics, statistics, electronics and biology. It can also be used by publishers in naming series of related books, e.g. The Library of Anglo-Catholic Theology.

The American library annual, including index to dates of current events; necrology of writers; bibliographies; statistics of book production; select lists of libraries; directories of publishers and booksellers; list of private collectors of books, etc

Library work cumulated, 1905-1911, A bibliography and digest of library literature

Public libraries

Encyclopedia of library and information science

Strategic management for public libraries, a handbook