OC Hell C

Greenfield Librarian Turns Catalog Cards Into Art

GREENFIELD, Mass. — Once central to any quest to locate books within a library, the fate of card catalogs was sealed with the rise of the Internet and computer searches, relegating many of those index cards to the country’s basements, storage cabinets and trash bins.

But on a wall in the corner of Greenfield Community College’s Nahman-Watson Library, 128 artifacts from the library’s card catalog hang preserved in a glass case — signed by the authors who penned the very books to which the cards once led.

A public appeal has been launched to save the hundreds of thousands of ancient manuscripts smuggled out of Timbuktu during the crisis in Mali, which are now facing a more insidious threat: moisture damage.

Dating back over 700 years, the fragile manuscripts range from poetry to commerce records, and are from Andalusia and Southern Europe, Arabia, Egypt, Morocco,and Arab trading ports on the Indian Ocean as well as the region of Timbuktu itself. Initially reported to have been destroyed by Islamist rebels in a fire, the 300,000 manuscripts were evacuated from Timbuktu by librarians and archivists.

It’s a quarterly.

So each year, there’s a Winter October, a Spring October, a Summer October, and a Fall October.

Hi! It’s about that time where you need to start figuring out what to pack for ALA. Here are some posts from the vault (or open web, or whatever) that might help:

LW special edition posts on packing  (get tips from people like Char Booth, Jenna Freedman, David Lee King, Buffy Hamilton, and more!)

LW conference photos from past conferences  (see what people have worn to previous conferences to get a sense of what might be good to pack || if you’d like to be a photographer yourself at #ala2013 and take pictures like these, fill out our form!)

Hack Library School’s LW feature  (scroll down a bit for information on packing for conferences)

Free Range Librarian’s ALA conference survival tips

Erin Dorney’s What I’m not bringing to ALA

Emily Clasper’s suitcase on Pinterest

The library brings together content from Open Source providers and top global publishers. It is designed for low-bandwidth environments through the use of a local network topology. The platform is designed to be device agnostic. That means it can be accessed via mobile phones, e-readers or even low-cost tablets.

British country house libraries