"Badass Librarians of Timbuktu"

You just really have to read this story from NPR! It is an interview with the author of a book about librarians in Timbuktu who rescued thousands of medieval manuscripts from destruction by Al-Qaida.

"Former lives"

The building Drake Library is in was built expressly to be a library, but some library buildings had other uses before becoming home to a library. A recent NYLA (NY Library Association) bulletin article tells about how the Waterford NY library was once a train station!

Newly discovered "island"

A few days ago this blogger walked by a couple of students on the ground floor who were studying the Anglo Saxon epic Beowulf together. Now news is out about the discovery of a previously unknown Anglo Saxon "island." The Anglo Saxons have a fascinating history and have contributed much to the modern world. Epics of theirs like Beowulf and other literature are classics of the English language. We have many good books on them, and the article literature is extensive. Shown here is a glass counter from the site that may have originally been set in a bronze bowl.

Your surname!

Here's an interesting site, a genealogy site with data and mapping for surnames. Give it a try, see how common your name is, where most people with that name live and so on. If you do have a yen to do some family history or genealogy, we have a library guide that can help you get started.

Library History

Library history, probably not a topic on a lot of people's minds, but think about it: lots of us use libraries, spend many hours in them as children, as students, researchers and so forth, but where do they come from? Were there always libraries around like today? This blog has a lot of informative and fun entries on all sorts of library history topics, have a look today!

The photo here is of our predecessor library, the library quarters in the old Brockport Normal school c1910.

"Bound journals"

Let's start the new semester off with something a little old, "bound journals." You won't have to use these the way people once did, but it may come up, you never know. Even in 2016 not everything is available online!

If you run across something that is in the bound journals, it simply means those "books" on the ground floor. They aren't regular books, they're journals or magazines, and at the end of every year we send them out and they get "bound," or made into books. Like the old Scientific Americans from the WWI era in this photo. The bound journals are shelved A-Z by title. You can read them in the library, or photocopy or scan them with one of our scanners. (If you have a smart phone you could take pictures of the pages, or use an app like Office Lens to scan them."

If you have any questions with any of this please ask one of us!

A library ghost cam?

This is interesting about the public library in Indiana with a "ghost cam," especially with an intern coming to the Rose Archives this spring to update the famous Hartwell ghost history. Perhaps we need a ghost cam in Hartwell Hall? Drake Library has a lot of books on the spiritualist movement, paranormal phenomenon and so forth.