Library stuff

This webpage supplies access to Booklist book reviews from 1995 through 2003. Its author seems quite discontented with the ALA's Booklist webpage, which supplies selected current reviews but summarily announces that "As of April 2003, Booklist reviews are no longer being archived on the Web site. Turn to the print Booklist for complete review coverage."

It remains to be seen how long the non-ALA-sanctioned "backdoor" to the archived 1995-2003 reviews will remain active and unblocked. Yup, everything's available for free on the Internet, and always will be... who needs those musty old printed copies....

This link ripped from www.librarian.net, which also has some interesting links to articles about the new Seattle Public Library building. (NYT evil-registration-required article here, New Yorker here, some photos here.)

I'm not all that impressed by the appearance of the building, but I am intrigued by the New Yorker's description of the architects' arrangement of the bookstacks:

The architects saw that in most older libraries, where books are stored on rows of shelves on separate floors, collections are arbitrarily broken apart, depending on the amount of space available on each floor. But since the Dewey Decimal System is a continuous series of numbers, they reasoned, why couldn’t books be stored on a continuous series of shelves? And what if the shelves wound up and up, in a spiral? They saw that it was possible to design stacks in the manner of a parking garage, with slanted floors joined in a series of zigzagging ramps. The stacks, which the architects named the Spiral, take up the equivalent of four floors in the middle of the eleven-story building. They are open, which means that you can browse.

Melvil Dewey meets Frank Lloyd Wright!