USF Bloggers Planet

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Hello everyone!

April 11 – 17, 2010 is National Library Week.

National Library Week is an annual celebration of the contributions of our nation’s libraries and librarians.

This year’s theme and focus is on the many ways libraries support local communities.

Here at Gleeson many of our events, displays, and exhibitions give library goers an opportunity to meet others who are interested in similar arts and letters, as well as provide intellectual and aesthetic stimulation through collective enjoyment of art, discussions, and talks. Allow me to count a few of the ways Gleeson Library | Geschke Center is supporting local communities in 2010 alone:

• Thacher Art Gallery Exhibits – Positively Sixth Street & The Urban Unseen. Both examine how our surroundings in San Francisco –  from people to buildings to everything in between — influence our lived experience. Every exhibit is accompanied by a reception and a talk.
• Gleeson Celebration of National Poetry Month brings together USF faculty and staff poets and celebrates San Francisco and Bay Area poetry. Join us on April 29!
• The USF Book Club gives a venue to avid readers and book lovers to meet and discuss books. They meet once a month and are open to all USF people. Join us on April 14!
• Exhibition, events, and talks given in the Rare Book Room — most recently The Exhibition of Mezzotints, which included an artist talk.
• Community & campus outreach, such as staffing a library table at Stress Less Day, donating library fines to Haiti and conducting correspondence with elementary students interested in our library.
• Providing facilities to foster the educational group experience, such as computer labs, group study rooms, and conversational areas for academic discussion.

The moral of the story… if you aren’t already participating in or enjoying some of the activities and services listed above, we would love you to! You can keep up to date with Gleeson goings-on by checking us out right here at our blog, Gleeson Gleanings. Please consider this your formal invitation to join us at a talk, exhibition, or just to come soak up the positive info vibes we radiate. We would love to see you!

A few years ago I attended a reception at the Menasha Public Library in conjunction with the Wisconsin Library Association's annual conference and discovered that the library owned one of the unusual revolving bookcases of the former Tabard Inn Library. I have written a previous post about the Tabard Inn Library which was a was a for-profit membership library founded in 1902 by Seymour Eaton. It was administered by the Booklovers Library, another Eaton enterprise. Over the years I have accumulated a collection of ephemera and artifacts related to the both the Tabard Inn Library and the Booklovers Library and this month I have an exhibit of those items at the Menasha Public Library. The exhibit is supplemented by a selection of items from my Wisconsin Library Memorabilia exhibit. "With all the Red Tape on the Box" was a slogan that Eaton used to highlight the simplicity of borrowing books from the Tabard Inn Library. Seymour Eaton was an extremely interesting individual and I wrote a recent post about Eaton's connection to the Roosevelt Bears.

It almost escaped me that this month marks the fifth anniversary of "The Library History Buff" website. The "Library History Buff Blog" was created as a companion to the website. The LHB website which I started in March 2005 evolved from a free website offered by my Internet provider which I began in October of 2002. That site was simply called "Librariana". On the homepage of the LHB website I define a "library history buff" as an individual with a passion for library history and its artifacts who might also be described as a "library history nut". Although I am flattered when someone refers to me as a library historian, I am not in the same league with the library history scholars who do such a fantastic job of reliably documenting library history. I previously posted a tribute to those individuals on the LHB Blog. The LHB website like the LHB Blog has as a purpose "Promoting the appreciation, enjoyment, and preservation of library history". The site is divided into three broad categories. The "Library History" category includes pages with information about library history, the "Librariana" category includes pages with information about the collecting of library memorabilia and artifacts, and the "Postal Librariana" category includes pages with information about the collecting of postal artifacts related to libraries. Although its not exactly a high traffic site, if you search Google for "library history" it comes up as the number one site.

National Library Week is April April 11-17 and for the 13th straight year the "@" symbol will be a prominent part of the slogan for this annual promotion by the American Library Association (ALA). This year the slogan is "Communities thrive @ your library". In 2001 ALA launched a major multi-year public relations campaign tied to "The Campaign for America's Libraries" using the "@ your library" theme. In 2003 "@ your library" became a registered trademark of ALA with heavily prescribed allowable and un-allowable uses. I'm not terribly enamored of the continued use of the "@" symbol as a public relations device for promoting libraries. I'm more of a "Libraries change lives" kind of guy. I'm not sure if ALA will be allowed to continue to use the "@" symbol in any case. It has just been acquired by the Museum of Modern Art. Daniel Soar has written an interesting piece about the "@" symbol in the London Review of Books. For a philatelic tribute to National Library Week along with a list of previous National Library Week slogans click HERE. What's your favorite library slogan?