Tuesday 26 April 2011

A Quiet Volume

I took advantage of the long weekend to head over to Hackney Central Library and seize the opportunity to take part in / attend The Quiet Volume with a good friend.

There's a brilliant review here, which is far more eloquent than I can be at this time of night, so I will simply say this: it was fabulous.

Once you check in, you get assigned Right or Left, given an ipod and led to a desk in the study area of a library, and then you're on your own, with just the voices in your headphones to guide you. It's about libraries as places, and about books, and reading, and the nature of meaning, and the nature of texts and it slips from page to audio and back again so seamlessly, it's like magic.

If there's any chance you might be able to catch this next week, when they're running it at Senate House Library, go and book your tickets right now!

Sunday 17 April 2011

quick quote

"Libraries like all other institutions must grow and adapt to changing requirements and conditions. The rate of change in the world today and in our knowledge of it is incredibly fast. We cannot afford to let our libraries slip behind."

-John F. Kennedy, 1963


(found via Swiss Army Librarian)