The Library of Babel Jorge Luis Borges The Library exists ab aeterno. This truth, whose immediate corollary is the future eternity of the world, cannot be placed in doubt by any reasonable mind. Man, the imperfect librarian, may be the product of chance or of malevolent demiurgi; the universe, with its elegant endowment of shelves, of enigmatical volumes, of inexhaustible stairways for the traveler and latrines for the seated librarian, can only be the work of a god. To perceive the distance ...| Otlet's Shelf
The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood James Gleick James Gleick, the author of the best sellers Chaos and Genius, now brings us a work just as astonishing and masterly: a revelatory chronicle and meditation that shows how information has become the modern era’s defining quality — the blood, the fuel, the vital principle of our world.| Otlet's Shelf
The Five Laws of Library Science S. R. Ranganathan Books are for use. Every reader his book. Every book its reader. Save the time of the reader. The Library is a growing organism.| Otlet's Shelf
Libraries Candida Höfer For almost 30 years Candida Höfer has photographed interiors, mostly representational spaces accessible to the public, such as staircases, lobbies, reading halls or exhibition spaces. Rather than staging them, she takes their picture in the state she finds them, with great discreetness and a touch of humor.| Otlet's Shelf
The Cultures of Collecting Roger Cardinal This book traces the psychology, history and theory of the compulsion to collect, focusing not just on the normative collections of the Western canon, but also on collections that reflect a fascination with the “Other” and the marginal – the ephemeral, exotic, or just plain curious. There are essays on the Neoclassical architect Sir John Soane, Sigmund Freud and Kurt Schwitters, one of the masters of collage. Others examine imperialist encounter...| Otlet's Shelf
The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires Tim Wu In this age of an open Internet, it is easy to forget that every American information industry, beginning with the telephone, has eventually been taken captive by some ruthless monopoly or cartel. With all our media now traveling a single network, an unprecedented potential is building for centralized control over what Americans see and hear. Could history repeat itself with the next industrial consolidation? Could the Interne...| Otlet's Shelf
Library: An Unquiet History Matthew Battles Through the ages, libraries have not only accumulated and preserved but also shaped, inspired, and obliterated knowledge. Matthew Battles, a rare books librarian and a gifted narrator, takes us on a spirited foray from Boston to Baghdad, from classical scriptoria to medieval monasteries, from the Vatican to the British Library, from socialist reading rooms and rural home libraries to the Information Age.| Otlet's Shelf
Dexter Sinister: Portable Document Format Dexter Sinister A library is a collection of books kept for use. That axiom is key to this sly little book, part of Sternberg’s White Pocketbook Series. Even the title is sly: the portable document format refers both to texts assembled in the -library- at dextersinister.org, and to this other amazing artifact of technology, a pocket-sized, hardcover book.| Otlet's Shelf
You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto Jaron Lanier test For the most part, Web 2.0 — Internet technologies that encourage interactivity, customization, and participation — is hailed as an emerging Golden Age of information sharing and collaborative achievement, the strength of democratized wisdom. Jaron Lanier isn’t buying it. In You Are Not a Gadget, the longtime tech guru/visionary/dreadlocked genius (and progenitor of virtual reality) argues the opposite: that unfettered — and anonym...| Otlet's Shelf
The Gift: Creativity and the Artist in the Modern World Lewis Hyde By now a modern classic, The Gift is a brilliantly orchestrated defense of the value of creativity and of its importance in a culture increasingly governed by money and overrun with commodities. Widely available again after twenty-five years, this book is even more necessary today than when it first appeared. An illuminating and transformative book, and completely original in its view of the world, The Gift is cherished by art...| Otlet's Shelf
Collected Fictions Jorge Luis Borges Jorge Luis Borges has been called the greatest Spanish-language writer of our century. Now for the first time in English, all of Borges’ dazzling fictions are gathered into a single volume, brilliantly translated by Andrew Hurley. From his 1935 debut with The Universal History of Iniquity, through his immensely influential collections Ficciones and The Aleph, these enigmatic, elaborate, imaginative inventions display Borges’ talent for turning fiction ...| Otlet's Shelf
Glut: Mastering Information Through The Ages Alex Wright What do primordial bacteria, medieval alchemists, and the World Wide Web have to do with each other? This fascinating exploration of how information systems emerge takes readers on a provocative journey through the history of the information age. Today’s “information explosion” may seem like an acutely modern phenomenon, but we are not the first generation - nor even the first species - to wrestle with the problem of information o...| Otlet's Shelf
What Technology Wants Kevin Kelly This provocative book introduces a brand-new view of technology. It suggests that technology as a whole is not a jumble of wires and metal but a living, evolving organism that has its own unconscious needs and tendencies. Kevin Kelly looks out through the eyes of this global technological system to discover “what it wants.” He uses vivid examples from the past to trace technology’s long course and then follows a dozen trajectories of technology into the...| Otlet's Shelf
The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences Michel Foucault When one defines order as a sorting of priorities, it becomes beautifully clear as to what Foucault is doing here. With virtuoso showmanship, he weaves an intensely complex history of thought. He dips into literature, art, economics and even biology in The Order of Things, possibly one of the most significant, yet most overlooked, works of the twentieth century. Eclipsed by his later work on power and discourse, nonethe...| Otlet's Shelf
Alberto Manguel Inspired by the process of creating a library for his fifteenth-century home near the Loire, in France, Alberto Manguel, the acclaimed writer on books and reading, has taken up the...| Tumblr