BOOK COLLECTORS IN AUSTRALIA, during their book hunting endeavours, will no doubt have encountered books bearing the bookplate or book stamp of a School of Arts or Mechanics’ Institute. These institutions were, during the second half of the nineteenth century and the early decades of the twentieth century, a most important feature of Australian social and local history.
Category: Libraries
Libraries
The State Library of Victoria has created a new website that invites you to share your treasures with the rest of the world. Presumably it is only for Victorians with treasures, although this is not made clear in the publicity.
The Cambridge History of Libraries in Britain and Ireland is a monumental achievement. It declares itself to be “the first detailed scholarly history of libraries in Britain and Ireland”, covering libraries of all types (institutional and private), and their user communities. The three volumes are supplemented by extensive bibliographies and indexes.
The newspaper The Weekend Australian of 6-7 September 2008 cites, in the Editorial Comment column of its Weekend Editor section on p.32, the following translation of part of an item about the “success of devices for reading books” in the German newpaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung: