How Adele sent her love to libraries | #WhyBooksMatter

Library advocacy | Public libraries | Outreach \ Culture

June 12, 2017

By Steven MacKenzie

@stevenmackenzie

 

Adele may have headlined Glastonbury and filled arenas across the globe in a worldwide tour that climaxes next month with four sold-out dates at Wembley Stadium, but 10 years ago she was playing a gig in a library in Lancaster for an audience of 175. “You can check out the show online,” says Stewart Parsons. “I am so relieved we filmed that!”

 Parsons, a librarian with more than 30 years of experience, started the Get it Loud in Libraries scheme 10 years ago to introduce new people to libraries by turning them into live music venues for special concerts. Over the last decade, 36,108 people have attended 279 shows put on by acts including alt-J, Florence + The Machine, Imelda May, British Sea Power, Plan B and, of course, everyone’s favourite balladeer, Adele, whose fee that evening in Lancaster was £50.

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Argentina's page turner: How a Canadian author became the leader of a library revolution

Libraries | Alberto Manguel | Culture

The National Library of Argentina sits at the epicentre of the country's cultural life. So when government officials appointed Alberto Manguel – native son and longtime Canadian anthologist – to radically rethink the institution, pushback from the intellectual elite was all but certain. Stephanie Nolen reports on an irascible scribe's rocky tenure

A few years after Jorge Luis Borges, left, ended his tenure as head of Argentina’s National Library, he began a friendship with Alberto Manguel, right, then a teenager in Buenos Aires. Argentina’s greatest writer was, by that time, blind, and invited the young Mr. Manguel to come home and read aloud to him, which Mr. Manguel went on to do many times over the next few years. Now, Mr. Manguel has taken Mr. Borges’s former role at the library.

PHOTO ILLUSTRATION: BRYAN GEE/THE GLOBE AND MAIL
IMAGES: GETTY IMAGES; HORACIO PAONE FOR THE GLOBE AND MAIL 

May 12, 2017 

Alberto Manguel is harried. A stream of wealthy Argentines, all stiletto heels and elegant umbrellas, is leaving his office in the National Library; he hopes to cultivate them as donors, and ushers them to the door with awkward pleasantries. A line of employees with requests waits in the hall, hoping to catch him. An assistant brandishes a clipboard thick with demands: There is a committee, but there is also a meeting, he is expected imminently at a luncheon, and there's this journalist, and – "I've abandoned my previous persona: I detested nothing more than lunches and cocktails and meetings and groups of more than three people," Mr. Manguel says with a sigh and a valiant attempt at a smile, when he has retreated back behind the office door. "And I'm spending my life doing this."

Back in December of 2015, Mr. Manguel was living in New York and teaching at Columbia and Princeton; he opened his e-mail one day to find a startling request from a stranger. The newly appointed Minister of Culture for Argentina was wondering if Mr. Manguel would consider returning to the country where he was born – and which he left 50 years ago – to serve as director of the storied National Library. Mr. Manguel says he assumed at first it was a joke – "What next, being Pope?"Read more...

People who read books tend to be nicer than those who don't - [study]

Culture | Books | Reading

Reading: pretty good, apparently Credit: Danny Lawson/PA Wire 

 

• Adam Boult

8 May 2017 • 12:27pm

 

Does reading books make you a nicer person? Or are nicer people more likely to be drawn to reading?

A recent study by researchers at Kingston University found that people who read works of fiction tend to be kinder and more empathetic.

"Exposure to fiction relates to a range of empathetic abilities," said researchers, who addressed the British Psychological Society conference in Brighton last week. Read more...

New York Public Radio and The New York Academy of Medicine Recapture a Piece of American Medical and Broadcast History

Launch Digital Archive of 1950s Radio Broadcasts on Health and Medicine

The New York Academy of Medicine (NYAM) and New York Public Radio (NYPR) have digitized and released a treasure trove of 1950s WNYC radio broadcasts that feature significant voices from the past and provide a unique view of the medical and health concerns of American in the 1950s. The broadcasts brought lectures from the groundbreaking NYAM series Lectures to the Laity and For Doctors Only out of the halls of the Academy to a broad public audience, offering a new form of access to timely discussions on medicine, health, and culture.

The 40 digitized lectures and talks are part of a collaboration between NYAM and WNYC, which was then owned and operated by the city. Highlights include talks featuring Leona Baumgartner, New York City’s first woman health commissioner; cancer pioneer Sydney Farber; American microbiologist and Pulitzer Prize-winning author René Dubos; acclaimed anthropologist and social critic Margaret Mead; Norbert Wiener, father of cybernetics; and discussion of the Freud Centenary and Lincoln’s doctors.

“NYAM’s innovative partnership with WNYC in the 1950s brought important medical discussions out of the Academy’s rooms and into the public’s living rooms,” said Lisa O’Sullivan, PhD, Director of the NYAM Center for the History of Medicine and Public Health. “Today, NYAM remains committed to making the history of medicine accessible to broad public audiences, and we are extremely pleased to partner with New York Public Radio to release this digital collection.”

“The combination of expertise has made for a project with perfect synergy,” said Andy Lanset, Director of Archives, New York Public Radio. “We’re thrilled to make such important recordings available to both the scientific/medical community, and the public at large.”

These lectures are drawn from the more than 1,500 original lacquer discs transferred from NYAM to the NYPR Archives in 2008. The digitization and cataloging resulted from a joint project between NYAM’s Center for the History of Medicine and Public Health and the NYPR Archives, with a grant from METRO, the New York Metropolitan Library Council. 

NYAM and WNYC began their radio relationship in 1946 with the launch of The Laity Lectures, later to become Lectures to the Laity, a popular series of Academy lectures and talks on culture and medicine that had started in 1935. By mid-1950, this series was joined by For Doctors Only, which aimed to bring “the best of the meetings, conferences, roundtable discussions held at the academy” to the medical profession. On its debut broadcast of July 27, 1950, The New York Times called it “an epochal advance in the educational use of radio.” The New York World-Telegram and Sun referred to it as a “bold venture” and “enterprising” in the interest of good health for millions of people. For Doctors Only also addressed critical analysis of issues of society and medicine, as well as the application of the social sciences to medicine, and provided academic presentations in the history of medicine.

The lectures are available on WNYC’s website. Individual titles are also available through NYAM’s library catalog.

Paul Theerman, PhD

Associate Director

Center for the History of Medicine and Public Health

New York Academy of Medicine

1216 Fifth Avenue

New York, NY, 10029

212.822.7350

http://nyamcenterforhistory.org/