So where does one go in such a wobbly, elusive, dynamic, confusing age? Wherever the librarians and archivists are. They’re sorting it all out for us.
A library is a place to go for a reality check, a bracing dose of literature, or a true reflection of our history, whether it's a brick-and-mortar building constructed a century ago or a fanciful arra...
Of course. Ask your librarian. Always the right answer.
Librarians' values are as sound as Girl Scouts': truth, free speech, and universal literacy. And, like Scouts, they possess a quality that I think makes librarians invaluable and indispensable: they w...
Good librarians are natural intelligence operatives. They possess all of the skills and characteristics required for that work: curiosity, wide-ranging knowledge, good memories, organization and analy...
Librarians consider free access to information the foundation of democracy.
Members of the Order take vows of literacy, obstinancy and bibliomancy. Bibliomancy? It's defined for us a little further down: Divination by jolly well Looking It Up.
Librarians are essential players in the information revolution because they level that field. They enable those without money or education to read and learn the same things as the billionaire and the...
I became interested in librarians while researching my first book, about obituaries. With the exception of a few showy eccentrics, like the former soldier in Hitler's army who had a sex change and too...
One of the reasons I decided to enter this profession, one of the Riot Librarrrians wrote, was because I'm in love with information, and the library remains one of the few spaces in our lives where in...
Homo sapiens who lived in caves put trash in front and slept in the back; not so in the caves occupied by Homo heidelbergensis. Those humans, probably the last common ancestor of Homo sapiens and nean...
This is the greatest and most fraught romance of modern society, the marriage between the IT staff and those who depend on them.
The convention that there were two sides to every story eliminated the third and fourth and fifth sides. Even dividing the past two and a half million years into the Neolithic (the new stone age) and...
We'll always need printed books that don't mutate the way digital books do; we'll always need places to display books, auditoriums for book talks, circles for story time; we'll always need brick-and-m...
What was archaeology to him? It was the opposite of killing things. It was trying to will life back into stuff that had been forgotten and buried for thousands or millions of years. It was not about s...
Place is not the background of archaeology—it’s the point. As any archaeologist will tell you, context is everything.
Bibliomancy: Divination by jolly well Looking It Up.
Bone grease with dried meat and berries to make pemmican, the energy bars of a thousand years ago, and with a pouch of pemmican, the Native Americans were good to travel far and wide. (If you can’t pa...
Libraries have always been there for me. Of course I'll stand up for them.
I regretted my human form briefly; it would be so much easier to drag and rope information into the brain as neatly as one dragged and dropped information on the computer. Perhaps I was suffering from...