Showing titles in Library & Museum Studies

Most of us take for granted that our books are vertical on our shelves with the spines facing out, but Henry Petroski, inveterately curious engineer, didn’t. As a result, listeners are guided along the astonishing evolution from papyrus scrolls boxed at Alexandria to upright books shelved at the Library of Congress. Petroski takes us into the pre-Gutenberg world, when books were so scarce they were chained to lecterns for security.

Py-Lieberman reflects on the profound connections between even outwardly dissimilar objects and offers insight and stories from Smithsonian experts. The book explores artworks, scientific specimens, historical artifacts, airplanes, spacecraft, plants, and so much more, contemplating how each item represents different facets of humanity and resonates with cultural meaning in surprising ways. Whimsical, affecting, and insightful, The Object at Hand offers an intimate and exclusive tour of the Smithsonian collections.

The Western museum is a battleground—a terrain of ideological, political, and economic contestation. Almost everyone today wants to rethink the museum, but how many have the audacity to question the idea of the universal museum itself? In A Programme of Absolute Disorder, Françoise Vergès puts the museum in its place. Exploring the Louvre's history, she uncovers the context in which the universal museum emerged: as a product of colonialism, and of Europe's self-appointed claim to be the guardian of global heritage.

Written by a former election campaign consultant for a major political party, How to Win an Indian Election takes listeners into the forbidden world of election war-rooms and gives them a glimpse of how strategy is formulated, what works with voters on the ground and what doesn't. Based on research, interviews and the author's own experiences, this book is invaluable for its insight into the inner workings of politics, political parties and what really makes for a winning election campaign.

In June 2015 Alberto Manguel prepared to leave his centuries-old village home in France's Loire Valley and reestablish himself in a one-bedroom apartment on Manhattan's Upper West Side. Packing up his enormous, 35,000 volume personal library, choosing which books to keep, store, or cast out, Manguel found himself in deep reverie on the nature of relationships between books and readers, books and collectors, order and disorder, memory and reading.

La conmovedora historia de un vigilante de museo que encuentra consuelo y significado en su día a día entre los pasillos del Museo Metropolitano de Arte. Una obra imprescindible para los amantes del arte. Millones de personas suben cada año la gran escalinata de mármol para visitar el Museo Metropolitano de Arte, pero solo una privilegiada minoría tiene acceso ilimitado a todos sus rincones y recovecos: son los vigilantes, que deambulan discretamente en trajes azul marino, con un ojo atento al tesoro de 185.000 metros cuadrados.

Buried in information? Cross-eyed over technology? From the bottom of a pile of paper and discs, books, e-books, and scattered thumb drives comes a cry of hope: Make way for the librarians! They want to help. They're not selling a thing. And librarians know best how to beat a path through the googolplex sources of information available to us.

On an afternoon in January 1865, a roaring fire swept through the Smithsonian Institution. Dazed soldiers and worried citizens could only watch as the flames engulfed the museum's castle. Rare objects and valuable paintings were destroyed. The flames at the Smithsonian were not the first—and certainly would not be the last—disaster to upend a museum in the United States. The Museum explores the concepts of "crisis" as it relates to museums, and how these historic institutions have dealt with challenges ranging from depression and war to pandemic and philosophical uncertainty.

What does the transformation to a visitor-centered approach do for a museum? How are museums made relevant to a broad range of visitors of varying ages, identities, and social classes? Does appealing to a larger audience force museums to “dumb down” their work? What internal changes are required? Based on a multi-year, Kress Foundation-sponsored study of ten innovative American and European collections based museums recognized by their peers to be visitor centered, Peter Samis and Mimi Michaelson answer these key questions for the field.

Cultural infrastructure has been designed to maintain structures of inequality, and while it doesn’t seem to be explicitly about race, it often is. Blunt Instruments helps listeners identify, contextualize, and name elements of our everyday landscapes and cultural practices that are designed to seem benign or natural but which, in fact, work tirelessly to tell us vital stories about who we are, how we came to be, and who belongs.

Today, nearly one million books are published each year. But is the era of the book as we know it - a codex of bound pages - coming to an end? And if it is, should we celebrate its demise and the creation of a democratic digital future, or mourn an irreplaceable loss?

Esta guía propone al lector una visita al Museo del Prado con el objetivo de que pueda disfrutar de ella y aprovecharla al máximo. Le invita a detenerse en aquellas obras absolutamente imprescindibles y, sobre todo, le muestra cómo "mirarlas" para percibir aún más su belleza, le ayudará a reparar en la excelencia del artista volcada en su obra y a observar los distintos aspectos y detalles que hacen que esos cuadros sean únicos.

Using information in its everyday, nonspecialized sense, Michael Buckland explores the influence of information on what we know, the role of communication and recorded information in our daily lives, and the difficulty (or ease) of finding information. He shows that all this involves human perception, social behavior, changing technologies, and issues of trust.

Hoy en día, escuchamos con mucha frecuencia sobre criminología, asesinos en serie y homicidios atroces. Los vemos en las noticias, el cine, la literatura y los videojuegos; el asesino en serie ha polarizado una gran parte de la expresión mediática. ¿Quién no ha oído hablar de Dr. Hannibal Lecter o Dexter Morgan? ¿Y quién no ha visto un episodio de CSI? Pero, ¿cuánta verdad hay en todo esto? ¿Cómo actúan los asesinos en serie? ¿Cómo eligen a sus víctimas? ¿Y por qué matan? ¿Funcionan realmente las técnicas de investigación como las vemos en los programas de televisión?...

Nuestra lengua es rica en modismos, expresiones, frases hechas o locuciones que tratan sobre cualquier tema y ocasión. Nuestros abuelos, abuelas, tíos y tías siempre han usado multitud de frases hechas. Esta colección —guía de la fraseología tópica de la lengua castellana— invita a mirar nuestro idioma de otra manera. Pretende ser un homenaje a todas las personas que han hecho perdurar la sabiduría popular a través de los años mediante las frases hechas. También es un modo de difundir el español gracias a los modismos. No pretende ser un libro de frases hechas más, ya que ...

¿Sabes quiénes han sido o son las personas más ricas de la historia? ¿Qué hitos lograron? ¿Cómo fueron sus vidas? ¿Cuáles fueron sus dificultades? En este libro encontrarás biografías —breves, pero contundentes y llenas de curiosidades— de algunas de las personas que han marcado época con sus inventos o logros. Cada una de ellas ha vivido de forma distinta, pero todas han conseguido un objetivo común: la riqueza. Descubre la vida y secretos de estos millonarios: JOHN DAVISON ROCKEFELLER KARL FRIEDRICH BENZ BILL GATES STEVE JOBS WARREN BUFFETT GEORGE SOROS DONALD TRUMP JEFF ...

At the same time Adolf Hitler was attempting to take over the Western world, his armies were seeking and hoarding the finest art treasures in Europe. He had begun cataloguing the art he planned to collect as well as the art he would destroy: "degenerate" works he despised. A special force of American and British museum directors, curators, art historians, and others, called the Monuments Men, risked their lives scouring Europe to prevent the destruction of thousands of years of culture.

Este libro pretende ser un homenaje a todas ellas y a los millones de mujeres que han hecho perdurar la sabiduría popular a través de los años mediante los refranes. También es un modo de difundir el español a través de los refranes. No pretende ser un libro de refranes más, ya que no están —ni de lejos— todos los que son, pero sí son todos los que están. La idea es presentar algunos de los refranes más populares y comentarlos desde la humilde opinión de quien escribe. La otra pretensión de la obra es que los refranes de estas mujeres perduren con los años y no caigan en ...

This book considers the work of the celebrated 17th century court painter Diego Velázquez (1599-1660) presented in a comprehensive exhibition at The National Gallery London from October to January 2006-2007. It follows the phases of development charted from rooms one to four in the Getty Wing, ranging from the initial scenes of workers in bars and domestic scenes to the paintings made at the Court of King Philip IV in Madrid.

At the height of the Syrian Civil War, deep beneath the shattered streets of rebel-held Darayya was a secret library. This basement room filled with thousands of books, rescued under constant sniper fire from gutted buildings, was an oasis of normality in a country at war with itself. Here, despite a devastating four-year siege, people risked their lives to read. Over a period of more than a year, Mike Thomson heard their extraordinary stories via tenuous Skype calls, emails, social media messages, and audio diaries recorded on their mobile phones.