2009 Dewey Decimal Project: 027.009 B
Matthew Battles' Library: An Unquiet History was supposed to be my nonfiction book for October, but since I read barely anything in October, I decided to grant myself amnesty and skip straight to November.
Library is a roughly chronological survey of libraries and librarianship through history. It's interesting enough, and I did like that some of his older examples are not European, although later chapters are very Western focused. Battles seems to have a particular interest in library destruction. I was struck by how recent some of those are. The book is a couple of years old, which means he gets out of putting much time into libraries as sites of internet access, and is, I think, from before the Seattle Public Library's RFID implementation.
Library is a roughly chronological survey of libraries and librarianship through history. It's interesting enough, and I did like that some of his older examples are not European, although later chapters are very Western focused. Battles seems to have a particular interest in library destruction. I was struck by how recent some of those are. The book is a couple of years old, which means he gets out of putting much time into libraries as sites of internet access, and is, I think, from before the Seattle Public Library's RFID implementation.