We all found it impressive when Amsterdam’s Rijksmuseum put up 125,000 Dutch works of art online. “Users can explore the entire collection, which is handily sorted by artist, subject, style and even by events in Dutch history,” explained Kate Rix in our first post announcing it.” “Not only can users create their own online galleries from selected works in the museum’s collection, they can download Rijksmuseum artwork for free to decorate new products.”
But we posted that almost two and a half years ago, and you can hardly call the Rijksmuseum an institution that sits idly by while time passes, or indeed does anything at all by half measures…And so they’ve kept hard at work adding to their digital archive, which, as of this writing, offers nearly 210,000 works of art.
Library for All is now working in impoverished places around the world on a simple mission with a major impact. Rebecca McDonald came up with the idea for Library for All after visiting Haiti in 2010. The country had just experienced a major earthquake, and the schools there were having a tough time getting back to normal—even more so, because they lacked basic education materials.
“The reason we started the library was that, everywhere I went, they didn’t have any books. And if they did, they were in English when people either speak Haitian Creole or French. They were good paperweights, and that was about it,” McDonald says.
Library for All now works with 10 schools on the island, with plans to partner with nine more. The model is simple. The nonprofit assembles a highly curated local-language collection of books that schools access through Android tablets.
Last year we featured All of Bach, a site that, in the fullness of time, will allow you to watch the Netherlands Bach Society perform each and every one of Bach’s compositions, completely for free. Back when we first posted about it, the site offered only five performances to watch, but now you’ll find a full 53 waiting there, ready for you to enjoy.
You could pay $118 on Amazon for the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s catalog The Art of Illumination: The Limbourg Brothers and the Belles Heures of Jean de France, Duc de Berry. Or you could pay $0 to download it at MetPublications, the site offering “five decades of Met Museum publications on art history available to read, download, and/or search for free.” If that strikes you as an obvious choice, prepare to spend some serious time browsing MetPublications’ collection of free art books and catalogs. READ MORE: Download 422 Free Art Books from The Metropolitan Museum of Art | Open Culture.
A few interesting library collections noted here…I’m sure there are many others that are not mentioned in this Flavorwire list.
Imagine walking into the home of a recently deceased resident after getting a mysterious phone call about a massive collection of maps. That’s what happened to Glen Creason, the map librarian at Los Angeles Central Library and author of Los Angeles in Maps. Creason walked out of the home with boxes of historical maps and coveted city guides that instantly doubled the library’s collection. L.A.-based filmmaker Alec Ernest captured the story of Creason and an unknown map collector named John Feathers in a mesmerizing short film about the beauty and power of physical objects, and the strange passions people have for them. Ernest’s film inspired us to travel libraries around the world and explore their unique and sometimes bizarre collections.
In March of 2012, the Guardian announced a major literary and cultural discovery: more than 500 new fairy tales had been unearthed in Germany. The haul of stories was vast, impressively so. It contained in its pages a new world of enchanted animals, magic and romance, legend, otherworldly creatures, parables about nature, and wild exaggeration. But there was something else. These tales had been collecting dust in a bunch of old boxes for more than 150 years. This dating is significant: it confirms that the tales are roughly contemporaneous with those of the Brothers Grimm. To be sure, this was an historic and unprecedented discovery. The woman who made it, a cultural curator and folklorist named Erika Eichenseer, compared the collection to “buried treasure.”
But before Eichenseer found this treasure, before she undertook the truly invaluable work of reading, sorting, and transcribing these tales, she had to discover them in a municipal archive in Regensburg, Germany. And before they were placed in this archive, they were the property of one Franz Xaver von Schönwerth, a high-ranking government official and amateur folklorist of the mid-nineteenth century, who, inspired by the Brothers Grimm, took it upon himself to travel around the Upper Palatinate region of Bavaria, to collect and interview and record the stories he heard from the people there. Schönwerth’s hard work did not go unnoticed. Jacob Grimm, in 1885, declared that “Nowhere in the whole of Germany is anyone collecting [folklore] so accurately, thoroughly and with such a sensitive ear.”
The fruits of this labor of love, of Schönwerth’s (and later Eichenseer’s) hard work, have now been expertly translated, introduced, and commented upon by Maria Tatar in a volume titled The Turnip Princess and Other Newly Discovered Fairy Tales.
Where music goes, technologically speaking, audio books soon follow. We’ve had audio books on vinyl LP, on cassette tape, on CD, and on MP3, just like we’ve had music. Now that so many of us pull up our daily jams on Spotify, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that we can do a fair bit of our “reading” there as well. We’ve found a few lists that gather up the best audio book available on Spotify, including 21 classics and a collection of Shakespeare plays and sonnets at Gnarl’d, ten evergreen literary picks from Lifehacker, and a Spotify forum thread dedicated to subject.
I tried accessing ShoutFactory! content this morning (Thursday, February 5) but content is not yet playable/accessable on my desktop or iPad. I’m interesting in checking out Twilight Zone, Bushido Man and Dreamscape. An error comes up “Sorry, the requested video is not yet available on this device.” Content may be accessible later this afternoon or there may be an issue with accessing content from Canada. The About Us page states “SHOUT! FACTORY TV is a free-to-the viewer, ad-supported video offering containing full-length television shows, movies, specials, and original content viewable through desktop computers, mobile, tablet, and “over-the’top” devices such as Roku…In addition, Shout! Factory maintains a vast digital distribution network which delivers video and audio content to all the leading digital service providers in North America.”
The big four broadcast networks — ABC, CBS, Fox, and NBC — don’t really have specific brands. They’re nebulous, offering drama, comedy, reality, and whatever else they put on the air. They’re the giant department stores of TV. Cable channels are more like specialty stores. ESPN is for sports fans. Nickelodeon is for kids. TNT knows drama.
The same is now happening with streaming services. We have a “big three” — Netflix, Hulu, and Amazon Prime. We have offshoots of TV networks, like HBO Go and Showtime Anytime.
And now we’re starting to see the rise of specialty streaming services, like one launching from Shout! Factory. Previously known for releasing DVDs of films and TV shows other studios didn’t want to, Shout’s new streaming service carries the same philosophy to the world of online TV. It’s filled with classic shows and movies that are hard to find elsewhere. It’s got more of an eye toward curation than building a platform. It’s built off of others’ software.
Rosa Parks was more than just the woman who refused to give up her seat on a segregated bus in 1955. Letters and photos that belonged to the civil rights activist offer new insights into her complexities. Parks legacy has been somewhat simplified by the history books.
Her archive goes on display for the first time on [February 4, 2015] at the Library of Congress, after long legal disputes hid the documents from public view for years. Researchers and the public will have full access to Parks archive of letters, writings, personal notes and photographs for the first time. About 7,500 manuscript items and 2,500 photographs from the civil rights activist, including a pocket-sized Bible, letters from admirers and her Presidential Medal of Freedom, are part of the collection.
Fascinating to glimpse the different types of Rubik’s Cubes this guy has in his collection. I thought there was only the original! The 17x17x17 cube would be a unique addition for libraries to have available for patrons to borrow.
Seven hours sounds just about right for the average puzzle enthusiast to solve a standard 3x3x3 Rubik’s Cube. But Youtuber RedKB isn’t your average puzzle enthusiast. Instead of tackling a 3x3x3 cube, he solves this incredibly complex 17x17x17 cube designed by Oskar Van Deventer. In the end it took him about seven-and-a-half hours to get all the colored sides put back in order. READ MORE: It Took This Guy Over 7 Hours To Solve the World’s Hardest Rubik’s Cube | Gizmodo
infophile 