Library Studies

This is not the original book. This is a book summary of The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg. In The Power of Habit, Charles Duhigg, award-winning business reporter for The New York Times, takes us to the thrilling edge of scientific discoveries that explain why habits exist and how they can be changed. By distilling vast amounts of information into engrossing narratives, Duhigg brings to light a whole new understanding of human nature and its potential for transformation.

日本が当事国であった戦争を知る世代が少なくなるなか，忘れてはならない記録と記憶の継承を志す場があり，人がいる．戦争の時代を生きた人間を描くノンフィクションを多数ものしてきた作家が，各地の平和のための博物館を訪ね，そこで触れた土地の歴史と人びとの語りを伝える．

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.

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.

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.

As a child he dreamt of changing South Africa; as a man he changed the world. Nelson Mandela spent his life battling apartheid and championing a peaceful revolution. He spent 27 years in prison and emerged as the inspiring leader of the new South Africa. He became the country’s first Black president and went on to live his dream of change.

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.

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.

Elena is lost in the shuffle between her three overachieving siblings. But now that she’s on her own for a whole semester, she intends to keep the spotlight on herself - and Spain is just the place to do it. But Elena has always been more comfortable writing plays than starring in them, and she’s beginning to realize that keeping out of the spotlight has its perks, too....

Cat Wilcox has left chilly Boston for sunny Mexico and a summer of girl bonding with her best friend, Sabrina. But Sabrina has a surprise. She is accompanied by her boyfriend - a boyfriend Cat didn’t even know existed. So rather than Sabrina and Cat spending their study-abroad semester working together at the orphan school building site, Cat expects she’ll be hammering nails all by her lonesome. Then she meets Aidan. He’s cute, he’s smart, and he’s paying her a lot of attention. Cat can’t tell if he’s flirting or friendly, but she’s not sure it matters.

For 17-year-old Delk Sinclair, studying abroad in Ireland means one thing: escape. Delk is tired of hearing about her friends' debutante parties, watching her pregnant stepmother redecorate her mother's house, and having to smile sweetly even though she doesn't think she'll ever get over losing her mother. Ireland is Delk's chance to be happy.

Seventeen-year-old Nicole dreams of spending the rest of her life with her boyfriend, Nate. So when she finds herself on her way to Paris to study abroad without him, she’s less than thrilled. Paris is filled with cars that move at the speed of light, edible snails, and a language Nicole can’t speak or read. Worst of all, Nicole feels lost without Nate. She’s not sure she’s capable of finding joie de vivre on her own, but with the help of some new friends - and a certain handsome Frenchman - Nicole might find Paris as sweet as a café au lait after all.

On December 7, 1941, Japanese war planes appeared out of nowhere to bomb the American base at Pearl Harbor in Hawaii. It was a highly secretive and devastating attack: Four battleships sunk, more than 2,000 servicemen died, and the United States was propelled into World War II. In a compelling, easy-to-digest narrative, children will learn all about a pivotal moment in American history.

When "metadata" became breaking news, appearing in stories about surveillance by the National Security Agency, many members of the public encountered this once-obscure term from information science for the first time. Should people be reassured that the NSA was "only" collecting metadata about phone calls - information about the caller, the recipient, the time, the duration, the location - and not recordings of the conversations themselves? Or does phone call metadata reveal more than it seems?

People who love art, are fascinated by archaeology, or are history buffs may have considered the idea of working in a museum. But experience as a museum visitor reveals only the public-facing side of the museum, and not its complex, dynamic internal structure. So You Want to Work in A Museum? helps to demystify museums as institutions and to prepare prospective museum staff to explore the field further.

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.

>Luminous and revealing, a daughter's memoir of the art world and a larger-than-life father. Gabrielle Selz grew up in a home full of the most celebrated artists of the 1960s and 1970s: Rothko, de Kooning, Tinguely, Giacometti, and Christo. Her father, Peter Selz, was the chief curator of painting and sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art in the heyday of Abstract Expressionism. Selz's father was vibrant and freewheeling, but his enthusiasm for both women and art took its toll on their family life.

The Maryhill Museum of Art is located on 5,300 acres in the Columbia River Gorge. Miles from any sizeable town and surrounded by the gorge's spectacular scenery, Maryhill is an internationally recognized - and undeniably eclectic - repository of art that ranges from one of the nation's best Rodin collections to one of the world's largest assemblage of chess sets. Dancer, Dreamers, and the Queen of Romania is the story of the four widely disparate people whose lives intertwined in such a way as to lay the foundation for the museum.

In its first four months of operation, the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture surpassed one million visits and quickly became a cherished, vital monument to the African American experience. And yet this accomplishment was never assured. In A Fool's Errand, founding director Lonnie Bunch tells his story of bringing his clear vision and leadership to realize this shared dream of many generations of Americans.

"Big Data" is on the covers of Science, Nature, The Economist, and Wired magazines, on the front pages of the Wall Street Journal and The New York Times. But despite the media hyperbole, as Christine Borgman points out in this examination of data and scholarly research, having the right data is usually better than having more data; little data can be just as valuable as big data. Borgman, an often-cited authority on scholarly communication, argues that data have no value or meaning in isolation; they exist within a knowledge infrastructure.