Inside a fabulous library of 65 years ago.

Be still my heart. A librarian's stroll down memory lane, a bibliophile's paradise, a film made in 1956 of la Bibliothèque nationale de France (the National Library of France) in Paris. Much of it looks like the inside of the library at the University of Illinois where I worked as an undergrad, graduate student and a professional librarian (in Slavic studies). I can almost hear the creak of the elevator, smell the dust and mold, and feel my shoulders ache from lifting heavy volumes. And yes, librarians did wear high heels and dresses in those days. We wore lab coats to go into the bowels of the beast to look at the latest arrivals from Russia and Europe. If you've ever worked in a large, magnificent library you must see this film.

https://aeon.co/videos/a-bibliophiles-paradise-the-national-library-of-france-in-a-classic-documentary-from-1956  (21 minutes)

What becomes of old blogs and bloggers?

Today I found my blog listed in “Evolving Internet Reference Resources,” by William Miller and Rita Pellen, a book which also appeared as two issues of Journal of Library Administration, not uncommon for library publications. At that time (information probably collected 2004-2005) about 150 librarians had web logs in the U.S. I was retired when I started my blog in 2003, but still wrote about library topics, something I rarely do today, and participated in a few library related discussion groups.  This blog, Collecting My Thoughts, was listed as personal musings, entertainment, and doubtful for a reference tool:      

The Kept Up Academic Librarian is an example of a librarian blog the authors liked and recommended, so I looked it up to see if it was still viable.  It closed out in August, 2012.

"After nearly 8 years, 5,000 posts and 500,000 page views, this is the last post at Kept-Up Academic Librarian. It has been a good run but the need for this blog is diminished and even though the time it takes to compose it each day is not great, it is time I could use for other activities. Now with so many others sharing higher education news on social networks, along with other sources such as University Business' daily update, Academic Impressions and daily news items in the Chronicle and IHE, it's clear there is less need - and that is supported by the stagnant usage data."

The blog owner wrote a good summary of what happened to blogdom that concerned any profession or hobby or special interest.  People flocked to other social networking sites from Facebook, to Twitter, to Pinterest, and many on-line publications improved their review coverage. Indeed, many of my FB friends are people I met while blogging.  But it is interesting to browse this one and see many concerns of four years ago are still in the forefront of the news, and still nothing has been done.

"Exponentially growing student loans are driving up tuition and creating a demographic time bomb as well as a higher-education bubble that could explode in taxpayers' faces."  Link

I suspect this is our housing bubble of 2007, so hang on to your pocket books ladies, it's coming just in time for the next administration, since this one did nothing but exacerbate it. But that link is dead, and so this is only a summary, something not unusual in blogdom.  I find a lot of dead links on my blog as online publications disappear or are rewritten.

The STLQ blog essentially ended in 2009, with a referral in 2011 to his personal blog, which hasn't had much going on for years.

"As it has been over two years since my last post, it is evident that STLQ's time has come to an end. I want to thank everyone who has followed my posts here since the blog began in April 2003. I continue to maintain my personal blog, The Pod Bay Door, should you wish to follow me there."

And what did Google have in mind 10 years ago (reported on this now defunct blog).