David Gwynn

Things have been incredibly hectic lately, which doesn’t justify the lack of recent posts, but maybe at least explains it somewhat. And this one isn’t likely to be art, either. It’s just a list of some cool projects, posts, and articles  I’ve stumbled across lately:

• Wolfwalk (NC State): This one’s even better on your iPhone. It’s a georeferenced history of the N.C. State campus that also uses your phone’s GPS capabilities to provide a guided walking tour. It’s just cool.
• This is just one of those articles that makes me want to contact the author and offer to volunteer my labor just for a chance to play with  this collection. It makes me all giddy and warm just thinking about it.
• And this one, via Tame the Web, is just something I could have used earlier this week.

This is a nice commentary on preserving  libraries as physical spaces in an age of digitization.

On a similar note, here’s an article from the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette on the 120th anniversary of the first Carengie Library to be built in Braddock, Pennsylvania.

Pittsburgh’s first Carnegie, in my adopted neighborhood of Lawrenceville, was on a recently proposed list of closures, but seems to have been spared for now. I love this vintage neighborhood library, with its (apparently) original shelving and fixtures. With some money (that’s always the catch), it could be an incredible landmark and probably an even more valuable community resource.

A great thing about having lots of credit at the local used book emporium is that you sometimes take a chance on a  book you might not have grabbed if you’d had to pay cash for it. This one is a good example that I picked up last night. Apparently, it even comes with its own website (one that really annoyingly tries to resize your browser window when you launch it).

Interestingly enough, I was reading coverage last year about the reopening of Eero Saarinen’s TWA Terminal at Idlewild Kennedy and have really been itching to see it, even if the renovation was less than desirable, and also involved the demolition of an important part of the structure.

Latest addition to the ever-growing library at our house: the complete run of Progressive Architecture from 1953 to about 1990, and the complete Architectural Record from 1950 to 1969. These gems were picked up at the Forsyth County Public Library’s recent book sale, and I assure you we paid nowhere near $3000 for either set. The purchase required us to invest in four new six-foot bookshelves, bringing the total in our library to ten, plus four additional three-foot shelves in another room, for fiction.

Excessive? You be the judge. I have too much reading to do. I have to admit that it disturbs me to find that these items are still in the library’s online catalogue, even though they are very much in my house and likely to stay there.

Speaking of libraries (which I do a lot of lately), I start work tomorrow as a volunteer on a digitization project at the Greensboro Public Library. I’ll be scanning and cataloguing newspaper microfilm on the Greensboro sit-ins and other civil rights era stories. Should be interesting, and it will make nice resume fodder as well.

Endangered Durham is the kind of website I live for: the author is trying to document pretty much every piece of property in downtown Durham, over time and with vintage and current photos. This is the sort of obsessive mission the web is supposed to be all about, dang it.