Iwasaki Library Blog

Well, my library colleagues have requested that I do a post about websites that I think are pretty freakin' sweet. Why you ask? Well, I'm not sure if you know this about the library staff, but we're all a bunch of nerds. Here's a short list of websites that I think are neato:

Sorted Books: Artist Nina Katchadourian's Sorted Books project involves arranging books on shelves to create sentences, poems, or just funny phrases.

Big Picture: Boston.com's Big Picture is just that, a bunch of high-resolution, beautiful photographs, emphasizing photojournalism. As the site says: "News stories in photographs." Updated daily.

Shorpy: The 100 year-old photo blog. Every picture reveals a little something about life in American in them olden' days. Oh yeah, and every single picture is amazing.

Vintagraph: I think this site is brought to you by the same people as Shorpy, but this time the focus is on historic American posters.

ArtStor: Available through Emerson's library databases. You can check out and search all sorts of pictures.

Now why would you need any of this? Like I said before, it's fun! Who doesn't like pretty pictures? But also, things like posters from WWI or advertisements from the 50s can say a lot about the visual communication and values from those times.