The New York Public Library Puts Classic Stories on Instagram: Start with Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Read Kafka’s The Metamorphosis Soon

in Books, K-12, Libraries, Literature, Technology | August 27th, 2018

I’d be hap­py if I could think that the role of the library was sus­tained and even enhanced in the age of the com­put­er. —Bill Gates

The New York Pub­lic Library excels at keep­ing a foot in both worlds, par­tic­u­lar­ly when it comes to engag­ing younger read­ers.

Vis­i­tors from all over the world make the pil­grim­age to see the real live Win­nie-the-Pooh and friends in the main branch’s hop­ping children’s cen­ter.

And now any­one with a smart­phone and an Insta­gram account can “check out” their dig­i­tal age take on Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adven­tures in Won­der­land—no library card required. See Part 1 here and Part 2 here.

Work­ing with the design firm Moth­er, the library has found a way to make great page-turn­ing use of the Insta­gram Sto­ries plat­form—more com­mon­ly used to share blow-by-blow pho­to­graph­ic evi­dence of road trips, restau­rant out­ings, and hash-tagged wed­dings.

The Won­der­land expe­ri­ence remains pri­mar­i­ly text-based.

In oth­er words, sor­ry, har­ried care­givers! There’s no hand­ing your phone off to the pre-read­ing set this time around!

No trip­py Dis­ney teacups…

Sir John Ten­niel’s clas­sic illus­tra­tions won’t be spring­ing to ani­mat­ed life. Instead, you’ll find con­cep­tu­al artist Magoz’s bright min­i­mal­ist ding­bats of key­holes, teacups, and pock­et watch­es in the low­er right hand cor­ner. Tap your screen in rapid suc­ces­sion and they func­tion as a crowd-pleas­ing, all ages flip book.

Else­where, ani­ma­tion allows the text to take on clever shapes or reveal itself line by line—a pleas­ant­ly the­atri­cal, Cheshire Cat like approach to Carroll’s impu­dent poet­ry.

Remem­ber the famous scene where the Duchess and the Cook force Alice to mind a baby who turns into a pig? Grab some friends and hunch over the phone for a com­mu­nal read aloud! (It’s on page 75 of part 1)

Speak rough­ly to your lit­tle boy,

 And beat him when he sneezes:

 He only does it to annoy,

 Because he knows it teas­es

CHORUS

 (In which the cook and the baby joined)

 ‘Wow! wow! wow!’ 

Nav­i­gat­ing this new media can be a bit con­fus­ing for those whose social media flu­en­cy is not quite up to speed, but it’s not hard once you get the hang of the con­trols.

Tap­ping the right side of the screen turns the page.

Tap­ping left goes back a page.

And keep­ing a thumb (or any fin­ger, actu­al­ly) on the screen will keep the page as is until you’re ready to move on. You’ll def­i­nite­ly want to do this on ani­mat­ed pages like the one cit­ed above. Pre­tend you’re play­ing the flute and you’ll save a lot of frus­tra­tion.

The library plans to intro­duce your phone to Char­lotte Perkins Gilman’s short sto­ry “The Yel­low Wall­pa­per” and Franz Kafka’s The Meta­mor­pho­sis via Insta­gram Sto­ries over the next cou­ple of months. Like Alice, both works are in the pub­lic domain and share an appro­pri­ate com­mon theme: trans­for­ma­tion.

Use these links to go direct­ly to part 1 and part 2 of Alice’s Adven­tures in Won­der­land on Insta­gram Sto­ries. Both parts are cur­rent­ly pinned to the top of the library’s Insta­gram account.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Behold Lewis Carroll’s Orig­i­nal Hand­writ­ten & Illus­trat­ed Man­u­script for Alice’s Adven­tures in Won­der­land (1864)

Alice in Won­der­land: The Orig­i­nal 1903 Film Adap­ta­tion

The Psy­cho­log­i­cal & Neu­ro­log­i­cal Dis­or­ders Expe­ri­enced by Char­ac­ters in Alice in Won­der­land: A Neu­ro­science Read­ing of Lewis Carroll’s Clas­sic Tale

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine. Join her in NYC on Mon­day, Sep­tem­ber 24 for anoth­er month­ly install­ment of her book-based vari­ety show, Necro­mancers of the Pub­lic Domain. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

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New York Public Library Card Now Gives You Free Access to 33 NYC Museums

in Libraries, Museums | July 30th, 2018

If you’re one of the 8.5 mil­lion peo­ple liv­ing in New York City, take note of this: When you sign up for a library card from the New York Pub­lic Library, you can get access to 30,000 free movies (includ­ing many from the Cri­te­ri­on Col­lec­tion) and also some 300,000 Free eBooks. But that’s not all. A new ini­tia­tive lets mem­bers of the New York Pub­lic Library (plus the Brook­lyn and Queens libraries) to sign up for a Cul­ture Pass and there­by gain free entrance to 33 muse­ums across NYC. The list of par­tic­i­pat­ing muse­ums includes some big ones–the Met, Mor­gan, Whit­ney, Frick and Guggen­heim. Also the MoMA, Brook­lyn Muse­um, and Brook­lyn Botan­ic Gar­den, and more. Find a com­plete list below.

The Cul­ture Pass web­site has more infor­ma­tion about this new pro­gram. The web­site is also where you will need to actu­al­ly make reser­va­tions to vis­it the muse­ums. Accord­ing to Hyper­al­ler­gic, “Each card­hold­er is eli­gi­ble for one pass per cul­tur­al insti­tu­tion annu­al­ly and allowed to reserve two impend­ing vis­its at any giv­en time.”

New York­ers, you can sign up for library cards via these links: New York Pub­lic Library, Brook­lyn Library, and Queens Library.

If you would like to sup­port the mis­sion of Open Cul­ture, con­sid­er mak­ing a dona­tion to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your con­tri­bu­tions will help us con­tin­ue pro­vid­ing the best free cul­tur­al and edu­ca­tion­al mate­ri­als to learn­ers every­where. You can con­tribute through Pay­Pal, Patre­on, and Ven­mo (@openculture). Thanks!

Par­tic­i­pat­ing Muse­ums

  • Brook­lyn Botan­ic Gar­den
  • Brook­lyn Chil­dren’s Muse­um
  • Brook­lyn His­tor­i­cal Soci­ety
  • Brook­lyn Muse­um
  • Chil­dren’s Muse­um of Man­hat­tan
  • Chil­dren’s Muse­um of the Arts
  • Coop­er Hewitt, Smith­son­ian Design Muse­um
  • The Draw­ing Cen­ter
  • The Frick Col­lec­tion
  • His­toric Rich­mond Town
  • Inter­na­tion­al Cen­ter of Pho­tog­ra­phy
  • Intre­pid Sea, Air & Space Muse­um
  • Jacques Mar­chais Muse­um of Tibetan Art
  • The Jew­ish Muse­um
  • Louis Arm­strong House
  • The Met­ro­pol­i­tan Muse­um of Art
  • The Mor­gan Library & Muse­um
  • Muse­um of Mod­ern Art, MoMA PS1
  • Muse­um of Chi­nese in Amer­i­ca
  • Muse­um of Jew­ish Her­itage — A Liv­ing Memo­r­i­al to the Holo­caust
  • Muse­um of the City of New York
  • New York Tran­sit Muse­um
  • Noguchi Muse­um
  • Queens His­tor­i­cal Soci­ety
  • Queens Muse­um
  • Rubin Muse­um of Art
  • Sculp­ture­Cen­ter
  • Smith­son­ian Nation­al Muse­um of the Amer­i­can Indi­an
  • Soci­ety of Illus­tra­tors
  • Solomon R. Guggen­heim Muse­um
  • Sug­ar Hill Chil­dren’s Muse­um
  • Wave Hill
  • Whit­ney Muse­um of Amer­i­can Art

via Hyper­al­ler­gic

Relat­ed Con­tent:

New York­ers Can Now Stream 30,000 Free Movies, Includ­ing the Entire Cri­te­ri­on Col­lec­tion, with Their Library Cards

The New York Pub­lic Library Lets Patrons Down­load 300,000 eBooks

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Download 150 Free Coloring Books from Great Libraries, Museums & Cultural Institutions: The British Library, Smithsonian, Carnegie Hall & More

in Art, Coloring Books, Libraries, Museums | February 6th, 2018

coloring book 1

A news alert for fans of col­or­ing books.

You can now take part in the 2018 edi­tion of #Col­or­Our­Col­lec­tions–a cam­paign where muse­ums, libraries and oth­er cul­tur­al insti­tu­tions make avail­able free col­or­ing books, let­ting you col­or art­work from their col­lec­tions and then share it on Twit­ter and oth­er social media plat­forms. When shar­ing, use the hash­tag #Col­or­Our­Col­lec­tions.

Below you can find a col­lec­tion of 20 free col­or­ing books, which you can down­load, print, and col­or until you can col­or no more. Also find a com­plete list of 150 col­or­ing books over at this site main­tained by The New York Acad­e­my of Med­i­cine Library.

To see the free col­or­ing books offered up in 2016, click here. And 2017, here.

The image up top comes from The British Library.

If you would like to sup­port the mis­sion of Open Cul­ture, con­sid­er mak­ing a dona­tion to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your con­tri­bu­tions will help us con­tin­ue pro­vid­ing the best free cul­tur­al and edu­ca­tion­al mate­ri­als to learn­ers every­where. You can con­tribute through Pay­Pal, Patre­on, and Ven­mo (@openculture). Thanks!

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The First Adult Col­or­ing Book: See the Sub­ver­sive Exec­u­tive Col­or­ing Book From 1961

Down­load 15,000+ Free Gold­en Age Comics from the Dig­i­tal Com­ic Muse­um

Read Mar­tin Luther King and The Mont­gomery Sto­ry: The Influ­en­tial 1957 Civ­il Rights Com­ic Book

Dr. Seuss Draws Anti-Japan­ese Car­toons Dur­ing WWII, Then Atones with Hor­ton Hears a Who!

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Boston Public Library Launches a Crowdsourced Project to Transcribe 40,000 Documents from Its Anti-Slavery Collection: You Can Now Help

in History, Libraries | January 30th, 2018

We can hard­ly under­stand Amer­i­ca with­out under­stand­ing Amer­i­can his­to­ry. Can we under­stand Amer­i­can his­to­ry with­out under­stand­ing slav­ery? Many a his­to­ri­an would answer with an unqual­i­fied no, and not sim­ply because they want to see Amer­i­cans med­i­tate on the sins of their ances­tors: plung­ing into the con­tro­ver­sies around slav­ery, see­ing how Amer­i­cans made argu­ments for and against it at the time, can help us approach and inter­pret the oth­er large-scale legal and moral bat­tles that have since raged in the coun­try, and con­tin­ue to rage in it today.

The Boston Pub­lic Library’s Anti-Slav­ery Col­lec­tion, one par­tic­u­lar­ly impor­tant resource in that intel­lec­tu­al effort, could use our help in mak­ing its con­sid­er­able resources more read­i­ly avail­able. “For the past sev­er­al years, we have been dili­gent­ly cat­a­loging and dig­i­tiz­ing man­u­script cor­re­spon­dences from our Anti-Slav­ery col­lec­tion,” writes the BPL’s Tom Blake, all of which “doc­u­ment the thoughts, trans­ac­tions, and activ­i­ties of the abo­li­tion­ist move­ment in Boston, Mass­a­chu­setts, and through­out New Eng­land.”

Now, “in order to make this col­lec­tion more valu­able to researchers, schol­ars, and his­to­ri­ans we are pleased to announce the launch of a new web­site which will make these hand­writ­ten items avail­able for you to tran­scribe into machine read­able text.”

It’s no small job: the col­lec­tion con­tains rough­ly 40,000 pieces of “cor­re­spon­dence, broad­sides, news­pa­pers, pam­phlets, books, and mem­o­ra­bil­ia from the 1830s through the 1870s,” includ­ing the work of some of the most notable Amer­i­can, British, and Irish abo­li­tion­ists of the day. But the com­bined efforts of every­one will­ing to tran­scribe a few doc­u­ments, will, in Blake’s words, “allow the text cor­pus to be more pre­cise­ly search­able and bet­ter suit­ed for nat­ur­al lan­guage pro­cess­ing appli­ca­tions – help­ing researchers bet­ter under­stand pat­terns, rela­tion­ships, and trends embed­ded in the lin­guis­tics of this par­tic­u­lar com­mu­ni­ty.” Which, ulti­mate­ly, will help us all to bet­ter under­stand Amer­i­ca. If you’d like to lend a hand, you can cre­ate an account and start tran­scrib­ing at the Anti-Slav­ery Col­lec­tion’s site today.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Mas­sive New Data­base Will Final­ly Allow Us to Iden­ti­fy Enslaved Peo­ples and Their Descen­dants in the Amer­i­c­as

1.5 Mil­lion Slav­ery Era Doc­u­ments Will Be Dig­i­tized, Help­ing African Amer­i­cans to Learn About Their Lost Ances­tors

Freed Slave Writes Let­ter to For­mer Mas­ter: You Owe Us $11,680 for 52 Years of Unpaid Labor (1865)

Visu­al­iz­ing Slav­ery: The Map Abra­ham Lin­coln Spent Hours Study­ing Dur­ing the Civ­il War

The Anti-Slav­ery Alpha­bet: 1846 Book Teach­es Kids the ABCs of Slavery’s Evils

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. His projects include the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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Free: Download 10,000+ Master Drawings from The Morgan Library & Museum’s Online Collection

in Art, Law, Libraries, Museums, Opera | January 29th, 2018

It’s hard for the casu­al brows­er to know where to begin with a col­lec­tion as vast as the mas­ter draw­ings belong­ing to the Mor­gan Library & Muse­um.

The Library’s Draw­ings Online pro­gram gives the pub­lic free access to over 10,000 down­load­able images, drawn pri­mar­i­ly from—and in—the fif­teenth through nine­teenth cen­turies. Many images are fleshed out with inscrip­tions, infor­ma­tion on prove­nance, bio­graph­i­cal sketch­es of the artist, and, in over 2000 instances, images of the ver­so, or flip side of the paper.

Researchers and sim­i­lar­ly informed seek­ers can browse by artist or school, but what if you don’t quite know what you want?

You could tour the high­lights, or bet­ter yet, bush­whack your way into the unknown by enter­ing a ran­dom word or phrase into the “search draw­ings” func­tion.

Know­ing that the inter­net is crazy for cats, I made that my first search term, but the results were skewed by an 18th-cen­tu­ry Dutch artist named Jacob Cats, whose work abounds with cows and sheep.

Car­i­ca­tur­ist Al Hirschfeld’s por­trait of Kath­leen Turn­er in the 1990 Broad­way revival of Ten­nessee Williams’ Cat on a Hot Tin Roof  is unavail­able for view­ing due to copy­right restric­tions. (It’s eas­i­ly view­able else­where…)

And the Where’s Wal­do-esque excite­ment I felt upon an anony­mous artist’s Moun­tain Land­scape with Ital­ian-Style Clois­ter faux-Bruegel dis­si­pat­ed when I real­ized this return owed more to the abbre­vi­a­tion of “cat­a­logue” than any feline lurk­ing in the pen-and-ink trees.

Next I entered the word “babies.” I’m not sure why. There cer­tain­ly were a lot of them, almost as many as I encounter on Face­book.

Return­ing to the pre-select­ed high­lights page, I resolved to let the experts pick for me. I saw a charm­ing rab­bit fam­i­ly by John James Audubon and the old favorite by William Blake, top, but what real­ly grabbed me was the first page’s final selec­tion: Hon­oré Daumier’s Two Lawyers Con­vers­ing, cir­ca 1862.

Part of the Mor­gan’s recent­ly closed Drawn to Great­ness: Mas­ter Draw­ings from the Thaw Col­lec­tion exhib­it, the sub­jects’ dress may be archa­ic, but their expres­sions are both humor­ous and ever­green. Lawyer. I had my search term.

My favorite of the sev­en search results is illus­tra­tor Edmund J. Sul­li­van’s Soumin an’ Roumin from 1914. One of a dozen or so draw­ings Sul­li­van made for an updat­ed edi­tion of George Out­ram’s Legal and Oth­er Lyrics, it shows “an old woman in a farm­yard sur­round­ed by live­stock flee­ing three mon­strous lawyers wear­ing wigs and robes and armed with hideous talons instead of hands and feet. One … chas­es a cow with a scourge, the thongs of which end in scor­pi­ons.”

Down­load that one for all your lawyer friends or your lawyer spouse… upload it to a t‑shirt if you’re crafty.

Claud Lovat Fras­er’s set design for Per­gole­si’s short com­ic opera La Ser­va Padrona (or The Maid Turned Mis­tress) at the Lyric Ham­mer­smith doesn’t depict any lawyers, to the best of my knowl­edge, but he him­self was one—also a car­i­ca­tur­ist, lam­poon­ing the lit­er­ary and the­atri­cal lumi­nar­ies of his day, and a sol­dier whose life was cut short due to expo­sure to gas in World War I.

In addi­tion to the Morgan’s par­tic­u­lar­ly well-fleshed-out artist bio for this work, the ver­so is a treat in the form of a print­ed announce­ment for the Chelsea Arts Club Cos­tume Ball.

Browse the Mor­gan Library & Museum’s Draw­ings Online in its entire­ty here, or nar­row it down by artist, School of Art, or per­son­al whim.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

300+ Etch­ings by Rem­brandt Now Free Online, Thanks to the Mor­gan Library & Muse­um

The British Library Puts 1,000,000 Images into the Pub­lic Domain, Mak­ing Them Free to Reuse & Remix

Down­load 2,500 Beau­ti­ful Wood­block Prints and Draw­ings by Japan­ese Mas­ters (1600–1915)

1.8 Mil­lion Free Works of Art from World-Class Muse­ums: A Meta List of Great Art Avail­able Online

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine.  Join her New York City  on Feb­ru­ary 8, when she hosts Necro­mancers of the Pub­lic Domain, a vari­ety show born of a sin­gle musty vol­ume — this month: Mas­ter­pieces in Colour, Bas­ten-Lep­age. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

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China’s New Luminous White Library: A Striking Visual Introduction

in Architecture, Books, Libraries | November 14th, 2017

MVRDV, a Dutch archi­tec­ture and urban design firm, teamed up with Chi­nese archi­tects to cre­ate the Tian­jin Bin­hai Library, a mas­sive cul­tur­al cen­ter fea­tur­ing “a lumi­nous spher­i­cal audi­to­ri­um around which floor-to-ceil­ing book­cas­es cas­cade.” Locat­ed not far from Bei­jing, the library was built quick­ly by any stan­dards. It took only three years to move from “the first sketch to the [grand] open­ing” on Octo­ber 1. Elab­o­rat­ing on the library, which can house 1.2 mil­lion books, MVRDV notes:

The building’s mass extrudes upwards from the site and is ‘punc­tured’ by a spher­i­cal audi­to­ri­um in the cen­tre. Book­shelves are arrayed on either side of the sphere and act as every­thing from stairs to seat­ing, even con­tin­u­ing along the ceil­ing to cre­ate an illu­mi­nat­ed topog­ra­phy. These con­tours also con­tin­ue along the two full glass facades that con­nect the library to the park out­side and the pub­lic cor­ri­dor inside, serv­ing as lou­vres to pro­tect the inte­ri­or against exces­sive sun­light whilst also cre­at­ing a bright and even­ly lit inte­ri­or.

The video above gives you a visu­al intro­duc­tion to the build­ing. And, on the MRDV web­site, you can view a gallery of pho­tos that let you see the library’s shape­ly design.

If you would like to sup­port the mis­sion of Open Cul­ture, con­sid­er mak­ing a dona­tion to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your con­tri­bu­tions will help us con­tin­ue pro­vid­ing the best free cul­tur­al and edu­ca­tion­al mate­ri­als to learn­ers every­where. You can con­tribute through Pay­Pal, Patre­on, and Ven­mo (@openculture). Thanks!

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Watch 50+ Doc­u­men­taries on Famous Archi­tects & Build­ings: Bauhaus, Le Cor­busier, Hadid & Many More

A is for Archi­tec­ture: 1960 Doc­u­men­tary on Why We Build, from the Ancient Greeks to Mod­ern Times

A Vir­tu­al Tour of Japan’s Inflat­able Con­cert Hall

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