Well, America's libraries may be in trouble, but at least New York City is trying to get everyone a library card. Provided we keep the libraries going, that seems like a good initiative.

Also, the New York Public Library has a nifty high-tech book sorter now!

Harvard also has some nifty storage areas and sorting techniques, but they're busy trying to imagine what libraries will be like (and what they will need) in the future.

In a real-life story which sounds like it's straight out of The Name of the Rose, a man used secret passageways and rope ladders to take books from a remote monastery's library, in the spirit of preserving them. Wow.

The library in The Name of the Rose is based on Borges' Library of Babel, and a fantastic essay in Lapham's Quarterly discusses the connection between the bones and bookspines of librarians and libraries.

(Incidentally, "Bones and Bookspines" is the new slogan of Spooky Librarians.)