Our Public Intellectual: Matthew Battles--Houghton Library, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA

Fuente: ERIC Institute of Education Sciences
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Format: Recurso educativo Open Access
Language:en
Published: 2004
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collection Education Resources Information Center
contents Our Public Intellectual: Matthew Battles--Houghton Library, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA Libraries Librarians History Scholarship Library Materials Many people take for granted the tools of the librarian's trade: typography, books, even the idea of a library. But when Matthew Battles looks at these things, he sees responses that evolved to meet human needs and wants to know more. What purposes were these tools put to and what do they tell people about the culture that produced them? What does the destruction of books and libraries tell people about the power of the ideas inside them? What Battles thinks about, he writes about. After "Lost in the Stacks" appeared in Harper's he was invited to expand the article into "Library: An Unquiet History" (Norton, 2003). He did not want to write a dry history of library facts, he wanted to look at the interplay between knowledge and cultures. This goal prompts Battles's friend Joshua Glenn of the Boston Globe to describe him as "Harvard Square's last trim public intellectual ... and a scholar of the history of the very idea of the library."
format Recurso educativo Open Access
id eric_EJ701756
institution ERIC Institute of Education Sciences
language en
publishDate 2004
record_format eric
spellingShingle Our Public Intellectual: Matthew Battles--Houghton Library, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA
Libraries
Librarians
History
Scholarship
Library Materials
Our Public Intellectual: Matthew Battles--Houghton Library, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA Libraries Librarians History Scholarship Library Materials Many people take for granted the tools of the librarian's trade: typography, books, even the idea of a library. But when Matthew Battles looks at these things, he sees responses that evolved to meet human needs and wants to know more. What purposes were these tools put to and what do they tell people about the culture that produced them? What does the destruction of books and libraries tell people about the power of the ideas inside them? What Battles thinks about, he writes about. After "Lost in the Stacks" appeared in Harper's he was invited to expand the article into "Library: An Unquiet History" (Norton, 2003). He did not want to write a dry history of library facts, he wanted to look at the interplay between knowledge and cultures. This goal prompts Battles's friend Joshua Glenn of the Boston Globe to describe him as "Harvard Square's last trim public intellectual ... and a scholar of the history of the very idea of the library."
title Our Public Intellectual: Matthew Battles--Houghton Library, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA
topic Libraries
Librarians
History
Scholarship
Library Materials
url https://eric.ed.gov/?id=EJ701756