Asgarian, Roxanna

The Art Lending Library, originally commissioned by Glasgow’s Market Gallery and created by Walker & Bromwich, is a series of crates fitted together, filled with donated works of art from living contemporary artists around the world. Anybody who walks in the libraries where the project is housed can sign out a work of art of their choosing, and the piece is crated up and shipped to their house for up to a week.

A Superman comic depicting John F. Kennedy, originally released shortly after the president’s assassination, on January 9 finally made its way to the JFK Library in Boston, where illustrator Al Plastino had thought it had been for nearly 50 years.

Librarian Sharon McKellar and other staff at the Oakland Public Library, CA, have been collecting notes and other items found in between pages of books or left on the floors and tables of the library for years. McKellar got the idea to document the library staff’s collection of these objects when she stumbled on the website for Found Magazine. When she was put in charge of developing the library’s website and blog, she decided to ask fellow librarians, library assistants and aides, and other staff if she could scan their found items.

When Colorado's Arapahoe Library District, which serves the Denver area, heard about the opportunity to purchase Google Glass before it was released to the public, the staff jumped on it. It is a good thing they did, because as it turns out, the library staff heard about the Glass Explorer contest, in which you tweeted at Google what you would do with Google Glass using the hashtag #IfIHadGlass, just one day before the deadline.

Dalhousie University’s library system was in a bind. Bound books, mostly out-of-date academic journals that had since been uploaded to online databases, had been piling up for years. At nearly 50,000 volumes, the library was running out of space, and shredding didn't work. When builder and inventor David Cameron heard of the problem, he hoped to solve two problems at once, by using them to insulate an abandoned schoolhouse that’s now a community center focused on sustainability.