Who doesn’t like free? Beyond the walls of the amazing (albeit somewhat small) Fanwood Memorial Library, the web will provide.
Here’s just a tiny taste of what’s out there – how about…
ART 422 Free Art Books from The Metropolitan Museum of Art – You could pay $118 on Amazon for the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s catalog The Art of Illumination: The Limbourg Brothers and the Belles Heures of Jean de France, Duc de Berry. Or you could pay $0 to download it at MetPublications, the site offering “five decades of Met Museum publications on art history available to read, download, and/or search for free.” If that strikes you as an obvious choice, prepare to spend some serious time browsing MetPublications’ collection of free art books and catalogs.
MUSIC Every recording that Folklorist Alan Lomax ever collected! He spent his career documenting folk music traditions from around the world. Now thousands of the songs and interviews he recorded are available for free online, many for the first time. It’s part of what Lomax envisioned for the collection — long before the age of the Internet. He recorded a staggering amount of folk music, working from the 1930s to the ’90s, and traveling from the Deep South to the mountains of West Virginia, all the way to Europe, the Caribbean and Asia. When it came time to bring all of those hours of sound into the digital era, the people in charge of the Lomax archive weren’t quite sure how to tackle the problem, but it’s all there for you now from the folks at www.culturalequity.org.
BOOKS The Literary Classics Online Book Club – it is specially tailored for people who enjoy reading and talking about classic literature. Each year, they select six classic books to read and discuss. Throughout each book’s first month, participants can read the book and we will also post fun and interesting facts about that literary classic on the club’s social-media outlets. The second month we will post discussion questions for participants to read and comment on.
Library Reads can lead you to the top ten books published each month., as recommended by librarians (who better?) across the country.
PHOTOGRAPHS The Library of Congress’s Online Collection of Photographs – Unique in their scope and richness, the picture collections number more than 14 million images. These include photographs, historical prints, posters, cartoons, documentary drawings, fine prints, and architectural and engineering designs. While international in scope, the collections are particularly strong in materials documenting the history of the United States and the lives, interests, and achievements of the American people.
Dan Weiss
Dan is currently the director of the Fanwood (NJ) Memorial Library. Since he accepted that position in 1997 he has dramatically taken this small suburban library into the 21st century with improvements in facilities, staffing and service. He has served locally, regionally and state wide on many civic and library related committees and boards. In his current position Dan gets to do it all, from overseeing web development, graphics design and renovations, to public relations and fund-raising, all while being the go-to-guy for overflowing toilets and salting the front walk. With his colleague, Meg Kolaya, Dan started the consulting firm Library Connections that developed the nationally recognized and award-winning Libraries and Autism: We’re Connected project. They produced a customer service training video (updated in 2014) and website primarily for library staff to help them serve individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) and their families more effectively. Dan and Meg have given many customer service and autism workshop presentations and keynote addresses, participated in conferences, taught online courses and consulted both locally and around the United States. After hours, Dan continues his varied music career, now with well over 50 years of performing, singing and playing the guitar. He loves all kinds of music with a special fondness for vocalists (Hank Williams, Ray Charles, Billie Holiday and George Jones), bluegrass, honky-tonk, and acoustic roots country. Check www.dannyweiss.com to find out where to hear him next.