Category: Collections

  • Get Bach!!!

    Mutopia wants to get you back to Bach and others, with their massive database of free sheet music available in easy to download pdfs. [Image no longer available]

    In the vein of Project Gutenberg, another popular ibiblio mainstay, Mutopia volunteers have uploaded hundreds of sheet music files from the public domain on to their database. Anyone can contribute, and anyone can access this music.

    Featured artists include masters such as Bach Mozart, and Chopin, as well as more obscure composers such as the 16th century’s  T. Arbeau. The 1698-piece archive is searchable by composer, instrument, and musical category, to make it easy for you to find that piece you’ve always wanted to learn. Don’t remember how it sounds? Entries include a midi file like this Prelude in E minor by Frederick Chopin:

     

    Chopin Prelude in E minor

    Break out your mandolin, your pipe organ, your piano or cello, and get playing!

    Photo: http://erdbeerengel.deviantart.com/

  • Jessamyn West to speak at Wilson Library

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    Without a Net: Librarians Bridging the Digital Divide

    Mark your calendars!

    At the invitation of the Special Libraries Association, Jessamyn West, author, librarian, and community technology instructor, will grace our halls on November 18, 2011 to talk about her work teaching computer skills to novices, and helping small and rural libraries manage the transition to a digital world.

    Much of this work is described in her latest book, Without a Net: Librarians Bridging the Digital Divide. You can find out more about Ms. West at her website, Librarian.net hosted here at ibiblio. She also moderates and maintains a community question and answer resource at ask.metafilter.com, and describes her other goings-on at her website jessamyn.com

    Jessamyn will be speaking a 1pm at the Wilson Library Pleasants room on November 18, 2011.

    We’ll see you there!

  • Lo! ’tis a gala night….

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    …Within the lonesome latter years!
    An angel throng, bewinged, bedight
    In veils, and drowned in tears,
    Sit in a theatre, to see
    A play of hopes and fears,
    While the orchestra breathes fitfully
    The music of the spheres.

    This is the first stanza of the expectedly macabre, somewhat depressing, but beautifully crafted poem The Conquerer Worm by the great Edgar Allan Poe. The poem describes the inevitability of death, but on this dreary Halloween, revelers will pour onto the streets and into the bars and parties of their respective towns and celebrate–life, silly costumes, ghosts,  ghouls, probably more than a few occupy wall street protesters and Jersey Shore cast members, and of course, spirits. Spirits, that is, of a character most transformative to one’s disposition…

    If you can’t make it to the masquerades, then do yourself a favor and don’t let the mood of the evening pass you by. Pour yourself a glass of Amontillado,  and curl up by a fire with your e-reader and look through Project Gutenberg’s collection from the likes of Poe, Hawthorne, Shelly and Stoker [Linked content no longer available].

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