The Memory Library

In Jennifer Summit’s account, libraries are more than inert storehouses of written tradition; they are volatile spaces that actively shape the meanings and uses of books, reading, and the past. Considering the two-hundred-year period between 1431, which saw the foundation of Duke Humfrey’s famous library, and 1631, when the great antiquarian Sir Robert Cotton died, Memory’s Library revises the history of the modern library by focusing on its origins in medieval and early modern England. Summit argues that the medieval sources that survive in English collections are the product of a Reformation and post-Reformation struggle to redefine the past by redefining the cultural place, function, and identity of libraries. By establishing the intellectual dynamism of English libraries during this crucial period of their development, Memory’s Library demonstrates how much current discussions about the future of libraries can gain by reexamining their past.

Pre-order this gorgeous novel from a debut voice, that pairs the perennial love for books about books with themes of family, loneliness and hope. For forty-two years, Sally Harrison has been building a library. Each year, on her daughter's birthday, she adds a new book to her shelves - with a note in the front dedicated to her own greatest work. But Ella - Sally's only child - fled to Australia twenty-two years ago after a heated exchange, and never looked back. And though Sally still dutifully adds a new paperback to the shelves every time the clock strikes midnight on July 11th, her hopes of her daughter ever thumbing through the pages are starting to dwindle. Then disaster strikes and Ella is forced to return to the home she once knew. She is soon to discover that when one chapter ends, another will soon follow. All you have to do is turn the page... Journey through the pages of this heartwarming novel, where hope, friendship and second chances are written in the margins. Perfect for book lovers everywhere and fans of Sally Page's The Keeper of Stories.

After an unspecified disaster, the future is quiet and analogue. Behind a doorway in the old town, a private library service flourishes. Signed up by the inscrutable Charlie, patrons subscribe to a membership they don't fully understand. Retro-tainment, existential eavesdropping, or the future of self-help? Whether heartbreak, a rainstorm, or habitual brittleness leads you to The Memory Library, your contributions can be accommodated.

The Memory of Mankind is an illustrated history of the unique role libraries have played in the history of civilzation. Don Heinrich Tolzmann took the classic German-language work The History of Libraires by Alfred Hessel (published 1925 and translated by Reuben Peiss in 1950) and expanded it with additional text to cover the important past 75 years. Tolzmann also completely rewrote the first chapter due to the discovery of many clay tablet libraries in the ancient Middle East, thus expanding our library history knowledge back 5,000 years.

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Parallel Processing and Applied Mathematics, PPAM 2002, held in Naleczow, Poland, in September 2001. The 101 papers presented were carefully reviewed and improved during two rounds of reviewing and revision. The book offers topical sections on distributed and grid architectures, scheduling and load balancing, performance analysis and prediction, parallel non-numerical algorithms, parallel programming, tools and environments, parallel numerical algorithms, applications, and evolutionary computing and neural networks.