One of my earliest memories is accompanying my mother, a life-long student and author, to the main branch of the San Francisco public library. The building was a gem: enormous, imposing, marble and limestone with a grand staircase, quite reading rooms with long tables and green crook-neck study lamps. I remember holding her hand and walking up the grand central staircase of white marble, looking down all the while and watching my red Mary jane shoes skip steps alongside her. Mom asked a librarian for assistance, and he guided us through this room to that one, and finally to a tiny (closet-sized) space, painted deep Pompeii red, lined floor-to-ceiling with…

“Hyperlinks are people, too,” says Prof. Michael Stephens. This statement is the heart of the matter. People are linked by a variety of networks: school, culture, neighborhood, city, nationality, family… and on and on. As individuals, we “wear many masks” as per George Orwell, and therefore we are hyper-linked. These links don’t often have a brick-and-mortar building associated or necessary to establish or confirm their validity. The link between siblings, parent-to-child, student-to-student/teacher, boss to employee, are all intangible, but very real links. And they are the first types of “networks” we create as humans. Simply put, our hyperlinks are infinite. With the onset of communication technology, our links went beyond…

“The library is everywhere” is an overwhelming thought. It’s similar to “God is everywhere,” a typical lesson for young emerging Christians, with the guiding principle that if you look, you will find it. Equally perplexing is Briet’s famous claim that the antelope is a document. These concepts, while excellent fodder to chew on, are difficult to construct a building upon. In fact, they even scare people away. How, then, do we create a modern library?             The ancient Greeks used the agora as their exchange space: ideas, politics, and gossip were traded alongside foods and other goods. It was an open space that was full of information. Today’s library is…

Summer in Hyperlink- It sounds like a place I should go… maybe? Let’s see where this brings me.