Blog Posts by Subject: Social Sciences

The U.S. economy and the upcoming presidential election are on my mind as well as on the minds of many Americans.

I'm not an economist, a political science major or an historian.

I'm a librarian at the Mid-Manhattan Library who specializes in health and medicine — but, I am interested in understanding what has happened to our country over the past ten years.

Though there’s very little chance, apparently, of accurately predicting the future, it seems we’re hardwired to try.  History, reason, and desire seem to be the main tools in this quixotic venture. It helps if you don’t go too far, as The Economist does. But for longer visions, the results are often, in hindsight, hilarious.

Franz Boas (1858-1942) , often referred to as the "Father of Modern Anthropology," was a prominent German scholar who emigrated to the United States in 1885 and taught at Columbia University from 1896 until his retirement in 1936. It was under his influence that Columbia established its Department of Anthropology in 1902 and that the four fields concept of anthropology — integrating the disciplines of cultural/social anthropology, linguistics, biological anthropology, and archaeology — became widely accepted within American academia. Boas championed the concept of cultural relativism through his teaching and research, distancing himself from many of his 

Does the word homework make you cringe in your seat?

Well, you can find complete, trustworthy information a lot faster using the Library's databases.

If a picture is worth a thousand words, then those words are priceless to people who cannot see. Verbal imaging is the art of describing pictures, art, and the world for people who are blind or have visual difficulty. For the past few years, Art Beyond Sight/Art Education for the Blind has been conducting art and craft programs at the Andrew Heiskell Library, teaching a variety of techniques to blind and visually impaired people, from sculpting to painting. And through their New York Beyond Sight project, they've been making city landmarks accessible to people who can't visually experience them.

Our links from April.

Free touch tour of the Glenn Ligon: AMERICA exhibit at the Whitney Museum on Friday, May 6 at 11:00AM. Call 212-570-7789 to RSVP.

How Bind People See the Internet is a nice overview.

From inspiring stories to the latest in assistive technology, we've got it all! Here are the links and announcements we posted on Facebook and Twitter for March.

The New York Times covered our Unseen Dance program, presented by the No-See-Ums.

"Sunlight is said to be the best of disinfectants." This banner quotation so often used in connection with the issue of transparency in goverment was written by U.S. Supreme Court Justice Louis D. Brandeis (pictured below) in Harper's Weekly, December 20, 1913 (before he was nominated to the court). [This quote can be viewed in the NYPL database Oxford Reference Online (available from home with a library card). Although NYPL has a database covering old copies of Harper's Weekly, coverage ends with 1912 so the original source for this quote isn't part of that collection].

With few exceptions (music, sculpture, tactile canvases), the Arts have typically been inaccessible to people who are blind or who have visual difficulties, but the times, as is often said, are a-changing. Dana Salisbury and the No-See-Ums will be presenting BARK! An Unseen Dance, at four New York Public Libraries this month. Based on non-visual perception, this is the first dance form fully accessible to people who are blind or visually impaired.

We've got a grab-bag of links and articles for you this month.

Unseen Dance at the New York Public Library: Dana Salisbury and the No-See-Ums perform BARK, a dance for blindfolded audiences. Audience members experience the dance through their other senses. The group will perform at the Andrew Heiskell Library on Saturday, March 12, 2011 at 2:00 p.m. For Adults Only.

March 16th is the birthday of James Madison, and because of his role as advocate for openness in government that date is celebrated by many different organizations, including the New York Public Library at SIBL, as Freedom of Information Day.

How many times have you vowed to build more downtime into your weekend schedule? How often have you done it?

In recognition of Black History Month, I thought I would take this opportunity to suggest U.S. Patents as an available primary resource that can be used to do historical and biographical research on African American Inventors.

After I'd spent four Sunday evenings in January engrossed in the doings of the Earl of Grantham and his household on the PBS "Masterpiece Classic" series Downton Abbey, this month's choice for Spencer Collection Book of the Month was obvious: a book that lingered for more than three centuries in the company of barons and earls, before being exiled from their presence in exchange for cold, hard cash.

If you're anything like me, you've been glued to your computer screen for more than a week observing the will of an entire people force a reckoning with its despotic ruler, against all cynical logic that insurrections and revolutions somehow irretrievably belong to ages past. What is the context for this momentuous event that will undoubtedly have repercussions for years to come? 

In the summer of 2009, the National Library Service for the Blind and Physically Handicapped officially went digital. For many months before digital cartridges were introduced, however, digital books were available for downloading from the National Library Service's BARD (Braille and Audio Reading Download) website. At first, the BARD service was only lightly used, but once patrons started to receive their players in mid-2009, BARD downloading began in earnest. Here's how the year of downloading books shaped up, statistically speaking. The number of total downloads for the month is in parentheses for each title.

This month's links focus on disability rights, along with some useful services.

The White House Disability Group holds monthly calls to update the public on various issues related to disabilities.

To listen in:
Dial-in number: (800) 230-1093
Title: Disability Call (use instead of code)
For live captioning (at time of call) go to the event page.



In our work at the Tanenbaum Center for Interreligious Understanding, we regularly come across public school educators who believe that they are not supposed to talk about religion in the classroom. On the contrary, we feel that teachers can and should teach about religion.

When I started blogging last May, I hoped to post frequently, but my "day job" of cataloging the books I'd like to write about kept getting in the way. This year, I made a New Year's resolution to blog more regularly. To get started, I thought I would pick a "Spencer Collection Book of the Month" at the beginning of each month and write a short post about it—just enough to share with my readers some of the things that make it special, because the Spencer Collection is a Special Collection at the New York Public Library, and so all of our books are special. Or above average, anyway. (For those not familiar with the Spencer Collection, see my first post: "A