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This report of research on concepts and problems of "Libraries of the Future" records the result of a two-year inquiry into the applicability of some of the newer techniques for handling information to what goes at present by the name of library work— i.e., the operations connected with assembling information in recorded form and of organizing and making it available for use....

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Fiction about (or involving) motion pictures started appearing in the late nineteenth-century, when writers first became aware of early kinetoscope technologies. These stories grew more and more popular as the public became increasingly fascinated with the movies, the film industry, and the odd inhabitants of Hollywood. These stories reflect and often respond to the public's fascination with the movies; at the same time, they also reveal their fears and anxieties about the new medium. The first volume of this anthology collects 16 short stories and a monologue about motion picture technology and the film industry published between 1895 and 1922. (Summary by ChuckW)...

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Fiction, Short stories

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Amory Blaine grew up in a wealthy family and was given an Ivy League education. Without a need to learn a profession, he chiefly dabbled in literature and partying. His school chums were of similar background, and the ideas they reflected to each other grew in their minds to be of the greatest importance. Amory began to think of himself as somewhat of a character in a Rupert Brooke poem (from which the book's title is taken). World War I intervened in this happy fog and brought focus to some, doubt to others. In the rapidly changing technology of the war era, the financial underpinnings of the Blaine fortune began to fall apart. The deaths of Amory's parents left the finances without a rudder and as Amory's situation deteriorated he came to realize he had only his interest in literature to fall back upon. Meanwhile, a series of young women traipsed through his life, attracted to his handsome face and bright wit like moths to a candle. But Amory could never master the role of being a real person... and, one by one, they traipsed out. This Side of Paradise was F. Scott Fitzgerald's first novel and was one of the nation's most popular ...

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Fiction

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A cautionary tale about the evils of interference, matchmaking and good intentions turned awry, Emma is the study of a young woman raised without sufficient discipline or occupation. Handsome, clever and rich, Emma is the epitome of what a young woman should be in Regency England, except for the fact that her indulgent father and lack of a mother have left her spoiled and used to getting her own way. Emma's only true critic and voice of reason is Mr. Knightley, a gentleman whose opinion she values greatly. She delights in meddling in the romantic affairs of everyone around her, thinking celibacy is a privilege she alone can enjoy by virtue of her social standing. In the end, Emma is forced to acknowledge both her own lack of insight into the motives of others, and admit her need for a companion who can challenge her to become a better woman. (Summary by Moira Fogarty)...

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Romance, Fiction

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Mr. Vinycomb has in these articles aimed to give his readers a practical dissertation upon the modes of execution, rather than upon the history and classification of styles in the production of book-plates; and in this he has certainly departed from the beaten track, and has furnished a very concise and clear account of the various processes by which our book-plates are produced and reproduced, and the numerous and ingenious methods of manipulation resorted to in their manufacture....

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Ozma of Oz was the third title in the Oz series by L. Frank Baum. In this book Dorothy is shipwrecked and lands on the shores of a fairy country that adjoins Oz, the land of Ev. There she meets Tiktok, a wind-up mechanical man; a talking chicken, Billina; and Ozma, the girl ruler of Oz who is leading a quest to rescue the royal family of Ev from their captivity by the Nome King. Dorothy is also reunited with her old friends, the Scarecrow, the Tin Woodman, and the Cowardly Lion. Together the adventurers travel to the Nome King’s underground kingdom and have many exciting adventures before returning to Oz, and for Dorothy, eventual return to her family in the “civilized” world. (Summary by Judy Bieber)...

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Children

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3 Robert Sheckley short stories that demonstrate the breathof his fantastic imagination. In Watchbird, the question can machines solve human problems? is answered with a resounding YES! But there may be a few unforeseen glitches. Just a few. Warrior Race drops us into an alien race of warriors who fight in a way you will never be able to imagine until you listen. And Beside Still Waters is a gentle story that shows us a man who really wants to get away from it all ... sitting on a rock in the asteroid belt with only a robot for a friend. No girls allowed! A poignant and unsettling story to say the least....

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Science fiction

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The Machine Stops is a short science fiction story. It describes a world in which almost all humans have lost the ability to live on the surface of the Earth. Each individual lives in isolation in a 'cell', with all bodily and spiritual needs met by the omnipotent, global Machine. Most humans welcome this development, as they are skeptical and fearful of first-hand experience. People forget that humans created the Machine, and treat it as a mystical entity whose needs supersede their own. Those who do not accept the deity of the Machine are viewed as 'unmechanical' and are threatened with Homelessness. Eventually, the Machine apocalyptically collapses, and the civilization of the Machine comes to an end. (Wikipedia)Comment by book coordinator: A condensed rapidfire of details and ideas imagining a dystopian world. Good thing he made it a short story. And the world he describes feels so appalling, although we are good on the way to be where Forster imagined us - shocker. So imaginative for 1909! Staying at home with the telly and internet and instant messaging and videoconferencing, google and pizza delivery and all flats and all cit...

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Science fiction

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The Master Key was one of Baum's earliest full length fantasy books for children, published in 1901 just one year after The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. The protagonist, Rob, while experimenting in his workshop, accidentally summons up an electrical fairy who presents him with electrical devices so advanced as to seem magical. His gifts include a flying contraption, a stun gun, and something resembling an omniscient portable TV set. Rob travels the world, rendering assistance to European heads of state and narrowly escaping disaster at the hands of “primitive” cannibals, Turks and Tatars, pirates, and evil scientists who try to steal his inventions. It's great fun, despite the occasional use of racial stereotypes that reflect the values of its time....

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Children

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Iron bars do not confine a Man—only his body. There are more subtle, and more confining bindings, however....Police methods of the future will naturally use complex new technology but police will still need to deal with the same old sad human nature, forever doing horrible deeds. The night stick may be replaced by the hypo-gun but is prison the only solution? Listen to this neat story by Randall Garrett and see....

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Science fiction

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Science fiction (abbreviated SF or sci-fi with varying punctuation and case) is a broad genre of fiction that often involves sociological and technical speculations based on current or future science or technology. This is a reader-selected collection of short stories that entered the US public domain when their copyright was not renewed. Summary by Cori Samuel, with Wikipedia input....

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Fiction, Science fiction, Short stories

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This is a cerebral play that underlines the pettiness of a person lost among things (of an unnatural size), and much more: lost among ordinary people.

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SCENE I A laboratory equipped with all the advantages of modern medicine. It appears to be a waiting room in a sanitarium, with four doors - one to either side of the stage and two against the back. The doors are marked in order, "0", "Ward 1", "Ward 2", and "Ward 3." The interior is dark. Stuffed people. A "New Man" is kept frozen in a trunk made of glass. He is a specimen of new technology, and above him are pinned up revelatory advertisements and newspaper clippings. Doctors and Assistants are dressed in black smocks, their faces cold and inhuman, and their eyes glassy. The patients are dressed in the striped overalls of the infirm. Both the patients and useless medical staff limp, though more so the former. The Doctor, enveloped in frosty mist, is seated in an elaborate chair with his back towards the audience. Only the nape of his neck shows during the play, though his chair is stirring from time to time. He seems to turn himself towards the audience sometimes, but he gives up. Neither in the intervals, nor at the end of the play this actor does not show up for cheers. His voice is unearthly... synthesized....

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Ancient living machines that after millennia of stillness suddenly begin to move under their own power, for reasons that remain a mystery to men. Holati Tate discovered them—then disappeared. Trigger Argee was his closest associate—she means to find him. She's brilliant, beautiful, and skilled in every known martial art. She's worth plenty—dead or alive—to more than one faction in this obscure battle. And she's beginning to have a chilling notion that the long-vanished Masters of the Old Galaxy were wise when they exiled the plasmoids to the most distant and isolated world they knew.... (Summary from book jacket) Originally published in 1962 as A Tale of Two Clocks. James Henry Schmitz lived from October 15, 1911–April 18, 1981. Gutenberg Project states: Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the United States. (addition by km)...

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Science fiction

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Ozma of Oz was the third title in the Oz series by L. Frank Baum. In this book Dorothy is shipwrecked and lands on the shores of a fairy country that adjoins Oz, the land of Ev. There she meets Tiktok, a wind up mechanical man, a talking chicken, Billina, and Ozma, the girl ruler of Oz who is leading a quest to rescue the royal family of Ev from their captivity by the Nome King. Dorothy is also reunited with her old friends, the Scarecrow, the Tin Woodman, and the Cowardly Lion. Together the adventurers travel to the Nome King's underground kingdom and have many exciting adventures before returning to Oz, and for Dorothy, eventual return to her family in the civilized world. (description by Judy Bieber)...

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Children

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In American Notes, Rudyard Kipling, the Nobel Prize-winning author of the Jungle Book, visits the USA. As the travel-diary of an Anglo-Indian Imperialist visiting the USA, these American Notes offer an interesting view of America in the 1880s. Kipling affects a wide-eyed innocence, and expresses astonishment at features of American life that differ from his own, not least the freedom (and attraction) of American women. However, he scorns the political machines that made a mockery of American democracy, and while exhibiting the racist attitudes that made him controversial in the 20th century concludes “It is not good to be a negro in the land of the free and the home of the brave.” G. A. England of Harvard University (letter to The New York Times 10/11/1902) wrote: “To the American temperament, the gentleman who throws stones while himself living in a glass house cannot fail to be amusing; the more so if, as in Mr Kipling’s case, he appears to be in a state of maiden innocence regarding the structure of his own domicile.” (Summary by Tim Bulkeley with Quotations from the Gutenberg edition of American Notes and the online version of T...

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Essay/Short nonfiction

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They were broadcasts from nowhere--sinister emanations flooding in from space--smashing any receiver that picked them up. What defense could Earth devise against science such as this? In the far future of 1972, on a secret military installation, Staff Sergeant Bellews is an expert on the latest scientific discovery: a way for ordinary machines like vacuums and lawnmowers to gather experience in their jobs, becoming error free over time. Then the strange broadcasts began to blow up transmitters everywhere. Were they from space? Enemies? the future? He didn't care until they started messin' with his machines. Then he took it personally. (summary from the first chapter and Phil Chenevert)...

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Science fiction

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Tom Swift, that prolific youthful inventor, is engaged in trying to help the Allies win WWI. After reading newspaper accounts of the British tanks, Tom takes a sheet of paper and sets out to design a better one from scratch. And fortunately, he can throw the whole family business behind his venture. He has two problems: First, his friends and acquaintances are questioning his patriotism because he hasn't enlisted as a rifleman for the front lines. Even his girl is worried his blood isn't true-blue. But that's because he is developing his tank in secret, and they don't know he's concentrating on winning the war the American way, with machines. The second problem is that the German spies have penetrated the secret of what is being built in the high-security shop on the Swift property. And they will stop at nothing to steal its design - not kidnapping Tom, and not kidnapping the tank itself, complete with crew. Tom and his buddies had better work fast, or the American riflemen are going to find the Kaiser's soldiers using American-designed tanks against them! (Summary by Mark F. Smith)...

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Fiction, Teen/Young adult, Adventure

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Britain won the Moon Race! Decades before Neal Armstrong took his giant leap for mankind two intrepid adventurers from Lympne, England, journeyed there using not a rocket, but an antigravity coating.Mr. Bedford, who narrates the tale, tells of how he fell in with eccentric inventor Mr. Cavor, grew to believe in his researches, helped him build a sphere for traveling in space, and then partnered with him in an expedition to the Moon.What they found was fantastic! There was not only air and water, but the Moon was honeycombed with caverns and tunnels in which lived an advanced civilization of insect-like beings. While Bedford is frightened by them and bolts home, Cavor stays and is treated with great respect.So why didn't Armstrong and later astronauts find the evidence of all this? Well, according to broadcasts by Cavor over the newly-discovered radio technology, he told the Selenites too much about mankind, and apparently, they removed the welcome mat! (Summary by Mark)...

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Adventure, Science fiction, Teen/Young adult

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Few things, even in literature, can really be said to be unique — but Moby Dick is truly unlike anything written before or since. The novel is nominally about the obsessive hunt by the crazed Captain Ahab of the book’s eponymous white whale. But interspersed in that story are digressions, paradoxes, philosophical riffs on whaling and life, and a display of techniques so advanced for its time that some have referred to the 1851 Moby Dick as the first “modern” novel. (Summary by Stewart Wills)...

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Adventure, Sea stories

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Excerpt: ACT I. SCENE I. Rome. A street. [Enter FLAVIUS, MARULLUS, and certain Commoners.] FLAVIUS: Hence! home, you idle creatures get you home: Is this a holiday? what! know you not, Being mechanical, you ought not walk Upon a laboring day without the sign Of your profession? Speak, what trade art thou? First Commoner: Why, sir, a carpenter. MARULLUS: Where is thy leather apron and thy rule? What dost thou with thy best apparel on? You, sir, what trade are you? Second Commoner: Truly, sir, in respect of a fine workman, I am but, as you would say, a cobbler....