Check out every book selected for our #BookoftheWeek series, all available for free to read in the Public Knowledge Library!

Courtesy Preston Rhea. Licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0 from https://www.flickr.com/photos/prestonrhea/14751493275/

Are you paying for music, TV, movies, and books? You don’t have to! Here are three different apps/websites that you can use for free. Simply create accounts using your library card, then gain instant access to hundreds of thousands of titles, from silent cinema classics to today’s top-40 chart hits—all from the comfort of your own home.

As part of our Meet a Librarian Series, Public Knowledge sat down with Ariana Perez, one of the librarians of the San Francisco Public Library.

Public Knowledge: What are you currently reading?

Participants at SFMOMA’s 2018 Wikipedia Edit-a-thon in honor of International Women’s Day

Did you know that fewer than 10 percent of Wikipedia editors are women?

In honor of International Women’s Day in March 2018, the Public Knowledge Library hosted SFMOMA’s first-ever Wikipedia Edit-a-thon in collaboration with Art+Feminism, an international project about “women and the ways we talk about them and write about them on the Internet.”

Attendees included SFMOMA staff from four departments, in addition to Wikipedia staff and several members of the public. The results of this session included five brand-new articles, 37 articles edited, and nearly 9,000 words added in total.

Artists with new or updated pages include Jean Conner, Janet Delaney, Sharon Hayes, Claudy Jongstra, Rinko Kawauchi, Yolanda Lopez, and many others.

SFPL Librarian Elizabeth Perez Photo: Beth LaBerge

As part of our Meet a Librarian Series, Public Knowledge sat down with Elizabeth Perez, one of the librarians of the Main Children’s Center of the San Francisco Public Library. Elizabeth conducts children’s, tween/teen, and family programs, in addition to working with various community groups and schools to promote the use of and interest in the library.

One of the most prominent features in the Public Knowledge Library is a beautiful card catalogue cabinet, one of a large number of such cabinets that held the original card catalogue of the main branch of the San Francisco Public Library (SFPL) more than a hundred years ago. Today it stands as a reminder of how much the idea of “search” and the practice of information retrieval have changed.

In September 2017, a temporary, non-circulating branch of the San Francisco Public Library opened inside SFMOMA’s Koret Education Center. Inspired by the work of the Queens Museum with the Queens Library in New York, we had begun by wondering about what the meaning of a public library branch might be within an art museum in our context. The result features books on a variety of topics for adults and children, local and thematic periodicals, a piece of SFPL’s original card catalog, and a vinyl listening station. While much of this could be seen as a nostalgic gesture, or as a reflection on the obsolescence of different media, our aim was for the space to be more than that. But what, we wondered, would a physical hub for the Public Knowledge initiative and the SFMOMA-SFPL partnership need to be?