Iraq National Library

The British Library are hosting the Diary of Saad Eskander, Director of the Iraq National Library. A journal that makes other library blogs (this one included) seem somewhat frivolous. It has caught the attention of The Guardian and Reuters among others.

Some days in this library nearly reduce me to tears, but at least the end of week work return never has to read: "I spent the rest of the week trying to advise a number of my employees what to do, as they got death threats." Five of his staff members have been killed in the last year and more than a dozen have been abducted by gunmen.

Hi mum! I'm on the telly (review page)

A reference librarian gets quoted in a Nancy Banks Smith television column in the Guardian today. She writes: "He seems," said our reference library, doubtfully, "to write about cheese."

Missing file

This week's edition of Property Week features a large piece about the Guardian's move from its current home in London's Farringdon Road to Kings Place in 2008. There's lots of interesting stuff about how the paper's move to Clerkenwell in 1976 started the area's regeneration (although claims that 'sleazy shops with fringed curtains' being boarded up are a bit premature as table dancing clubs seem to be springing up all along Farringdon Road), and how there may be a similar effect at Kings Cross. Christine Eade, a former Guardian journalist, also writes about life in the paper's former home on Gray's Inn Road during the early 1970s. All good stuff but two thirds of the way down is this little gem:

'Ken Murphy, the librarian, retrieved information quicker than Google from the tiny library where thousands of newspaper cuttings were filed. Ken was too gentlemanly to remonstrate when I lost the Dr Christian Barnard file. If The Guardian archive is relocated with no information on the first heart translplant surgeon, I take full responsibility.'

Not to worry as my spies at Farringdon Road have confirmed that the file is still there.