Saturday Sharing (My Finds Are Yours)

This week's edition of Saturday Sharing is all about destinations. Among its stops: Paris, Canada, the Middle East, Africa, and an art studio in southern Missouri.

✭ Paris is not only the City of Lights. It's also Le Pavillon des Lettres, in the 8th arrondissement, where every room, from A to Z, is named after an author. Among the 26 writers honored with a room of their own: Anderson, Flaubert, Kafka, Ovid, Shakespeare, Woolf, and Zola. (My thanks to The Book Bench at The New Yorker for the heads up. Sweet dreams!)

✭ While funding for libraries in the United Kingdom is being axed, a project of an entirely different sort, Libraries Across Africa (LAA), has been launched with seed funds from the World Bank Institute. The idea behind the project, a spin-off from Urgent Evoke and outlined in this fascinating project proposal, is to "offer organized access to the greatest population, at the least cost" by providing access to "zones of information access (e.g. libraries) that combine wide-spread knowledge sharing with local insight. . . to trigger the discovery of solutions to immediate and compelling problems" in African communities. The goal is to establish over 10 years some 5,000 operational libraries — in effect, a franchise of libraries linked to the Web.

Donation Site for LAA

LAA on FaceBook

✭ The Canada-based charity Daughters for Life Foundation, which was established following the tragic deaths of three daughters of Izzeldin Abuelaish a.k.a. "the Gaza Doctor", provides high school and university scholarships and scholarships for health and other education programs for young women in the Middle East, without regard to background. It is exemplary of efforts to respond to violence not with more violence but with opportunities to instill hope for a better world.

Daughters for Life Memorial (Here you can learn the story about the event that led to the foundation's creation. The site is offered in English, Arabic, and Hebrew.)

"Primal Shape", Sculpture by Miko Memoralizing Abuelaish's Daughters

Media Coverage of Daughters for Life

✭ Nathan W. Ferree is no ordinary sculptor and potter, as his site Cyborg Clayworks attests. Although he creates fully functional stoneware, he is known for his hand-formed ceramic robots around which he creates stories or naratives. Go here to view images of Ferree's often larger-than-life work, including this "Robot Dog" —"the most complete example of this type unearthed to date" — and "Cheeseburger with Robots". 

✭ Need to learn how to create a book trailer? This post at The Creative Penn takes you through the steps. A guide to creating a podcast is here.

The Creative Penn on FaceBook and Twitter

✭ A still-expanding word-searchable, full-text database of historical and contemporary books and documents known as the Sudan Open Archive is accessible to both organizations and individuals who may use, download, transmit, or print materials for research, education, or nonprofit activities not for commercial gain. Designed and implemented by the Rift Valley Institute and affiliated with Bard College, the SOA is guided by an international advisory board of Sudanese scholars, international area specialists, and technical experts.