Saturday Sharing (My Finds Are Yours)

Come in from the cold and sample today's selections at Saturday Sharing, which travels to the British Library for the written word; the National Film Board of Canada's Main Street; Chile, where you'll see the most amazing fingerpainting; and the virtual and wall-less Monasteries of the Heart. When you feel like sitting down for a spell of reading, make a choice from Storycuts.

✦ The Random House Group series Storycuts has more than 250 digital short stories from a range of writers across genres. 

✦ Anyone who enjoys and wants to know more about the preservation of our library heritage should follow the Library History Buff Blog, written by Larry Nix, a former director of public library development at Wisconsin's Department of Public Instruction who also is a stamp collector. See Nix's online resource on bibliophilately. (My thanks to Fine Books blog for the heads-up.)

✦ If you've been to the British Library or even visited it online, you know what an extraordinary resource it is. Complementing a recent BBC series on the written word, the library presented online related holdings in its collections, among them oracle bones (c. 1600-1060 BC) from its Chinese language collections; the Diamond Sutra, a Buddhist scroll made in 868, the world's "earliest complete survival of a dated printed book"; and Beowulf, the 3,000-line epic poem in Old English. You may explore these invaluable texts and many other now virtual treasures using the library's Turning the Pages™ system. There are apps for them, too.

The Books That Shaped History, Audio Slideshow

Cambridge Digital Library

✦ Spend some time on Main Street by Danny Singer, an interactive National Film Board of Canada project that will take you off the main highways into small prairie towns. The site comprises hundreds of Singer's "stitched together" individual exposures of towns to create composites that let us zoom in and explore up-close the communities' social, cultural, and commercial centers. It's a remarkable project that Singer says is about a real place. Another marvelous project is Aaron Vincent Elkaim's Fire. (My thanks to the New York Times Lens blog for spotlighting these NFB interactive projects.)

✦ Crowdsourcing is producing some fine collaborations on the collection and use of historical manuscripts. Here's one such project: Crowdsourcing History. (My thanks to The Bigger Picture blog at the Smithsonian for this link.)

✦ I'm delighted to pass on this link to Monasteries of the Heart from my friend Peggy Rosenthal at Image Journal (see her post here). A virtual "monastery without walls", the organization describes itself as "a movement of seekers interested in becoming part of a community of seekers. . . to support one another in shaping their spiritual lives around Benedictine values and priorities." You'll find some wonderful resources here, including excerpts from Joan Chittister's book The Monastery of the Heart, selections of prayers, audio for experiencing lectio divina, poems of Christian mystics, and an interactive book, Awakening the Mystic in You.

✦ Fingerpainting can be a lot of fun but as Chilean artist Fabian Gaete Maureira's "fingerscapes" on glass show, a talented hand can use it to produce incredible results. (My thanks to Teia Peterson for the tweet that led me to the video and this Huffington Post article about the artist.)