Richard Urban

Richard Urban received his Bachelor of Arts degree in History with honors from Pennsylvania State University in May 1993. He received his Masters in History with Certificate in Museum Studies from the University of Delaware in May 1997.

Currently, he is a doctoral student at the Graduate School of Library and Information Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He serves as a graduate research assistant for the IMLS Digital Collections and Content project and as project assistant for the Metadata for You & Me: A Training Program for Shareable Metadata.

Richard began his career in Washington, DC at the Junior Fellow Library of Congress Manuscripts Division in 1993. He worked as a Library Technician at the Smithsonian Institution Libraries from 1993 to 1995. In 1997 Richard was Assistant Curator for the Historical Society of Delaware where he wrote The City that Launched a Thousand Ships: Shipbuilding in Wilmington 1644-1997. In 2002 Richard worked briefly as Web Site Coordinator for the Historical Society of Pennsylvania and with the ECHO DEPository Project. Prior to returning to his graduate studies, Richard served as the Operations Coordinator for the Collaborative Digitization Program (aka Colorado Digitization Project), which assisted libraries, archives, museums and other cultural heritage organizations providing online access to their collections.

Titles

The City that Launched a Thousand Ships: Shipbuilding in Wilmington l644-1997

Quote of the day

There are worse crimes than burning books. One of them is not reading them.
Joseph Brodsky

O, let my books be then the eloquence and dumb presagers of my speaking breast.
William Shakespeare

Books are the bees which carry the quickening pollen from one to another mind.
James Russell Lowell

There are books...which take rank in your life with parents and lovers and passionate experiences, so medicinal, so stringent, so revolutionary, so authoritative.
Ralph Waldo Emerson

All good books are alike in that they are truer than if they had really happened and after you are finished reading one you will feel that all that happened to you and afterwards it all belongs to you; the good and the bad, the ecstasy, the remorse, and sorrow, the people and the places and how the weather was.
Ernest Hemingway

A book is like a man-clever and dull, brave and cowardly, beautiful and ugly. For every flowering thought there will be a page like a wet and mangy mongrel, and for every looping flight a tap on the wing and a reminder that wax cannot hold the feathers firm too near the sun.
John Steinbeck

The good of a book lies in its being read. A book is made up of signs that speak of other signs, which in their turn speak of things. Without an eye to read them, a book contains signs that produce no concepts; therefore it is dumb.
Umberto Eco

The oldest books are still only just out to those who have not read them.
Samuel Butler

A book is a part of life, a manifestation of life, just as much as a tree or a horse or a star. It obeys its own rhythms, its own laws, whether it be a novel, a play, or a diary. The deep, hidden rhythm of life is always there-that of the pulse, the heart beat.
Henry Miller

A good book is the best of friends, the same today and for ever.
Martin Tupper

Authors

Richard Urban

Titles