Cleveland librarian John Harris is providing books outside of the Republican National Convention this week.
Thanks, Lynne Thomas!
Addendum from later the same day: here’s an image Janis Winn sent to the ALA Think Tank Facebook page, saying “Prepare to see a lot of this one, my library friends.” Thanks, Dina Wood !
The Taman Bima Microlibrary in Bandung, Indonesia was built using upcycled plastic ice cream containers, possibly LuVe Litee brand, though I’m not sure. Thanks, Terry Kennedy!
I’m not playing this [see below] and I don’t really understand how it works except that I hear Vernor Vinge’s Rainbows End has a similar kind of game in it it.
Apparently, Pokémon Go players are finding creatures and other stuff in libraries all over the United States. I wonder if I could lure one into my office? I will find out.
Pokémon GO: What Do Librarians Need To Know? (School Library Journal)
‘Pokémon Go’ sends swarms of players to bookstores and libraries. But will they remember the books? (Los Angeles Times)
Everything Librarians Need To Know About Pokemon Go! (Where We’re Going, We Don’t Need Shelves)
Why Pokemon Go and The Library is a perfect partnership (ALSC blog)
Local library goes viral thanks to Pokemon plans (The Island Packet)
Addendum, July 21: Change “I’m not playing this” to “I wish I could play this but my phone doesn’t have a gyroscope. My kids are playing it and so is practically everybody I know.”
A colleague was able to capture two creatures in the Special Collections area:
I ordered Joshua Hammer’s book for my library when I first read a review of it, months ago. Today a friend suggested the story of these “bad-ass” librarians as a shenanigan, and I have to agree. Smuggling controversial manuscripts to safety is the kind of dangerous and non-goofy shenanigan librarians were kinda born to do.
Thanks, Daniel M. Shapiro!
Sarah Katherine Stengle snapped this photograph and put it on Facebook with the note “The sign on the door of the WC at the Art Museum in Jyväskylä Finland. The bathroom contained a library: loved it.”
Thanks, Emily Lloyd!
Tutt Library at Colorado College is undergoing a major renovation right now (in fact, I’m listening to the sounds of slams and crashes as I type this). Workmen cleaned out our sub-basement and found an old architectural model of our building, probably made in 1980 when the South addition was built.
As soon as we installed the model in our display case, my colleague Sarah Bogard began taking close-up photographs. I think these are lovely, and strangely poetic.
We found ourselves placing the little people in various arrangements and playing with the model like a dollhouse. Other colleagues stopped by to see what we were doing and got involved. Someone said this set-up looked like the whomping willow in the Harry Potter books:
An hour or so later, a small Pegasus appeared.
What will happen next?
Addendum, May 26, 2016:
Addenda, May 31, 2016:
I love when libraries put together oddball mini-exhibitions on obscure topics. (I guess that’s no surprise coming from the person who brought you mini-exhibitions on 19th Century Beards, Different Kinds of Paperclips, and Composition Books.) The Cambridge University Library currently has a display of their towel-related holdings in honor of Towel Day, May 25, celebrating Douglas Adams and his Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy series. Possibly my favorite sentence in the article: “The bibliography of towels is, in fact, remarkably limited.” Thanks, Lynne M. Thomas!
Being a librarian and poet, I’m always on the alert for other such, so, herewith, lists of poet-librarians, gathered using the lazyweb and from a post on the topic at In the Library with the Lead Pipe (a blog with the tagline “The murder victim? Your library assumptions. Suspects? It could have been any of us”).
Please let me know of any others who should be on this list — it’ll be an ongoing project. If you’re on the list but would prefer a different link, let me know that, too (jessyrandall@yahoo.com).
(English language)
(languages other than English — thank you, Amadeu Pons i Serra and the Catalan Library Association for providing most of these names)
Manuel Machado
Marcelino Menéndez y Pelayo
Addendum, December 9, 2016: Patrick Williams informs me that Josh Honn has a list of librarian poets here.
The New Hanover County Public Library in North Carolina held a contest in 2015 for clothing and accessories made from discarded library books and cassette tapes. You can view the runway show above and the full details here. You’re too late to sign up for the 2016 contest, but perhaps they’ll do it again next year. Thanks, Tom Lovell!
Most of the library renovation work happening in Tutt Library is noisy, messy, dusty, and not much fun for the people in the building. But here’s a brilliantly shining silver lining to the project: artist Sandy Kinnee has loaned two of enormous, gorgeous abstract paintings for the duration of the renovation.
Special Collections has had many incarnations over the years. The space shown here:
now looks like this (photographed with a wide-angle lens by the artist):
The paintings are numbers 2285 and 2290 from his Stepping Stones Perhaps series of March 2016 (images courtesy of the artist):
Each painting in the series is about 14 feet long and 8 feet high, with some variation.
Where are all the books, you ask? Where are the cabinets and shelves? The books and files have been moved to non-browsable areas of Special Collections, mostly the “cage” across from the curator’s office. The college donated the cabinets and shelves to Queen Palmer Elementary School, where the students have become quite fond of them already as stand-up desks. We hope the Woman’s Educational Society will be pleased that the furniture they donated in 1977 is having a second life in a new kind of educational setting.
Starting this summer, the Sandy Kinnee Room (so dubbed by curator Jessy Randall) will be open for general study whenever the library is open. Special Collections researchers will work in the curator’s office, which now seats eight. We will use the Kinnee Room when we have more than eight researchers at a time and whenever we perform class instructions (about once a week during the school year).
Addendum, July 18, 2016: the Pokemon Go craze has come to Colorado College, and the creatures are everywhere. A visitor snapped this photo of a Diglett in in front of Kinnee’s work:
Anne Haines