Can a book save your life? Well, not really. And with a Kindle you’ll die quickly. This isn’t really a library shenanigan, just a book shenanigan. I wonder if older books, with leather covers, might have offered more resistance? Thanks, Sarah J. Sloat!
This video from SaveOhioLibraries.com (with the help of the Capital Area Humane Society) points out how public libraries help people find work. I like when the kitten prints out her resume. If you want more, see the hat outtakes! Thanks, Dina Wood!
I’m not sure what library this is, anybody know? Thanks, Dina Wood!
Several institutions of higher learning offer (or suffer) library dance parties during exam week. Oberlin College’s five-minute dance breaks recently got some NPR coverage; this video shows a sampling (sans music) at about 1:07 and forward. The University of Montana, Allegheny College, the University of North Carolina-Wilmington, the College of Charleston, the University of Virginia, the University of Miami, and many others also host (deliberately or not) dance parties small and large. Thanks, Carol Dickerson, Ray English, and others!
Students at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln perform a choreographed dance to My Chemical Romance’s “Teenagers” during the university’s “dead week” in December 2010. The youtube description calls it a flash mob, but to my mind a flash mob would be bigger and perhaps less choreographed; this seems more like a show. Excellent shenanigan, whatever they may call it. Thanks, Gwen Gregory!
In 2006, the University of Aalborg library in Denmark had an excellent Christmas tree made of (green) volumes of the National Union Catalog. Later, libraries at Loyola Marymount University and the University of San Francisco had similar trees. Thanks, Erin McKean!
The parking garage for the Kansas City Public Library looks like a shelf of books! Awesome. Why can’t all parking garages be works of art? (Now I’m thinking of a parking garage in my hometown, Rochester NY, which looked a lot like the Guggenheim.) The people of Kansas City even had some say in which titles would be included. Thanks, BoingBoing!
In Audrey Niffenegger’s The Night Bookmobile (Abrams ComicArts, 2010), each night bookmobile is full of all the books its visitor has ever read — no more, no less. Imagine!
It’s a beautifully-drawn graphic novel mostly about books, love, loneliness, death, and identity, but it’s also about librarianship, I suppose. You can read it in one sitting, but I bet you’ll think about it for much, much longer, whether you’re a librarian or not.
Thanks, Marianne Aldrich.
On Saturday, November 13, 2010, more than 1800 libraries in the U.S. and elsewhere will celebrate National Gaming Day by providing board games, video games, and other kinds of games for their patrons to play.
This is one of those shenanigans that kinda loses its punch by being library-sanctioned. But, game on, gamers, and those to whom the games are new. Thanks, BoingBoing!
photo by Scott Johnson
Colorado College student Max Robillard, of CC’s Integrative Design Club, created a small jungle at CC’s Tutt Library using plants found throughout the building. He says:
“I saw it as a simple, easy public space intervention. I just wanted to give people in the library something new, and to offer them a pseudo-shelter, or retreat, from the public space that the library is. My friends and I put it together on Sunday afternoon, and we took it down Monday night.”
Thanks, Carol Dickerson!