Library Stuff

From the folks who brought you The Breast Cancer Site and The Rainforest Site, comes The Literacy Site. They recently reached a holiday goal of 100,000 books to be donated. It costs you nothing but a few seconds of time, and looking at some very small banner ads. Go! Click! While you're there, click to give a woman a free mammogram or buy back a bit of rainforest. It's like one-stop shopping for feeling virtuous...

Great library Foxtrot comic from yesterday. Are they encouraging the stereotype? Yes. Do I care? No. It's funny!

Thanks, Amy, for pointing me to this site, Folktexts.

Thanks to Akeisha (as usual!) for finding this snarky t-shirt.

"I'm not your damn search engine." I like the Googlesque font...

On one list in which I participate we were having a rather facetious discussion about what our motto or slogan would be at our respective libraries. "Abandon all hope, ye who enter here" was one suggestion

So what should show up on another list, LibRef-L, but the following, sent by someone at Dallas Baptist University:

Someone in circulation found the following statement for the Reference Desk, and I thought it was hilarious:

I fully realize that I have not succeeded in answering all of your questions... indeed, I feel that I have not answered any of them completely. The answers I have found only serve to raise a whole new set of questions, which only lead to more problems--some of which we weren't aware were problems. To sum it all up...in some ways I feel we are as confused as ever, but I believe we are confused on a higher level and about more important things.

By now, you've probably heard about Shelley Jackson's Skin Project. She plans to 'write' her story "Skin" by tattooing one word at a time on 2095 people. It was written up in a NY Times article yesterday:

What kind of person signs up for an experiment in epidermal literature? Curiosity seekers and members of ''body modification'' communities have been early adopters. But many enlistees have been surprisingly mainstream. Mothers and daughters are requesting consecutive words. So are couples, perhaps hoping to form the syntactic equivalent of a civil union. For others, the motives are social: Jackson is encouraging her far-flung words to get to know each other via e-mail, telephone, even in person. (Imagine the possibilities. A sentence getting together for dinner. A paragraph having a party.) In addition, Jackson has heard from several dyslexics, who have struggled with mastery of writing and reading. And librarians are signing up in droves. ''A lot of librarians are probably a lot hipper than we think,'' Jackson says.

Some folks on my undergrad alumni listserv were a bit surprised at this. As I told them, "Sensible shoes cover a multitude of sins!"

Today's Unshelved comic is a classic Dewey moment. If you haven't been following the storyline, our hero Dewey has been maneuvered into doing a 'bilingual' storytime, despite his inability to speak any other language but English...well, any other human language!

It seems my library neighbors in the next county have been busy!

The Library Directors of Dallas County (Iowa) 2005 Calendar has arrived. "We went to see the movie, 'Calendar Girls' in which some women posed nude to raise money for a woman whose husband had died," [Adel library director Paula James] said.

James said that, although the movie was hilarious, she knew her fellow librarians wouldn't go for the nude route.

But that didn't mean the end of the story. James, determined to give the public a vision of librarians without their trademark glasses hanging off their noses or their "stuffy looks," kept on keeping on.

The first run of calendars were selling like hot cakes, James said, and very few remained of the original 300. She said people can call the library (515-993-3512) if they have questions about the calendar or its availability. The proceeds from the calendar sales will be divided amongst each community's library.

"I didn't know they would sell this well," James said. "I always figured we could sell them to family members if it didn't work."

You go, ladies!
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