The Stranger is a local indie paper in Seattle that has never been particularly fond of Seattle’s new library. I found their latest article “Killer Library” subtitled “The New Central Library Offers Civic Validation, a Huge Collection of Material, and a Staggering Number of Startling New Ways to Die” totally hilarious. It’s a mix of genuine design flaws (up escalator only? really?) with just quirky architectural decision (of course people call that little platform over the huge atrium area Lover’s Leap, have you lived through a Seattle winter?). I like how their platonic library patron is exactly my age. update: amusingly, everything old is new again and this article is from a while ago. I still enjoy it. [thanks megan]
Category: libraries
MLK library in DC when it was new
I’ve shown you my sad set of MLK’s Library photos from when I went to DC. My friend Mary Early has found an older, niftier looking set of photos of the same library back when it was new and lovely and full of hope and promise. I wish the Save DC Libraries site looked like it was still alive. The DC Friends site is still kicking, albeit with bad news and the DC Public Library Foundation looks like they spent all their money on web design. Meanwhile DC Public hires teens to shelve books and answer phones which seems like a real good news/bad news situation in a library dealing with massive underfunding and understaffing.
1,000,000 pennies, the five year fundraiser
I’ve been looking at Michigan library websites in anticipation of my talk at the Michigan Library Association conference that I’ll be speaking at this Thursday. I try to have local examples of various 2.0 endeavors and Michigan is hard because people always say “AADL, duh!” but there’s so mch more going on. My favorite little project has been the Spies Public Library’s 1,000,000 pennies fundraiser in honor of the library’s 100th anniversary. The library is in the UP, practically in Wisconsin, in Menominee. My favorite part of the whole thing, besides it just being a novel idea to raise money, is the chart at the bottom of the page. Watching the dollar amounts go up 5000 pennies at a time really gives you a sense of a community activity. I’ll be talking about their “low tech 2.0” approach on Thursday. If anyone’s at MLA, please stop by and say hello.
some library halloweens
Just a few links that I spotted from libraries doing Halloweeny stuff.
- Ann Arbor District Library pumpkins
- Alien Bowling at the library Halloween party
- Not quite the library, but Statistics Canada does an annual creepy stats roundup about this time. Here’s Halloween b the numbers, found at the canuck librarian.
- Come to the library… if you DARE, a photo set from the Manatee County Public Library in Florida
- University of Iowa Libraries put up a Halloween Digital Collection of the spookiest bits from their stacks
- a blog post discussing Roald Dahl’s Revolting Recipes. I mention this specifically because their blog gets to do what many library blogs can’t do and that is link directly to the item in the library’s catalog. Yay GA PINES!
I had fun noodling around making this list. One of the benefits of having been around the blog block a few times is that I can remember looking at libraries doing Halloween stuff, at least a little, back in 2000. There were almost no libraries with blogs, Flickr didn’t exist yet, and the whole idea of the read/write web was sort of a hazy shimmer on the horizon. While you’ll notice in that old post that Karen Schneider was already writing about our profession with her way with words (in the NY Times!) and Marylaine Block — who has a great recent column on party people in libraries creating community — was advising people to give books instead of candy for Halloween, it was still a small-seeming web. So, without turning this into another “blah blah library 2.0” cheer, let me just say that I think it’s gratifying to see this explosion on not just user-generated content, but library-generated content. I hope the next seven years are just as fruitful and fascinating.
status of libraries, museum and archives in affected fire areas of California
The California State Archivist reports on the status of archives, museums in affected fire areas in California via the California State Library Blog. [thanks anarchivist]