…more than just books!

Image text by Andy Woodworth, NJ Librarian (http://agnosticmaybe.wordpress.com/)

Facts. @yourlibrary

(Jessamyn West —–> ALA Think Tank)

Resolved: Libraries are Obsolete [Harvard University]

Discuss.

card catalog concierto

Yale University Card Catalog from Ellen Su on Vimeo. Made to bring attention to the vast collection of old catalog cards stored in Sterling Memorial Library. <3

this modern romance

dating: meaning window shopping (?); cake and ice cream (yes please); meaning soda date (letters and sodas?!); meaning maybe romance, but one nite stands only. looks like the library made the cut, too, for a suitable date local. i approve. sign posted at the corner of franklin avenue and fulton street, brooklyn.

“Librarians are the secret masters of the universe. They control information. Never piss one off.”

Casanova was a librarian (really) and other library-related fun facts here (CNN article). Happy National Library Week friends!

Over-night Scavenger Hunt at the New York Public Library

Find the Future: The Game will kick off on May 20, 2011 as part of NYPL’s Centennial Festival weekend, with a “Write All Night” event inside the landmark building at Fifth Avenue and 42nd Street. Register here!

Yale Law Library Offers Dog for Check-out

Yale Law School has launched  a pilot program in which students can “borrow”  Monty, a therapy dog. Brilliant! Monty will be available at the circulation desk to stressed-out students for 30 minutes at a time, for a three-day trial run.

“We hope that making a therapy dog available to our students will prove to be a positive addition to current services offered by the library,” said librarian Blair Kauffman. “It is well documented that visits from therapy dogs have resulted in increased happiness, calmness, and overall emotional well-being.”

Other universities have offered similar services, including the Counseling Center at the University of Wisconsin Oshkosh. Sherman  is the Center’s new therapy dog.

Issues of Copyright in the Global South

The "delinquent" posters of Ulrike Brueckner

We are told that we live in the ‘digital revolution’ era and that we can communicate across the globe as we never could before, yet restrictive copyright laws still act as a serious barrier to sharing and learning from each other. Copyright and intellectual property protection impinges, in different ways, on the practices of librarians as individual professionals, on libraries as institutions of various kinds (public, commercial, and academic), on the professional organizations of library workers, and to some extent on ‘librarianship’ as an idealised amalgamation of all of the above.

The CopySouth Research Group (CSRG) has sought to research the inner workings of the global copyright system and its largely negative effects on the global South. The recently published papers presented at the 2010 ”3rd CopySouth Workshop: International Conference on Copyright Issues” take up copyright from a political economy perspective and can now be accessed here. Also see the CopySouth Dossier which explores issues including copyright and cultural domination by the North, traditional/indigenous knowledge and copyright, and calculating copyright-related capital flows from the global periphery to the centre.

Library Sleevefacing!

According to Sleeveface.com, a sleeveface is “one or more persons obscuring or augmenting any part of their bodies with record sleeve(s) causing an illusion.”

Armed with vinyl and inspiration, Bowling Green State University’s Music Library and Sound Recordings Archives started sleevefacing to promote the library and bring awareness to its collection… and is now challenging others to do the same. Anyone can enter! Keep in mind that there is a “Library Use Only” rule – all sleevefaces must be photographed in a library of some kind. Fun!!!