I’m back from ACRL, which was great all around, though next time I’ll stay for three nights instead of two. (And the next one will be in my native Baltimore, so I’ll be able to stay with family.) My compatriots from the fellowship program and I kept drawing up comparisons with the MLA conference: more […]
On Friday morning I’m heading off at a truly ungodly hour to the ACRL conference in Minneapolis, there to attend as many papers, panels, and posters as I can cram into my schedule, participate in a roundtable with my fellow Fellows, maybe take in some theater if there’s time, hopefully meet a few people I […]
I’ve never been much of a one for playing April Fool’s Day pranks myself, but I’m glad to see that the good people at Library Journal have been observing the day in an appropriately leg-pulling spirit. Since the special LJ April Fool’s Edition will probably disappear tomorrow, here are a couple of screen captures for […]
Check out this exhibit of hand bookbindings through the ages from Princeton University Library. Among the highlights: disappearing fore-edge decoration (scroll to the bottom of this page for an explanation of how it’s done); books meant to be attached to your belt; a sixteenth-century book satchel from Ethiopia; lovely embroidery; and recycled manuscripts used as […]
If you haven’t yet visited the New York Public Library Digital Gallery, you must. Among many other things, it offers the joy of serendipitous image-discovery. I browsed around the collections for a while and then tried a keyword search for "snow." I used the selection tool to grab everything that looked particularly interesting, and ended […]
…which, by now, has made the rounds of the library blogs, as well as some of the scholarly ones, so I feel redundant commenting on it, as well as still rather amateurish compared to lots of the other people who’ve done so already. However, I will say that it’s not every morning that you start […]
[This is something of a test post, because there was a bit of Typepad weirdness last night. Anyone else try to post and then get prevented from editing?] Do you use Wikipedia? Did you know you can look at Wikipedia content organized by Library of Congress classification? Complete with subclasses. I think that’s kinda nifty, […]
Via LISNews, a news item on a project of the kind I would love to be involved with someday: Mellon grant to fund project to develop data-mining software for libraries In his winning project, titled "Web-based Text-Mining and Visualization for Humanities Digital Libraries," Unsworth [John Unsworth, Dean of the School of Library and Information Science […]
Look, it’s a reference desk sestina! From TangognaT, who’s also written reference haiku. Marvelous. I am inspired. Henceforth my diary-esque posts will take the form of short autobiographical free verse poems in the manner of Frank O’Hara. (My lunch hour walks have been accompanied by lots of "I do this, I do that" inner monologue […]
Today I helped someone track down information about a University of Virginia alumnus who came here in the 1850s and who was known by his middle name, which, of course, wasn’t listed in full in the University catalogues. But after much searching I found him nonetheless. By the time I was done answering that question, […]