Best song ever

A Librarian's Guide to Etiquette

This blog provided a necessary chuckle to my sleep-deprived state. While it is directly mainly at librarians, I do think that many of these can apply to non-library workplaces. If it doesn't, then it will provide a window into the perverse and twisted world of librarians. As much as I hate to say it, I'm actually kind of surprised that it is written by two men. One, because it seems like many of the sentiments come from women, and two, because there are so few men in the profession. Enjoy!

Yes, Virginia, censorship does still exist

While on the one hand I love to hear librarians in the news. It thrilled me to hear an interview with a librarian on NPR this morning until I realized why they were talking to a librarian. Recently, a large medical database decided that "abortion" would be a stop word. Essentially, this means that it stops the search from working. If you were to try and search for abortion in this database, you would retrieve nothing back. You might ask, "how can that be? Aren't there are a lot of scholarly, research articles about abortion?" The answer is yes, which is a big problem. In my mind, this is a perfect example of politics determining access to information, which should not be. If we allow these practices to continue, it could be as bad as the futuristic society found in Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451. Luckily, the change to the database has been reversed, and the ever-previous access to information has been restored. But if it happened once, do we have to worry about it happening again? It could. Optimistically, I'd like to believe that it might not happen after a change in our administration, but that's just too Polly Anna-ish for me.

Read more from Salon.com

Empty libraries make Dewey cry

I'm not sure if I like the purpose or design of this t-shirt better. Most times, the only people who think like this are librarians, but this time Glarkware outdid itself. Known more for their irreverent and non-sensical designs, Glarkware is dontating the whole sticker price of the shirt to this year’s book drive charities the Rockhouse Foundation and Children’s Institute. If you'd rather not have the t-shirt, you can dontate directly at Dewey Donation System. Go on... do a good deed for libraries.

"A Librarian's Worst Nightmare"

I like what this article says about Wikipedia, as I am a big fan of the community effort to increase the reliability of the site. I haven't used Yahoo! Answers much, but I have found similar problems that the author mentions. I'll stick with Wikipedia, thank you very much.

Literary death metal?

This should be part of ALA's "@ Your Library" campaign: Bloodhag: The Faster You Go Deaf, The More Time You Have to Read

if you liked march of the penguins...

You'll love March of the Librarians.

This is a video from the conference in Seattle last January, but it felt the same way when I checked in this morning.