moral support during finals

Here at Tutt Library, Colorado College, we’re giving students back some of their leftover energy from the first part of the school year, when they arrived full of enthusiasm and excitement for their studies. Thanks, Jonathan Caws-Elwitt, for the idea!

Other libraries provide similar moral support during finals:

Kellie Meehlhause uploaded this photo to the ALA Think Tank Facebook page, and others followed up.

Acme Upstairs Library School

Do you suck at real science? Try library science! From Lisa Genius of the Acme Upstairs Library School. Thanks, Shanon, Lawson!

fake survey is funny

We Asked 22 Librarians About the Most Italian Guy They Ever Had To Find A Book For

This made me laugh so hard. Thanks, Steve Lawson!

birds preserve documents

Birds living in a cathedral in Zvenigorod, Russia accidentally preserved documents from the 1830s! ” ‘Swifts and jackdaws, which collected the documents to build nests, run their archives differently than people do,’ wrote Sedov [Dmitriy Sedov, research director of the Zvenigorod Historical and Architectural Museum] in a statement on the museum’s website. Instead of gathering up the most historically important documents and shelving them according to subject and chronology, the birds took whatever they could find. The result is an ‘incredibly diverse collection of fragments of human thoughts, feelings, experiences, concerns, passions and desires,’ he wrote, forming ‘a single giant discordant chorus’ of Zvenigorod life from 1830 through the early 1900s.”

It’s not often I get to use the category “perpetrated by animals,” so, thanks, Steve Lawson!

book menorah

Hanukkah began this past Sunday, and here at Colorado College we are celebrating with a menorah made out of bound volumes. (I’ve previously posted about Christmas trees made in similar ways.)

library slide

The library of Hoseo University in South Korea has installed a two-floor metal tube slide! Thanks, Diane Westerfield. See this post for more library slides.

15 people expected, 600 show up

Sometimes a library shenanigan is not exactly a shenanigan, but something subversive and wonderful. Not exactly against the rules, but against some people’s rules, and risky in some way.

On December 2 of this year, the Mount Horeb Public Library in Wisconsin hosted a reading of I Am Jazz, a picture book about a transgender child. The reading, originally scheduled to take place at a nearby elementary school where a student had recently transitioned from a boy to a girl, had been canceled after “Liberty Counsel,” a conservative Florida-based group, threatened legal action.

See the full story here.

Thanks, Lynne M. Thomas!

book fountain in Budapest

Isn’t this wonderful? More information here. I love the comment at Gizmodo saying “They should also make a magazine version that randomly fires jets of water in all directions, like those subscription cards that constantly fall out.” Thanks, Esau Katz!

sexy librarian candle and more

This candle is not a joke! It is real! You can buy it for $18 here. Frostbeard Studio also sells “old books” scented candles. I don’t know how either kind actually smells. If you know, tell us in the comments. Also available: sprays etc. and another candle. Thanks, Diane Westerfield!

room-naming shenanigan

Colorado College’s Tutt Library will begin a major renovation in the summer of 2016, and the college will of course provide naming rights to high-level donors. For now, though, we notice that several spaces in the current building have acquired home-made honorifics. Suddenly this week we have rooms, nooks, corners, and even door knobs named for librarians both real and fictional: S. R. Ranganathan, Louise Kampf, Manly Ormes, Carol Dickerson, Melvil Dewey, Rupert Giles, and Starr Lackawanna.

No one has taken credit for this shenanigan. Perhaps several people are responsible? We look forward to seeing who else might be judged worthy of a naming opportunity. We expect that not all the names will belong to librarians. Perhaps I’ll name my office after Doctor Who companion Ramanadvoratrelundar, or Project Runway mentor Tim Gunn!

Addenda, November 18: B.R. Coad and E.J. Josey.