THIS MEME IS NOW DIAMONDS!

A few items to follow up on yesterday’s post:

• First, I must share this video because it deserves to be shared again and again until the heat death of the universe:
  
  Bravo, Harold B. Lee Library. Bravo.
• Thanks to this video response, we can now all have Isaiah Mustafa provide our voice mail message.
• Check out The Root‘s Cord Jefferson speaking to this subject in a more serious way: “Why the Old Spice Guy is Good for Black America”. Definitely worth reading.
• And finally, the man himself shows us the power of intimately knowing your audience:
  

And, in closing, LIBRARIAN AB POINT.

It’s about time this happened to someone other than librarians

Thanks to the imagination of David Malki ! and the diligent effort of one Liam Cooke, the internet has now obviated the genre author.

A doubly-interesting day

…at least, for those of us who deal with the world of work. 

Today is both Workers Memorial Day, which honors those who have been injured or killed due to their jobs, and Equal Pay Day, which marks the symbolic date on which the average woman’s earnings catch up to the amount a man earned in the previous year.

 

The links above will take you to posts I made on the subjects over at the Catherwood blog. For more info on Workers Memorial Day, visit the AFL-CIO site; to learn more about Equal Pay Day, visit the site from the National Committee on Pay Equity.

GOOD Magazine’s Wanderlust

Another keen site, this one via Boing Boing: Good Magazine has put together a truly keen interactive map outlining nearly two dozen of history’s most notable journeys, documenting the trips of folks ranging from Kerouac to Columbus to Phineas Fogg (who shouldn’t be excluded just because he’s fictional, says I).

Check it out: Wanderlust. The URL does not lie — it really is awesome.

(Oh, and if funky maps are your thing, be sure to add Strange Maps to your RSS reader of choice. It will not disappoint.)

Of giant crustaceans and cool sites

So, this week, I discovered the existence of the coconut crab (Birgus latro). I am unconvinced that such creatures should exist in a sane world. Some may call such doubts harsh, or cruel, or tied up in my general dislike of bugs. However, as a rational being, I am willing to offer evidence that my uncertainty is merited.

My research of this question led me to discover a page dedicated to these lumbering beasts of nightmare at a site called ARKive, a repository of images and video documenting the vast array of life that inhabits our planet. From their FAQ:

What is ARKive?

ARKive is the Noah’s Ark for the Internet era – a unique global initiative, gathering films, photographs and audio recordings of the world’s species together into one centralised digital library.

ARKive is leading the ‘virtual’ conservation effort – finding, sorting, cataloguing and copying the key audio-visual records of the world’s animals, plants and fungi, and building them into comprehensive multi-media digital profiles.

Using films, photographs and audio recordings, ARKive is creating a unique record of the world’s biodiversity – complementing other species information datasets and making a key resource available for scientists, conservationists, educators and the general public.

It’s an amazing resource, and one I’m glad to have found… even if the path I took there was strewn with sinister crustaceans the size of terriers.

Wordle

By way of Bruce Baugh’s livejournal, I discovered Worldle: a fun little application that lets you turn texts into (visual) art. I was unable to resist the temptation to so transmogrify my massive planning, marketing, and assessment project from this past Spring:

Also, thanks to all the folks who suggested resources on Drupal! It is greatly appreciated.

Like a debutante ball with less chiffon

Professor Scott Nicholson, director of the Syracuse University iSchool’s LIS program, has put together a single RSS feed that provides posts from several professional blogs maintained by folks associated with the school.

The Nascent Librarian is one of those blogs. The publicity has doubled the number of total comments here in less than an hour. Sure, said number has gone from “one” to “two,” but surely that’s cause enough for giddiness and nervousness, right?

So, if you’re coming here by way of the aforementioned feed, welcome! And if you’ve actually been following this blog all along, go subscribe to that feed. Lotta cool people there posting cool things.

A trio of fun links…

…makes for a relatively easy post.

First on the agenda: I’ve used the Powerhouse Museum in Sydney as an example in class discussions more times than I can count over the past year. Its online collection database uses both professionally-created categories and a folksonomy in a way that I think bears examination and imitation. Now, according to Lorcan Dempsey, the Powerhouse is working with Flickr in a big way. This just gets better and better.

Second up: Wikipedia is working its way into academia, not as a reference, but as a project in and of itself.

Finally, Jenica Rogers-Urbanek detailed the work she and her colleagues did to provide stress-busters for finals-ravaged students. I forwarded this to some of my colleagues, and we may decide to give this a go. It’s simply a great idea.