I hardly ever post about the day-to-day details of my work life, but I’ll make an exception to say: One of the underappreciated perks of working at Swarthmore is that you can be going about your regular business on an otherwise unremarkable Valentine’s day when suddenly, a student dressed as a ninja rushes into the […]
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Amanda
I ran across Lori Nix’s website the other day, and am fascinated. Nix is a photographer who creates miniature models and then photographs them. Her most recent work (as seen on BoingBoing) is The City, a series of tableaux of grand but abandoned buildings — museums, libraries, an aquarium, a theater, a clock tower — […]
I’ve just had a paper proposal accepted at the Questioning Authority 2008 conference, upcoming in March at the University of Michigan. The conference is organized around the theme of the authority of digital information; I’m going to be talking about authority control and LibraryThing. Very exciting. Now I have to get cracking on actually writing […]
In the vain hope that sharing a time-sink with the interwebs will somehow stop me wasting my own time, I present to you my most recently-discovered procrastination enablers: Flight of the Hamsters. I think I’m probably the last person in the blogosphere to link to this game, but it’s bizarrely addictive. The fact that the […]
In the ongoing series of Things I Learned in Library School, here are the latest, all courtesy of the course on Curatorship of Special Collections I’m taking this term*: Conservators use the term "inherent vice" for those physical characteristics of books that cause them to self-destruct. The standard example is the acid in wood-pulp paper […]
I’ve been thinking, in a work-related context, about close reading, and how librarians might help students learn to do it. The standard "bibliographic instruction" model — class meets in library, librarian shows students how to find what they need — tends to be geared toward paper research. Close reading is a skill that isn’t usually […]
Not long ago I came up with a career-inclinations quiz question, a way of identifying what one wants to do. Imagine that you and a bunch of other people, from various walks of life, are stranded on an island* — or, if you prefer, sent off to start a colony on an uninhabited planet.** Assume […]
Thanks to Ravelry, I can now stick potential knitting projects into a virtual queue to remind myself of what I want to knit next. In my queue at present, for whenever I finish the sweater I’m working on (or whenever I need a break from it): Lace-up opera gloves, to which I was drawn both […]
I’m back from my weekend in New York, where my friend R. and I took in BAM’s production of Happy Days and a performance by the British troupe 1927. I thoroughly enjoyed both; I was predisposed to like 1927’s show, Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea, after I read a blurb that described […]
Several things: I stumbled across the work of David Bordwell, a film scholar who’s coined the term "network narrative" to describe the kind of multi-plotline ensemble drama where characters don’t all know each other but their paths nonetheless intersect, often by chance. Magnolia is a good example of this genre, which I hadn’t known there […]