Blog Archives

Yo, yo, yo! The video for the new Bubba Sparxxx song "Ms. New Booty" includes footage of an "actual librarian" getting a new booty instantaneously on an infomercial. There's also a stamping-and-shushing scene, followed by some shakin' in the stacks. The rapper (someone other than Mr. Sparxxx in that part) takes care to whisper while in the library.

If you're looking to get "The Blogga Song" out of your brain, this might do the trick.

"Mother Blogga" Rochelle recently wrote about unfortunate acronyms @ your library. And Aaron took a pic of a nastily worded sign in one Chicago-area library.

And now another library in a Chicago suburb has a grant-funded books-by-mail program that's modeled on NetFlix. Farinaceous idea. But look at what they call the service.

Now, we suck at marketing as bad as any librarian, but we'd at least know enough not to use a name that's so easy to make oral-sex jokes about. We're very tempted to re-make their logo. But, again, that would be too easy.

For an example of library marketing that doesn't suck, Rochelle has a genuinely farinaceous little idea for some farinaceous library signage.

Lots of folks have mentioned The Blogga Song in their blogs or in comments on other bloggers' blogs. Thanks for spreading the contamination word.

Our favorite comment so far is this mention on a Dutch blog, which Babel Fish translates as:

Unfortunately, the jogging librarian not yet come in this very farinaceous song beyond! Possibly in the next version?

Function: adjective
1. having a mealy texture or surface
2. containing or rich in starch

Check out this great photo of a library sign, posted by Fiddling Librarian. Only 50 cents?

Inspired by The Llama Song (or at least by the need to drive it out of our head), we've created an extremely stupid Flash video about the biblioblogosphere: The Blogga Song. Sung by Lloyd, the Llibrary Llama. "Here's a blogga, there's a blogga ..."

In case anyone asks at the ref desk ...

What lunatic invented skeleton? (We thought it was someone who thought going feet-first, face-up on a luge wasn't quite insane enough, but that's apparently not the case.)

Curling ... what the fuck?

Where can I find a video of Apolo Anton Ohno breakdancing?

Are the people on the U.S. Olympic Committee complete dicks, or what? (Aww, no pics in Google's cache.)

... why Chicago is the center of the librarian webiverse:

Michael Stephens will be starting a full-time gig at Dominican in August. Since it's a Catholic institution, we're thinking that Michael's resemblance to Jesus is a check on the plus side.

If anyone walks up to the ref desk, looking for anatomical drawings of cartoon characters' skeletons, now you know where to find them. (We'd've thought that shmoos were invertebrates, though.) No one's asked us for this yet, but it's always good to be prepared.

Oh, and here's a pen that's supposed to have Abraham Lincoln's DNA in it. We actually were asked to find a picture of it once. By a mom doing her kid's homework, of course.

Number 23. Jordan. Sandberg. And now us. Let's get on with the show ...

Creative Librarian experiences the value of being a middle man -- helping to get things done by understanding the needs of different participants, and knowing something they don't. This is a role that librarians are (or at least ought to be) pretty good at.

Liz B at Pop Goes the Library interviews Jeff Chow, developer of virtual middle man Library Elf, asking if he'll take the J. Lo approach and call it L. Elf.

rhl space ponders whether Playaway digital audiobooks (each title on its own inexpensive player) would make a good addition to library collections. This has potential as an idea other librarians can steal, one of our suggested topics.

The Distant Librarian does a nice wrap-up of a federated search symposium, with some practical points from Roy Tennant and a good, stealicious idea from a vendor at the end.

Good advice from A Librarian's Guide to Etiquette: Use water words to let people know how busy you are. That is such a totally great idea for librarians to steal!

Across quite a bit of water, way over in the Phillipines, aczafra.com was blogging about Steven at Library Stuff blogging about Jenny at ALA TechSource blogging about Casey Bisson blogging (and presenting) about a mash-up he's doing with an OPAC, blog, comments, tags, Amazon.com stuff, and other content. Our suggested topic of what would really happen if patrons could add tags to OPACs is left unaddressed, since Bisson proposes in an example that a reference librarian would add tags.

A follow-uppish post at Maison Bisson leads off with a link to an ebyblog commentary on patron privacy which observes: "If your library offers book clubs that have people read the same book then there is another privacy issue. If I know how long someone has been in the club and what books the club has read then I can probably tell what that person has been reading, even without the library keeping a patron history."

Amanda at blogwithoutalibrary.net ran across a company you can pay to print a wordcloud from your site on a t-shirt. Which reminds us that we still haven't seen anyone else talk about inverse tagclouds. Our genius goes unrecognized.

Perhaps we just need to read Diffusion of Innovations. Christina's LIS Rant has a rant that's much more of a rave about how the parts of that book she's read so far have flipped on a light switch about those amazing ideas that just don't catch on, and what factors affect the adoption of innovation.

A couple of the Out of the Jungle folks have done a nice series of posts about career development for (law) librarians, starting with Where do baby librarians come from? and continuing with Just where do baby librarians come from? (illustrated!) and More about librarian development - seriously.

:31 Librarian has the ol' searching vs. finding epiphany, and writes about it well.

Scott at BiblioTech Web directs our attention (though we're a little distracted by a CSS boo-boo; scroll down past the white space if it's not fixed yet) to the elements of online collaboration in a hilarious techucational cartoon. Watch it, but not while consuming a beverage.

Linda at The Lipstick Librarian (who inspired us to start this site 7 years ago this month) confesses to not being as starry-eyed about being a librarian as she used to be.

No stars in library worker Kristina's eyes. She now knows that it's completely unacceptable to use her creativity, initiative, and own off-work time to start a well-received (except by TPTB) blog for her library's teen group.

Boobies or innocently naked boys in videos are what's completely unacceptable to patrons of the library where Popular Librarian works. Violence is, of course, no problemo.

If you're on two blogs, you can get into our Carnival twice! Moonlighting over at PLA Blog, Steven this time points to a news snippet about a public library auctioning its naming rights on eBay. Bidding starts at $325k; local pickup only, no shipping. Steven's round-up of local library news also mentions that Laura Bush announced the 2005 National Awards for Museum and Library Service last week.

Speaking of the First Lady, and leaving the warm incest of Biblioblogworld, Chicago radio legend Steve Dahl wonders on his blog whether Laura partied with her husband during his substance-abuse days. "That would be hot as Hell, but that's just what I think. She must have, right? There's nothing like a librarian who likes to get naked, or necked, as they say in TX."

Returning briefly to Terra Blogga Biblioteca, Steve Lawson at See Also ... discovered from other sources -- namely, MySpace and Facebook -- that Librarians are Hot. He also found words of wisdom imprinted on the cover of the 1931 edition of Ranganathan's 5 Laws: "To be literate is to possess the cow of plenty."

Back outside the Libraryblogiverse again, BoingBoing has the lyrics to "Blogue", a parody (actually, a burlesque, if we correctly remember the discussion of those art forms in the "Pretty Woman" federal court case years ago) of Madonna's "Vogue". It took this long for someone to think of this?

That's it. Show's over, folks. Move along safely to the great egress. Carnival #24 will be hosted by Grumpator. (Submission instructions are here.) Now, if you'll excuse us, we have to go find a middle man to make sure someone cleans up after the carnival animals and the cow of plenty.

We recently posted another card to the Librarian Trading Cards pool on Flickr. This new one is based on the design of the 1968 Topps baseball cards. That's a 16-inch softball we're holding, cuz we've got big balls 'round these parts. (Though a fresh-outta-the-box Clincher is anything but soft.)

We've noticed that almost no one else has posted cards not made with the trading-card-maker toy. (In addition to the baseball card, we've made from scratch a Dewey card and a rock 'n' roll fancard.) That's sad, although some of the photos people used on their toy-made cards are creative and/or interesting; we particularly like David King's. We did use the toy to make the first card we posted, but we were at least trying to drive things off on a tangent, expecting a flurry of furry-critter cards. Didn't happen, though Michael and a few other folks hopped on that ride.

So, let's see a bit more originality in the pool. You won't drown.