Posts filed under ‘archives’
April Fools Day is a good day for shenanigans
We here at Library Shenanigans always appreciate a good April Fools Day blog post, even when it’s perpetrated by … ourselves.
library prank at Gallaudet University
The Gallaudet University Library Deaf Collections & Archives shared these photos on Facebook November 29, 2018, saying: “Throwback Thursday: The Library Prank. On a January morning in 1940, students and faculty discovered that pranksters had entered the library in College Hall (now the President’s Office) during the night and turned all the books around so their spines faced the wall. The stunt must have required multiple people, since there were too many books for one person to do alone. However, despite rumors over the years, no one ever came forward and admitted they were the ones behind this prank — and since it was almost 80 years ago, the original pranksters have probably taken the secret with them. The first photo shows the library as it was initially discovered, with all the books reversed and several students and faculty milling around. The second and third photos show students who were enlisted to clean up the mess and put the books back in proper order.”
so many shenanigans
I went on a road trip with my family and a whole bunch of library shenanigans (and one museum shenanigan) piled up.
The Hermitage Museum keeps 74 cats on site to protect its treasures from rodents!
Gloria Gaynor disco party at the Library of Congress in May, yes, this is for real. You know you wish you could go.
“Quirky photo project” by Elise Schimke at the University of Wisconsin – Madison.
The Folger Shakespeare Library apparently gets pretty cold, but researchers can borrow hand-knit shawls while on site. Thanks, Lynne M. Thomas!
And speaking of library-themed clothing, library book leggings are available from Kickin Leggings (this ad showed up in my Facebook feed, so Facebook isn’t totally useless I guess).
little goofs
Sometimes the littlest library shenanigans are the best library shenanigans, like when your coworker makes you laugh by goofing around with the foam book supports,
or when your friend Nick Humez sends you a cartoon about the Dewey Decimal System.
librarian bad-assery
I ordered Joshua Hammer’s book for my library when I first read a review of it, months ago. Today a friend suggested the story of these “bad-ass” librarians as a shenanigan, and I have to agree. Smuggling controversial manuscripts to safety is the kind of dangerous and non-goofy shenanigan librarians were kinda born to do.
Thanks, Daniel M. Shapiro!
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!
kitty cat pulls prank on monks
Sometime in the year 1445 (probably), a cat stepped in black ink and made paw prints in this Croatian manuscript. I wonder what the scribe (likely a monk) said when he (likely a he) found these marks. My guess is that it involved a few swear words. Thanks, Ross Gresham!
rare books dress
ModCloth is selling their “Archive Got the Power” dress for $99.99 in sizes from XS to 4X. Oddly, no one has reviewed it yet, which seems strange for a dress with books all over it, somehow.
lost ancient art of librarian miniaturization
BoingBoing’s no-text post with this image, posted November 12, 2013, is titled “Fragmentary evidence of the lost ancient art of librarian miniaturization,” which counts as a shenanigan, I think.
The image is all over the internet, sometimes with a citation to the Archives of Prague Castle. [UPDATE, November 14: I’ve just received an email from Martin Halata, head archivist at Prague Castle, who tells me the photograph is not from their archives.] It’s even got lolz versions in Czech [I found these a few days ago but now I can’t find them anymore and it’s driving me crazy].
I used Google’s nifty image search mechanism to discover that — as far as I can tell — this image first appeared on the internet on April 22, 2013, at Lost and Found in Prague. The photographer is M. Peterka and the date is unknown. [Some versions of the image appear with a date of ca. 1940; some say the person in the picture is a man; others say it is a woman.]
MAJOR UPDATE, January 2023: Piotr Kowalczyk of “Reader Updated” has found the original source of this image. It appeared on page 35 Fotorok, volume 58, Issue 1, 1959, with the caption (in Czech): “Archivy chystají velkou jarní výstavu československé státní myšlenky na Pražském hradě,” translated by Kowalczyk as “The archives are preparing a large spring exhibition of the Czechoslovak state idea at Prague Castle.” The photographer was Miroslav Peterka, and the location was the Clementinum in Prague.
Papier-mâché employees of the Internet Archive!
The Internet Archive, home of the Wayback Machine and an enormous public-domain digital book collection, is housed in an old church in San Francisco. The pews of the church sanctuary are filled with papier-mâché representations of the employees! I haven’t been able to find out who made these or how it all came together or whether it’s a temporary thing — if you know anything about it, please comment. Thanks, Carol Dickerson!
Library Shenanigans 