Posts filed under ‘perpetrated by students or patrons’
25 mini-adventures in the library
Mama Scout has some fantastic ideas here. I especially like the idea of the Kind Bomb in the library. Some of these ideas are more shenaniganish than others, of course. “Take a present to the librarians” is a nice one! Thanks, Heather McHale, for this one.
Flash mob at Tutt Library, Colorado College
Man, I wish I could have seen this. It took place on Tuesday, February 12, at 8:30 p.m., and lasted 3 minutes and 16 seconds, the duration of the song “The Harlem Shake” by Baauer (2013, more information here).
The UT-Austin library also took part in this meme:
Thanks, Steve Lawson and Joan Petit!
A wedding in the library!
In February of 2013, Barbara Morrow and David Kurland were married in the Northwest History Room at the Everett Public Library in Washington State. A librarian performed the ceremony. Best quote from the Paris Review article: “Following cake with the staff, the bride renewed her library card.”
I’m surprised there aren’t more weddings in libraries, when I think about it.
Thanks, Dina Wood!
Oreo ad library shenanigan
Apparently, this ad aired during the Superbowl yesterday. I missed it, but several people let me know about it. I only wish people really did whisper whenever they were in the library. I confess I have shushed, and been shushed, both. Thanks, everybody!
Climbing the library!
At Portland State University in 1988, at least one student attempted to climb the library building as part of the Outdoor Program’s “Halloween Climb.”
Here at Colorado College, students have attempted to climb various campus buildings over the years, but not, as far as we know, the library.
Thanks, Joan Petit!
Under-desk shenanigan
At the University of Illinois at Chicago, staff discovered this diary and drawing written on the underside of a table in the Daley Library. It was probably written mostly in the spring of 1988; one entry (“Totaled my Dad’s car”) is dated May, 1988.
It’s likely this shenanigan would never have been discovered if the staff hadn’t decided to redecorate. When they dismantled the table, they found this bit of history.
Thanks, Gwen Gregory!
bookstore shenanigan
Somebody (probably not staff, but I’m not sure) turned around a whole bunch of books in the mystery section of a Barnes and Noble bookstore, making them particularly mysterious. I don’t know much about this image and would be glad to get the details. Thanks, PotaDOS and Sundress Publications!
things found in books, from dirty to sublime (or both)
Noel Black recently interviewed me for his Big Something radio show on the Colorado Springs NPR station. He got interested in the things found in books at the Colorado College library and asked me to talk about the collection the library keeps.
Some of the things we’ve found over the last decade were left in books deliberately as a sort of art shenanigan, we believe. Most, we are fairly certain, stayed in the books by accident. Library staff, especially student assistants, have been building the collection for about a decade.
I consider the collection itself to be a kind of shenanigan, since it’s unusual for a library to collect and display odds and ends such as these.
“Gangnam Style” at the University of Maryland library
With big shenanigans like this, involving hundreds of people, I always wonder how much the library staff was involved. Did they get advance warning? Did they give permission? Did they plant the idea for the shenanigan in the first place? The Facebook page for the event suggests the library at least wasn’t against it. I know we would be pretty psyched to have something like this happen at Tutt. Thank you, David M. Kay, M.L.S.!
No girls in the library?
According to Jill Lepore’s excellent book The Mansion of Happiness: The History of Life and Death (2012), 19th century New York public libraries had different rules for girls and boys. To use the Astor Library, for example, you had to be fourteen years old … and male. Do you know what this means, shenanigan connoisseurs? This means that any girl who used the Astor Library was committing a shenanigan! I am working on finding out more about this cockamamie rule, but I had to tell you right away about all the presumable shenanigans that must have taken place in the late 19th century in New York. Girls with fake mustaches? Girls in drag? Presumably girls and women were, at some age, allowed in the Astor, but I don’t yet know the exact age requirement for them. I’m working on it; check back in a week. Now, in the 21st century, the NYPL rules state that all children from the age of zero upward are eligible for library cards. I like the idea of a newborn baby having a library card.
Thanks, Jill Lepore, and, by way of Lepore’s footnotes, thank you also to Miriam Braverman and her book Youth, Society, and the Public Library (1979).
Addendum, August 13: Braverman’s book doesn’t discuss the Astor Library. The factoid about boys fourteen and up appears in another source Lepore cites, Frances Clarke Sayers’s Anne Carroll Moore: A Biography (1972). Beginning in 1896, Moore was a children’s librarian in New York City; for better or for worse, she had long-lasting national influence on the profession. Unfortunately, Sayers’s biography doesn’t contain any added information about the age requirements for boys and girls at NYC libraries. I would like to think the Astor Library allowed all girls in, regardless of age, though that’s not what Sayers implies. The librarian of the Astor in 1854, when the rule about boys fourteen and up was in place, was not impressed with the books the “young fry” chose to read; he described their choices (Scott, Cooper, Dickens, Punch, and the Illustrated News) as “trashy” (Sayers, p. 106). Circa 1868, both girls and boys under the age of sixteen in Washington Heights could pay five cents a week to use the library there (Sayers, p. 110). As far as I can tell, boys and girls had equal access to children’s libraries in NYC in Moore’s time. I’ll keep working on it.
Library Shenanigans 