Posts filed under ‘public libraries’
“I don’t remember the title, but the cover was blue?”
An unknown library created this display to help those patrons who can only remember the color of the cover of the book they wanted. Thanks, Lynne Thomas! Lots more funny library stuff at The Library News on Facebook. One commenter draws our attention to a related video, “The Confusing Library” by The Two Ronnies.
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!
libraries collecting/lending shenaniganish things
The Macaulay Library of the Ornithology Lab at Cornell University has digitized over 7000 hours of wildlife sounds, including the clarinet-like call of the indri lemur, which they describe as “the best candidate to appear on a John Coltrane record.” You can hear that sound and more in the NPR story, here. (You don’t have to listen to the whole story — the website has pulled out a few animal sounds for easy clicking.)
Speaking of unusual library collections, the Basalt Regional Library District in Colorado is lending seed packets. Patrons grow fruits and vegetables from the seeds they check out, and then harvest seeds from them and return those to the library.
Thanks, Rebecca Laroche!
blind date with a book
Many libraries have perpetrated this shenanigan, including the Lawrence Public Library in Kansas, the Maplewood Memorial Library and the Hillsdale Public Library in New Jersey, the Rockville Centre Public Library in New York, the Jasper Public Library in Indiana, the Amarillo Public Library in Texas, and many, many more. Thanks, Sundress Publications, for drawing my attention to this!
Australian library reclassifies Lance Armstrong books
The Manly Library in Australia put up this sign recently, saying they shall be reclassifying Lance Armstrong’s books as fiction. Thanks, Tom Lovell!
UPDATE JANUARY 21, 2013: it appears this shenanigan was a prank (is that redundant?). The library does not actually plan to reclassify the books. Here’s an article explaining what happened. Thanks, Brian Springett!
Big Nate fictional library shenanigan
This is actually a great idea! I think library bookmobiles should totally do this!
Thanks, Will and Celie, my kids, who have read all the Big Nate books about a hundred times. This particular comic appears on page 29 of Big Nate: Here Goes Nothing (Harper, 2012).
Hernando Guanlao’s private public library
Hernando Guanlao has been running his own version of a public library for twelve years in Manila. The library has grown from about a hundred books to a few thousand. From the article: “The idea is simple. Readers can take as many books as they want, for as long as they want – even permanently. As Guanlao says: ‘The only rule is that there are no rules.'”
Thanks, Dina Wood!
Show us your library card Flickr pool
In honor of Library Card Sign-Up Month, the American Library Association’s “At Your Library” public awareness campaign is sponsoring a Flickr pool of images of people with their library cards. John Waters has a big one — perhaps to go along with his supposed statement about people who don’t have any books, which has been making the rounds on Facebook. You can also see the cards of a stuffed gorilla, an orange shark, and the Karate Kid. Thanks, Jessamyn West!
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 cat shenanigans
I’m sure these library cats are models of good behavior and never ever do any shenanigans. Thanks, Dina Wood!
Update, April 2017: a three-legged cat at a Cambridge University library relieves student stress.
Library Shenanigans 
