Posts filed under ‘Tutt Library Colorado College’
library slides
The Paris Review gives us this incredible view of the enormous slide used to move books from one building to another at Columbia University in 1934. (A similar slide was used at Colorado College in the great book move of 1962.) Click the image to see other, less enormous, more fun library slides. Thanks, Brooklyn Blowback!
not my favorite shenanigan.
Circulation staff at Colorado College’s Tutt Library have found a couple of decorated hard-boiled eggs on bookshelves in our stacks. We’re not sure who’s behind this, or how long it’s been going on, and you know we’re all for library shenanigans in general, but this one has some potentially yucky consequences down the line. We humbly request: if you want to hide eggs in the library, could you maybe use plastic eggs, or blown eggs, or, you know, any kind of non-smelly, non-messy egg-like items instead?
Thanks, Marianne Aldrich, for the photo.
museum shenanigans of the 1920s
Okay, so this isn’t precisely a library shenanigan, but it’s close enough, I think — people tend to elide museums and libraries.
On May 10, 1922, Colorado College students removed taxidermied animals from the college museum in Palmer Hall and placed them all over campus. This shenanigan was apparently in protest of then-president of the college, Clyde Duniway, whose policies were unpopular with students: he limited the times when men could visit women’s dormitories; strictly enforced chapel attendance; and fired a football coach for using profanity on the field. 350 students (about half the total enrollment) signed a petition complaining about Duniway, to no avail. The animals prank was one of several that spring: students also released hydrogen sulfide in one classroom building and somehow got a live cow up to the second floor of another.
In January of 1929, CC students again placed the museum animals around campus, this time to protest the firing of the editor of the student newspaper.
Source: J. Juan Reid, Colorado College: The First Century (1979), chapter V, “Controversy and Student Unrest.”
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!
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.
library poetry shenanigans
My new collection of poems, Injecting Dreams into Cows (Red Hen Press, 2012), contains several poems about libraries and least one about library shenanigans. One of the library poems has now become the victim/beneficiary of an anonymous shenanigan here at Tutt Library, Colorado College!
“Going to the Library,” was made into a promotional flyer for Tutt (where I work). Copies of this flyer hang in campus bathrooms. This morning a colleague found an amended version of the flyer in one of the library bathrooms. Someone turned my sweet little poem into a piece of smut!!
Less scandalously, in the library shenanigan poem in the book, “The Library at Night,” the shenanigans are perpetrated by the books themselves:
The Library At Night
The empty library
stutters awake, words
falling out of their paper beds,
alarms of exclamation points
ringing from every corner.
The librarians are gone,
sound asleep at home,
shushing their dreams.
They have forgotten
all about the library
and what is inside.
This is why, in the morning,
the books are not where
they are supposed to be.
This is why, in the daytime,
the library feels vaguely alive,
objects pulsating on the shelves,
glowing like brains.
(first appeared in The Hat, 2005)
The Stapler Obituaries: a mini-exhibition at Tutt Library
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- stapler’s suicide note
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- stapler suicide
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- Stella
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- Stella’s lives
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- Lester “John Henry” Stapler
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- “They were just teeth…”
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- p. 2 of scientific paper
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- scientific paper on staplers and human aggression
Each year, at the printing stations of Colorado College’s Tutt Library, dozens of staplers die untimely deaths. Much wailing ensues. The mourners look to library staff for support during these difficult times. LeDreka Davis, our Circulation Operations Coordinator, has put together a fabulous mini-exhibition of stapler obituaries and other documents, including a scientific paper entitled “Evolutionary Basis of Stapler-Induced Human Aggression and Psychopathology.” Thanks, LeDreka and Tutt students and staff!
CC students respond to library annoyances
The “Let’s CC the World” Tumblr feed has a couple of funny visual aids for library annoyances:
When People Use the Library as a Place to Socialize (featuring a panda!)
and
When You Suddenly Lose Service in the Library (featuring Doctor Who!).
It’s nice to know that some students have the same crazy love for the library as we librarians do! Thanks, Dina Wood, for pointing these out to me.
Super Mario Brothers shenanigan
A lot of this Super Mario Brothers shenanigan takes place in Tutt Library, Colorado College. We’re glad somebody finally found a use for the little caged-in area at the bottom of our staircase. Thanks, Rebecca Harner!
IMing at the ref desk with pornbots
Sometimes we librarians get instant messages from sexy robots while we we’re at the reference desk. Here’s one way of dealing with it. Thanks, Steve Lawson!
Library Shenanigans 