Daily Thoughts 11/10/2010 (Al Jaffee's Mad Life, The Works of Dean Swift)

Gustav Adolph Hennig, Lesendes Mädchen, 1828

Daily Thoughts 11/10/2010

Today has been another quiet day.  I checked the displays to make sure things were in order.  I also made sure that everything was reading for SCORE.  We are having another session today.  I am doing the graphic novels club today as well.  The SCORE sessions went well today.  I am happy with the results.  I did not have that many people for the graphic novels club specifically.  There were eight people from the trading card club who were there already, some of them took a few graphic novels.  Plus we had a couple people come in to look.  Several graphic novels from the Sandman series went out written by Neil Gaiman.

I am still thinking about doing a poetry program in January if it works out.  The book, The Referral Engine Teaching Your Business To Market Itself  by John Jantsch has come in for me to read.

I am going to have to pass on the Content Strategy meeting tonight.  I will be doing my regular activities.  I did a little bit of work for the gala tomorrow with the displays in the rotunda.  We were putting up pictures from the library in the glass display cases.  Much of it is local history.  There are pictures all the way back to the building of our current building which started construction in 1896.  The first library in our city was in a school house, it was in 1854.  We have eight books from 1854 that I can find so far.  One that especially caught my attention was The Works of Dean Swift Embracing Gullivers Travels, Tale of A Tub, Battle of the Books, Etc. With A Life of the Author by Reverend John Mitford And Copious Notes  by W.C. Taylor LL.D., New York, Leavitt  & Allen, c1854  This is a link to the book on Google Books http://bit.ly/a60y2H

On the train home, I read some more of Al Jaffee's Mad Life.  The biography is one of incredible difficulty with lots of humor and hardship.  He describes his mother staying behind in Lithuania just before the start of World War II in the the shtetls.  He also describes his fathers troubles with keeping and holding jobs.  He moves from place to place, relatives house to relatives house, alternating between New York and Lithuania. The one constant throughout the story is humor, inventiveness, and the absurdity of life. The other constant is light hearted mischief and cartoons.  Al Jaffee does many full color cartoons throughout the book about incidents in his life and people from his family.  He is best known for his work for Mad magazine.

Web Bit

Something provocative for you librarians out there. http://www.zdnet.com/blog/perlow/digital-underclass-what-happens-when-the-libraries-die/14554 Reminds me a bit of the Fox news episode on libraries. Silos anyone, giant bricks full of books. Are we as librarians going to be user experience designers, metadata taxonomists, digital image repositiry specialists, information architects, or content strategists in this brave new world.  Maybe we can also become emerging technology advocates, providers of data to the underclass as preventers of the digital divide.  Think on this one.