TILT #69 — Pleasure your shelf at the Innisfil Public Library
The new trailer for Emilio Estevez’s movie The Public is better than the last one. More focus on women with speaking roles, among other things. The movie, about a polar vortex and a population of people experiencing homelessness who seek refuge in the library, is set to be released in April. That should be right around when our polar vortex is finally ending.
I’ve been working on my wintertime project which is getting more public domain images into Wikipedia and writing articles for underrepresented people who could use them. Big thanks to Cleveland Art Museum for making 30,000 of their artworks open access. Lately I’ve been crate digging in the C. M. Bell Studio collection at the Library of Congress. Thousands of photographs, many of very famous people, identified only by their last name and maybe first initial. A fun project. Speaking of amazing collections, the Beinecke Rare Book Library at Yale recently redesigned and has a lovely interface. No rights-based searching, alas.
Do you need some good usable stock photos of a wide variety of women of color using technology? Sure you do! This WOCinTech Flickr photoset is for you. Or maybe you need someone to speak about historical expertise and you want that person to be woman-identified? Women Also Know History is for you.
Ann Arbor District Library, long a fave of mine, now has a Letterpress Lab where you can learn to typeset. And how cool is the Secret Lab category? Speaking of catalogs, Afrofuturism is now a Library of Congress Subject Heading. Thank you Black Panther, for everything.
Another great public domain photo resource, the Flickr Commons, has a lot of participating libraries and archives. I found this… bookmobile streetcar? as part of the Provincial Archives of Alberta’s offerings. I don’t know the story here, but I love imagining what it might be.
Portland Community College’s instructional support has created some useful guides:
- Web accessibility handbook (pdf) showing how to make accessible web pages, Google Docs, audio and video, and more.
- Complex Images for All Learners (pdf) showing how to convert graphically presented information to more accessible formats.
I found out on Twitter today that Librarian.net and Library Link of the Day (Hi John!) are the only two library blogs from LISNews’s Blogs to Read round-up that are still in existence. I still read library blogs, they’re just different ones from the ones I used to read (and I often get to them from Twitter). The stuff I write for mine nowadays often starts as an email, or copying something from another online space. How to Help Someone Use a Computer by Phil Agre is up top over there now. Lord knows I talk about it enough.
A great blog post I read recently is from Iris Jastram’s Pegasus Librarian blog, talking about how to track down research articles. She’s an academic librarian and is working in an educational environment, but I find it’s helpful for anyone who is trying to read the science news nowadays.
Some little good newses:
- A $25 million grant will help Stanford Libraries preserve Silicon Valley Archives.
- Evanston Public Library book lending machine installed at a local community center.
- Washington D.C. is one of a few US cities that offer publicly funded tech support programs. Read more about why this is such a good idea, from CityLab.
- Lafeyette Public Library is reading Finding Gobi by Dion Leonard for their Lafeyette Reads Together program and has some great pet tie-ins including working with the local shelter and having a Beds for Bowsers program where people can create pet beds with the sewing machines in the library’s makerspace.
This is an actual library card. This is a video of the actual librarians who work in this library, when asked to read this slogan.
Speaking of, sort of, have I mentioned Hand Job: A zine about mass digitization, labor, error and art? It’s so good.
Stay warm everyone. And if you need help with a Wikipedia article, or getting print-disabled access to the Internet Archive’s online books, you know where to find me.
Here’s a few books I’ve been reading lately.
Today in Librarian Tabs is written irregularly by Jessamyn West who also maintains librarian.net. It’s available in more-accessible format your inbox via TinyLetter. Thanks for reading.
