"Librarians gone wild."

This is what Melissa used to say when we were temps, and wondering if many of these folks ever got out for a drink- "It's librarians gone wild!!"

But Wow!

Here is something that will get the attention of all of those library information associates, library information analysts, library specialists, librarians, and lovely digital archivists.

It's some of the most lovely libraries in the world, and I mean lovely, together here in this book, in hot, slippery living color.

Seriously, the book is called "Libraries," photographs by Candida Höfer.

Nice work huh? It looks like all the libraries are in Europe, at least in the link to the "thenonist.com" blog I post above. However I know there are some dandy library architecture spaces here in the U.S. and certainly in good old Tucson. The Gould Simpson building's library is a small gem with a million dollar view. The old library in the AZ State Museum has the coolest reading room in the world, and probably some of the biggest windows you'll ever see. The Main Library on Campus has good mezzanines- unknown, cluttered behind poor interior decoration- I think they have a committee discussing, and discussing, and discussing, that- and a great courtyard in front of the entrance, which courtyard is of course full of disgusting smokers breathing their vaporized chemical shit in the general direction of the rest of us. Oh, also, the 2 stroke gas powered blowers all over the place a couple times a week too. The guys wielding them have ear and eye protection and masks, but naturally they blast our ears and fill the courtyard with pollution and dust during peak hours. Yes, I know, welcome to Arizona.

Following orders like we always do

Link to a machinima where the characters in a game start wondering what the hell they are doing there. "Why are we doing this?"

Yes I read about it on Boing Boing. As I try to always tell people, if you're not reading Boing Boing, then you should be.

Machinima I first understood when I attended a lecture by a Stanford librarian who was cataloging and constructing an online archive of such things as well as studying the sociological side of in-game communities. People manipulate computer games to turn the audio/visual output into a story, that's what machinima is. The Wikipedia article in the link above is really quite good.

Boing Boing today also had another machinima post. Here is the link.

And here is a link to a machinima "talk show" done from within a game called Halo.

Also see machinima.com for more.

Interlibrary loan and Homeland Security

[12/27/05-- this story was a HOAX. Of course we should be asking ourselves what we are going to say when they come knocking at your door, looking at your library records, tapping your phone, snooping in your house, following your web-surfing and reading your email] I'm posting Boingboing's permalink regarding this story since Boingboing pretty much sums it up:

Update: "DHS visits student over Little Red Book" report

Interlibrary loan is a service you use if, say, your library does not have a copy of a book you'd like to read and cite in a history or sociology paper you're working on. Your library contacts another library and the book is sent. We have a workteam dedicated to that function at the libary I work at, and it is all in the name of scholarly sharing of information, academic freedom, and libraries doing what libraries are meant to do: help you out when you'd like to research, report, read, relate, study, communicate knowledge, etc.

The college student in the story borrowed a book via ILL and supposedly because the book was written by Mao Tse Tung, and the student travels internationally Homeland Security officers visited the student at his house and questioned him.

The student, if this is true, must've been terrified, and my point here is about a chilling effect police behavior like this has- you can get in trouble for reading a book.

Of course there are doubts that this happened- it's too ridiculous to be true & there are supposedly holes in the story.

But really, think about how stupid this is- it's like saying if I read Marx I want to be a communist, if I read a book about Hitler I want to be a nazi, if I read a book by St. Augustine I want to be a christian. And what the hell does communism have to do w/ homeland security anyway? Nothing, obviously- there must be thousands of communists in the U.S. & who gives a shit?

My other point is that once you give these shady police agencies the power to snoop, they are going to snoop. They're don't seem to be accountable to anyone, certainly not the people of the U.S. They are like a private security force.