UNT's Rare Books Room Celebrates 25 Years

The UNT Libraries' Rare Books Room recently celebrated its 25th anniversary. To celebrate, they displayed a large exhibit of their "best of" from the past twenty-five years. Last Friday, I came up with my Nikon and took an hour to shoot the whole exhibit before they took it down. I haven't yet edited or weeded any of these photos, but they're on flickr for your enjoyment!

PhDs, Palimpsests, and Presentations, Oh My!

(I could actually add "photographs" and "politics" to my list of "p" words for this post, but ah well. That's what you get for letting an English major have a blog.)


To continue the "To PhD or Not to PhD" discussion, my husband Alex sent me a link to this Census Bureau document yesterday: "The Big Payoff: Educational Attainment and Synthetic Estimates of Work-Life Earnings." Not only is it a fascinating report, but it shows that I've got my husband using govdocs now!

This is a fascinating Smithsonian article about X-rays revealing a hidden text by Archimedes--it had been scraped off and the parchment re-used for a prayer book. (Thanks to my Rare Books classmate--and GovDocs GLA--Tessa Powell for this link!)

This Thursday at 1pm CST, I'll be co-presenting about wikis with Chad Boeninger for Five Weeks to a Social Library. Chad will be presenting "The Wonderful World of Wikis: Applications for Libraries" and then I'll present "The 'How' of Wikis." Our webcast will be available archived afterward; I'll post the link.



I just posted the "best of" from our photoshoot for the Denton Reads project on my Flickr account. I took these last week to use for flyers and posters. I'm printing them to take the to DR meeting tomorrow at Barnes & Noble, so that committee members can decide which images they'd like to use for various purposes. Chuck and I have a Graphics Team meeting Friday to discuss our progress on the poster and bookmarks, and to brainstorm what events will need flyers.

I've also rasterized the logo so that it can be blown up to larger sizes, and I'm trying to do the same with the logo text... but Adobe Illustrator keeps crashing.

If I'm going to continue to be involved in producing various library graphics, I'm really going to need to take a graphics design course at some point. I think I'll consider taking one in the fall.

A geek's view of politics: reviews of presidential campaign websites.

Back to Work!

This morning was a blur of email, and this afternoon was a blur of... everything else.

Our collection of documents from the Advisory Commission on Intergovernmental Relations is now online. Many, many thanks to our diligent student worker who endured many hours of frustrating and confusing metadata entry.

This morning in my inbox, I received a plethura of GovDocs comics: a color copy of Sprocket Man to replace our missing one, and "Wishes and Rainbows" from the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, and ten others from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. Ah, what fun!

I also set up an independent study project (this semester I'm taking Rare Books to further augment my education). I'll be creating an online finding aid for the UNT Rare Books William Blake Collection. No, it's not technically comics, but the combination of literature and art makes it close enough to pique the interest of this artist/art historian/english major/librarian. That, and I might get to do some traditional cataloging to augment all this metadata experience. MARC, here I come...

On a lighter note... ALA's electronic newsletter last week referred to a Monty Python’s Flying Circus skit on (Series 1, Episode 10, December 21, 1969) that features gorilla applying for a librarian position.

“You see, I don’t believe that libraries should be drab places where people sit in silence, and that’s been the main reason for our policy of employing wild animals as librarians.”