Posts on awesome

I just got to pet an opossum, a baby alligator, an armadillo, and a baby ostrich. I also got a close-up look at a tarantula and helped carry a 9 foot, 80 pound (baby) Burmese python around the auditorium.

My job rocks.

We hired zoologist Dr. Robert James to do his Animal Encounters program for a packed auditorium (about 85 people, and there were people who went disappointed). He brings a half dozen animals with him and walks the aisles with each as he talks about them.

You're allowed to touch all of them except for the tarantula—which made the stroll upon a little girl's hand. You're allowed to take pictures and video (I did not, sorry to say). The only rule is no talking.

All the animals are rescues who will be rehabilitated and released to the wild or orphans who have imprinted on humans and cannot be released. The animals are attuned to Dr. James's voice, to the point where they expect it. When he's on the other side of the world, back home his animals listen to recordings of his voice.

Dr. James said that after he spent time as a POW he vowed he would never cage an animal again, so he's very anti-cage, anti-leash. He guided the ostrich through the aisles with verbal commands in Spanish.

He also talked about appreciating diversity, not making judgments about an animal or person without having met them first, not making generalizations about a whole species/ethnicity/whatever based on your experience with an individual. Nevertheless, there were still people (adults, need I say?) who shrank back in fear/disgust when certain animals came their way. Sad.

More take-home points:
- Armadillos are hairy in spite of their leathery skin.
- Some possums have very pretty, clever faces.
- Alligators are dumb, have no saliva (so they don't eat unless they're in water to lubricate their meals), and bear a glassy-eyed expression similar to my dog when she's blissed out.
- Pythons feel like one really long, intense, chilly muscle and get freakin' heavy after 10 minutes. Also, they have two three-inch-long vestigial legs that retract into their bodies near the tail.
- My job, again, rocks.

You know how some rock music videos have apparently absolutely nothing to do with the song lyrics? Well, a clever fellow by the name of Dustin McLean is doing his part to set things right with his "literal video" series, redubbing music videos with lyrics that match the action, with hilarious results.

McLean started with A-ha's "Take On Me" and has since followed up with Tears for Fears' "Head Over Heels"—which, as you may know, takes place in a library! View it and weep (with laughter).

(Warning... some mildly NSFW language near the end.)

In case the video has erased your memory of the original song lyrics, you can read them here.

I've mentioned before how much I love the Boston Globe blog The Big Picture. Here's an image that caught my attention: a vast library projected onto the Tower of David in Jerusalem's Old City.

Magical, huh? Looks like a wizardly library to me. Click the photo to see it at full resolution. It's #21 on the page. (Sorry about the hot-linkage, guys...)

More photo fun: If you love vintage photos, check out Shorpy: History in HD, which offers high-definition photos from the 1850s to the 1950s. You can even purchase prints. (Via AL Direct.)

Some of the best things in life—the best online resources, anyway— really are free. For example, I don't know what my department would do without Mid-Continent Public Library's amazing Juvenile Series and Sequels resource.

Wondering the order of the Betsy-Tacy books? Getting Anthony Horowitz's series mixed up in your mind? Browse thousands of children's and YA series by author name, series title, book title, and series subject. You'll get a neat list in clean text of series in sequential order!

My department uses this resource just about every day, sometimes several times a day. Very rarely have I found errors or omissions.

Actually, I do know what we'd do without without this resource: we'd go to Amazon.com and deal with long load times and multiple edition/publication date confusion. But we don't have to, because MCPL has put this absolutely fantastic resource out on the web, free for all.

Looks like MCPL also has a weekly radio show, The Library Guys. Each week they interview an author and plug library programs. Many of their author interviews are available for download. I sense a definite bias toward mystery and suspense for adults, but still: cool!

Beggar's dog - Hoboken (LOC)
Originally uploaded by The Library of Congress

For someone who went through library school just a couple years ago, I'm feeling very late to the party - or maybe just extremely forgetful. Somehow I missed that for the past 10 or so years the Library of Congress has offered digital images from its collection through its Prints and Photographs Online Catalog, with a collection of over a million images.

And now, through a cooperative effort with Flickr, called The Commons, LOC is improving access to thousands of those images (so far) through Flickr's interface and public tagging capability.

This is very cool stuff. More people will appreciate these visual documents of our nation's history, and the images will get more thorough cataloging through tagging (though possibly also more erroneous, or extraneous - I hope LOC's Flickr moderator will weed out the dumb ones occasionally). Moreover, all the images have "no known copyright restrictions", which means they can be freely shared and remixed - even more freely than a Creative Commons license allows. Just please still remember to attribute the source!

Via The Monkey Speaks