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Congrats to the folks at the University of Michigan Hatcher Graduate Library for putting together an awesome photo set of librarians reading their favorite banned books. I helped a little with this project and not only was it fun to do, it’s great seeing photos of all these people I don’t really get to see much (even though I work in the same building).

Check it out: Celebrate Banned Books Week Flickr set

Even our University Librarian Paul Courant participated!

Created with Admarket’s flickrSLiDR.

From the news item:

Subversive. Objectionable. Offensive. Inappropriate. These are just a few of the terms used to describe many of the books that are challenged by society every year.

To participate in national Banned Books Week (Sept 29 – Oct 6, 2007), we invited our staff to highlight some of their favorite banned books in our library collections. Now these highlighted books and the wonderful people who select, acquire, organize, preserve and manage our collections are featured in Flickr, a photo-sharing web site!

The freedom to make your own decisions about what you want to read, and to have access to these items, are rights that libraries fully support. The University of Michigan’s library collection reflects these principles in its diversity. We invite you to get acquainted with our staff and our collections through our Celebrate Banned Books Week Flickr photo set.

For more information on intellectual freedom, censorship, and to view some banned book lists, see:

• Banned Books Week
• 100 Most Frequently Challenged Books
• OCLC Banned Book List
• ACLU FreedomWire

Went to a screening of Helvetica, a documentary by Gary Hustwit.

I’m not sure if I’ll be using Helvetica any time soon, but the interviews with Helvetica fanatics and critics were fantastic and it gave me a renewed love for design.

Here’s what I learned. Helvetica (the typeface) is everywhere, it’s soulless, it’s neutral, it’s the mother tongue, it’s responsible for the Vietnam war, it’s your friend, it’s the corporation, it’s the air, it’s about the figure and the ground, it’s ubiquitous, it’ll bore the shit out of you.

I’ve been working with the University of Michigan library web team on a survey to find out how patrons feel about the library’s website and online resources, as well as some questions about what types of web technologies they’re currently using… and my favorite question “If you could contact a librarian via facebook or MySpace for help with your research, would you? If not, why?”

The survey is geared to UM affiliates and we’re giving away 3 $50 gift certificates to encourage folks to fill out the whole (24 question) survey. Sorry – only UM folks are allowed to submit for the prizes.

So if you’re at UM (or use any of the UM libraries) – please take our survey!

I plan to post the results when I have them.

Over at the Information Wants To Be Free blog, Meredith Farkas has compiled the results from her 2nd survey about librarians and their blogging habits.

She’ll be releasing it in chunks, the first being the results of the demographic section:
[link]

Here are the bits I found most interesting:
Of those who responded to the survey…

• The largest demographic group for age is 31-40
• The largest demographic group for job type is reference
• The largest demographic group for type of institution is large academic libraries (with large public libraries a close second)
• The largest demographic group for gender is women, but according to Meredith
  

  Women are definitely better represented in the blogopshere than they were last time, but men still are more likely to blog in proportion to their representation in the general population of librarians.

Though I no longer make “art” (yes, I was a weird art school chick) I still love art and now I love libraries. So, here is a collection of where the two intersect.

Nina Katchadourian’s Sorted Books project

Cara Barer

Brian Dettmer’s carved book series

chotda’s bookshelf organized by color

Mickey Smith’s series of journal spine photographs

Abelardo Morell’s photographic book series

Jonathan Callan

Thomas Allen

My attempt at library related art: “Library Details” flickr set

See also:
cARTalog: University of Iowa Library’s project to purpose their retired card catalog into art and the The Rainbow of Books Flickr Group