Improbable Research, in concert with our friends & colleagues at the Museum Of Bad Art (MOBA), is cooking up some events for libraries. If you work at a library that provides events for your community, may I hit you up for some advice? You can reach me at marc@improbablecom.wpcomstaging.com
Tag: library
The case of toilet management in a French academic library
A look at how a library manages to manage the facilities that help library users manage their bowels will likely enliven the 5th annual international User Experience in Libraries conference, or UXLibsV. The conference will take place at Royal Holloway [pictured below], University of London, on 17-19 June 2019. The session to be sure to […]
10 tips that media library specialists are advised to not follow
What can be done about the troublesome numbers of overdue library books? A set of strategies (10 in number) is provided by Bacon, Pamela S. in the journal Library Media Connection. For example: • ‘Never allow students to renew a book’ • ‘No matter what the question . . . always say no first’ • […]
The Benefits of a Lending Library for Female Urinals
Libraries can have many benefits. This paper outlines one: “The Benefits of a Lending Library for Female Urinals,” Julie Vickerman, Nursing Times, vol. 99, no. 44, 2002, pp. 56-57. The author is at the Chorley and South Ribble Primary Care Trust, Lancashire, UK. Here’s detail from the paper:
Geotrichum candidum (fungus) might destroy your CDs?
Many thanks to Dr. Victor Cardenes of the Department Geology and Soil Science at Ugent, Belgium, who provides us with a photo of a music CD being colonised by Geotrichum candidum (or a near relative). Whilst working in Belize, Dr. Cardenes noticed that a CD ‘Pieces of Africa’ by the Kronos Quartet, showed mysterious markings […]
Librarian-titillation TV
The Harold B. Lee Library, at Brigham Young University, is a premier producer of titillating television programs for librarians. This program, called “The Many Stations of Book Preservation,” is no less than eight minutes, twenty-five seconds of variegated stimulation for persons who find hope or dread in the perils and pitfalls of book decay, destruction, or preservation. […]
Battle over a library’s use of an Ig Nobel Prize-winning teenager-repellant
People are displeased that a Welsh town’s library installed an Ig Nobel Prize-winning device designed to repel teenagers. BACKGROUND: The 2006 Ig Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to Howard Stapleton of Merthyr Tydfil, Wales, for inventing an electromechanical teenager repellant — a device that makes annoying high-pitched noise designed to be audible to teenagers but not to adults; and for later […]
Librarians just want to have fun: Wheel of Confusion
In this video, members of the American Library Association (ALA) try to remember or figure out what some of the ALA’s acronyms might mean. The video is called “Wheel of Confusion”:
Lowering into the books
Bookride describes a passage from a 2009 book Books Do Furnish a Room, by Leslie Geddes Brown: There is a great shot of designer Sallie Trout who built shelves in an inaccessible stairwell which she reaches by a bosun’s chair fastened to a chain hoist hanging from the ceiling above.
Case report: She pees in a cup in the library
Miss Conduct [who is also, under her own name, the psychology editor of the Annals of Improbable Research] considers a difficult case. The person who brought it to her attention wrote: “It has come to my and several co-workers’ attention that a woman who works in our office is locking herself in the library and […]