Lighthouses and libraries

Hornby

Scanning the scholarly Library Journal - as you should - and was struck by the article "The history of lighthouses" by Alex Byrne in the special 50:50 by 2020 issue.
Alex uses the analogy that libraries like lighthouses have an equally long and important history, and reveals the similarities.
As lighthouses shifted from manned to automated (Maatsuyker Island was the last in 1995), so too libraries have moved from print to electronic.
Alex finishes with "Libraries & librarians will continue to respond to their communities, subtly, continually and sometimes dramatically re-imagining their services. (true enough) We continue to be beacons of knowledge, but, unlike lighthouses, we will not become silent outposts of technology blinking hopefully out to sea."

Macquarie

Barrenjoey

I take some umbrage on behalf of the silent outposts - they will come into their own when an EMP burst takes out all the satellite guidance GPSs and we welcome trusty old clockwork.
Maybe like lighthouses libraries are solidly built to withstand all that can be thrown at it, and to see us through the passage of time.
Alex included a fact I didn't know - lighthouses are covered in the Australian Constitution 'the Commonwealth has the power to make laws for the peace, order and good government with respect to lighthouses', transferring them from the states.
I've included a number photos of the classic-style Sydney lighthouses (Alex is the NSW State Librarian).

Colouring with personality

Drew Daywalt and Oliver Jeffers teamed up in ‘The day the crayons quit’ to create a colourful solution to a crayon-based crisis in a playful, imaginative story that had both children and adults laughing and playing with their crayons in a whole new way. 

Poor Duncan just wants to colour in. But when he opens his box of crayons, he only finds letters, all saying the same thing: We quit! Beige is tired of playing second fiddle to Brown, Blue needs a break from colouring in all that water, while Pink just wants to be used. Green has no complaints, but Orange and Yellow are no longer speaking to each other. The battle lines have been drawn. What is Duncan to do?

Time passes and we ask ourselves, could these guys repeat the trick and provide us with a witty sequel?

Along came ‘The day the crayons came home’. This time the crayons are back and they're crosser than ever! One day Duncan receives a set of postcards from his crayons who have been lost, forgotten, broken - even melted in a clothes dryer and stuck to a pair of underpants! There are recurring postcards from Pea Green (aka Esteban), who dreams of traveling, and clueless directionally challenged Neon Red crayon who is trying to get home. 
So in the end, both books have a hilarious text and joyful illustrations that combine to show that crayons have feelings too.

Curating online

 This 14th Thing is looking at 'online curation', using tools like Pinterest and Tumblr. How institutions and  the public can use various websites and tools to curate collections around their chosen topics and, using mobile apps, do this anytime and anywhere.
Pinterest allows users to create virtual pinboards of images and videos according to their interests. The library's Pinterest board features local images with a history emphasis.

Tumblr allows users to post multimedia and other content to a short-form blog, littered with hashtags.Tumblr's visual appeal has made it ideal for photoblogs that often include copyrighted works from others that are re-published without payment Tumblr users can post unoriginal content by 'reblogging', a feature on Tumblr that allows users to re-post content taken from another blog onto their own blog. 

The dashboard allows the user to upload text posts, images, video, quotes, or links to their blog with a click of a button displayed at the top of the dashboard. 

One of the Tumblr 'Discover' tasks was This is What a Librarian Looks Like that has the tagline “challenging the librarian stereotype one post at a time” which appears to cover the whole gambit of expression.


Must admit that it frustrates me that with some Tumblr images, you can't track back to where some photos originate from.

Which is why I feel that Pinterest has it over Tumblr when comes to organisation and descriptive curation.