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will byers stan first human second
tumblr dot com
pixel skylines
izzy's playlists!
Cosimo Galluzzi
macklin celebrini has autism
One Nice Bug Per Day
DEAR READER
occasionally subtle
#extradirty
if i look back, i am lost
Misplaced Lens Cap
oozey mess
we're not kids anymore.
Xuebing Du
Sweet Seals For You, Always
blake kathryn
Peter Solarz
TVSTRANGERTHINGS
seen from United States
seen from Colombia
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seen from Chile
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@metrolibrarycouncil
METRO on the Move
Goodbye 11th Street, Hello 11th Avenue!
METRO is packing up and moving out of our office of 24 years to develop our new facility at 599 11th Ave. And while we’re at it, we’re closing shop on Tumblr.
It’s been great to follow along with all of you! Keep in touch with us via Twitter at @mnylc, Instagram at @METROlibrarycouncil, and at metro.org.
Thoughts from the Edge
We were thrilled / honor that Daniel Flood from the Edge came to speak at METRO while he was touring the US investigating awesome library ideas.
Here are a few notes one of our staff members was able to type into the Notes app on her phone. A full video is coming to Vimeo soon (update: it’s here!).
*
To understand limits, you must go beyond the edge (so to speak).
To be curious is to risk failure on a daily basis. Do stuff b/c it is fun! Failure should be the result of ambition not laziness. The difference between a spectacular failure and an unmitigated success is PR.
Now that we are online, everyone has the right to be ignorant. Specific ignorance is unavoidable. So many things to learn that are relevant to life. To mitigate this, though, libraries should give users a chance to explore the world.
There are things that cannot be learned from books. We need to learn by doing. So much of ignorance is due to the lack of access.
Community is an asset. Community members’ needs should be taken more seriously than our own (we are not the center of the universe)
Be daring / Fail spectacularly rather than succeed quietly. A great manager encourages staff to take risks
Building for community is all about localization / context. And remember: damage to the community can't be undone.
Another note for managers: hire staff who are driven and curious. Burn the need to find and answer and to share findings. Turn curiosity into rich engagements. Make it so that others can use it. You can’t be everywhere. Avoid reinventing the wheel.
On making money: sell your cleverness that made the object but not the object itself. People always need bespoke stuff.
Try to remain an outsider; it’s tough but you need to let your need go when they are ready. Ego has no place in working with a community.
Plan your exit from the outside -- always know where you are headed! You will have to hand responsibility over to a community eventually & you'll have to be ok with that.
How to Support Housing Justice Efforts: A few notes from our Social Justice Interest Group meeting
A panel of advocates from housing justice organizations shared a couple of tips regarding how librarians and archivists (and anyone, really) can get involved with housing justice efforts around the city.
Get in touch with local efforts. The Metropolitan Council on Housing is a good place to start.
Get to know your neighbors. Be a part of your community so that you know what’s up when housing-related issues (like spiking rents, pressure to vacate rent controlled apartments) arise.
Share information, especially in the “know your rights” category.
Libraries can support housing justice advocates and communities by offering meeting space, keeping handouts available, and talking to their users about these issues.
And if you’re interested, check out there’s a rally in support of strong rent laws going on tomorrow, May 14 at 5:00 p.m. It includes across Brooklyn Bridge, originating at Foley Square.
Wiki-ing it up this May
check out these fantastic upcoming wikipedia editathons:
“Black Lunch Table” Editathon Sunday, May 17, 1:00 - 6:00 pm Studio Museum in Harlem: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Meetup/Black_Lunch_Table
“Selections from the Guggenheim Collection” Editathon Tuesday, May 19, 3:00 -7:00 pm @ Guggenheim: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Meetup/Guggenheim_Museum
“Women of Jazz” Editathon Saturday, May 30, 12:00 - 5:00 pm @ New York Public Library for the Performing Arts https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Meetup/NYC/WomenOfJazz
“AfricaCrowd” Editathon Sunday, May 31, 1:00 - 4:00 pm @ Brooklyn Public Library https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Meetup/NYC/AfroCrowd/AfricaCROWD
“[Wikipedia] is, for [millennials], the source of information that they go to, and therefore, if they are looking up Ida B. Wells and Ida B. Wells isn’t there, then Ida B. Wells doesn’t count,"
Khalil Muhammad, Director, The Schomberg Center for Research in Black Culture in Huffington Post
Contemporary ideas about data are tied up inextricably with metaphors around data. As a concept, data constantly eludes crisp definition. It is everywhere and nowhere, encompassing a mind-boggling array of people, activities, and concepts. One dictionary, taking up the challenge of definition, unhelpfully offers that data is “facts and statistics collected together for reference or analysis.” But this problem is not unique to data; humans are forced all the time to deal with broad concepts they cannot fully articulate. So people do here what they do in all cases—lean on the crutch of metaphor. Rather than talk about data directly, we analogize to better understand situations that seem to line up with the problem at hand.
'The Cloud' and Other Dangerous Metaphors in The Atlantic
2014 was a great year for us here at METRO. We launched new programs, met new colleagues, and continued to keep our community informed through more than 100 workshops and events.
Read our year in review here.
Happy Holidays!
Our member spotlight this month shines on Vaughn College of Aeronautics and Technology. It was great to speak with Jo Ann Jayne, director of the library there, about their super deep collection of materials in aviation and engineering. In fact, pilots on layovers sometimes stop in to the library to catch up on their reading (and, of course, to take questions from students who hope to follow in their footsteps).
It was also fascinating to hear about their 3-story observation tower, which overlooks LaGuardia Airport's runways and receives feeds from air traffic control. What a great way to learn the ins and outs of aeronautics!
http://bit.ly/vaughnlibrary
NDSR resident Vicky Steeves shares her walk to the office through the Hall of Saurischian Dinosaurs on the 4th Floor of the American Museum of Natural History. Lucky duck!
Learn how it's going over there at AMNH in our interview with all five of our National Digital Stewardship Residents! We're glad to hear things are going well, and we'll be sure to check in with them again soon.
Resident Shira Peltzman standing outside Carnegie Hall’s newly opened Resnick Education Wing, where her office is located.
Now that we're two months in to our first-ever run of National Digital Stewarship Residencies, we interviewed our first cohort about their projects thus far. Read up on the adventures of all five of our NDSR residents in this interview.
NDSR Resident Julia Kim works on digital assessment at NYU Libraries.
Julia's part of a cohort of five participants in our National Digital Stewardship Residency program. After launching in September, each of the five residents took up a project at our five host institutions. Hear how they're doing in our interview.
NDSR Resident Peggy Griesinger stands next to Lightweeds by Simon Heijdens, an interactive digital artwork at MoMA.
We're deep into our first-ever iteration of the National Digital Stewardship Residency program in New York. Now that our cohort is settled into projects at their host institutions, we caught up with them to gather their thoughts on preserving and accessing digital materials. Read more here.
NDSR resident Karl-Rainer Blumenthal poses proudly with a small piece of the landscape design materials collection he curated for OLIN (photo by Sahar Coston-Hardy).
To mark the second month of our National Digital Stewardship Residency program, we interviewed our first-ever cohort on their thoughts about digital stewardship as well as the progress they've made on their projects so far. Check it out here.
Hey, librarian and archivists and other open access activists in NYC!
You're invited to a screening of The Internet's Own Boy: The Story of Aaron Swartz on Thursday, October 23 at 6pm in Barnard College's Lehman Auditorium (located at 202 Altschul Hall). A live chat with director Brian Knappenberger will follow the screening.
This event is free and open to the public. It's co-sponsored by the Center for Digital Research and Scholarship, Barnard Library and Academic Information Services, the Digital Humanities Center, the Digital Science Center, and the Digital Social Science Center.
To RSVP, be in touch with Leyla Williams at lwilliams [at] columbia [dot] edu.
See you there!
Know of a super awesome public domain image/video that's gif-worthy? Submit it to GIF IT UP, an international competition run by Digital Public Library of America and DigitalNZ.
Here's info on participating: http://dp.la/info/gif-it-up/
Send in your gif by December 1 for your chance to have your work featured and online at the Public Domain Review and the Smithsonian Magazine.
Join us at METRO next Thursday to celebrate One Year of Wikipedia! Our reception will feature wine, cheese, and updates on Wikipedia initiatives in libraries, archives, and museums in New York from Marek Zielinski, Megan Wacha, and Dorothy Howard.
We hope to see you there!
RSVP here.
What does stand-up comedy have in common with library instruction! Lots, it turns out. LIU Brooklyn's Eamon Tewell breaks it down.