lonely fire

Having recently moved back in, here’s some of things I found whilst poking around in the basement:

My collection of various Grateful Dead memorabilia from when I was 15/16 (the poster is for a show on some mountain in CA in the mid-80’s, billed as “the highest GD concert in the world”):

the concert ticket from when I saw them in 1995 on their last tour:

my lava lamp:

my authentic Bob Ross Beginner’s Painting Kit:

my guitar string “sculpture”:

and finally, the cream of the crop:

my 6th grade biography assignment, “Good Trips, Bad Trips: The Beginnings of Jimi Hendrix.”

note especially my explanation of the title from the Introduction. How I got away with this in Catholic school, I don’t know…

and last but not least, my grandfather’s WWI medals and plaque, dated 1918, from when he was a soldier in the Italian army:

impressive, yes, but note the signature at the bottom:

“B. Mussolini.” Whether it was handwritten or stamped, I’ll probably never know (unless I get it appraised or something). Nonetheless, how many families can claim to have the signature of an infamous 20th century dictator hanging on their wall, hm? I wonder what else I can scrape up…

So, I recently moved back into my parent’s house (at age 26 no less). Last summer before she got sick, my mom had started to rip down wallpaper in one of the bedrooms so that she could paint it. When she started taking down the wallpaper, she discovered pictures on the wall drawn by my dad’s sister some 55 years ago….. This room is the room that I just moved into, and I before I finished the paint job, I took picture’s of Aunt Louise’s work…. The majority of these pictures can be found on my Flickr page, but I thought I’d include a couple here:

First, Mama Conneaut herself:

some jive hep-cat lingo:

put on yr. dancin’ shoes:

senior prom anyone?

before:

after:

The American Library Association’s TechSource blog had this post a few weeks ago, about libraries in Arizona rearranging their physical locations and online public access catalogs to be more like the Barnes and Noble around the corner. The books, in both their physical locations and in their corresponding surrogate records in the OPAC, were categorized using BISAC codes (a standard the book industry uses), not the traditional Dewey Decimal or Library of Congress schemes. So far, the general public seems pretty happy with it… the only complaints coming from other librarians who have heard about the story (as this link to a news story from the blog post will tell you).

This trend has been a long time coming in public libraries, I know…. And I do remember being at Powell’s Books two years ago on vacation, walking around, browsing, and feeling constantly engaged and interested in every section, and wondering “how come libraries don’t look like this??” Of course, the reason is Dewey and LCSH can offer a much more in-depth results in doing serious research (though I’ve definitely fell victim more than once to the “onesie syndrome” Schneider mentions in the blog), but, as the quote from Jessamyn West from the news story above notes, most people aren’t looking to do serious research, but rather just get a general idea of what something is about. If this trend in Arizona is indicative of where public libraries are headed, I’m not really opposed- if it gets more people in the library, and more comfortable finding books on their own, then so be it. I think this quote from blogger Michael Casey in the news story hits the nail on the head for me:

“Librarians like to think that we’re indispensable,” he said. “While I think that is true to a point, I don’t think we should continue to propagate the idea that we’re indispensable by keeping a complicated cataloging system.”