I come across lots of interesting articles, pictures & links in my internet travels & I bookmark quite a number of them. This post is me decluttering my bookmarks [yes, I frequently organize & clean up all my bookmarks] & a lot of them were worth sharing.
I’ve decided to call these types of posts “Show & Tell” because really, what else is a personal blog, except kindergarten for grown-ups?
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What if Native Americans had been worried about spam?
Enter the Dream CAPTCHA!
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Desiger & blogger Lisa Congdon will photograph, draw or print a collection of items, everyday for a year. So far there is are collections of erasers, crayons & [my favorite] vintage pencil lead boxes. Both interesting & artistic – check it out on her blog!
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Documents from the Vatican have just been made public for the first time ever & published in the book Vatican Secret Archives .
The Vatican Secret Archives features a papal letter to Hitler, an entreaty to Rome written on birch bark by a tribe of North American Indians, and a plea from Mary Queen of Scots.
That’s just a short list of some of the unique items contained in the collection.
Check out the description of the Vatican’s archive:
Archival material created after February 1939 is kept behind a strong wire fence in the archives’ two-story underground bunker, inaugurated by Pope John Paul II in 1983.
Made of reinforced concrete, the bunker resembles an underground parking garage featuring rows of metal shelves instead of cars. The yellow lines painted on the floors do not indicate parking spaces, but are glow-in-the-dark arrows pointing to emergency exits.
It doesn’t do much to change the ‘archivists work in dark dungeons’ stereotype, but it sounds pretty cool, if not intense.
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My husband has been a long time fan of McSweeney’s publications & today he sent me a link to this [hilarious & great] essay, titled Little Housing Crisis on the Prairie. A funny, yet refreshing look at our financial system from a random & unexpected point of view.
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This May, the University of Michigan is hosting TAT: Thinking About Things
Thinking about ‘Things’ (TAT): Interdisciplinary Futures in Material Culture is a three-day international and interdisciplinary graduate student conference designed to explore material culture and the ways in which we create it, interact with it, use it, discard it, and study it
The emphasis is on preservation &, as an aspiring archivist, that’s definitely a topic I’m very interested. The conference looks really interesting & I already have one friend so far who’s going to submit a paper. There’s a very tiny part of me that is considering submitting mine [but I doubt I will].
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This quote from Thomas Merton about what makes a meaningful life has made me think. A lot. I’m still thinking.:
There is a pervasive form of contemporary violence, and that is activism and overwork. The rush and pressure of modern life are a form, perhaps the most common form, of this innate violence.
To allow oneself to be carried away by a multitude of conflicting concerns, to surrender to too many demands, to commit oneself to too many projects, to want to help everyone and everything is to succumb to violence.
The frenzy of our activism neutralizes our work for peace. It destroys our own inner capacity for peace, because it kills the root of the inner wisdom which makes work fruitful.
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This is an amazing example of using technology to help people. A institute in rural North Carolina used a geographic information system to illustrate inequalities in their community [in their case they showed how poor & minority communities were being excluded from municipal services]. Read the interesting & informative article!
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I follow a lot of great people on twitter [& you should all follow me!], but SUETheTRex [aka Specimen FMNH PR2081] is one of my absolute favorites. Who’s Sue the T-Rex? Well my clues involve telling you she lives in the Smithsonian & this is her bio “Hi. I’m Sue, I’m a Leo, I like meat, Chicago, the movie Jurassic Park, and what else? Oh yeah, I’m the world’s greatest apex predator.”
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Tomorrow, the National Archives are a featured category on Jeopardy! We don’t own a tv, so hopefully I can convince a friend to have me over & to watch it with me, but at least I can read the article about it.
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That’s all for today!
Related posts:
- The sharing of links & happiness
- Books & Archives & Things to Share!
- Are you going to share, or should I just take that?
- Archivists misrepresented on the Daily Show… but what else did you expect?
- All sorts of interesting
Tuesday, January 5th, 2010, 10:24 pm | 
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