sunday tidbits

One of my favorite feeds is the NYT Obits. Yesterday’s crop included that of Elizabeth Kals Reilley, librarian, scholar, and collector of horticulture. Read this and tell me her legacy isn’t ridiculously glamorous, exciting, and inspiring. And yes, she held an actual MLS.

I was familiar with Good magazine through Gawker’s borderline-obsessive coverage, but hadn’t actually seen it until someone (with outside income?) left it around the library breakroom. The winter issue had this piece on the ARChive of Contemporary Music, which mentioned that the impetus for its founding was the fact that no established archive would take his massive and valuable record collection. (He’s since entered negotiations with Columbia.)

ArchivesNext had this post last week that asked why archives weren’t part of popular culture. Maybe it should start with more archives (and not just EMP and Bowling Green and a handful of other designated Pop sites) learning to understand and handle products of contemporary culture. Besides, it’s also an emerging workforce issue, because I have firsthand data that says that a large fraction of the white girls flocking to library school these days have current or prior experience as “record nerd girlfriends”, “movie nerd girlfriends”, and even “comic nerd girlfriends” and thus have been lectured extensively on proper care and handling of such materials.

Newly Registered

Would you be crazy to crank up “The Osage Bank Robbery,” episode of “The Lone Ranger” (December 17, 1937); “The Button-Down Mind of Bob Newhart,” Bob Newhart (1960); “The Wailers Burnin’,” The Wailers (1973); and “Graceland,” Paul Simon (1986) on your IPod? Possibly, but you might also be paying homage to the 2006 National Recording Registry of the Library of Congress. This year’s list brings the total to 225 recordings deemed “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant,” and that will be preserved forever and ever and ever.