a blog about a blog

One of my photos was used as an illustration for a blog entry on this website: See Also... A library weblog, by Steve Lawson

Here's the closing line:
But if we want to want to show them the richness of the complicated, multifaceted, multi-format environment that is the modern day academic library, I can’t think of a worse way to teach that than with newspaper obituaries.



The funny thing about this is that I took that photo while working for the Oregon Newspaper Project at the University of Oregon. We microfilmed over one hundred current titles and old issues of the Oregonian.

That microfilm ball was a long time in the making. My boss, a film aficionado and amazing photographer, was always the first to defend microfilm. "It has a shelf life of 800 years! And what if all the computers crash?!" She is actually infinitely more eloquent than my paraphrase. Afterall, she's the person who taught me the word "maven." And in context.

Now I work in a small art-based academic library and we are always looking for new and exciting ways to promote information literacy. I agree with Mr. Lawson in that forcing people to find print sources of death notices is not the way to do this. The last time a student asked after print obituaries, it was for an art project.