Friday, September 5, 2008

Link of the Week: MaintainIT

Finally, a place for public libraries to share information, tips and tricks for dealing with their technology:

http://www.maintainitproject.org/

Things I like about it:
  • The language is accessible for the techies, but non-intimidating for the non-techies.
  • It's full of lots of different kinds of information, from print-like publications to webinars to audio interviews with various folks, which is sparkles my interest.
  • the design seems highly functional. The color scheme makes me a little crazy, but it didn't stop me from being drawn into the website and finding interesting stuff.

Monday, September 1, 2008

Museum of Jurassic Technology


While in Denver last month, I visited the Denver Zine Library and saw a short documentary on the 'Museum of Jurassic Technology' located in Culver City, California. It is an entirely different pretext of creating a public event, part science, part art, part question, and part answer. On one of their sites, they comment:

"The rarest and most precious knowledge is not that which is imposed, but rather, that which is absorbed, inhaled almost, from the ephemeral substance of the world in which we are contained."

Unfortunately, I have the feeling none of these sites successfully capture the nature, the aboutness of this enterprise. It plays upon that which we already know and take for granted, and push those assumptions to their edge, twisting them just slightly into the realm of myths, but rooted in a level of childlike wonder for the complexity of the world.

If this Museum of Jurassic Technology merges the lines where science and myths intersect under the name of 'museum', what would a library along the same pretext look like?