Friday, October 12, 2012

Daily Thoughts 10/12/2012

"Girl reading a letter", Alfred Edward Chalon (1780-1860)

Daily Thoughts 10/12/2012

Yesterday, I read a few of the stories in At The Mouth of the River of Bees by Kij Johnson. They are absolutely unique.  They have a feeling of oddness which is a tiny bit similar to Neil Gaiman at his best.  A thing I noticed about the writing is that she does not try and explain some of the odd things that happen which makes the stories even better.

This morning, I checked the Twitter and Facebook pages for the library.

I spent some time this morning placing orders.  I also spent some time looking through the core collection lists from BWI for history and biography.  I have a copy of Booklist to read through.

The book, Makers The New Industrial Revolution by Chris Anderson has come in for me to read.  Where I surprisingly have seen some interesting things is in the world of art and music.  You too can print your own guitar http://kunc.org/post/you-too-can-print-your-own-guitar   The Metropolitan Museum of Art Recently had a 3D Hackathon http://www.metmuseum.org/about-the-museum/now-at-the-met/features/2012/hackathon  Also, there was a recent article in Wired about The San Francisco Asian Museum of Art also had a 3D Scanathon http://www.wired.com/design/2012/10/scanathon/ 

There are many examples of people making and selling things with 3D printers that are very interesting.  While I was reading about The Kickstarter Handbook by Don Steinberg, one of the project was a 3D filigree skull made using 3D printing. http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/joshharker/crania-anatomica-filigre-me-to-you

I finished reading Booklist and took some time to look at the purchase alerts and the collection management sheet for patron requests.  I also added a few donated oversize art books to the collection, one on Leonardo Da Vinci and one on Winslow Homer.  I spent a little more time reading reviews from Library Journal online.  The reviews from the online version are different from the print version.

On the way home, I read some more of At The Mouth of the River of Bees, some of the stories have traditional trickster themes in them.  I especially liked the final story of the collection The Evolution of Trickster Stories Among the Dogs of North Park After the Change as well as the story Fox Magic.  The stories seem to have a message of thinking differently about the world.

I also read some more of Makers.  Chris Anderson is arguing that 3D printing and manufacturing is very similar right now to the early stages of the personal computer revolution.  He focuses on the history of manufacturing in the first few chapters.

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