Random Fun (Or Why I Love My Job)

I’m prepping a talk about “Librarians on the Edge” for a group of school librarians here in Virginia. Part of that prep includes reading BiblioTECH by John Palfrey, founding director of the Digital Public Library of America. I’ve spent a good bit of the morning browsing the DPLA website and am most fascinated by the app that allows you to search the site by color. Called Color Browse, the app was built by Chad Nelson who, like most humble programmers, adds all sorts of qualifiers (it’s alpha, there’s code to be cleaned up, etc.) to what is a very cool way to do a search, mainly because you get this amazing cross section of resources.

I chose yellow and besides the postcard below was directed to several copies of a magazine from North Carolina and admission tickets to Andrew Johnson’s impeachment.

Charlotte North Caroline postcard

Choosing saddle brown led to a motherlode of books, including Archer’s Barbecue Scrapbook, a collection of handbills and news articles about events where Archer’s Barbecue of Albemarle was featured.

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