Librarians

A lot of contestants have come and gone on “Jeopardy,” but Margaret Miles officially walked away with our hearts.  Miles is a librarian working at the New Hanover County Public Library in Wilmington, North Carolina who appeared on Thursday’s episode of “Jeopardy.” Alex Trebek couldn’t help but ask Miles more about her life when she was leading mid-show with $7,600. 

There’s been a growing trend in libraries for several years to create maker spaces — places where cutting-edge creative activities such as computer-aided design, robotics, programming, circuitry and audio-visual editing take their place alongside low-tech crafts like sewing and jewelry-making. 

“Certainly it focuses on technology, which is new,” said Multnomah County Library director Vailey Oehlke, who is also the president of the National Public Library Association. “But I’d also suggest that libraries have a long history of responding to the ways in which community and the world around us is changing. There’s a need in our community for people to understand these new skills.”

From Oregon Libraries Invest In Cutting-Edge Maker Labs . Radio | OPB

But, we’re not as great at dealing with our patrons’ digital interactions. We’re not as great at making sure their web transactions are secure, we’re not as great at making sure their wifi transactions are secure, that they can browse the internet securely. And so there’s this awesome project called the Library Freedom Project, which is all about raising awareness about that issue, number one, but number two actually giving libraries the tools that they need in order to do this. I mean we’re a democracy and so part of that is that everybody is equal to every other person. And you deserve, you know, the same rights to life, liberty, pursuit of happiness, that kind of thing, as everybody else gets. But in reality we’re a very tiered system where people who are more rich or more powerful have access to more and better services, more and better access to things, to tools, to jobs — as well, to obscure stuff like privacy.

From Library freedom, free speech and the freedom to tinker — Medium

Amanda Brennan is a librarian for the Internet. Her career in meme librarianism began in graduate school at Rutgers, where she received a master’s in library science.

But instead of heading to a brick-and-mortar library, Brennan continued documenting online phenomena at Know Your Meme and then at Tumblr, where she solidified her profession as information desk for doge, mmm whatcha say and the other viral Internet sensations in need of classification, categorization and preservation.

Here's the meme-ish story from the Washington Post.