I’ve been looking for this for a long time. I hope I remember to use it when the need arises. Have you ever been stumped by a drive you just cannot eject because it is “in use?” You’d be happy to stop the “use” buy you have no idea where it is coming from? Then “What’s Keeping Me?” may be what you need.

Some creative stop-motion for lunchtime.

Beware, some of the other films made by PES are not quite so tame.

I was creating a simple mosaic at my mother’s house on Kelley’s Island this past week. I have not worked with tile in over a year. I miss it and was really happy to be getting my hands dirty again.

Tile is fairly unforgiving. Hard to shape. Easy to break. While learning to make curves with the wet saw I got to thinking:

The perfect is not the enemy of the good,
it is the enemy of the beautiful!
Embrace the happy accident.

We spend a lot of time trying to perfect things, especially in libraries. We are fond of order and authority. We insist that systems perform flawlessly. We are perfectionists. Technology for libraries is hard, at least as hard as cutting tile. Developing services for faculty and students is an ever-evolving challenge. We don’t have time to perfect, in fact, when we try we miss the boat.

But we all want to be proud of our work, to feel we have done our best. Beauty is often born of the “happy accidents” of brush stroke, blade, or muse. If we are awake to those accidents, open to them, ready to flow with them rather than against them, to find out where they lead. Accidents often lead to interesting resolutions we might not have thought of. They can point the way to simpler solutions, exciting opportunities. They can provide a natural spontaneity that elicits wonder from the viewer or users. They can be delightful.

Insisting on perfection makes little room for this sort of beauty. I think we should work on being open to the happy accident, embracing its beauty in our work, bringing some wonder to the eyes of our community.

Noelle told me about this, but I just found it today. It looks like a few people have found out where (the hell) Matt is, and they are dancing along with him.

I’ve enjoyed Matt’s earlier videos, if you have not seen them, they are worth a look. I defy to to hold back the smile!

Tim Spauling of Librarything has put out a call for an open classification system for public libraries.

The Dewey Decimal System® was great for its time, but it’s outlived that. Libraries today should not be constrained by the mental models of the 1870s, doomed to tinker with an increasingly irrelevant system. Nor should they be forced into a proprietary system—copyrighted, trademarked and licensed by a single entity—expensive to adopt and encumbered by restrictions on publishing detailed schedules or coordinating necessary changes.

He notes that the effort is focused on publics because academics would have a much harder time moving large collections to a new scheme and the LC system already widely in use by academics is already in the public domain.

Check out Build the Open Shelves Classification if you are interested in helping out. Is OCLC really doing such a poor job with DDC?

If you are mashing up some video for YouTube you might want to review Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for Online Video, a report just published by the Center for Social Media at American University. ArsTechnica has a nice summary.

I tracked the tweets out of the PDF2008 meeting and it looked like a great event. Many of the keynotes (Edwards, Lessing, Zittrain, and more) are up at pdf.blip.tv. (Hat tip to techPresident.)

This weekend we made sure to catch the latest beauty from Pixar. Wall-E is wonderful. I highly recommend it.

I love the “day at work” clip in the videos tab, which delights with its music as it lets Wall-E show you a normal lonely but happy day on Earth.