Prom Photos!

Here are a few of my photo-booth photo's from Librarian Prom - as you can tell we has an amazing time! More photos from Prom can be found on our Flickr Page.

Tattooed Librarians, on the radio...

As I mentioned last month, it has been awesome seeing where the Tattooed Librarians of the Pacific Northwest Calendar has been popping up. Seeing it on a librarian's blog from the Netherlands was exciting, but today's discovery blew that out of the water:

Ziba Z, a distance-learning library student with University Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, stumbled across our calendar on the internet, she tracked down the cover girl, Amber, and finagled aninterview with her....

...and it's awesome.

They talk about Amber's journey into librarianship, the intersection of social justice and public libraries, Seattle, music, Amber's alternative identity as DJ Dewey Decimal and (of course) Tattoos.

Be sure to check out the other radio shows on Ziba's awesome blog.

And Ziba, if you're out there, the world would love to see a Tattooed Librarians of California Calendar (and I think a zebra tattoo would be rad, too) !!

we've gone global...

Not long ago, I posted about a fund-raising campaign that my cohort was conducting, raising funds for graduation: The 2011 Tattooed Librarians of the Pacific Northwest Calendar. So far we've made a couple of hundred dollars, so it's been a success (don't worry, there are still plenty of months left to fill with beautiful ink and intelligent young librarians, so you should buy yours today!). One of my favorite parts of this project has been watching where on the internet it's been popping up.

For example, it was featured on two of my favorite blogs: The Swiss Army Librarian and Needles and Sins. An overarching goal of the project (other than making us money) was ensuring that it was accepted in both the library community and the tattoo community, and seeing that calendar on these two blogs confirmed our success.

I think my favorite spot we discovered the calendar being promoted (and certainly the most surprising) was Bibliothecaris in blog, Dutch librarian/writer Laurent Meese's blog:


They always tell you to be careful what you put out on the internet, because you never know where it might end up. Logically, this makes sense, but it is still surprising when it happens to you. Thankfully, this sort of surprise was super positive, proof that our calendar now has a global reach (I just hope that folks across the pond are purchasing our calendar)!

I wanted to confirm the language this blog was written in and read what was actually said about the calendar. So I hoped over to Google Translate, and it was pretty easy to copy and paste the text. He is what Mr. Meese had to say:

Tattooed librarians, it is not an oxymoron. The students of Emporia State Master of Library and Information Science give a remarkable calendar for charity, namely himself. They should, has recently paid for their graduation and thus to generate some income. The calendar shows no traditional librarians pads with a bun but trendy birds with tattoos and piercings. DiVenti photographer Lisa took this funny pictures of the prospective librarians in the Pacific Northwest College of Art Library. The calendar costs 25 U.S. dollars. Last year there was a similar project with the Texas Library Association and their 2010 calendar "The TattooedLadies of TLA . A new fad is born, so it seems.

...Trendy birds with tattoos and piercings, indeed! Obviously not the best translation, but enough the get the feel. Thank you, Mr. Meese, for helping us with our cause (ourselves) and spreading the gospel of tattooed librarians!

PS: If anyone knows of any great plugins for FireFox that offer great translating features, please share!

Tattooed Librarians of the Pacific Northwest

One of the great things about attending a distance learning program is that our cohort has the autonomy of planning our own graduation ceremony. However, with great privilege comes great responsibility: we have to pay for it ourselves.

To try and circumvent this (if we're already in debt for the degree, we don't want to have to pay for anything else), the graduation committee has come up with a nifty little fund-raising campaign:

The Tattooed Librarians of the Pacific Northwest 2010-2011 Calender!!

This has been quite the endeavor putting it together, but we are really proud of the end product. We are selling them through a print-on-demand website, you can check out our online shop here: zazzle.com.nyssaj

We know at $25 dollars it's a little spendy: we had to add on a royalty so we could actually raise funds through the calender. But, if you band together with friends, the more calenders you buy, the cheaper it is - and we still get our royalties!!

So please check it out, and if you like what you see: help us out and buy one!! They make great gifts and are the perfect calender to spice up any drab office wall!!