Just a few links that I spotted from libraries doing Halloweeny stuff.
- Ann Arbor District Library pumpkins
- Alien Bowling at the library Halloween party
- Not quite the library, but Statistics Canada does an annual creepy stats roundup about this time. Here’s Halloween b the numbers, found at the canuck librarian.
- Come to the library… if you DARE, a photo set from the Manatee County Public Library in Florida
- University of Iowa Libraries put up a Halloween Digital Collection of the spookiest bits from their stacks
- a blog post discussing Roald Dahl’s Revolting Recipes. I mention this specifically because their blog gets to do what many library blogs can’t do and that is link directly to the item in the library’s catalog. Yay GA PINES!
I had fun noodling around making this list. One of the benefits of having been around the blog block a few times is that I can remember looking at libraries doing Halloween stuff, at least a little, back in 2000. There were almost no libraries with blogs, Flickr didn’t exist yet, and the whole idea of the read/write web was sort of a hazy shimmer on the horizon. While you’ll notice in that old post that Karen Schneider was already writing about our profession with her way with words (in the NY Times!) and Marylaine Block — who has a great recent column on party people in libraries creating community — was advising people to give books instead of candy for Halloween, it was still a small-seeming web. So, without turning this into another “blah blah library 2.0” cheer, let me just say that I think it’s gratifying to see this explosion on not just user-generated content, but library-generated content. I hope the next seven years are just as fruitful and fascinating.