A Great Emancipator-themed iPhone app, coming to you free courtesy of the Rosenbach Museum in Philly. And an idea for better mobile museum software. More after the jump.

Brainchild of U.S. librarian of congress James H. Billington, the World Digital Library launched early this week. Increased is the internet/computer having world’s access to high quality digital representations of cultural artifacts. Novelties include browse by interactive timeline…

An encyclopedia of novelty & variety performers & showfolk.

Fat Folk, “Ethnic Curiosities”, Hairy Folk, Her or Him, Giants, Circassians, Bearded Ladies, Thin Men, Wolf Boys, Crab People, and More!!!!!!!

Brian Lehrer was talkin Museum budget cuts this morning, featuring several guests, including interviews with Laura Urbanelli of the Montclaire Art Museum and Brooklyn Museum Director Arnold Lehman. You can listen to the interview on the site.

Some things we learned:
- Limited exhibition display times (alternate days, mornings only, etc)
- Staff layoffs! (But are the directors taking pay cuts?)
- Four day workweeks, reduced hours
- Everything Must Go: current trend of “De-accessioning” material (aka selling off your collection). There are supposed to be guidelines, that are not always followed: Sell art to buy art, rather than to pay off debt.
- It’s a “Perfect Storm” of museum monetary shittiness
- “voluntary separation agreements” = buy outs

A big SD welcome to our newest contributor, Laura, coming at us LIVE from Austin Texas. Her first post, KEEP OFF THE ART, is below. Welcome Laura. We look forward to more Museum reviews and generally droppin’ the Library Science.

As to be expected of Texas, UT Austin is home to the largest university museum in the country, The Blanton.

This art museum, also known as that big building on the south edge of campus no one’s ever been in, recently re-worked an outdoor sculpture to add a heart warming invitation to interact with the work.

Perhaps this is a move toward embracing the ways of UT’s other, more famous, cultural institution the Harry Ransom Center, home of the fifteen minute training video on how to interact with the materials. Get out your freshly washed hands and book snakes.

Seriously though, does this mean no more drunk coed sing-alongs tangled in the tendrils of public art?

What we do know is that these paintings are pretty as all get-out and seriously, you should be going to this museum all the fucking time. Someday you’ll have kids and you’ll move to Connecticut and it will be boring as shit and you’ll miss the days when one of the world’s great repositories of cultural history was just a subway ride away, but you blew your chance to be a regular there because you got high or spent time with your girlfriend when you’re missing the goddamn point because you don’t seem to realize that you would enjoy being high in the Jaques and Natasha Gelman Collection, or that you could french your sweetheart upstairs while looking at the fucking Rodins which are the most erotic objects in the universe, Legends of the Fall-era Brad Pitt included. Come on in to get yelled at while learning about painting!

Just discovered B.O.M.B. — Brooklyn’s Other Museum of Brooklyn. This glorious fake Museums seems to have a real location on Wallabout street, and a bunch of “artifacts” promoting good local causes, along with other articles of vague historical import or curiosity.

We’re especially curious about the physical space itself, anyone been?

We also learned about the long-gone Wallabout Market, formerly the largest produce market on the East Coast from 1801 to 1939, before it was destroyed and swallowed up by the Navy Yards, never to return.

Great vintage photography site, Fans in a Flashbulb.

Featuring:
45 RPM
The Butchers of Fort Greene Place
Let’s Eat

and more!

Ah, the Swedish Museum of Science and Technology has acquired an old server from The Pirate Bay for their collection. Last week the founders of the ‘Bay were sentenced to a year in prison. But the site’s still up, of course. We did, however, hear that a prime investor in the site is a member of an extreme right-wing anti-immigrant party in Sweden.

The Museum’s got it right:

The museum says making copies of copyright-protected material is nothing new and that music tapes were also controversial in the 1970s.

See also: Home Taping is Killing Music

Judith Krug, Librarian Superhero, passed away on Saturday. Per the Times Obit, she fought against banned books since the 1960s, defending the public’s right to read and access “Huckleberry Finn,” “Mein Kampf,” “Little Black Sambo,” “Catcher in the Rye,” and sex manuals. More recently, she fought against restricting children’s access to the internet.

Thank you, Judith Krug. We are sure you will be missed.

Library Journal has just released a comprehensive list of ‘best of reference’ 2009. Nice! We definitely plan to reference this list of references. For cheapskates/lazy home office bloggers like us, they’ve also included best of free web reference, which we’ve copied wholesale and pasted to the inside of this post (sticky, gross).

Clickhereformorenowjustdoit