Laughing Kookaburras and Preserved Fetuses

Thank god the Museum of Animal Perspectives exists to post videos of what it looks like to walk through the woods from the top of a wolf’s head. But actually, this one is pretty good: Laughing Kookaburras

GO WORLD

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…

museum as retail

Here’s a new one: a revolving online collection and gallery of old paperback books, hosted via Etsy. They are for sale, of course, and as one leaves, a new book replenishes the gallery. A neat idea, by a seller named Librarycopy.

Related:
The Repetitive Pattern Paperback Book Cover pool on Flickr
So Much Pileup: Graphic Design Artifacts from the 1960s-1980s.

We stand on the shoulders of midgets

The Museum of Folly (MoFo) is our favorite new Fake Museum (aka Online Museum aka Blog as Museum). A droll celebration and catalogue of FAIL, they recently relocated from the basement of a civic parking garage to a starchitect-designed mega-facility, housing their collection of 2,639,934 objects. We are proud to announce that a public-private partnership funded the buildings.

Highlights from the collection:
+ Golf Ball, 2008 (Found in the rough and once struck by Andrew Giuliani)
+ Picasso, Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, 1990s (Reproduction, written up as a great work of art by an “Art Historian” seeking to quantify significance by counting text-book reproductions)

In their own words:
The Museum of Folly is widely recognized as the world’s foremost museum dedicated to educating an international audience about the contributions of clowns, jesters, oafs, and fools to the art and history of idiocacy, wrongheadedness, farce, and foolishness.

We would like to nominate our crummy webhost, lunarpages, whose servers were down for a while yesterday, for accession to the Museum. Perhaps we could donate some of the strands of hair we pulled out to the collection.

collecting what museums and libraries don’t

For collectors whose collections will never see the hallowed halls of a museum but just might interest someone on the web, there’s the Public Collectors project. We’re in like with this smart, simple site, which has its share of weird and ‘why-would-you-ever’ collections.

Our favorites from the digital collections section:
Face Painting Options in Mexico City
Documentation of Childhood Graffiti From Antique Sources
Documentation of Bibles Stolen From Hotels

digital LIFE

Whoa. Millions of photos from LIFE magazine are all online at google images. A promotional page is here, but use search filter source: life with whatever search term you like. We are reading (and loving) the Grapes of Wrath right now, so we’re digging this 1930s migrant search.

Wish they would scan the ads, too.

The Iceman Scanneth

There’s little we like more than old weird medical exhibits (as long as they don’t use the bodies of prisoners and charge $40 to get in, you know who you are). Combine that with high-res images and a nice lil’ zooming interface and you’ve got online collection gold! It’s Iceman Photoscan, and it’s on your computer, now.

Strangely, there’s little written info on the site about The Iceman himself.

Also: a 3d feature and a section devoted to the dude’s tattoos.

And: This organization must have the coolest (no pun intended) name ever, for they are THE INSTITUTE FOR MUMMIES AND THE ICEMAN.

not-so-run-of-the-milwaukee

The UW Milwaukee library has a Nurse Romance Cover of the Week online archive. And there are a LOT of weeks. Oh my gosh, so many weeks, I think I may have to take my time and count them all, one at a time, full image search.

Please note how we feature a cover in which the woman in question is a Doctor, not a nurse lusting after some skeezy male Doc. Feminism lives y’all.

Found via @archivesbitch on twitter, who rightly asks, Why can’t there be an Archivists Romance Cover of the Week Archive?