Tuesday, January 19, 2010

Betty Turock Kicks Off ALA Scholarship Fund-Raising With $100K Donation

Betty Turock, past president of the American Library Association and a professor and dean emerita at Rutgers, has donated $100,000 to provide scholarships to MLS candidates from traditionally underrepresented groups. She made the donation as a challenge toward a $1 million goal.

For more information please see the news article.

For more about Betty please see her Friends of Rutgers School of Communication and Information entry and a 2001 ALA news release about a scholarship in her name funded by her family.

Wednesday, January 6, 2010

Erik the Librarian Mysteries on YouTube

Ego-surfing led me to the Erik the Librarian channel on YouTube (also on Blip.tv). There is a slight physical resemblance between the actor Erik Charles Neilson and me (and we share first and middle names, too, with just one letter's difference!). I just hope I'm a little less insane than the character.

Erik the Librarian is a 60Frames original series, but you'll notice that the 60Frames site is down. The OfficeTally blog tells us that Brent Forrester from NBC-TV's The Office writes and directs Erik the Librarian. And the lovely and talented Mindy Kaling (Kelly Kapoor on The Office) plays a patron who suffers through Erik's rants.

It looks like there's just the four Erik episodes, uploaded about a year ago.

— Eric Charles Schwarz
(another Eric the Librarian but no relation to Erik)