Library News

Harvard senior thesis project

On the heels of the Harvard faculty mandate for open access to their scholarly work, Harvard students have created a website for posting freely accessible copies of seniors’ theses. More specifically, this website was developed by the Harvard College Free Culture group, a local chapter of Students for Free Culture, a national organization inspired by, among other things, Stanford law professor Lawrence Lessig’s book Free Culture. For more background, see this lively discussion of the Harvard faculty mandate on the Chronicle’s news blog.

Barcodes in art & design

I came upon this really cool blog post at Dark Roasted Blend, a site devoted to “weird & wonderful things”. Well this is pretty wonderful. Usually when you see barcodes, you think of consumerism and mass-produced objects that lack individual character, so this post refreshing for me personally. The cute barcode designs at the beginning are distinctly Japanese, and they actually ended up being used on packaging for grocery items. When you scroll down to the designs created by Art Lebedev, a Russian design studio, the barcode is translated into several arrangements with different objects with a long, vertical structure such as icicles and kebab skewers. Further down are examples of the barcode being used on as large a scale as the facade of a building and just below is it being used on a small scale as composite of barcodes to create a photorealistic work.

The Story of Stuff

This is probably the most delightful video I’ve seen in at LEAST two days. It talks about the environmental and social impact that occurs at each stage of the production/consumption of goods. It’s cute and funny and personable, but it also goes remarkably in-depth into the issue of, as Annie Leonard calls it, ‘Stuff’. This little video covers where it (stuff) comes from, how it’s processed, how it’s consumed, and how it’s discarded – things that are easily forgotten in that intial flush of excitement after purchasing a new little ipod or trinket. It makes me very guilty about my own obscene, unnecessary collection of random stuff. Just last night, for example, I bought seven sheets of handmade artisan wrapping papers from Papyrus. Why? No reason other than they were pretty (they really are so incredibly pretty) – and now they are sitting on my shelf as glaring, accusatory reminders of my own role as significant contributor to society’s manic, superfluous consumption of ‘stuff’. Sigh. http://www.storyofstuff.com/