We are in the information-sharing business. So it is great to find new sources of information we can use to share with our communities! You might also choose to spend some time browsing around here yourself, and finding all sorts of great videos to watch!

“NASA’s Armstrong Flight Research Center is in the process of uploading hundreds of videos of rare test flight, launch, and landing footage to YouTube and the agency’s website. It’s all part of a continued effort to better open access to NASA’s archives, as well as help inform the public about the types of research and record-setting milestones the agency achieves each year across various fields of aerospace engineering. The existence of the new, update archive on YouTube and the AFRC’s website was first reported by Motherboard.

About 300 out of a total 500 clips have been uploaded to YouTube thus far, with some footage going back many decades. The clips include everything from the assembly of the D-558 Skystreak aircraft back in 1947 to a 1991 takeoff of a Lockheed Martin SR-71 stealth jet to hypersonic test flights of the unmanned NASA X-43A in 2004. Though it was first uploaded back in March, you can also find the infamous “Controlled Impact Demonstration” video in which NASA and the Federal Aviation Administration flew a Boeing 720 jet into a device that tore its wings off, resulting in a giant explosion and an hour-long fire. (It was for the purpose of testing crash survivability and performing jet fuel combustibility research.)

Prior to today, the AFRC’s video library was available only through the Dryden Aircraft Movie Collection on the website of the Dryden Flight Research Center, which was the name of the Armstrong facility before a 2014 change. Now that it’s all on YouTube, it will be indexed by Google and more easily available through the company’s search engine. For those that just want to take a tour of aerospace history, however, just heading over and clicking on a few clips is a great way to start diving in.”

Connecting with our users is always a key thing for any type of library. Figuring out what they need, and how we can provide it, will always be the right way to go in providing great service. And the Folger Shakespeare Library is not only providing some great materials – but also great service!

The Folger Shakespeare Library Will Lend Chilly Readers a Handmade Shawl

“In the reading room of the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C., researchers might spend hours carefully paging through a 16th-century pamphlet or the only surviving quarto edition of Titus Andronicus. (“If one good deed in all my life I did, I do repent it from my very soul.”) But they also have access to another unusual—if more informal—collection. Behind the reading room desk there is a vault where the staff keeps a small lending library of handmade shawls.

Three of the shoulder coverings are knitted and two crocheted. The blue one is longer and lighter; the brown one, the newest addition, has pockets. One circular shawl has rings of different colors, and another with light, spring colors is a little bit thicker and larger. The original shawl, the one that started the collection, is a sandy brown. All five are the work of Rosalind Larry, the room’s head of circulation, who made them, often on her lunch hour, during her many years at the library.

Larry started knitting the first shawl in the 1980s, after the library was remodeled and the reading room expanded. Not long before, she had seen a colleague making baby booties and thought she might like to learn to knit. “She showed me how, and at first I was terrible at it,” Larry says. But soon she grew more ambitious, and when she had some yarn she wanted to use up, she thought she might make herself a shawl, since it always felt cold in the reading room.”

(read the rest of this article here!)

Remember your first day in your library job? Hopefully it was fun, you met nice people, started to settle in, and maybe it was a little bit scary. (I could be projecting – that was my first day here!)

But it’s pretty safe to assume your first day was nothing like Abby Noland’s first day!

(see the entire article here!)

“Abby Noland’s years of experience working in libraries prepared her for anything. So when she found artillery shells in a closet on her first day of work at the Gleason Public Library in Massachusetts, she did not panic. She calmly called the police. She later told The Boston Globe, “I’ve been a director of libraries for a long time, and this kind of strange stuff just happens.”

The artillery shells were left in a bin at the bottom of her new closet. On the bin was a note that an expert had inspected the contents and decided they might be live.

Two hours after local police responded, the State Police Bomb Squad arrived. They agreed with the inspector—the shells were in fact live. To prevent a catastrophe, they brought them to a sand dune behind the Department of Public Works building, and detonated them.

Later, the Gleason Public Library concluded that the munitions dated to the Civil War and had been donated to the town of Carlisle, where the Gleason Public Library resides, in 1916. But they never received a permanent home, and their existence had been forgotten.

Through it all, Noland maintained her sense of humor. After the incident, she joked to her new coworkers: “If you want to get rid of me, there are more subtle ways.””