Randomly Friday:

• Since one of my primary professional passions is making old newspaper archives available online, this is pretty exciting to me. I’m a little disappointed that the demo suggests there will be no built-in mechanism either for printing or saving the content in question, but it’s still better than nothing. I assume the print and save restrictions are part of the copyright agreement wit ProQuest and (presumably) with the original publishers.
• Warning to candidates: don’t mess around with librarians. We will fuck you up. Or at least cause you mild embarrassment in a relatively polite and professional manner.
• Speaking of libraries (sort of), I ran across this interesting book in my local one the other night. It’s a good read; the author derides such modern “geniuses” as LeCorbusier, Sert, and Gehry among others not merely for having needlessly expensive and  ridiculous-looking buildings that don’t integrate with their surroundings, but also for designing buildings that don’t even serve their stated purposes well, either because of generally bad design or through astronomical maintenance requirements. It might be worth owning, methinks.
• The crazy week is over. I still have a lot of work hanging over my head, but I may be able to sneak out for a little drive this weekend, assuming gas prices don’t jump a dollar or so over the weekend like they did during Katrina.