"I like the dreams of the future better than the history of the past…"

Digital Culture

This is from

This is from Neil Gaiman's blog, after seeing an exerpt on Librarian.net.

I'd LOVE to have a Lucien figure…I'd keep him on my desk, to help me be a good librarian. 🙂
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Speaking as a librarian who is surrounded by librarians at work who are offended by this new librarian action figure, I can only say that perhaps it's time librarians across the board discovered the value of a good custom repaint on an action figure….
Hoping to make mine look rather delirious and get a Shakespeare one to go with so the two of them can have interesting conversations,
Anita

I wonder if they ever had this trouble when they did the Diskworld Librarian statues. (“We are not all orang-utans.”) It certainly makes me wish that DC would do a Lucien the Librarian Action figure for librarians everywhere.

Of course, if the whole point of the offended librarians is that librarians can, and, wisely, do, look like anyone, then any action figure would do. (“Isn't that a Gandalf toy?” “Nope it's a librarian. One with a hat and a beard.” “And he's next to a… Bettie Page toy?” “Nope. Just a cute, half-naked librarian with a big smile and a Bettie Page haircut.”)

By griffey

Jason Griffey was most recently the Director of Strategic Initiatives at NISO, where he worked to identify new areas of the information ecosystem where standards expertise was useful and needed. Prior to joining NISO in 2019, Jason ran his own technology consulting company for libraries, has been both an Affiliate at metaLAB and a Fellow and Affiliate at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University, and was an academic librarian in roles ranging from reference and instruction to Head of Library IT and a tenured professor at the University of TN at Chattanooga.

Jason has written extensively on technology and libraries, including multiple books and a series of full-periodical issues on technology topics, most recently a chapter in Library 2035 - Imagining the Next Generation of Libraries by Rowman & Littlefield. His latest full-length work Standards - Essential Knowledge, co-authored with Jeffery Pomerantz, was published by MIT Press in March 2025.

He has spoken internationally on topics such as artificial intelligence & machine learning, the future of technology and libraries, decentralization and the Blockchain, privacy, copyright, and intellectual property. A full list of his publications and presentations can be found on his CV.
He is one of eight winners of the Knight Foundation News Challenge for Libraries for the Measure the Future project (http://measurethefuture.net), an open hardware project designed to provide actionable use metrics for library spaces. He is also the creator and director of The LibraryBox Project (http://librarybox.us), an open source portable digital file distribution system.

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