Hey, PodCamp Boston is this weekend. I can’t go, but Sean M. Brown will be and he’s looking for librarians to join him.

From Yahoo! News and Ryan Eby, there’s a funny spelling bee planned in Erlanger Kentucky:

ERLANGER, Ky. – After a five-year hiatus, the Sisters of St. Walburg Monastery in Villa Hills are ready to show whether they are superior spellers.

The sisters were champions of the annual Corporate Spelling Bee for Literacy in northern Kentucky for years before giving others a chance to win.

But now the nuns are back, even if they’re a little timid about challenging the reigning champions — a group of Boone County librarians.

“Librarians give us a scare,” said Sister Mary Carol Hellmann, who says she’s been brushing up on Latin, Greek, Hebrew and Spanish root words to prepare for the bee. Some of the other sisters say they use the Internet to practice.

Meanwhile, the librarians say victory won’t come easy now that the nuns are competing.

“They have that strong Latin background,” said Cindy Brown, director of the Boone County Library. Brown said her spelling team is made up of “voracious readers with a certain verbal attitude.”

The winners will be decided Thursday during the ninth annual bee, which is a fundraiser for a Northern Kentucky Community Action Commission program that helps adults with literacy skills. Twenty teams made up of adults from local businesses, schools and nonprofit organizations will participate.

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That’s my contribution to the Springfield Public Library meme that Michael Casey and Laura Savastinuk started over the weekend.

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The ALA’s Intellectual Freedom folks came up with this Radical, Militant Librarian button (which I found in Library Mistress’ photostream):

In recognition of the efforts of librarians to help raise awareness of the overreaching aspects of the USA PATRIOT Act, the American Library Association (ALA) Office for Intellectual Freedom (OIF) is offering librarians an opportunity to proudly proclaim their “radical” and “militant” support for intellectual freedom, privacy, and civil liberties.

Interesting, meaningful, but badly designed.

That’s why we should thank Erica, the Librarian Avenger, for coming up with a much better design, putting it on buttons and mugs and shirts (and more), and making it easier to get.

Kara says this design looks a bit like communist propaganda (in a good way), but imagine it in brass, wouldn’t it make quite a badge?

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It used to be you could identify the librarian by the sensible shoes, but times they are a changing. Witness this ad from Library Bar. Sure their “librarians” are bartenders, but what cultural shift changed to thrust librarians up the sex appeal scale?

Yeah, this is old. After all, it was the Spring 2004 of Bust Magazine that asked if librarians might be the new “it” girls, but it’s still amusing.

Ruth A. Kneale explores this at length at librarian-image.net and Monika Bargmann, Flickr’s Library Mistress has cataloged quite a collection of images of librarians in contemporary culture, like Linux Lass (and the Library Bar photo above).

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