Michaels Stephens and Habib

Michaels Stephens and Habib, originally uploaded by jblyberg.

Thanks to John Blyberg for catching this photo. The OLA Super Conference was great. It was nice spend some face-to-face time with Michael after working with him on the TechSource interview. It was also nice to see John again so soon after his response to the interview.

“Librarian of Basra” puppet show

Patrons at the Library of Basra

Yesterday I was fortunate to attend the Paperhand Puppet Intervention’sAs the Crow Flies: Tales From Four Directions“. Danielle Latman, took a number of photos that I have now uploaded to my Flickr account.

The fourth and last part of the show was a puppet rendition of Jeannette Winter’s book “The Librarian of Basra“. For obvious reasons, we took particular care to document that part. Above is the first image from the series. If you click here and follow the photo stream, the photos and their titles will share (part of) the story of Alia Muhammad Baker, the librarian of Basra. (If you play the slideshow, the captions will be lost.)

“The Librarian of Basra” tells the true story of how Alia, a librarian in Basra, took steps to protect the books in her library both leading up to and during the War in Iraq.

While not related to libraries, the third part, “Seeing with New Eyes”, was also very impressive and featured a 20ft+ Buddha. Below is a picture of the giant Buddha in a battle of wills with a giant demon, Mara.

Buddha is surrounded by Mara and his Demons

You can view all of the photos from the puppet show here.

If you are in the Triangle region, the show runs through the weekend of Sept. 8-9. You can find details about showtimes here.

Technorati tags: Iraq Basra puppets Paperhand librarian librarians