How happy I am to see the mission statement of the Ministry of Reshelving evolve and expand to include such delightful interventions as Mary Hodder's and Betsy Devine's relocation of uberblogger Robert Scoble's book NAKED CONVERSATIONS to the art section. As the reshelvers put it: "Oh, look, Mary, it's _Naked Conversations_. But why did the Harvard Bookstore shelve it with the business books? Let's bring it over here with some books that have lots of photos of naked people." Love it!
This is exactly what real-world social bookmarking, the core of the Reshelving project, is all about. Folksonomy in real-media spaces. Design your own mission. Reshelve for your own delight. Reclassify as your own, self-designed statement. When it launched, true, the singular mission involving 1984 was a bit... heavy-handed, perhaps. But catchy enough to get the source code for the Reshelving project out there. Even the intelligent design folks reshelving evolutionary theory books to "Science Fiction" get a Colbert-inspired tip of the hat. By the way, as long as we're doing Reshelving updates... I wanted to comment that although I hoped to collect the evidence and stories of reshelving missions in a central location (the Flickr group), the vast majority of participants staged the action on their own blogs and forums, or simply submitted it directly to me via email. So it turns out to be quite a distributed network of interventions that currently is best explored through Google and technorati searches... and my Inbox. I still get nearly daily emails from people who are engaging with the project.
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I know it's not entirely related to naked books, but my husband and I reshelved several more copies of 1984 a few weeks ago... the Ministry lives on, even in Uglyhoma. Thought you'd like to know.
http://haikuoftheid.blogspot.com
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