On Summit

  On Wednesday April 1, 2026 I'll be rebooting the #library30 photo challenge and inviting people to participate in this year's event. What is it? Even though I work in a library, it's not uncommon for me (and others in the field) to look to related cultural institutions for new ideas and new perspectives. That's how #library30 happened. My wife (who worked directly with museum professionals at the time), alerted me to the #museum30 initiative that had been launched by  Magnifying Zoology  in 2017. The premise was pretty simple. Participants worked from a set of daily prompts and posted pictures on social media related to the prompt along with the #museum30 hashtag. As I followed that hashtag and saw the amazing stories that were being shared, I thought, "Libraries should do that...". And #library30 was born. A plain text list of these prompts are provided at the end of this blog post.  How does it work? All you have to do is upload a photo related to the dail...

This blog post actually has its origins in early 2020. That spring, The Metropolitan Museum of Art was hosting a major  Gerhard Richter retrospective at their Met Breuer location. Gerhard Richter is one of my favorite contemporary artists, so plans were made for a big NYC trip in June that would include the Richter retrospective and more. Then COVID happened. The Met's blockbuster retrospective, originally scheduled to run March 4 - July 5 lasted just over a week, closing, as much of the world did, after March 12. It was disappointing to be sure, but I wasn't alone there. In truth, if your dashed travel plans were the worst thing that happened over those weeks and months and years, you could rightly count yourself among the lucky. Still, it was a missed opportunity, and one that stayed with me. Fast forward five years to the late summer of 2025 when I learned that the Foundation Louis Vuitton in Paris was mounting an even bigger Gerhard Richter retrospective   ! Well, it...

I feel like I've been slacking recently in my efforts to keep up with this blog and the work that's been happening at the Akron almost-mansion. That's a testament I think to how busy I've been, and also to how weirdly routine this whole project has become. I don't want to say the novelty has worn off (the house still offers its share of surprises), but we'have fallen into some pretty regular patterns this winter. We drive the 110 miles north almost every weekend to patch, sand, prime, and paint. We spend a day and a half covering ourselves in the dust of the 20th century's finest paints, wallpapers, hardwoods, and plaster and then traverse the same 110 miles back home. We move garbage, cardboard, tools, and equipment out of one room and into another (and then out to the garage). We go up and down two flights of steps; first for the joint compound tape, then for our masks, and then again for the right screwdriver. We misplace tools only to trip over them minu...