Unshelved

Unshelved is a daily comic strip that takes a humorous look at daily life in a suburban library. Last week's story line touched on the library-vs.-internet debate and featured a series of exchanges between Dewey (the main character, a kind of hip teen librarian who's also a bit of a slacker) and Merv (a 12-year-old for whom the world revolves around video games and the internet, yet spends a lot of time at the library). In one strip, Merv was extolling all of the stuff that could be found online--podcasts, videos, news and how it was so much more interesting than the novel Dewey was reading. Dewey (who's reasonably tech-savvy himself) wasn't rising to the bait, even when Merv offered, "Want to see hamsters playing bagpipes?"--a poke at some of the zanier videos on YouTube.

You can check out Unshelved at www.unshelved.com, and sign up for a daily online installment of the comic strip.

This week's story is when the Mallville Library is a designated cooling center during a heatwave, only the library's A/C has quit...I think we've been there ourselves a time or two.

There are published collections of Unshelved, but SPL only owns 2 of them. (Consider for replacement lists, someone??)