Happy Friday! I’m so excited that it is almost the weekend, even if the weekend is supposed to be gloomy and rainy. So today, dear readers, we are going to throw away any pretense of this being a blog post of great substance on the issues of the day in library and archives land. Instead, this post is to get you ready for the weekend, armed with fun (and helpful) tidbits and goodies to share with whomever you cross paths. Yes, it is a classically random Friday post. Did you expect anything less?

First, something very important and good to share with your family, friends, and library patrons: Give them Lifehacker’s article on how to give to Japanese recovery efforts without getting scammed. Good cause, better if your money actually makes it to those who need it.

If somehow you missed it on Twitter this morning, the videos from Personal Digital Archiving Conference 2011 are now available on the Internet Archive. There are many interesting talks and I highly suggest listening to them, especially if anything I wrote while summarizing them last month didn’t make sense.

In exciting library publishing news, College & Research Libraries is going fully open access. To this I say, yay and it’s about time. Also, could we please make the UI better? It looks a bit wonky in Chrome.

Speaking of open access journals, I have to give props to Evidence Based Library and Information Practice which has always been (so far as I know) open access. Plus it publishes some great research articles, although I may be a bit biased as this journal published my first article and I am on their evidence summaries team. But really, it’s a great journal and the latest issue just came out, so go take a look.

This is something fun to share with your friends (and get a wee bit competitive about who does better on the test, if that’s your thing): The Cambridge Face Memory Test. Take the test to see how good you really are at facial recognition. (This one’s for the people I know who say they are excellent at faces, but quite bad with names. Let me know how you do.)

Lifehacker Night School has done it again. Check out the latest course on Digital Painting 101.

And finally, if you have people coming over in the near-ish future and it is as gloomy where you live as it is in the Bay Area, consider making Chipotle Black Bean Pizza. It sounds yummy and warming, plus who doesn’t like pizza?

Have a lovely weekend, filled with fun, relaxation, and reading. I plan on it. I’ll be back next week with actual thoughts on libraries, archives, tech, and other randomness. Allons-y!