January 2011
17 posts
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The Secret Life of Vladimir Nabokov
Nabokov said that if his family hadn’t been forced into exile, he would have become a full-time lepidopterist. He would have studied butterflies.
He studied butterflies anyway. In fact, he was actually curator of lepidoptera at the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard University.
However, many lepidopterists did not take his ideas seriously, and often scoffed at them. It turns out that...
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The Toronto Public Library began its “Human Library” project in November with about 200 users registering to “check out” interesting persons from the community who would sit and converse with patrons who might not otherwise have the opportunity to mingle with people like them. The first day’s lend-outs, for a half-hour at a time, included a police officer, a...
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This article is an example of librarians gone wrong. The National Archives reports that one of their historians admitted to using a fountain pen to change the date on a presidential pardon that Lincoln had issued to a military deserter, in order to make it appear to be a significant historical find. Another archivist had thought it looked different than the other documents on display and finally...
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The reCAPTCHA Project →
CAPTCHAs are those annoying blurred words you have to type in the little box when you buy tickets to prove that you are not a robot. Well, guess what? Besides providing a security, they have another purpose.
You users are helping to digitize the thousands of books with unreadable words. You basically are deciphering those words which are tagged as unreadable, thus helping to preserve human...
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Library of Congress: Digital Collections →
This is another exceptionally important resource to know about. Not many people have realized that many institutions are digitizing their collections and posting them online. If you go to a University like I do, you probably have access to their digital collections.
The Library of Congress has been doing the same, archiving their collections online so that everyone around the world can access and...
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World Digital Library →
I was reminded of this website today when talking to a friend. From the website, “the World Digital Library (WDL) makes available on the Internet, free of charge and in multilingual format, significant primary materials from countries and cultures around the world.” This was started by a team at the Library of Congress, and features materials from around the world, so that users can...
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“The feeling, a paradoxical mix of pulsing energy and profound peace, was intense...”
– The Life of Pi, Yann Martel
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“One day — it was the day after the C.I.D. man’s first visit —...”
– Catch-22, Joseph Heller.
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Library of Congress Receives Mile of Music From... →
The Library of Congress has received a donation of at least 200,000 metal, glass, and lacquer recordings from the subterranean vaults of Universal Music Group.
This is AWESOME. These recordings date from about 1926-1948, and contain the masters from such greats as Bing Crosby, Ella Fitzgerald, and so on. They’re hoping that if this goes well, they will eventually gain 60s recordings,...
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A recent edition of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is offending literary purists everywhere. Why, you may ask?
Well, Twain scholar Alan Gribben and NewSouth Books are planning to release Huck in a single volume along with The Adventures of Tom Sawyer.
Eliminating the n-word. And replacing it with the word “slave”. They are taking pains to eliminate “injun” as well; not...
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Check out The Moth! This is a regularly held performance, dedicated to the craft of storytelling. Storytellers get up, and tell a quick story about an event that happened to them. Most of these are interesting. Some are hilarious, some are heartbreaking. The Moth has expanded to several different events — there is a mainstage regular performance in New York City, storytelling SLAM contests...