Read alikes

check out the Read Alikes section at Book Browse for the ultimate in computer-aided book recommendations.

Wikipedia FAQ for librarians

FAQ about Wikipedia, for librarians and the information community.

Twain tells all

Here's the gist of it from The Independent:

The creator of Tom Sawyer, Huckleberry Finn and some of the most frequently misquoted catchphrases in the English language left behind 5,000 unedited pages of memoirs when he died in 1910, together with handwritten notes saying that he did not want them to hit bookshops for at least a century.

That milestone has now been reached, and in November the University of California, Berkeley, where the manuscript is in a vault, will release the first volume of Mark Twain's autobiography.

Librarians pass beer test

Very flattering article about librarians by Thomas Benton in Chronicle of Higher Education.

Frank Zappa goes wild with Windows XP

I'm always tickled to find blogs that include a picture of me in their masthead, and more than happy to promote them;  Visit Unexpectedly Bart now!

Bart King's blog has lots of intriguing bric-a-brac about catching positions and other things. And this arrangement of Windows error messages would have made Frank Zappa (the no-nonsense FZ of "Hot Rats" that is) proud:

Librarian wannabe

Librarian wannabe Keith Richards says: “When you are growing up there are two institutional places that affect you most powerfully: the church, which belongs to God, and the public library, which belongs to you. The public library is a great equaliser." John Harlow writes in the Times that Richards has has even considered “professional training” to manage thousands of books at his homes in Sussex and Connecticut. "He started to arrange the volumes, including rare histories of early American rock music and the second world war, by the librarian’s standard Dewey Decimal classification system but gave up on that as “too much hassle.” Amen.

A history of timelines

1753 -- Jacques Barbeu-Dubourg's 54-foot-long "Chronographie universelle," mounted on two cranks and enclosed in a case. This one, at Princeton University, still works.

An enthusiastic review of Cartographies of Time, by Daniel Rosenberg and Anthony Grafton.

Around the world in 80 seconds

If 80 seconds strains your attention span, here is an abbreviated version from dvdp (p.s. - be sure to follow dvdp for a daily dose of amazement)

Full books

www.fullbooks.com has thousands of e-books(html), classics as well as obscure things; Rasselas Prince of Abbysinia, The Golden Bowl, Recollections of my Childhood and Youth by Georg Brandes were all there, but there's no information at all about the site, which makes me wonder about its legitimacy. Books are arranged alphabetically by title, and so search options (though of course you can use Google and site:www.fullbooks.com)