A snack for researchers, historians, and the curious

A resource that holds promise for both professional and amateur hunter-gatherers is the Social Networks and Archival Context Project (SNAC)  - see article in the Chronicle and try out the prototype.

Higher education rankings

Rankings are always fun, even when woefully inaccurate (Norway's hapless football squad was in October 1993 ranked number 2 in the world by FIFA!), and this month sees the release of two higher education rankings: The Times Higher Education Supplement ranking of world universities, and an interesting newcomer, a ranking by U21 of countries (not institutions) that are the ‘best’ at providing higher education.

The ranking by U21 "aims to highlight the importance of creating a strong environment for higher education institutions to contribute to economic and cultural development, provide a high-quality experience for students and help institutions compete for overseas applicants."  Norway is ranked 7 in the world in the U21 survey, but behind Nordic neighbors Sweden, Finland and Denmark. The high ranking suggests that Norway has much to offer other than the quality of its institutions, since its top 4 universities - Oslo, Bergen, Trondheim and Tromsø - come in at 181, 191, 251-75 and 276-300 respectively in the Times ranking.

Literature at its wurst = literaturwurst

A lover of literature can’t help feeling that—as the conventions of the paper book have come under the interrogation of the visual arts—poetry, rhetoric, narrative, and meaning have often suffered.

So ends Michael Agresta's engaging and handsomely appointed  article in Slate about how the design of the paper book may evolve in the age of digital content. A wurst case outcome (can't help myself) might be German artist Dieter Roth’s literaturwurst -  Georg Wilhelm Hegel's complete works in 20 volumes ground up and used as a substitute for meat in a recipe for homemade sausage.

  Or, we might see more successful blendings of literary and visual arts, like this one:

An uncommonly beautiful and finely woven piece of fabric, from IRCs all over the world. Wish someone would fashion me a shirt out of that!

In a letter to the editor (NYT), director Valerie Hotchkiss of the Rare Book & Manuscript Library at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champagne shares some sites that chronicle "eureka moments" in the rare book world.

Non Solus blog at the University of Illinois: nonsolusblog.wordpress.com.

The Biblio File at the New York Public Library: http://www.nypl.org/voices/blogs/about-nypl-blogs. 

Brown University's blog space for reporting on new finds among old books: blogs.brown.edu/bulspecialcollections.

In a review of some recent books on English usage, Joan Acocella provides a useful survey of the descriptivist vs. prescriptivist battles. She omits two of my favorite installments, however; Nicholson Baker's "Leading with the Grumper"(1994), and David Foster Wallace's Tense Present (2001).
Among the pleasures in Acocella's review is this line about Kingsley Amis: Amis’s father was a clerk in a mustard-manufacturing firm, so his pleasure in spotting arrivistes is understandable.

A charming few minutes with Maurice Sendak

The Colbert Report
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Rereading

I never reread books, but better readers do...
The Books We Come Back To

See also Patricia Meyer Spack's recent book "On Rereading" .... and here's a review by Jonathan Yardley

Postcards from Norway

Check out the Library of Congress's spectacular collection of old postcards from Norway

Sassy!

The Spanish La Liga recently arranged a "Shake Your Booty" dance contest as half-time entertainment...a real sassy performance here by Villareal's Ruben and Real's Pepe.

Ryan Gosling on the importance of libraries

This is some moving shit.

The Lick - a musical meme

From Ethan Hein's blog

The Research Works [For Publishers] Act

NY Times op-ed about "the latest salvo in a continuing battle between the publishers of biomedical research journals like Cell, Science and The New England Journal of Medicine, which are seeking to protect a valuable franchise, and researchers, librarians and patient advocacy groups seeking to provide open access to publicly funded research"

Congratulations boys and girls!

Asimov on libraries....see story at Byzantium's Shores

Lisa Hanawalt

Lisa Hanawalt's illustrated review of Spielberg's War Horse sets a new standard for reviews of any kind. See her work at thehairpin.com

Animated Joy of Books

Happy New Year, myriad readers!
Here's a really cool video about the joy of books, from Type bookstore in Toronto.

Print and pdf options in Wikipedia

The wonders of Wikipedia never cease to amaze me. Only today do I discover these print and pdf options

that will turn an article that looks like this:

into a nice printable pdf like this:

Huffington Post on libraries in crisis

Universities under attack

Fritt Ord, the London Review, and the New York Review of Books jointly sponsored a conference last week about the current plight of universities, "Universities Under Attack." You can read Keith Thomas's remarks from the conference at the LRB website. See also Our Universities: Why are they Failing?, Anthony Grafton's review 8 recent books on this topic in the New York Review of Books.

Future of libraries stuff

The future library could be a "fab-lab" - like the one taking shape at the Fayettville Free Library - or it could be something else, depending on the findings of a newly inaugurated Pew study on the Changing Role of Public Libraries and Library Users in the Digital Age .

LIbrarians as "open source officers"

This NPR story suggests that the Onion was not too far off on its take on CIA's fbook program. And note that there are great opportunities here for social media savvy librarians!

A two bit player

Here's my Twitter character...not real impressive, doesn't even have shoes. Generate your own Twitter infographic at visual.ly

The Public Debate

Google books

What get's digitized?

An editorial in the NYT on the "curious contents of the digital library" alerted me to manybooks.net where all sorts of treasures are to be found, and to the amazing app from the British Library, the British Library 19th Century Collection. How extraordinary to be able to read something like Disraeli's Curiosities of Literature on one's iPad or Kindle!

The allure of country living

Top ten books lost to time (Smithsonian)

Stolen childhood

A heartbreaking picture..but such brave lads!

From the New Yorker

Old Russia in Color

See extraordinary color photographs by Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorsky at the fascinating "A Journey Through Slavic Culture" blog. The owner of the blog (whose identity is not readily apparent)writes:
"For those who don’t know yet, Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorsky was a photographer who’s experience in chemistry created one of the earliest techniques of color photography, which he used to document the scope of the Russian empire prior to the revolution, giving us a glimpse into the lives and cultures of the time."