Saturday, March 15, 2008

Sunday Links

- From BibliOdyssey, image details from Leiden's Blaeu atlas, newly digitized as I noted on Wednesday.

- Tim Spalding has been named one of Library Journal's 2008 "Movers and Shakers." Congrats, Tim - well deserved!

- Paul Collins has one from the archives, discussing a 2002 piece he wrote on hemacite (a disgusting "proto-plastic" somehow made from cow's blood and sawdust. Now, he notes, somebody's gone a written a book on one of hemacite's precursors.

- Rare Books Review notes an upcoming auction: PBA will sell books from all fields (concentrating on illustrated and children's books) on 20 March.

- The New York Public Library has mounted a new exhibit to commemorate the 400th anniversary of the birth of John Milton, Bloomberg notes.

- Joyce likes Google Books. And she's even found a way to "reverse OCR" the text"! I like it too, most of the time. It's become a handy way - in certain cases - to find information about a topic that you didn't know was out there. For example, I was writing a book description recently and wanted to find out a little something about a former owner. Plugging his name into Google Books yielded a necrology from the New Hampshire Historical Society with a full, detailed biography of the man. Would I have ever thought in a million years to look for that book in the library? Nope.

Didn't find any notable reviews this week, I guess. Must write a paper today, then it's back to finishing up John Adams' library (about a fifth of the records left to edit, then it's adding links to the digital versions and further enhancing the records).