The Biblio File

In sad news, David Foster Wallace committed suicide Friday night. Michiko Kakutani has a good article about his work at the NY Times:

A prose magician, Mr. Wallace was capable of writing — in his fiction and nonfiction — about subjects from tennis to politics to lobsters, from the horrors of drug withdrawal to the small terrors of life aboard a luxury cruise ship, with humor and fervor and verve. At his best he could write funny, write sad, write sardonic and write serious. He could map the infinite and infinitesimal, the mythic and mundane. He could conjure up an absurd future — an America in which herds of feral hamsters roam the land — while conveying the inroads the absurd has already made in a country where old television shows are a national touchstone and asinine advertisements wallpaper our lives.

I’ve been told that this video, and it’s “star,” Bas Rutten are old hat around the internet. If this is true, then my friends are jerks for not sending this to me, because I just discovered it last week. And the more I watch it, the funnier it is.

Jessamyn at Librarian.net points to this article from Time Magazine about Sarah Palin. Turns out, she tried to use her power as mayor to have books banned from the library:

Stein says that as mayor, Palin continued to inject religious beliefs into her policy at times. “She asked the library how she could go about banning books,” he says, because some voters thought they had inappropriate language in them. “The librarian was aghast.” That woman, Mary Ellen Baker, couldn’t be reached for comment, but news reports from the time show that Palin had threatened to fire Baker for not giving “full support” to the mayor.

I found this over at Infodoodads–The Periodic Table of Videos. Produced by the University of Notthingham, these videos give an overview of all the elements in the periodic table, including their properties and, occasionally, how they blow up. A good resource for beginning chemistry students.

Amy Goodman, host of Democracy Now!, was arrested Monday while covering the Republican National Convention. You can get the story, and listen to Tuesday’s show, here.

My library has launched a beta version of Encore, a new faceted search tool for our catalog. You can find information about Encore here, and take ours for a test drive here.

One of the items of discussion on the most recent CommandN episode was Alltop, a feedreader that keeps track of all the latest posts in subject areas you might be interested. For instance, here’s the L subject categories:

When you mouse over a subject heading, it gives you a popup window describing what you might expect to find there. Here’s the mouseover view for Lifehacks:

Clicking on a subject category will take you to a page of prominent sites in that subject area, with their most recent posts:



Mousing over a headline will give you the opening paragraph of that post:

I really like how this displays information. The only thing that would make it better is if you could add feeds to the display. (It will let you hide displays you’re not interested.)

Delicious has come out with a new version, complete with a snazzy new interface. Here’s a link to the details about the new features, which include a side bar featuring your top 10 tags, the ability to sort alphabetically, and faster searching.

NPR ran an interview with Boyd County, Ky., Library Director Debbie Cosper, who talks about the resurgence her library has had since the economy has gone south. A lot of people are coming in (who haven’t in a long time) for books and movies because, well, they are cheap and times are tough. You can also check out the responses people had to the story. I especially liked the man who was surprised that they scanned his book out instead of stamping a card in the back with a date stamp.

Maybe everyone already knows this, but it’s news to me: NPR streams entire concerts, for free, as part of its All Songs Considered segment. You can check out the list of performers here, which includes such Bibliovoodoo favorites as The Hold Steady, Devotchka, The Black Keys, The Ting Tings, and, most recently, Saint Tom Waits.