A letter by Rene Descartes, stolen in 1840s, recovered in 2010 by online detective work. The letter was stolen by Guglielmo Libri, inspector general of the libraries of France, who stole thousands of valuable documents and fled to England in 1848. Since 1902 it's been in the collection of Haverford College, its contents unknown to scholars, and nobody there realized that it was an unknown letter. But because they had catalogued it and recently put their catalogue on line, Dutch philosopher Erik-Jan Bos found it "
during a late-night session browsing the Internet". (A Haverford undergraduate thirty years ago had translated it and written a paper on it, in which he recognized that the letter was unknown -- but nobody followed up and the letter had sat in the library since then until it was listed online.) The letter includes some last-minute edits to the Meditations, and some thoughts on God as causa sui.
Haverford, whose president was a philosophy major, is returning the letter to the Institut de France.
posted by LobsterMitten
on Feb 26, 2010 -
21 comments
Dave Chalmers has just launched
PhilPapers, a directory of nearly 200,000 online papers in philosophy. This is a jawdropping and amazing resource for philosophical research. For evidence of the scope of this project and the care that has been given to it, see the
taxonomy of philosophy that was developed for the site.
posted by painquale
on Jan 28, 2009 -
28 comments
OCLC, owners of WorldCat, are getting greedy. It's now demanding that every library that uses WorldCat give control over all its catalog records to OCLC. It literally is asking libraries to put an OCLC policy notice on every book record in their catalog. It wants to own every library.
It's not just Open Library that's at risk here -- LibraryThing, Zotero, even some new Wikipedia features being developed are threatened. Basically anything that uses information about books is going to be a victim of this unprecedented power[ ]grab. It's a scary thought. [more inside]
posted by mecran01
on Nov 13, 2008 -
40 comments
The
Prelinger Library is a small privately owned "public library" in San Francisco with the
unique philosophy that browsing library stacks can reveal new knowledge, if the books are arranged for browsing. This is counter to most public libraries who rely on computer terminal searching, databases and the Dewey Decimal system to atomize books and subjects, with stack browsing a sort of random after effect, and in some places--like the Library of Congress--normally not even allowed. Now a (real) public library in Arizona has
joined the revolution and claims to be the first public library in the nation to drop the Dewey Decimal system. Instead, books will be shelved by topic, similar to the way bookstores arrange books. The demise of the century-old Dewey Decimal system is overdue, county librarians say: "People think of books by subject. Very few people say, 'Oh, I know Dewey by heart.' "
posted by stbalbach
on Jun 10, 2007 -
84 comments
The Zobo! Spanish-American Chess Men! Where can you find these amazing products, including
Sanitary Belt Pads the
Toilet Mask, or a handy
goat harness, at amazing, rockbottom prices? The
Sears, Roebuck Catalog, of course. Everything you could need for the modern American family! They did
houses (
1,
2) even. Starting in 1888 and mostly selling watches, this venerable institution of consumerism spent its first
10 years rapidly growing and adding products, lasting for over 100 years before finally folding in 1993. The catalog still stands as a detailed historical document of what the average American would buy to get through life. They make a fun collector's item,
too (1902 available on
CD-ROM as well).
[ This post inspired by the 1902 Sears, Roebuck Catalog blog. ]
posted by tweak
on May 26, 2006 -
11 comments
The Office of Human Radiation Experiments , established in March 1994, leads the Department of Energy's efforts to tell the agency's Cold War story of radiation research using human subjects. We have undertaken an intensive effort to identify and catalog relevant historical documents from DOE's 3.2 million cubic feet of records scattered across the country. Internet access to these resources is a key part of making DOE more open and responsive to the American public.
posted by Dome-O-Rama
on Feb 16, 2006 -
7 comments
Farewell, Whole Earth magazine? A lament at worldchanging.com:
"... spawn of the amazing Whole Earth Catalogs, source of the WELL, first to mention in print the Gaia Hypothesis, the Internet, Virtual Reality, the Singularity and Burning Man (or at least so the legend goes), the place where folks like Stewart Brand, Kevin Kelly and Howard Rheingold found their voices, and where a whole generation of young commune-kid geeks like myself learned to dream weird... " [via
Smart Mobs]
posted by Slagman
on Jan 31, 2004 -
10 comments
Critics call Abercrombie & Fitch catalog soft porn. I can't comment on the catalog itself, since I haven't seen it; I just had to laugh out loud though when I read this sentence: "Boycott organizers contend the company... is wooing younger customers and using sex to popularize its image." Oh, the horror! Also striking was A&F's spin on it, calling it " the Norman Rockwell of 2001." Clearly, a divide in perceptions.
Can anyone who has seen the offensive/inoffensive material in question explain why it is/isn't any different from the marketing practices of, oh, say,
everyone else?
posted by topolino
on Jun 22, 2001 -
23 comments
