Archives for posts with tag: History

Map of London

Hand-drawn map of London by Stephen Welter

The New York Public Library hosted a neat looking panel today.

Future Library: Socializing History with Maps, Hosted by The New York Public Library

Event Description:

Speakers:

  • Matt Knutzen, Geospatial Librarian at the New York Public Library
  • Alex Rainert, Head of Product at Foursquare
  • Jesse Friedman, Product Marketing Manager at Google Maps and Earth
  • Jack Eichenbaum, Queens Borough Historian[NYPL’s event listing]

It’s a shame when you hear about something interesting, and it’s too late, and it’s in another country. Where are the teleporters, already? Science, I’m looking at you

Moving on, it’s exciting to imagine maps being used like wikis.  It’s a field that has largely been dominated by businesses and advertising, but there is a lot of potential here for less commercial uses. OpenStreetMap is an open source project already doing this.

Other popular free(but not commercial free) resources, like Google Maps or Bing’s equivalent, can be an underused tools for pushing community information out to library users and visitors.

Imagine walkable or bikeable tours you could follow via smart phone, with info links, archival photos galleries, recorded personal testimonials, and other information. Online maps can be turned passing on community knowledge that is often lost or fragmented by .

Or arts walks. Or even digitally augmented literary scavenger hunts combining geo-caching and book releases.

Like most web-based tools, I’m pretty sure the most en-genius ideas haven’t been thought of yet. The opportunity is there for any locally minded persons who want to plant a few flags in the digital world.

Also, how cool would it be to be a Geospatial Librarian. I want one of those business cards!

***Addendum***

Stephen Welter’s portfolio site. Why not promote the analog approach?

Molasses Disaster

At work, some kind coworkers invited me to sit with them (which was nice, because I’m new). The conversation, twisted, turned and landed on disasters. Landslides in Italy. Then floods in Australia.

This lead to a more unbelievable catastrophe: the Boston Molasses Disaster.

Not one of us had all the details, but we worked together and came up with this (without reaching for our smartphones):

It happened back around the 1920s.

It was caused by the brilliant idea of painting a massive molasses tank black. Heat combined with the expansionary properties of such a viscous fluid, and boom, you get an ooey-gooey black flood.

Something like 2 million gallons of the stuff were spilled down the streets of the city, wrecking buildings and causing havoc.

Rumour has it that you can still smell the molasses on hot days.

It was a sticky, tasty, destructive and collaborative reference bomb! Bam!

Molasses! Destroys! Interpretive plaque.

Where's an interpretive plaque when you need it?

Further Reading:
Wiki entry on the disaster.

Boston Public Library’s flickr gallery on the disaster.

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What is a reference bomb? Find out here!

Email me your Reference Bomb experience! info@dropthereferencebomb.com

Catcher in the Rye

NPR, the other day, had an interview with Kenneth Slawenski author of J.D. Salinger: A Life.

From NPR.org:

One revelation that is elaborated on throughout Slawenski’s erratic biography [Stirling says: Ouch.] is just how crucial Salinger’s World War II experiences were to his later Zen Buddhism, as well as to his writing. Salinger served in an Army Counter Intelligence Corps. On D-Day, he landed on Utah Beach, then went on to fight in the Battle of the Bulge; toward the end of the war, he helped liberate a sub-camp of Dachau. According to Slawenski, manuscript pages of The Catcher in the Rye were on Salinger’s person throughout the fighting.[full article with audio!]

Crazy. One stray bullet and no Holden Caulfield! Generations of angst-ridden teens would’ve lost out. After all, there’s no Edward the Sulking Vampire without dear Mr. Caulfield.

Salinger fans would do well to check out Slawenski site: Dead Caulfields.

burning templars burn burn

My love of edu-TV melodrama meant I had to watch Museums Secrets the other night.

The show was on the Vatican Museum (cool in its own right and on my top list museums and libraries I need to see). I knew a lot of the stuff they talked about, except for their closing vignette about a recently rediscovered document apparently acquitting the Knights Templar from heresy charges.

From Reuters:

The parchment, also known as the Chinon Chart, was “misplaced” in the Vatican archives until 2001, when Frale stumbled across it.

“The parchment was catalogued incorrectly at some point in history. At first I couldn’t believe my eyes. I was incredulous,” she said.

A CBC report places the shady entry in 1628, 320 years after the original trial.

Conspiracy? Maybe…

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