Library News

Five Greek epigraphs

My husband recently finished writing a book about foreign policy.  Just as it was about to go to press, he hit a snag: he had started each chapter with an epigraph, a short quotation, from the ancient Greek historian Thucydides.  Now, you would think that anyone who wrote 2,500 years ago would be out of copyright and could be quoted freely, and you would be right, BUT…the owner of the English translation that my husband was using wanted $150 for each quotation, or 750 clams total.  My husband could translate Thucydides himself but doesn’t feel terribly confident of his own ancient Greek skills, although he knows Greek “a little.” Luckily, there is a translation that’s in the public domain, which means it can be freely copied and quoted.  It’s in the Perseus Digital Library, a web site with a wealth of primary and secondary source information on the ancient world.   So this is a grateful shoutout to the people behind Perseus: Greg Crane and Tufts University.   I’m in awe of this amazing example of scholarly publishing at its best! Are you looking for advice about using someone else’s work in your own scholarship?  Ask your subject librarian at the NU Libraries for assistance.  Maybe there’s a resource like Perseus for you, too!

From the Where Are They Now department: Lawrence Lessig

Lessig One of our most successful panels here at the NU Libraries was the Free Culture Forum in March 2006, sparked by student interest, and featuring Lawrence Lessig of Creative Commons fame. He’s now left Creative Commons to work in DC on a campaign for congressional reform (called Change Congress). The Nation recently published an article on Lessig and this act of his career. However on his web site he claims the work he was planning for “Change Congress” turned out to be beyond what a single academic could do, so he will be moving from Stanford, his previous academic base, to the Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard University, where he will apparently be pursuing a five year initiative on understanding the role of money in corrupting the public trust. So maybe we’ll have more chances to hear him speak again, now that he’s local!

Laura Lippman

This spring, Laura Lippman spoke at the Library. In preparation, I read most of her books, and really enjoyed them. They’re mysteries, which is a genre I love. (Though in some ways they grow increasingly serious, and I think could be appreciated by a non-mystery fan.) Her first is Baltimore Blues. I think that my favorite was The Sugar House, but it’s hard to pick one. Snell Library has most of her books, including her latest, Life Sentences, which she discussed when she spoke in March:  

Recommendations

As far as blog posts go, this is most likely my last for a while. I will not be around in the summer or fall of this year. In the spring of 2009, I should be back at work. Provided that this blog is still operational, I will be back to posting then. I will continue to post on the Facebook page and continue to leave comments. This is my opening disclaimer for this post.

I have decided to make this a comment–oriented post. There are numerous books that I want to read in the upcoming months, but it seems that I can never get around to them. Sometimes I feel that I am being too ambitious and trying to read books that are too weighty for this time in my life, when I have a lot of things going on. But I think I will get around to reading Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. I have heard generally good things about this book, and it seems to be very popular for a work of ‘literary fiction.’ It has been made in to a movie starring Viggo Mortensen that will premiere at Cannes in May. Before I see that film I will try to read this book and try not to picture Viggo Mortensen as the main character. Perhaps this will add another dimension of difficulty to the book.

I also want to get around to reading, at least partly, some of Pauline Kael’s writings in her various collections of Film Criticism. Trash, Art and the Movies is her most famous essay; I don’t think I’ve ever gotten around to reading all thirty-something pages. I would like to read The Citizen Kane Book: Raising Kane, where she argues that Orson Welles deserves more credit than is necessary for revolutionizing cinema with Citizen Kane, and even in the creation of certain aspects of the movie itself. I have read with interest other writings by Pauline Kael that I’ve read (what fan of movies hasn’t?) and feel the need to dig in to more.

But I need some recommendations as well. What are other good books that Snell Library has which are worth reading? What about movies? What is a good summer read. i.e something that is sort of silly but interesting? I still have two and a half more months in Boston (before I go to New York for a spell) and still need to spend some time in the Snell stacks.

Publishing Datasets (warning: geek content!)

The OECD (Organisation for Economic Development and Co-operation) has released a white paper with the refreshingly jargon-free title, “We need publishing standards for datasets and data tables” (.pdf). (http://dx.doi.org/10.1787/603233448430). Some of the paper talks about publishing issues, especially the options for OECD participation in CrossRef’s doi system and the challenges with that compared to publishing e-journal articles (primarily the dynamic nature of many datasets, compared to the static nature of e-journal articles). For all you metadata geeks out there, there is a section with a proposed metadata set for data. It is pretty bare-bones, kind of on a par with simple Dublin Core for online and digital information. It accommodates parent-child relationships (for example, a table linked to its parent dataset, linked in turn to its parent collection of datasets).  That seemed to be important to OECD. There was a field called “variable index” I was wondering if that would be something like the metadata in Lexis-Nexis Statistical, which allows you to search or browse by data breakdowns such as geographic region (e.g. “by country” “by city”),  demographics (e.g. “by age” “by ethnicity” “by educational attainment”) or economic (e.g. “by industry” “by occupation”).   That is really, really useful. There is also the suggestion to use a thesaurus of controlled key terms to describe datasets, the one suggested is called “JEL” but it’s not spelled out anywhere.  Is that the “Journal of Economic Literature” thesaurus?  Is that a common one to use if you’re an economist? The OECD paper proposes that metadata include a field called “periodicity,” which in some cases is mandatory, in others is optional.  I wasn’t sure what that meant.  Does that mean that data is available on a yearly basis, possibly in different files or data sets, or that it is presented in the described dataset with yearly rows or columns?  It seems to be the former, because this metadata field is considered “not appropriate” in the case of static tables. In Lexis-Nexis Statistical, the latter type of metadata is supported. It means you can search or browse for a chart or table of information, say unemployment statistics, presented in a single view “by year” “by quarter” or “by month”.  Invaluable feature!!