Did you know you could fly

Recently I came across a question from a patron: Which play is the Shakespeare quote "The earth has music for those who listen" from?

Sounds like a simple question with a simple answer, doesn't it? Only problem -- that quote doesn't exist anywhere in Shakespeare's complete works. I checked. Several times. There are quite a few searchable Shakespeare databases out there as well as print concordances. It's not there. Shakespeare never wrote it.

However, if you do some creative Google searching, particularly in Google Books as well as Amazon's "Search within this book" feature, you find tons of seeming reputable, and in some cases peer-reviewed scholarly books, who make use of this quote and attribute it, apparently unthinkingly, to Shakespeare. I did come across two places in which the quote was attributed to Oliver Wendell Holmes and George Santayana, respectively. However, full text searches of what was indexed of their works failed to come up with the quote either. It's possible that one or the other of them either said it in an interview or speech or wrote it in a letter or essay that is not indexed, but short of travelling to the libraries in which their manuscripts are housed and reading through everything, I doubt further verification is possible.

So, let this be a lesson to all of you out there. At some point, some person either heard that quote and went, 'that sounds like Shakespeare' or else made it up entirely and wanted to lend some authority to it. Either way, I imagine if one had the desire and time to do a true retrospective, all the numerous false attributions could probably be traced back to a single erroneous assertion that future writers simply took on faith. And the more people who copied the false attribution without verifying it, the more future writers felt safe in doing the same. After all, if everyone says Shakespeare said it, they can't all be wrong, right?

*sigh*

CHECK YOUR SOURCES, PEOPLE!!!

"Technology should be a familiar subject to us, after all; it lies at the heart of printing and book history. The most recent revolution, dazzling as it may appear in its purported transformation of how we pursue knowledge and communicate with each other, is only the third of three. The first technological revolution, the invention of writing, continues to dwarf in importance both the development of moveable type in the mid-fifteenth century and the reconstruction of the world in bits and bytes near the close of the twentieth. A digitized image of a medieval manuscript or early modern book may both widen and sharpen the educational process, but it cannot wholly substitute for the experience of learning from those whose job it is to pass on their hard-earned knowledge of how and why these cultural artifacts were made. Similarly, the growth of "content" on the web, extraordinary as it is, makes the interpretation of so much information all the more crucial. In the long run, there is still much to be said for the primal encounter between critical judgment, on the one hand, and the full spectrum of cultural production in all of its formats, on the other."

-- Richard Wendorf, The Scholar-Librarian: Books, Libraries, and the Visual Arts

I love my job.

Ok, I have to do a presentation on both the pros and cons of creating a library presence in SecondLife. So, on the pro side, can anyone give me examples of really good Library/University/Education sims in SecondLife? I've got a few, but I need more.

So I was browsing through an author's journal last night looking for fanfic (yes, my guilty pleasure) when I noticed a post in which she linked to an article referencing a "bastard child" and went off in a righteous rant about how we should be beyond attaching insulting names to children born out of wedlock, and how it was the father who should be called a bastard, and not the child.

While I agree with the sentiment, I immediately was compelled to write a reply pointing out that 'bastard' is actually a word that means 'a child born out of wedlock' and that the use of it as an insult came later. Literally, in fact, it is someone who is a product of 'excesses of the pack-saddle' and was a shortened form of the phrase 'fils de bast' meaning 'child of the pack-saddle', referring to the fact that medieval muleteers would use their pack-saddle as bedding in inns and taverns while on the road, and thus the pack-saddle was the site of many indiscretions with tavern wenches.

Um, yeah. The librarian instincts run deep.

I also got called to the Dean's office yesterday to be told that my reappointment went through just fine, and that in fact it was a very short meeting as everyone had only positive things to say about me. She said I should just keep doing what I'm doing to stay on track for tenure.

Go to the Electronic Journal of Special and Academic Librarianship and you will see the article I just got published (under my legal name Jenna Ryan). So nice to see my name in print. Happy happy.