Timesink alert: NYPL Digital Gallery

OMG, this totally is Bounce. Click on images for links to the NYPL and bigger views.

The Digital Gallery of the New York Public Library

provides free and open access to over 640,000 images digitized from the The New York Public Library's vast collections, including illuminated manuscripts, historical maps, vintage posters, rare prints, photographs and more.

With all that digital goodness available, where to begin? I started with - wait for it - dogs, and a search for dog images will turn up bazillions. Here are a couple old commercial posters:





A trio of Staffies:



Look at the Bedlington! Look at the gorgeous GSD! Look at the corgi...! Clearly they had not yet been perfected by the fancy.







Seriously, this is one helluva timesink. You've been warned.

[H/T: Design*Sponge.]

I've found my people

Library of the Abby of Saint Gall, the oldest library in Switzerland.

"My dear Selena,” I said, “to be always right is the claim of the charlatan, not of the Scholar. The mark of Scholarship is a fearless and unflinching readiness to modify theories in the light of new evidence.” [ Sarah Caudwell, The Sybil in Her Grave.]

I was no more than half a dozen lines into Lisa Gold's new blog, Research Maven, when I knew I'd struck pay dirt:

“The next best thing to knowing something is knowing where to find it.” — Samuel Johnson

I thought this famous Samuel Johnson quote would be an appropriate way to begin my blog. The problem is that Johnson never actually said this, despite the fact that you’ll find this attributed to him on a number of different quotation websites. None of these websites identified the original source of the Johnson quote, so I decided to dig a little deeper.

"Research is like treasure hunting, and to do it well you must be skeptical, curious, discriminating, persistent, and willing to look beneath the surface," writes Gold. Amen. Research Maven looks like a keeper.