O’Reilly’s new initiative, Safari Flow, which is currently available in beta form, is a timely prompt to review the success, and the qualities, of its elder brother, Safari Books Online. For several years Safari Books Online has been a great exemplar …
Here is Jean-Paul Sartre, aged around 10 or 11, sitting in his grandfather’s library and discovering the books there. At that age, I think I was mainly looking at the pictures. For Sartre, encyclopedias represented something far more significant.…
Patrick Lambe has established a reputation for his work on taxonomies in the last few years; this summer (July 2013) he gave the keynote address to the ISKO …
Reading Time: 3minutesHedden, H., 2010. The accidental taxonomist, Medford, N.J.: Information Today.
Heather Hedden has written an excellent introductory manual for anyone involved in setting up, running or expanding a taxonomy or thesaurus. Unlike many books on the subject, this is one for …
Reading Time: < 1minuteRegular readers of this blog will notice an ongoing series of definitions of the term “ontology”. Here is another one, by Tom Gruber, dating from 2009 (in the Encyclopedia of Database Systems, Springer-Verlag, 2009).
Denis Hollier’s collective work A New History of French Literature (1989) has a conventional-sounding title, but is anything but conventional in its arrangement. Instead of a chronological narrative, which is what the title suggests, or an A to Z listing of …
Reading Time: 3minutesCover of the original edition – the title was later changed from “Glossary” to “Dictionary”
An Illustrated Dictionary of Architecture: sounds like the perfect combination, a book combining text with pictures just when you need it. Compiled by two experienced …
Bertelsmann’s announcement of the closure of Brockhaus encyclopedias (June 2013) is indeed the end of an era. The Brockhaus encyclopedia style was fundamentally different to that of Britannica. While of similar size, its focus was very different. As Wikipedia states, “the …
Glancing vaguely at a mildly interesting book on the shelf: 50 literature ideas you really need to know, by John Sutherland, I started to think about what has changed in the last 30 years or so of studying literature. Judging …
The announcement that MarkLogic is to add linked data storage to its native XML content repository (April 2013), which was then discussed by David Gorbet at the recent ML User Group London (shown in the photo) was perhaps not so surprising.…
