Ready to recover?

President Obama signed the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 into law on Tuesday and if you've watched, listened to, or read any news this week you've probably heard a lot about it.

But what is it really all about and what does it mean for you? At 400+ pages, reading the thing is probably not an attractive option, (although you can do so here if you've got the spare time or the curiousity) but fortunately some folks have made understanding it a bit easier.

USA.gov, the major portal to U.S. government information online, provides this summary of the Act's aims, along with a timely warning against fraudulent offers of "stimulus" money, and links to both background information and more details.

The good bloggers at GovGab (from the General Services Administration) posted this link-filled highlight reel a few days ago. They focus on some of the middle-class tax-relief provisions of the legislation. One of the main links they recommend is recovery.gov, a new website set up to answer questions and keep the public informed as to how the Act is working. Be sure to check out the site's FAQ. And the site gives you opportunities to react and interact with the process. Check back with this site often, since their clever moving timeline will be filling up with more information as the Act's provisions are implemented.

If you do decide to look at the text of the Act, UT Arlington librarian Tom Lindsey has made it a lot easier to zero in on the right section with this handy blog post. He lists all the sections and the pages upon which page in the PDF version of the Act each starts.

Two birthdays for the price of one!

February 12, 1809, saw the birth of two little boys who would grow up to do great things. Such great things that two librarians were both inspired to blog about them! How famous can you get!

Famous Little Boy #1

Abraham Lincoln became the 16th President of the U.S. and guided the country through its darkest hour, the Civil War. Finding more information about this fascinating historical figure is easy—because so much has been written about him—and hard—because so much has been written about him! You can get an idea of this abundance looking at the listing in the post below.

On the web there's even more Lincoln information and artifacts. Ford's Theatre, where he was assassinated in 1865, is a site you might not think of for Lincoln research, but they have a Lincoln Museum onsite and also provide this website. [The image is from the Wikimedia Commons.]

Famous Little Boy #2

Charles Darwin developed the theory of evolution through natural selection, which not only revolutionized the science of biology, but also gave everyone a new way to look at the natural world. When I was in London last semester I enjoyed visiting the special exhibit at their Natural History Museum that was dedicated to Darwin's bicentennial. It was a really fascinating collection of memorabilia, handwritten notes, letters, photographs and books. [The Museum is high on Darwin even in non-bicentennial years; the photo is one I took in the museum's main hall of the Darwin statue there.]

I saw a particular San Antonio-Darwin connection in the exhibit that delighted me as as Spurs fan. One of the objects on display was a beetle Darwin collected on his famous voyage on the Beagle. And it was from Bahia Blanca, Argentina, one of the ship's ports of call, and the hometown of our own Manu Ginobili! It really is a small world, isn't it?

Lincoln, Darwin, and the NAACP

February 12, 2009 marks several anniversaries. It is the bicentennial of the birth of both Abraham Lincoln and Charles Darwin. It also marks the centennial of the founding of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), a leading United States civil rights organization.

More biographies (over 14,000) have been written about Abraham Lincoln, than about any other individual, according to Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Lincoln's complex personality and character have resulted in biographical studies with a variety of titles: Carl Sandburg's Abraham Lincoln: The War Years; Diplomat in Carpet Slippers: Abraham Lincoln Deals with Foreign Affairs; From Pioneer Home to the White House: Life of Abraham Lincoln: Boyhood, Youth, Manhood, Assassination, Death; Lincoln's Quest for Union: A Psychological Portrait; The Lincoln Nobody Knows; and The Last Best Hope of Earth: Abraham Lincoln and the Promise of America. These are just a few of the many books about Lincoln in the Blume Library's collection.

It might seem a stretch to compare Lincoln and Charles Darwin, but there are some commonalities. In fact Adam Gopnik's Angels and Ages: A Short Book about Darwin, Lincoln, and Modern Life, which has just recently been published, shows how these two men, who never met, altered the way we think about death and time--about the very nature of earthly existence.

It is no coincidence that the NAACP was founded a century ago, today. The NAACP is committed to struggle and armed with hope, working for full citizenship of all people regardless of origin, and continuing to press the cause of equality and social justice.

Happy Birthday!

[book cover images from http://covers.librarything.com/]

Bigger than Life

Back in the print-only, pre-digital-photography days, Life magazine was considered the gold standard for photo-journalism. Many famous photos, like the one at the right of a sailor kissing a nurse in Times Square on V-J day, were first published in Life.

Now Google has made an archive of millions of Life magazine photos, including many unpublished images, available online at images.google.com/hosted/life.

The archive can be searched from the page linked above, or just add source:life to any image search in Google from the regular search screen. Some of the archive's subject tags make precise subject searching somewhat iffy, but simply browsing through the results is fascinating. You can browse by decade, also, starting with the 1860's (yes, there was photography then, but not in the 1750's, as the web page hints—perhaps this is a typo?).

At any rate, photos of historical figures is a highlight of the collection, even back as far as the Victorian age—above at left is a photo of Queen Victoria herself.

Landscape photography is another area in which Life photographers excelled. On the right is a scene of shipping on the Yangtze River in China in the 1940's.

After you put in search terms or click on a link to browse, you'll see a page of thumbnails just like in a normal Google image search. Click on the picture of interest and you'll get a larger image (plus a link to a full-size image) and you may see information such as who took the photo, when and where it was taken, and additional information about the scene.

Trivia, tragedy, celebrity, ordinariness, action, tranquility—it's all a part of Life and you can find images of just about anything in this collection.


Note: all images in this blog post were taken from the Google Life Photo Archive. Photos in the archive are for personal, non-commercial use only. Remember always to credit the source of photos used in papers and presentations.