'[Bookplate of] Rudyard Kipling' by Philip Randal Jensen. Libraries & Culture, vol. 33, no. 3, 317-320. (Libraries & Culture Bookplate Archive).

After a hoax that the next Harry Potter book would be called The Pillar of Storgé, J.K. Rowling announced on her official site that Book 6 will, in fact be called Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince.
'Revealed: Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince' by Sarah Crown. The Guardian, Tuesday 29 June 2004.

Discovered while cataloguing a 1998 NIDA leaflet on inhalants:

"Discovery consists of seeing what everybody has seen and thinking what nobody thought."

An article in the New Scientist reports on a study into visual noise at the Smith-Kettlewell Eye Research Institute in San Francisco which seems to have discovered why Mona Lisa's expression seems so alive. Researchers manipulated a digital image of the painting to introduce different effects caused by visual noise and asked 12 subjects to rate the expression in the pictures on a scale ranging from sad to happy. "As would be expected, noise that lifted the edges of her mouth made Mona Lisa seem happier, and those that flattened her lips made her seem sadder. More surprising though, was how readily the visual noise changed people's perception of the Mona Lisa's expression." The online article includes a copy of the pictures so you can see the effects for yourself.

'Noisy secret of Mona Lisa's smile' by Philip Cohen. New Scientist, Vol 44, p.1493.

Amateur historian Maike Vogt-Luerssen believes that she has discovered the true identity of the Mona Lisa, claiming in her book Who is Mona Lisa?: In Search of Her Identity (published in Germany) that she is Isabella of Aragon, Duchess of Milan and known friend of Da Vinci and not the Marquese del Giocondo, as is usually believed.

'Was da Vinci's lover the face of Mona Lisa?' by Tim Cornwall. The Scotsman, Saturday 26 June 2004. (Requires free site registration).

Picturegoer Online

Magazines: An Exhibition of material from the Monash University Library Collection

'Magazine Covers and Cover Lines: An Illustrated History' by Gerald Grow. Journal of Magazine and New Media Research, 2002.

Designing Britain, 1945-1975: the visual experience of post-war society

A description, from the page about the project:
"The end product consists of 7 web-based E-Learning modules, each containing about 100 visual records. Visual source material derives from the University's expanding Design History Research Centre (DHRC) Archives as well as incorporating associated collections. The product is aimed at and delivered to the Higher Education (HE) community"

It includes some great images of the art designed for the Festival of Britain.

A history of HIV & AIDS Posters from around the world (on the Avert web-site).I'm really pleased to find that we have in stock copies of the two earliest posters warning against AIDS and HIV (or HTLV III as it was known originally):
Terrence Higgins Trust 1984
Terrence Higgins Trust / Avert 1984

Chaps Online is the latest campaign from the Terrence Higgins Trust. The campaign mini-site includes information and a game in which you have to jump or roll to avoid the risks of contracting HIV/AIDS.

"Our first plan should be to establish, at the outset, in every large district of the town, a not very extensive library, but consisting of books calculated to beget a love of reading, and to furnish materials for thinking ... The external machinery of these free libraries and reading rooms should be simple and inexpensive. A lock-up cupboard for the books, a librarian's table, chair and slate; a few benches, and a good fire, or other means of warming the room, are all the requisites. As for the rooms, there should not be any real difficulty in a town having most of its hundreds of Sunday schools standing empty during the great part, if not the whole, of the week-days ... As in the purchase of books, in these times, with a little judicious management on the part of one active, intelligent agent, a great store of really good works could be procured for very little money in the old book-shops and stalls ..."

Extract from an article originally published in The Manchester Guardian, 19 January 1842. Republished as 'Soup kitchens for the mind'. The Guardian, Saturday 19 June 2004.

According to its web-site, "There has been a public library service in Manchester since 1852, when the Manchester Free Library was opened in the Hall of Science in Campfield."

Liz Lochhead has been appointed as an associate playwright for Scotland's £75,000 Playwrights' Studio alongside David Grieg and Nicola McCartney. According to the Scotland on Sunday, Julie Ellen has commissioned them to run workshops, comment on scripts and act as mentors to writers coming through the studio system that is being established this year. The library and Internet archive has still to be put in place.

'Safe haven for writers at play'. Scotland on Sunday, 20 June 2004. (Requires free site registration).

According to an interview in yesterday's Observer, Lynne Truss lacked confidence as a result of a fiercely close and competitive relationship with her sister:

"'My sister died three-and-a- half years ago and that was the biggest family event in my life.' Truss says that her sister's death has made her re-evaluate herself. She has also had to come to terms with the nature of that relationship. 'One of the awful, tragic things about her dying is that she would have hated this [success]. She would have been very unhappy about [the book] doing so well, because she always hated it when nice things happened.'"

'I used to feel intimidated.Not any more' by Robert McCrum, The Observer, Sunday, 13 June 2004.

Interview with Susan Hill:
'Criminal instinct' by Jackie McGlone. The Scotsman Saturday 12 June, 2004. (Requires free site registration).

An article in Thursday's Scotsman records several readers' responses to The Diary of A Young Girl by Anne Frank. I was particluarly moved by Trevor Phillips' words:

"In her diaries, Anne Frank said: "I often lose my cue and simply can’t swallow my rage at some injustice." Any reasonable person living in today’s world should feel the same rage at the rise of the political racism, anti-Semitism and Islamophobia creeping across Europe.

"When I was chair of the Runnymede Trust we published twin reports on the resurgence of anti-Semitism and the rise of Islamophobia. I never imagined that these ugly sisters would grow so fast and spread their poison across our continent so quickly. But they have.

"In today’s world, we need Anne’s rage more than ever before. Everything that her legacy teaches us about yesterday tells us something about how we should behave today."

(Trevor Phillips is Chair of the Commission for Racial Equality).

'How one teenager's diary has touched our lives' by Louisa Pearson and Anna Smyth. The Scotsman, Thursday 10 June 2004. (Requires free site registration).

'A nation of storytellers' by Jackie Kay. The Scotsman, Saturday 5 June 2004.(Requires free site registration).

An interview with Steven Moffatt, the writer behind Coupling, now part of the new Doctor Who writing team:

'Time Lad scores with sex and Daleks' by Aidan Smith. Scotland on Sunday, Sunday 6 June 2004. (Free site registration required).

The BBC's Leonardo Da Vinci mini-site includes an interactive tour of how his studio might have looked, as well as a picture gallery of his masterpieces.

'How the bee got his knees' by Michael Quinion. The Telegraph, Saturday 31 May 2004.

The National Library of Scotland's summer exhibition covers the history of the news in Scotland over the last 400 years.

I defy anyone not to be cheered after reading Funny Bunnies by Laurie Frankel. Chronicle, 2004. ISBN 0811840557. I came across it this evening in a card shop into which I ducked out of the rain on my way to the station. The author, a professional photographer and designer, has photographed rabbits to illustrate different breeds and each glossy picture is accompanied by a brief synopsis of its major characteristics, as well as a character sketch of the individual bunny. The publisher's web-site includes an excerpt consisting of four of the bunnies, that can also be sent as e-cards. The quickest way to find these features is to type "funny bunnies" into the search box.