BitchBuzz: Jane Austen Writes

My BB column this week revisits the Jane Austen exhibit at the Morgan which I enjoyed so much last week (and yes, the William Blake exhibit is still on for a few more weeks). It's such a delight to see Jane's own handwriting and little pieces of her life gathered together for this exhibit, which offers a good sense of the Regency period in which she lived:

Through March of next year, the Morgan Library & Museum in NYC features an excellent exhibit, "A Woman's Wit: Jane Austen's Life and Legacy" which contains her handwritten script of Lady Susan as well as many letters, mostly written to her beloved sister Cassandra, and other personal effects.

While it seems impossible that we don't know everything there is to know about Jane (which isn't as much as most fans would like), it's a revelation to see so much written in her own hand.

Sure, there's the fannish squee of being so close to something Jane herself touched (then again, I'm a medievalist who shed a tear upon seeing for the first time the one and only Beowulf manuscript), but it's also an intimate window on the world in which she lived: one where paper was so precious that she used up every bit of surface area in her letters by writing across her own lines with further perpendicular lines (known as "cross-hatching")...

As usual, you can read the rest at BB HQ. Please help spread the news be retweeting, sharing and linking here!

Library Thing

All righty, kiddos -- I am finally getting on Library Thing, mostly because I have a grad student willing to put in some of the books in my office for me. Hurrah -- thanks, Anne!

How many of you use Library Thing? It seems quite easy, but there's also Good Reads which I have been invited to join, too. Any pros and cons between them -- or am I wrong in my assumption that they do the same thing? I love the idea of having my books catalogued, but as most of you know, I am hopeless at tedious and repetitive tasks...

BitchBuzz: Guardians of the Planet

My latest column for BB is all about our fave superheroes of information: Librarians! Here's a taste:

Go ahead, laugh. But think about it; what is the most crucial commodity in the world today? Information. Even if you're not quizzing Number Six, you are still bound to be wading through tons of information every day even if you don't wear a cable modem as an IV like I do. Estimates vary, but one study has suggested that by next year "the amount of digital information in the world will double every 11 hours."

Even if the real numbers don't end up that high (although it certainly feels well within reason), most folks will admit that we're swimming our way inexpertly through a barrage of information with insufficient help. When you consider the annual output of a just single bon vivant with a blog, a Facebook page, a couple of Twitter accounts and a web page to be prodigious when toted up at the end of the year, try imagining all the billions of internet users creating similar content of wildly divergent qualities.

It ain't all good stuff and it's often seems easier to stumble across the cretinous because everyone's passing it along the usual social media networks.

What do you do to find the stuff you need?

Read the rest at BitchBuzz HQ!