I apologize for the long period since my last blog post. This summer is turning out to be one of transition for Schlager Group, and I’ll be blogging more about those changes in the coming weeks. Today I’m in Dallas, and I just went to the Berk. Pub. site to view their blog to see what they’ve been up to, and I was shocked to see that their site (all of their various sites, actually) has been hacked. For now I am deleting the links to their site from our home page and from this blog. I’ll restore the links once they’ve fixed the problem. I sympathize with them, especially since the anti-American sentiments expressed by the hacker aren’t really on target–the folks at B. Pub. are obviously global citizens, liberals, and very interested in fostering better understanding between cultures. There are plenty of angry people out there who can obviously use the Internet to carry out all sorts of mischief.
I was in Boston over the weekend with my sister and her kids; my nephew is starting to look at college options and, being a math-techno-geek, wanted to take a good look at MIT. I had never seen the campus before. It’s quite urban, not terribly attractive, and has no uniform look; the most interesting building is a fairly new one designed by Frank Gehry. But one imagines that the brainiacs studying there could care less about the beauty–or lack thereof–of the campus. Our campus guide was a delightful young woman who was bustling with enthusiasm and energy (who better to be a tour guide?). She’s a biology-linguistics major from a small town in Tennessee. She’s president of the campus chorus group, is an avid rock climber, etc. etc. etc. It remains to be seen whether my nephew has what it takes to get accepted to a place like MIT (only 13 percent of applicants are accepted) , but it’s a good goal to shoot for.
We stayed at the “Grand Old Dame” of Boston hotels, the Fairmont Copley Plaza, directly across from the main branch of the Boston Public Library. The BPL building was constructed in 1852, although as I learned on my visit, it has a newer wing that is an “architectural travesty” (so a librarian there cheerfully admitted). Thus warned, I stuck to the old wing. It has a fantastic courtyard with a great fountain and numerous wonderful murals, including an interesting set about the quest for the Holy Grail and another religious-themed set by John Singer Sargent. Currently it also has an interesting exhibit of artifacts, books, and images related to Joan of Arc. The latter collection was put together by Cardinal John Joseph Wright, who died in 1979. I spent some time in the BPL’s General Reference division and was gratified to see several of our titles there, including Science and Its Times, Grzimek’s Animal Life Encyclopedia, Science of Everyday Things, and Contemporary Authors. As for the latter, BPL appears to have stopped its print subscription to the main CA series a couple of years ago, although it continues its print subscription of the New Revision series. In addition, though, it subscribes to the electronic version of CA. Its main full-text newspaper subscription is Thomson Gale’s InfoTrac, not ProQuest.
Today’s New York Times has a lengthy article about the Thomson Corporation, which it calls the “biggest media company you’ve never heard of.” The article explains how leadership of the company has now passed from Ken Thomson to his son David.