Amundsen photo discovered

ABC News (Australian Broadcasting Corporation) has a great article by Damien Larkins, Rare South Pole Photo Brought to Light. The photo is not just a newly discovered image of Amundsen's 1911 South Pole expedition, but is the only print in the world taken from the original negatives of the event.

What makes the story even more compelling is the process of discovery--through the National Library of Australia's digitization efforts, Harald Ostgaard Lund from the Norwegian National Library (pictured on the ABC News blog entry) was able to make the discovery.

Galilean Nights

Tonight through Saturday (Oct. 22-24, 2009), people around the globe will be looking to the skies to see what Galileo saw. Part of the International Year of Astronomy 2009, the focus for the event, Galilean Nights, will be observing what Galileo observed--the beauty of Jupiter, its moons, our moon, and other wonders of the night sky that attracted Galileo's gaze. By seeing what Galileo saw over 400 years ago, this moment of history, when the evidence that the Earth was not the center of the universe, can be relived.

If you've never seen the brilliant jewels seemingly strung on an invisible line that are the moons of Jupiter through even the smallest of telescopes, I strongly encourage you to seek out one of the Galilean Nights events near you or to participate in one of the remote observing events. To look at the planets and stars is one way to understand our position in the universe, and to really grasp that we are poised on top of a big ball around which sailors navigate.

Dazzle camouflage

The Fleet Library at the Rhode Island School of Design has a wonderful online exhibit of Dazzle Camouflage. The images and plans were donated to them by Maurice L. Freedman, a U.S. Shipping Board Emergency Fleet Corporation camofleur. The images are wonderful--all the ones I looked at were scans of full plans sheets. According to the site:

Our collection consists of 455 plans (includes port and starboard sides of a ship) and 20 photos. There are 10 types of merchant ships represented with multiple designs for each of those ships.

So the online images are just a taste of the rich resources held by the library.

The site is a little resource intensive, so might not work well at slower connection speeds. Also, the links are not readily apparent--for example, go ahead and click on "What is Dazzle?" as it's as live a link as the "Dazzle Camouflage Blog" or the individual images, even though it doesn't turn your arrow into a hand (at least under Windows, in Firefox & IE).

(As far as I can tell, the Fleet Library was named after FleetBoston Financial Corp., rather than "fleet" in the maritime sense.)

My thanks to MonkeyFist at the Cascobayboaters blog--it was their post that brought this site to my attention.

Semester at sea article

Ever wondered about combining a love of being aboard ships with a love librarianship? Many people do! An excellent article about being a Semester at Sea librarian was published in Virginia Libraries (Apr.-June 2009), Treasures found by seafaring librarians, (.pdf version) by Mary Johnston. (The article is reprinted on ALA's ilovelibraries.org blog.)

The article makes great reading, but also has an extensive list of citations to other articles by Semester at Sea librarians and to resources for those who might be interested in pursuing such a job.

Pirate woman & FictionMags

Originally published in All-Story Weekly, Captain Dingle's The Pirate Woman is now available at Project Gutenberg.

If you're interested in reading more of Aylward Edward Dingle's works, or other works published in the story magazines, check out the wonderful FictionMags Index. Organizing magazines and stories, it's an invaluable resource for locating poetry and serialized fiction in many genres, including maritime adventures, reaching back to the 19th century and covering classic pulp fiction titles. And don't miss the links section if you want to dive in further--they even list dealers.

(My thanks to Dan Krummes for introducing me to FictionMags!)