Deirdre

"The worst crimes of academic publishing are to not methodically address all known sources of information and documented accounts on a subject, and to ignore information that conflicts with the premise of the author's research. Of the countless historians and researchers who have pored over the official documents and accounts of the founding and early years of South Australia, only two before Don Langmead – Grenfell Price (1924) and Professor Michael Williams (1974) – had either published doubt over the authorship of the 'parkland town plan' or surmised on its true origins." Great story about warring historians and the things which might influence their work. Includes this strangeness: "When Langmead went to the State Library of South Australia in the course of his research, he discovered that Dutton had put an embargo on access to the Light Papers he had researched for the 1984 revision of Founder of a City." Huh? (via forested, Delicious) - Deirdre

Sea creatures being joyous, and a song from 1979. (12 MB) - Deirdre

"[Last year] people flipped rocks on four continents on sites ranging from mountaintops to urban centers to the floors of shallow seas. Rock-flippers found frogs, snakes, and invertebrates of every description, as well as fossils and other cool stuff. [...] Be sure to replace all rocks as soon as possible after documenting whatever lies beneath them. Any and all forms of documentation are welcome: still photos, video, sketches, prose, or poetry. We encourage those of a scientific bent to try and identify everything they find, but we’re also open to purely lyrical or impressionistic responses." - Deirdre

"...allows you to search, browse or find information about individual Australian birds." Includes MP3 files of bird calls on some pages. - Deirdre

"The idea of photocopying all the relevant documents was [an] impossibility, because of cost, time and travel constraints. [...] An off-hand remark to one of the staff at the Riksarkivet revealed that they not only allowed non-flash photography of their collections, but they even had a camera stand setup for the occasional photographing of maps and images that could not be photocopied. Gennari set about photographing 2,500 documents, producing some 25,000 images in total, which would have been the equivalent of $15,000 worth of photocopying. If he had used a film camera, almost 700 rolls of film (about $4,000) would have been required with the attendant costs of converting those to photo CDs adding $30,000 to the total costs). However, with the images safely stored on a handful of recordable DVDs Gennari was able to import the whole collection into Google's free Picasa image library software for cataloguing and study on his return to the US." (via Uncertain Times) - Deirdre