King Ashurbanipal (ca. 668-627 B.C.) was the ruler of ancient Assyria at the height of Assyrian military and cultural accomplishments.  He is known in Greek writings as Sardanapalus and as Asnappeer or Osnapper in the Bible.  Through military conquests Ashurbanipal also expanded Assyrian territory and its number of vassal states.  However, of far greater importance to posterity was Ashurbanipal's establishment of a great library in the city of Nineveh.  The military and territorial gains made by this ruler barely outlived him but the library he established has survived partially intact.  A collection of 20,000 to 30,000 cuneiform tablets containing approximately 1,200 distinct texts remains for scholars to study today.  Ashurbanipal's library was not the first library of its kind but it was one of the largest and one of the ones to survive to the present day.  Most of it is now in the possession of the British Museum or the Iraq Department of Antiquities.  The importance of Ashurbanipal's Library can not be overstated.  It was buried by invaders centuries before the famous library at Alexandria was established and gives modern historians much information about the peoples of the Ancient Near East.  The ancient Sumerian "Epic of Gilgamesh" and a nearly complete list of ancient Near Eastern rulers among other priceless writings were preserved in Ashurbanipal's palace library at Nineveh.  Ashurbanipal's accomplishments are also of great importance to scholars of library history.  Though this library was not the first of its kind, it was one of the largest and the first library modern scholars can document as having most or even all of the attributes one expects to find in a modern library.  Like a modern library this collection was spread out into many rooms according to subject matter.  Some rooms were devoted to history and government, others to religion and magic and still others to geography, science, poetry, etc.  Ashurbanipal's collection even held what could be called classified government materials.  The findings of spies and secret affairs of state were held secure from access in deep recesses of the palace much like a modern government archive.  Each group of tablets contained a brief citation to identify the contents and each room contained a tablet near the door to classify the general contents of each room in Ashurbanipal's library.  The actual cataloging activities under Ashurbanipal's direction would not be seen in Europe for centuries.  Partially through military conquests and partially through the employment of numerous scribes there was significant effort placed into what modern librarians would call collection development.

Find reference sources at http://web.utk.edu/~giles/

The Bell Ringers, a novel by Henry Porter, mentions that the story of a clue in a clay tablet found in King Ashurbanipal's collection shows how important libraries are:  British scientists have deciphered a mysterious ancient clay tablet and believe they have solved a riddle over a giant asteroid impact more than 5,000 years ago.  Geologists have long puzzled over the shape of the land close to the town of Köfels in the Austrian Alps, but were unable to prove it had been caused by an asteroid.  Now researchers say their translation of symbols on a star map from an ancient civilisation includes notes on a mile-wide asteroid that later hit Earth - which could have caused tens of thousands of deaths.  The circular clay tablet was discovered 150 years ago by Sir Austen Henry Layard, a leading Victorian archaeologist, in the remains of the royal palace at Nineveh, capital of ancient Assyria, in what is now Iraq.  The tablet, on display at the British Museum, shows drawings of constellations and pictogram-based text known as cuneiform - used by the Sumerians, the earliest known civilisation in the world.  A historian from Azerbaijan, who believes humans originally came to Earth from another planet, has interpreted it as a description of the arrival of a spaceship.  More mainstream academics have failed to decipher its meaning.  Now Alan Bond, the managing director of a space propulsion company, Reaction Engines, and Mark Hempsell, a senior lecturer in astronautics at Bristol University, have cracked the cuneiform code and used a computer programme that can reconstruct the night sky thousands of years ago to provide a new explanation.  They believe their calculations prove the tablet - a copy made by an Assyrian scribe around 700 BC - is a Sumerian astronomer's notebook recording events in the sky on June 29, 3123 BC.  The pair say its symbols include a note of the trajectory of a large object travelling across the constellation of Pisces which, to within one degree, is consistent with an impact at Köfels.  The Köfels site was originally interpreted as an asteroid impact, however the lack of an obvious impact crater led modern geologists to believe it to be simply a giant landslide.  However, the Bond-Hempsell theory, outlined in their book, A Sumerian Observation of the Köfels Impact Event, suggests that the asteroid left no crater because it clipped a mountain and turned into a fireball.  Nic Fleming  http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/science-news/3337909/Clay-tablet-holds-clue-to-asteroid-mystery.html

Railroads needed standardized times to keep an accurate schedule.  The Great Western Railway in Britain was the first to use a standardized time, ordering in November 1840 that all its stations use London time.  Many other railways followed.  In November 1852, the Greenwich Observatory began sending out daily telegraphs to railways to assist in standardizing time.  The first standard time in America was introduced by railways in New England following an August 1853 fatal head-on accident in Rhode Island that occurred because the conductors were using two different times.  Over the next several decades, U.S. railways adopted their own standardized times, allowing them to maintain an accurate schedule.  However, there were more than 50 railway times and hundreds of local times.  Stations displayed multiple clocks showing the local time and the times for the various railroads, creating confusion for passengers.  Allen’s proposal was based on one developed in 1869 by Charles F. Dowd, a school principal from Saratoga, N.Y., that called for four U.S. time zones, each measuring 15 degrees of longitude.  Allen tweaked the map to keep existing train lines within the same time zone so that railways would not have to significantly alter their schedules.  Therefore, the straight longitudinal divides proposed by Dowd were shaped to include certain cities within certain time zones.  Allen’s proposal created the Eastern, Central, Mountain and Pacific time zones, plus the Intercolonial time zone in Atlantic Canada.  It was agreed upon by the railways in October 1883 that they would adopt Allen’s standard time, which became known as Standard Railway Time, on Nov. 18, 1883.  Many local governments agreed to adopt Standard Railway Time, though others refused.  At noon on Nov. 18, the U.S. Naval Observatory adjusted its signals to reflect the new time zones.  Crowds gathered near town clocks across the country to watch the clocks be changed.  In many places where the time was moved back, it became known as the “day of two noons,” while other areas “lost” minutes.  “All over the United States and Canada, people changed their clocks and watches in synchronization with their zone’s standard time,” writes the Library of Congress.  “In one moment the many different standards of time that had caused conflict and confusion, were resolved into four simple standards.”  Many towns continued using their own local times for decades, but the “use of standard time gradually increased because of its obvious practical advantages for communication and travel,” according to the U.S. Naval Observatory.  In March 1918, Congress passed the Standard Time Act, which officially established standard time throughout the United States.  The Standard Time Act of 1918 also established daylight saving time, which had been adopted by many European countries during World War I as a way to conserve energy.   http://www.findingdulcinea.com/news/on-this-day/November/US-Time-Zones-Established-by-Railways.html

To celebrate 100 years since Dylan Thomas's birth, here are his best poems, quotes and lines, with recordings of him reading his work: 

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/11186744/Dylan-Thomas-best-poems-quotes.html

A TRIP DOWN MEMORY LANE  This time of year, we like spooky music and tongue-in-cheek music.  Besides Monster Mash (with Bobby Pickett impersonating Boris Karloff), I enjoy The Addams Family Theme, The Pink Panther, Caspar the Friendly Ghost--hear it sung by Little Richard at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xebhN7e7nYU--and Ding Dong, the Witch is Dead. 

Funeral March of a Marionette is good any time of the year:  While residing in London, England between 1871 and 1872, Charles Gounod started to write a suite for piano called "Suite Burlesque".  After completing one movement, the Funeral March of a Marionette, he abandoned the suite and had the single movement published by Goddard & Co.  The following storyline underlies the Funeral March of a Marionette:  The Marionette has died in a duel.  The funeral procession commences.  A central section depicts the mourners taking refreshments before returning to the funeral march.  The work has been recorded many times.  One of the earliest recordings was by John Philip Sousa's band in 1903.  Alfred Hitchcock had seen the 1927 silent movie Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans, and remembered the effect the music from Funeral March of a Marionette had on him when choosing the theme music for his television series Alfred Hitchcock Presents, which originally aired from 1955 to 1965.   It was through Hitchcock's program that the music achieved its widest audience.  The series continued for 10 years, and the theme music appeared in five versions by as many arrangers: in 1955, 1960, 1962, 1963, and 1964 ‒ the last version being arranged by Bernard Herrmann, who transposed the piece up a third.  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Funeral_March_of_a_Marionette

http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com  Issue 1210  October 29, 2014  On this date in 1787, Mozart's opera Don Giovanni received its first performance in Prague.  On this date in 1792, Mount Hood (Oregon) was named after the British naval officer Alexander Arthur Hood by Lt. William E. Broughton who spotted the mountain near the mouth of the Willamette River.