Jan. 27, 2015  “Perma.cc is a service, currently in beta, that allows users to create citation links that will never break.  When a user creates a Perma.cc link, Perma.cc archives a copy of the referenced content, and generates a link to an unalterable hosted instance of the site.  Regardless of what may happen to the original source, if the link is later published by a journal using the Perma.cc service, the archived version will always be available through the Perma.cc link.  In a sample of several legal journals, approximately 70% of all links in citations published between 1999 and 2011 no longer point to the same material. http://www.bespacific.com/perma-cc-built-run-libraries/     

Nine maps that explained the Internet in 2014 by Andrea Peterson and Brian Fung  This was a big year for the Internet, from the U.S. debate over net neutrality to proposals to shift control of the worldwide Web to the global community.  See maps showing how Internet worked and how people used it in 2014 at http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-switch/wp/2014/12/31/9-maps-that-explained-the-internet-in-2014/

What is The Internet?  The Internet is a massive network of networks, a networking infrastructure.  What is The Web?  The World Wide Web, or simply Web, is a way of accessing information over the medium of the Internet.  It is an information-sharing model that is built on top of the Internet.  Read much more at

http://www.webopedia.com/DidYouKnow/Internet/Web_vs_Internet.asp

CAPERS  There’s a plant called capparis spinosa.  When the plant creates a bud -- this starts every year in the spring -- this bud is going to be a flower.  However, if you pick the bud before it becomes a flower, that’s a caper.  In fact, properly we should call it a caper bud; the whole plant is a caper plant and it has various parts, but what we all call a caper is a caper bud.  If you leave the bud on the plant, then a couple of weeks later it opens up and has a flower -- a beautiful purple and white flower.  If you let the flower fall off, it's replaced a little bit later in the season by a fruit.  That fruit is called the caper berry.  It looks like an olive; it's oblong.  It's much bigger than a caper bud, and it has a similar taste and it's treated a similar way.  It is not quite as intense-tasting as the caper bud, but it has a very similar flavor and it’s really quite delicious.  In Greece, they also like to use the leaves of the caper plant.  There are capers grown all over the Mediterranean.  Some are grown in Asia and in Australia.  Most people in the world of capers will tell you the very best capers come from a small island called Pantelleria that is off the coast of Sicily.  It's actually a little closer to Tunisia than it is to the main part of Sicily.  But that's it.  That's caper heaven.  On the Internet, almost everybody says, "Get the smaller ones.  They are better."  But that is one of those food myths that just won't go away.  The only reason that you hear it is because that's what everybody has always said, and nobody has really taken the trouble to really research it.  When I was in Pantelleria I kept asking, "What size do I want?"  Everybody I spoke to -- from producers and chefs to local food writers -- all said the big ones are much more flavorful.  They usually come in three sizes:  small, medium and large.  The downside with the larger ones is these are closer to springing open and becoming flowers.  They are not quite as tight in texture, they're not quite as firm, they have a flower inside them waiting to break out.  However, they have developed to the most gorgeous flavor.  David Rosengarten

http://www.splendidtable.org/story/you-cook-with-capers-but-do-you-know-what-they-really-are

Laura Elizabeth Richards (1850-1943) had distinguished parents and a home life that would early introduce her to the delights of language and fine arts as well as to a range of people and experiences.  Her father, Samuel Gridley Howe, "a restless social reformer . . . [who] later gain[ed] fame as an abolitionist," was also "the practical founder ... of the Perkins Institution and Massachusetts School for the Blind" in 1832.  Howe's star pupil -- and Laura's namesake -- was Laura Bridgman, a child who had been left blind and deaf after a bout with scarlet fever at age two.  When Bridgman was seven, Howe met her and brought her to Perkins, where she became the first blind and deaf person to learn language and "finger spell."  (Another Perkins student, Anne Sullivan, later taught Helen Keller.)  Richards's mother, the poet Julia Ward Howe, is perhaps best known as the author of "Battle Hymn of the Republic."  When still quite young, Richards was introduced to languages through her mother's love of music. As she explained in her autobiography, Stepping Westward, When we [children] gathered delightedly round the piano . . . we soon began to sing with [mother]. German songs, many of them brought back from Heidelberg by Uncle Sam Ward . . . sparkling French songs whose gayety was enchanting . . . Italian songs that flowed like water under moonlight; to say nothing of English and Scottish ballads without end.  We never knew that we were studying French, German, Italian; that we were acquiring a vocabulary . . .  Richards's first book, Five Little Mice in a Mouse Trap was published in 1880, as was The Little Tyrant; two additional titles, Our Baby's Favorite and Sketches and Scraps (the latter illustrated by her husband), appeared the following year.  The same decade saw additional publications, including retellings of folktales such as Beauty and the Beast and Hop o' My Thumb (both 1886), and both volumes about Toto (The Joyous Story of Toto [1885] and Toto's Merry Winter [1887]).  1889 produced Queen Hildegarde, which Richards described as "my first stumbling essay in books for girls").  This became the first of her Hildegarde series.  The 1890s brought more girls books, including Captain January, perhaps now best known from the 1936 Shirley Temple movie.  She also published several interrelated stories: Melody (1893), Marie (1894), Bethsada Pool (1895), Rosin the Beau (1898).  Richards was also active in designing activities for youth and in community affairs in Gardiner.  In 1886, she created the Howe Club (named for her father), for her ten-year-old son Hal and his friends.  The group met for ninety minutes on Saturday evenings.  As Richards described it, I read to them -- first a poem, then Scott or Dickens for half the time; then there were apples -- or peanuts -- and games in many varieties, all with the pill of Information heavily sugar-coated.  To give the boys something that school in its crowded curriculum could not give; to enlarge first their vocabulary and then their horizon; to show them the fair face of poetry; first and last to give them a good time; this was my ardent desire.  The Howe Club lasted for approximately 25 years.  Additionally, Richards was involved in founding the Ten Times One Club (afterschool activities for children) and the Good Comrades Club (for young girls in the workforce).  Her interest in lifelong education led to her involvement with the History Class (later the Current Events club); this was an adult study group, where she and her husband "studied with ardor; wrote our papers with passion and read them . . . before a neighborly, friendly audience"  In 1895, she helped found the Women's Philanthropic Union (designed to correlate the activities of various women's organizations to avoid duplication of effort) and served as its president until 1921.  She and her husband also were two of the founders of the Gardiner (Maine) Library Association and participated in assorted fundraising activities for a library building (which her husband designed).  In the twentieth century, Richards continued to write children's stories and verse, including the two-volume Honor Bright series (Honor Bright:  A Story for Girls [1920] and Honor Bright's New Adventure [1925]), and an unsuccessful sequel to Captain January (Star Bright [1927]).  Her best-known collection of verse was Tirra Lirra:  New Rhymes and Old from 1932 (reissued in 1955 with a preface by May Hill Arbuthot), which incorporated early verses, many of which had been published in children's magazines, along with new material.  During this period, Richards also wrote biographies, some of family members or friends, including Florence Nightingale: Angel of the Crimea (1909), Two Noble Lives: Samuel Gridley Howe and Julia Ward Howe (1911), and Laura Bridgman:  The Story of an Opened Door (1928).  Richards and her sister Maud Howe Elliott co-authored Julia Ward Howe, 1819-1910 (1915), for which they received the Pulitzer Prize for biography in 1917.  Her final book, What Shall the Children Read, was published in 1939; the following year, the Gardiner Public Library Association issued Laura E. Richards and Gardiner, a compilation of Richards' poems and articles which had been previously published in local newspapers.  Read more and see pictures at http://readseries.com/auth-oz/richardsbio.html

http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com  Issue  1249  January 28, 2015  On this date in 1754, Horace Walpole coined the word serendipity in a letter to Horace Mann.  On this date in 1855, a locomotive on the Panama Canal Railway, ran from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific Ocean for the first time.