The term wool-gathering literally denotes the action of gathering fragments of wool torn from the fleeces of sheep by bushes, etc., or as a result of sheep scratching or grooming themselves.  As B. A. Phythian explains in A Concise Dictionary of Phrase and Fable (1993):  It was an activity for poor people hoping to gather enough fragments to weave together, entailing a certain amount of haphazard rambling among hedgerows and fields by women and children.  This rather random wandering has been a metaphor for dreaminess since the 16th century.  See a picture of the oil painting Gathering Wool by Henry Herbert La Thangue (1859-1929) at http://wordhistories.com/2015/07/10/wool-gathering/

Sistine Chapel gets full digital treatment for future restorations by Philip Pullella   The last time the entire Sistine Chapel was photographed for posterity, digital photography was in its infancy and words like pixels were bandied about mostly by computer nerds and NASA scientists.  Now, after decades of technological advances in art photography, digital darkrooms and printing techniques, a five-year project that will aid future restorations has left the Vatican Museums with 270,000 digital frames that show frescoes by Michelangelo and other masters in fresh, stunning detail.  "In the future, this will allow us to know the state of every centimeter of the chapel as it is today, in 2017," said Antonio Paolucci, former head of the museums and a world-renowned expert on the Sistine.  Michelangelo's ceiling frescoes include one of the most famous scenes in art--the arm of a gentle, bearded God reaching out to give life to Adam.  The Renaissance master finished the ceiling in 1512 and painted the massive "Last Judgment" panel behind the altar between 1535 and 1541.  The last time all Sistine frescoes were photographed was between 1980 and 1994, during a landmark restoration project that cleaned them for the first time in centuries.  The new photos were taken for inclusion in a new three-volume, 870-page set that is limited to 1,999 copies and marketed to libraries and collectors.  The set, which costs about 12,000 euros ($12,700), was a joint production of the Vatican Museums and Italy's Scripta Maneant high-end art publishers.  Post production computer techniques included "stitching" of frames that photographers took while working out of sight for 65 nights from 7 p.m. to 2 a.m., when the chapel where popes are elected is closed.  The project was known to only to a few people until it was unveiled in the chapel on February 24, 2017.  http://www.reuters.com/article/us-vatican-sistine-idUSKBN1661KP

Hitting a LexisNexis subsidiary with a class action, a law firm says Matthew Bender & Co.’s self-proclaimed authority on landlord-tenant law in New York is anything but.  More commonly known as the Tanbook, the New York Landlord-Tenant Law is one of several legal publications that make up Matthew Bender & Co.’s annual “Color Books” series.  Hoping to represent a class, the law firm Himmelstein, McConnell, Gribben, Donoghue & Joseph brought a Feb. 23 2017 complaint against the publisher in Manhattan Supreme Court.  “Rather than an authoritative source of state statutes, laws and regulations, the Tanbook, which is represented by the defendant as complete and unedited, is instead, at least as pertains to those involving rent regulated housing in New York rife with omissions and inaccuracies, rendering it of no value to the attorneys, lay people, or judges who use it,” the 25-page complaint states.  Himmelstein McConnell says it has bought multiple copies of the Tanbook every year since at least 2010 to keep its attorneys up to speed on real estate law.  At least 100,000 Tanbooks were sold during that period, according to the complaint.  The class says its attorneys at Fishman Rozen conducted an investigation that found 37 omissions and eight inaccuracies in the 2016 Tanbook regarding provisions of state and local statutes and regulations concerning rent regulation in New York.  One omission included the entire subsections providing for the mandated formula for calculating rents when a rent-stabilized tenant--who qualifies for exemptions as either a senior citizen or disabled person--receives a rent reduction order from the state Department of Housing and Community Renewal.  Other omissions included subsections limiting landlord from taking a vacancy-rent increase to no more than one time in any one calendar year.  The class seeks restitution and an injunction, alleging deceptive business practices, breach of contract and unjust enrichment.  Himmelstein, McConnell wants to represent a class of all Tanbook purchasers since February 2011.  Josh Russell  https://www.courthousenews.com/class-calls-lexisnexis-publication-totally-useless/  Thank you, Muse reader!

Major League Baseball officials are finally addressing something that many fans have complained about for years:  the length of games.  The average game last season took three hours.  Major League Baseball wants more action and less downtime during games.  That’s probably asking too much, because hitters are paid to work deep counts while pitchers throw harder, with better movement, than ever before.  It’s no accident that the number of strikeouts rises every year.  The larger issue, of course, is expanding the business, which means attracting more fans.  And baseball won’t touch the biggest impediments to that effort, because it would mean less money now.  Want to make the game move more quickly?  Cut every commercial break by 30 seconds.   Find more suggestions from New York Times reporters and readers see pictures at https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/01/sports/baseball/baseballs-too-slow-heres-how-you-fix-it.html

Finding an anonymous text, if you don’t know which one, exactly, you’re looking for, can be difficult, if not impossible.  When Emily Kopley, a scholar of British and American literature, was first researching anonymous texts, she would try searching in library catalogs for a variety of terms:  “by anonymous”… “no author”… “by a lady.”  But in the period she was researching, the early 20th century, signing a book “by a lady” was old-fashioned.  Few people signed “by anonymous.”  Anonymous books wouldn’t necessarily be catalogued as “no author,” either—there’s no agreed-upon system, among libraries, about how to list anonymous or pseudonymous books.  “It’s really hard to find them,” says Kopley.  She had more success looking in scholarly databases, where she could turn up examples that others had written about, and in collections of book reviews.  But those searches revealed anonymous texts that were already known, in some way.  “The hardest thing is to find a completely unknown or unstudied author who was anonymous or pseudonymous,” she says.  At one point in the history of literature, anonymous and pseudonymous texts were common, even dominant.  But at the end of the 19th century, as the number of texts being published grew, the percentage and, most likely, the absolute number of anonymous texts being published began to shrink.  By their nature, and because there was no agreed upon way to catalog such texts, they’re difficult to surface in libraries and archives; as a group, they’re hidden away in larger collections.  They blend into the crowd.  As Researcher-in-Residence at Montreal’s Concordia University Library, a newly created position meant to promote a culture of research, Kopley is searching for ways to resurface and expose anonymous texts.  Part of her job is to work with librarians to develop ways to catalog and search for anonymous texts that could make them easier to find.  If there were a way to find them and see them more clearly, she reasons, it would be possible to better understand how the use of anonymity has changed—why writers choose to remain anonymous.  Sarah Laskow  Read extensive article and see pictures at http://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/anonymous-texts-hidden-libraries

http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com  Issue 1672  March 6, 2017  On this date in 1927, Gabriel García Márquez, Colombian journalist and author, Nobel Prize laureate, was born.  On this date in 1943, Norman Rockwell published Freedom from Want in The Saturday Evening Post with a matching essay by Carlos Bulosan as part of the Four Freedoms series.