Resources for Wikipedians
by Alex
If your idea of a good time is writing wikipedia entries on obscure (preferably nineteenth century) intellectuals, then you’ll love the “Biographical Memoirs of the British Academy”:http://www.proc.britac.ac.uk/cgi-bin/somsid.cgi?page=memoirs/index&session=826924A and the “Biographical Memoirs of the National Academies of the United States of America”:http://lab.nap.edu/nap-cgi/discover.cgi?term=biographical+memoirs&restric=NAP&GO.x=0&GO.y=0. The British memoirs are fantastic — “J.A. Barnes’s memoir of Evans-Pritchard”:http://www.proc.britac.ac.uk/cgi-bin/somsid.cgi?page=73p447&session=777523A&type=header has long been a favorite of mine. Unfortunately, you have to pay ten pounds — which these days comes to roughly US$756,285 — to download the PDF. However if, like me, you’ve ever attempted to locate the Proceedings of the British Academy in a library, much less find an _index_ of it, you’ll know how valuable this online reference is. Of course I find this out _after_ I move to an island where holdings for this serial only go back to 1990, and then only in a library ravaged by a flood which is now closed-stack. *Sigh*
The National Academies, on the other hand, have “over three thousand free eBooks”:http://www.nap.edu/. Clearly someone l33t has gotten the ear of someone in the academies — the “about page of the Open Book initiative”:http://www.nap.edu/info/site.html lists the site’s ‘programming/scripting tools’ as “Perl,PHP, BBedit, Vedit,vi,Emacs,Kate,Cooledit”. If you guys are watching your referer logs: thanks tons for this great resource, and keep up the good work.