Andy : June 2010 Archives
The Christian Science Monitor is running a slide show on the "Top 10 Notorious Spies," related to the recent news about the discovery of accused Russian spies.
The article was brought to my attention by Eric Childress from OCLC Research, who also kindly did the leg-work for putting together a list of the WorldCat Identities for all but one of the spies on the list. Apparently Harold James Nicholson is so sneaky that he managed to escape the watchful eyes of the world's librarians.
So... if the talk of modern spies has your users asking questions about famous skulduggery, you may want to have them check out the following:
The article was brought to my attention by Eric Childress from OCLC Research, who also kindly did the leg-work for putting together a list of the WorldCat Identities for all but one of the spies on the list. Apparently Harold James Nicholson is so sneaky that he managed to escape the watchful eyes of the world's librarians.
So... if the talk of modern spies has your users asking questions about famous skulduggery, you may want to have them check out the following:
- Valerie Plame Wilson
- Aldrich Ames
- Robert Hanssen
- Ethel & Julius Rosenberg
- The Cambridge Five: Kim Philby, Guy Burgess, Donald Maclean, Anthony Blunt, John Cairncross
- Josephine Baker
- Richard Sorge
- Mata Hari
WorldCat Identities is one of my favorite features of WorldCat, and I've talked about it here before. One of the things I haven't mentioned is that there are lots of Identities in the service for what I think of as "not people." In some cases, that can be a fictional character, like the Identity for Dracula. But the jump to an "identity" for fictional characters isn't that big... they still have proper, personal names, and I think that's how I tend to think about Identity.
So what kind of Identities are there in addition to people (or vampires) with personal names? Lots. Here's some to get you started (some from current events... some just because they seemed like interesting examples):
- The Statue of Liberty
- The New York Yankees
- Apple Computer, Inc.
- British Petroleum
- The United States Supreme Court
- World Cup Soccer
- Afghanistan
- The Edmund Fitzgerald (ship)
At the bottom of the Identities page, there's a tag-cloud of "Associated Subjects." I've included the one for Afghanistan below:
So after you find a neat Identity for a subject, you can take your quest further in WorldCat.org with related subject searches. So if you're looking for a different way to approach a subject, see if it's got an Identity. Some cool stuff in there.
