In 1849 he resumed his project of providing a paper ‘in which literary men could answer one another's questions.’ Dilke encouraged him, with the result that the first number of ‘Notes and Queries’ appeared on 3 Nov. 1849. The name was chosen by Thoms, and he selected for a motto Captain Cuttle's phrase, ‘When found, make a note of.’ In form the journal was modelled on the ‘Somerset House Gazette.’

Founded under the editorship of the antiquary W J Thoms, the primary intention of Notes and Queries was, and still remains, the asking and answering of readers' questions. It is devoted principally to English language and literature, lexicography, history, and scholarly antiquarianism.

Notes and Queries (originally subtitled "a medium of inter-communication for literary men, artists, antiquaries, genealogists, etc") is a London-based, quarterly publication, part academic journal, part correspondence magazine, in which scholars and interested amateurs can exchange knowledge on literature and history.

The skill at unmasking error, or simple intellectual one-upmanship, is not completely without value, but we should be wary of creating a class of self-satisfied debunkers or, to use a currently fashionable word on campuses, people who like to "trouble" ideas. In overdeveloping the capacity to show how texts, institutions, or people fail to accomplish what they set out to do, we may be depriving students of the capacity to learn as much as possible from what they study. In a humanities culture in which being smart often means being a critical unmasker, our students may become too good at showing how things don't make sense. That very skill may diminish their capacity to find or create meaning and direction in the books they read and the world in which they live. Once outside the university, our students continue to score points by displaying the critical prowess for which they were rewarded in school. They wind up contributing to a cultural climate that has little tolerance for finding or making meaning, whose intellectuals and cultural commentators delight in being able to show that somebody else is not to be believed.

In a conversation format, seven anthropologists with extensive expertise in new digital technologies, intellectual property, and journal publishing discuss issues related to open access, the anthropology of information circulation, and the future of scholarly societies. Among the topics discussed are current anthropological research on open source and open access; the effects of open access on traditional anthropological topics; the creation of community archives and new networking tools; potentially transformative uses of field notes and materials in new digital ecologies; the American Anthropological Association’s recent history with these issues, from the development of AnthroSource to its new publishing arrangement with Wiley-Blackwell; and the political economies of knowledge circulation more generally.

You are no longer reading books for the stories contained inside. You are reading them for other reasons—to understand the authors’ arguments, to see how they handle evidence, to examine how they structure their arguments, and to analyze their work as a whole. Perhaps above all, you need to understand how any given book fits into the theoretical landscape, how it speaks to other works on the subject, its strengths and weaknesses. Plodding through a book one page at a time is not the best way to do this.

The goal of the workshop was not to produce a white paper! Rather it was to identify a set of requirements, and a group of willing participants to develop a mandate, open source code and a set of deliverables to be used by scholars to accelerate data and knowledge sharing and discovery . Our starting point, and the only prerequisite to participating, was the belief that we need to move Beyond the PDF (meant to capture a common philosophy, not necessarily to be taken literally).

In a heady moment we might also describe our efforts as the desire to contribute to the development of a free and open digital printing press for the 21st century. A platform, when utilized, moves us beyond a static and disparate data and knowledge representation to a rich integrated content which grows and changes the more we learn. A system (content plus platform) from which a scholar can interact and once evaluated shows improved understanding and interest.

"Rather than moving towards amalgamation and interoperability across databases, you really get the sense that everybody’s been busy grabbing at whatever piles of text they can lay their hands on, building the biggest little mudhill they can manage to put up, and then building walls around it. There are interstitial services that help a user 'jump' from one little fragmented collection to another and portals that aim to be a 'top level' to return to, sure, but we should be doing better by now."

"Over Thanksgiving weekend, I had a great search experience that I think is worth laying out here, because it captures three of the key dimensions of digital search."

The Council on Library and Information Resources has established a fellowship to honor A. R. Zipf, a pioneer in information management systems.