A regular patron of ours has been trying to authenticate a piece of artwork by a particular artist. Today he came in and said that he heard about a series of volumes put together by a gallery, a museum, and a university all working together to create something called a "catalog... reason?" of his works. He said he probably wasn't saying it quite right, but that the word sounded French. Although he knew some of the scholars involved, he had no idea of whose name would be on the cover, or exactly what the title was. Could I possibly help him track down what it was, and possibly get it, or find out who had it? Whew.
It turns out that what he was looking for was a catalogue raisonne, and the idea is pretty cool. The preeminent scholars on, and museums holding collections of a particular artist put their heads together and create a folio of *all* his or her works, so that future discoveries of unknown works can easily be compared against the entire corpus and authenticated... well, maybe not easiLY, but easiER than it would be otherwise.
My other "new thing" is completely random...I've been playing around with the site How Stuff Works, because I've gotten some good reference answers from them lately and wanted to see, well... how it worked. ;) One of the bits on today's front page caught my eye, so I'm sharing. Talk about your dual citizenship problems... find out how citizenship works for a child born on an airplane in mid-flight!