i s i t a b o o k ?
Where we take the Credit and lay the Blame.
"There are books in which the footnotes, or the comments scrawled by some reader's hand in the margin, are more interesting than the text. The world is one of these books."
- George Santayana
This website was created by Emily-Jane Dawson, Karen Drayne (a.k.a. Powell), and Barbara Davison, as a final project for LBSC 690, Information Technology, a course in the College of Library and Information Services (now the College of Information Studies -- the powers that be having foregone the word "Library" as if it were a shameful thing, and traded the humble word "Services" for the more erudite "Studies") at the University of Maryland at College Park. Writing credits for the various sections can be found at the bottom of each essay. We can be reached as follows,
Karen Drayne (a.k.a. Powell) cannot currently be reached by email.
The site is now edited and maintained by Emily-Jane, and appears through the courtesy of Peter Verheyen and the Book Arts Web. We are grateful for Peter's generosity in providing us with server space, and also for his time and patience in helping us to maintain the site.
Yay Peter!
Of course and most naturally, any mistakes or errors included in this site are ours alone, and do not reflect upon the sensibilities, intelligence, or judgment of those named above.
We must also take a moment here to pat ourselves and each other on our own backs, the friendship forged during the creation of this child of our imaginations and intellects being, we feel, the major fruit of this endeavor. If we weren't each and all the ones and we that we are, we would not have managed to become this wonderful us.
Ta da! We are pleased to announce that we three (that's Drayne, Davison, and Dawson) have received the 1998 Dean's Award, from the College of Library and Information Services, University of Maryland College Park, for the creation of Is It A Book? Aren't we proud!
Also you will find record of this website in an honest-to-goodness library catalog. The Dadabase of the Library, Archives and Study Centers of the Museum of Modern Art in New York includes a listing for Is It A Book?. We're shocked, but there it is.
All of the text and several of the images on these pages were composed by ourselves, excepting brief, credited quotations; and the section on Comix, which was written by the very talented Kristian Williams. The still from The lady from Shanghai that appears in the Cinema section is reproduced by the gracious permission of Michael Mills, from his website Classic films.
Emily-Jane wantonly re-writes the work of her co-conspirators occasionally during her irregular updates. The entire site is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 License; anything reproduced here but owned by someone else of course remains under the original copyright, if any. We are aware that intellectual property cannot ever belong to one individual, and believe that all works owe a great debt to those that influenced their creators. In any case, we are very interested in the free exchange of ideas and hope that others will benefit from our work without using our ideas in a manner disagreeable to ourselves.
If you are a student, scholar, learner, artist, teacher, zinester, craftsperson, or web author with interests that relate to the topics addressed in this website, you may use our words and pictures for your own non-commercial purposes pretty much as you please. We like hearing about what you've done, and we especially appreciate knowing if you've linked to this site.
Foyer | History | Literature | Comix | Book Arts | Cinema | Tricks & Games | Future | Bibliography | S.A.Q. | Assistance | Credits
