By Jo Ella Straley
In the news business people worry about having a "peg" for their stories, some current event or anniversary that situates your story inside what's relevant to listeners. News isn't "apropos of nothing." Thankfully, I'm not in news, I'm in the library so I can share with you this classic 1983 meditation on love by teenagers in Eugene, OR.

First, let's set the mood with a quiz:

Which of these most adequately describes the feeling that humans have come to call "love":
a. "a really big birthday cake with candles and drippy frosting that is sickeningly sweet... but you just eat it and eat it and eat it, and then you get sick."
b. "walking down school halls, seeing someone catches that your eye, and slowly getting to know them--saying 'hi' once in a while. It's like.........WOW."
c. "anything anyone says, you feel happy about it."
d. a driving beat in the music bed.

Everybody picked your answers? Ok, press play to find out more (I've left the dead roll music in there so you can do a little dance after life's greater mysteries are revealed):

Puppy Love - February 14, 1983 All Things Considered by M'Lou Zahner-Ollswang

By Jo Ella Straley
Notions about intellectual property may be changing, but copyright is still a big deal to folks who want to be sure they are recognized/paid for their work. Unfortunately for most applicants, the process of obtaining a copyright is long and getting longer. The Washington Post reported Tuesday that glitches in a new system intended to improve the application process are responsible for the growing delay. Fun fact: According to the 2007 Copyright Office Annual Report, 526,378 claims to copyright were registered -- no matter how you look at it, that's a lot of paperwork! To the folks at the Copyright Office I say: "Courage."

By Maureen Clements

Textbooks: Relics of a time gone by? iStockphoto.com

My memory of high school would not be complete without the textbook. Lugging those 20 pound beasts of burden to and fro, shoulders aching, my homemade paper bag book jackets tattered and littered with graffiti - those were the days of character building, but those days may soon be over if you live in California. In an effort to save money and speed innovation, Governor Schwarzenegger recently announced a new educational initiative to offer free, open-source digital textbooks to California high school students by fall of 2009.

Even though California's initiative is currently limited to secondary math and science textbooks, some colleges and universities have already dipped their toes in the digital textbook experiment with positive results. Serious challenges await California, but if they can successfully implement the model, it could radically alter accessibility to educational materials and potentially the change textbook distribution model forever. The future is now my friends.

By Maureen Clements

There's a new NPR twitter feed in town called NPRBackstory. Created by Public Interactive's Keith Hopper, NPRBackstory is "experimental mashup that digs through the NPR archives to unearth the backstory on trending top." I'm following...are you?

By Hannah Sommers

We'd heard of pirate radio, but radio pirates? Our colleague at WNYC, Andy Lanset, brought this film to our attention. It's already been released in the UK where this review originated.

And or course, the trailer:

By Maureen Clements

The other day I was pawing around the stacks and came across the All Things Considered theme from 1971. It's a hoot. Listen carefully for the voice of Mike Waters. He was one of the early All Things Considered hosts. He also had one of the most stylish radio voices around.

By Maureen Clements

If you're interested in rare book and manuscript digitization, then you must read the fantastic article from last Friday's Wall Street Journal, called The Next Age of Discovery. It's all about the intersection of technology, history, scholarship and religion. The article highlights the work of Benedictine monk, Father Columba Stewart, who's leading the charge to preserve religious historical manuscripts through digitization. He "cites his monastic order's long tradition of copying texts to ensure their survival as inspiration."

By Maureen Clements

Michael Jackson and Ronald Reagan, May 1984 (AP Photo/Scott Stewart)

What do Mother's Day, Pink Floyd and eclipse gazing have in common? They all appear on May's episode of Playback, the monthly podcast that lets you relive NPR's most interesting stories from 25 years ago. Up this month, Michael Jackson's visit to the White House, Richard Nixon's presidential predictions and Ron Howard's version of Gary, Indiana. So, let's hop in the time machine and get listening shall we?

By Maureen Clements

There's a really interesting article by John Timmer from Ars Technica about a Wikipedia hoax that fooled the likes of The Guardian. Apparently, an Irish college student inserted some finely crafted, yet totally false wording into the Wikipedia entry for composer Maurice Jarre, who had just passed. That finely crafted, yet totally false wording was directly lifted by several news organizations who wrote about Jarre's life. OOPS! Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, umm...Wikipedia, umm...won't get fooled again.

By Maureen Clements

Ever heard of Wolfram Alpha? The name conjures visions of solar systems and Battlestar Galactica episodes, but Wolfram Alpha isn't a constellation or a galaxy. It's the name of a new computational research engine spearheaded by legendary physicist Stephen Wolfram. According to CNET, Wolfram Alpha is "a cross between a research library, a graphing calculator, and a search engine." In a nutshell, you can ask it a question, such as "What's the GDP of France?" and it gives you the answer. In more technical terms, it's a giant repository that employs complicated computer algorithms to perform computational calculations of vetted data sets requested by natural language queries. Got that?

Unfortunately, Wolfram Alpha isn't publicly available yet and, based on early demonstrations, there are still kinks to be worked out. However, the idea and concept are there. Using my crystal ball to gaze deep into the future, I see major implications for librarians and investigative news researchers. A tool like this could revolutionize investigative reporting for cash-strapped news organizations and start-up blogs. Reporters and researchers will no longer have to spend countless hours compiling data to determine whether correlations exist between events. Maybe Wolfram Alpha will turn into a star after all.

By Kee Malesky
This week, I'm sure Swine Flu (or H1N1 virus) has been a major topic for many libraries. We've been collecting information, links and all kinds of resources, and posting them on NPR's internal News Wiki (sorry, we can't point you to it!) to support the incredible work of the Science, National and Foreign Desks, as well as NPR show hosts and the reporters from our member stations.

One particular item caught the librarian's eye, and I guess we should give our colleague Linton Weeks honorary librarian status. Yesterday, his NPR.org column on the influenza epidemic included some lexicographical information:

Is H1N1, or some derivative, a sign of Internetese or "txt msg creep"? Michael Agnes, editor in chief of Webster's New World dictionaries, says not. He says such alphanumerical designations are frequently used within the scientific community. And nothing but "swine flu" has gained traction so far among the general public...

The English language has always been amazingly absorbent, able to soak up words and phrases from all over the planet. So we shouldn't be surprised at the inrush of codes and abbreviations from the scientific and digital world...

Hey, Linton. We're happy to share our "language police" function with you!