A joke, courtesy of ML, but fwded from where, I'm not sure. It's pretty good.

A priest and a pastor from the local churches are standing by the side of the road, pounding a sign into the ground that reads:
The End Is Near - Turn Yourself Around Now Before It's Too Late!
As a car speeds past them, the driver yells, "Leave us alone, you religious nuts!"
From the curve they hear screeching tires and a big splash. The pastor turns to the priest and asks,
"Do you think the sign should just say 'Bridge Out?' "

When Death Means the Loss of an Archive

Joe Nash's collection on black dance in the US might be dispersed as he left no will...

"We run into this all the time in the archive business," said Vicky Risner, who is in charge of acquisitions for the music division of the Library of Congress. "People deny they're going to die."

NYTimes by Daniel J. Wakin Published: May 18, 2005

NYTimes story on Mayan women's poetry:

"Now after 30 years' work, 150 Mayan women from Taller Leñateros (Woodlanders' Workshop), a paper- and book-making collective founded by Ms. Past in 1975 in the Chiapas city San Cristóbal de las Casas, have produced what may be the first book of Mayan women's poetry created almost entirely by them, and translated into English."

"As she listened to the women, Ms. [Amber] Past said she realized that they sometimes spoke in poetry, in couplets and in gleaming metaphors.

"I was so deeply moved hearing in these mud huts these breathtakingly beautiful verses, sometimes echoing verses and phrases spoken or written 500 years ago," she said. Some words resembled ones in the Popol Vuh, the Mayan creation story."

The book is called "Incantations".

The Poetic Hearts of Mayan Women Writ Large By Dinitia Smith Published: May 11, 2005

Wow! Check out Google Answers (answers.google.com) and Google Scholar (beta - scholar.google.com).

Google Answers is a paid answers (reference) service, kinda like what we were doing at the Internet Public Library (for free :)). I remember it coming up in reference class, and looks like it is still going. Wonder what the business model is like. Anyway, look at the questions and answers - they are pretty interesting.

I notice that sometimes the question is answered as a comment by another researcher... Then the person doesn't have to pay any money, I guess? That is kinda cool, anyway.

Google Scholar - you can search scholarly journals and so forth. I tried one or two and it links to citations in PubMed (which is free) and Ingenta (paid) and so on. If you're lucky, you get the pdf from some university site. Otherwise, it's pay-per-article with Ingenta or whatever. It could still be a valuable service, to find out what's "out there" and do search-across (federated search??), though you'd have to look in your library's subscribed databases to get the full-text. A good last resort, I guess, if nothing is coming up from the library sites.