Cannes Film Festival on Cinema Image Gallery

Barton Fink

The 64th Cannes Film Festival is currently under way in France, with moviemakers from all over the world showcasing their latest work.

Did you know that Cinema Image Gallery features at least a record for every winner of the festival's prestigious Palme D'Or dating back to 1946? And that the database has a substantial number of images for almost all the movies that have won this coveted international award since that date?

A Man and a Woman

Using Cinema Image Gallery to search for Palme D'Or winners not only gives you a full list of all the awards each movie has won, but also allows you to see at a glance which of the movies your library has in stock.

Why not look and see if any of the following films are available in your library, so you can recreate the atmosphere of the Croisette in your own living room?

Union Pacific (11 images) • The Lost Weekend (15 images) • The Third Man (15 images) • Othello (13 images) • Friendly Persuasion (12 images) • The Cranes are Flying (6 images) • La Dolce Vita (31 images) • The Leopard (21 images) • A Man and a Woman (25 images) • Blow Up (71 images) • If (34 images) • MASH (50 images) • Scarecrow (15 images) • The Conversation (17 images) • Viridiana (9 images) • Taxi Driver (81 images) • Apocalypse Now (80 images) • The Tin Drum (11 images) • Kagemusha (12 images) • All That Jazz (38 images) • Missing (19 images) • Paris Texas (15 images) • Otac na Sluzbenom Putu (4 images) • The Mission (12 images) • Wild at Heart (28 images) • Barton Fink (13 images) • Farewell My Concubine (8 images) • The Piano (16 images) • Pulp Fiction (64 images) • Secrets & Lies (12 images) • The Pianist (24 images) • The Wind That Shakes the Barley  (15 images) • 4 Months, 3 Weeks, 7 Days (10 images) • Entre Les Murs (22 images) • The White Ribbon (3 images) • Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (8 images)

A reminder about our new phone system

Just a note to remind you that H. W. Wilson has switched over to a new VoIP phone system.

This new system means that you can contact your sales representative using the 1-800 number (within the U.S. and Canada) and their extension no matter where they are without needing to take note of cellphone numbers or different area codes.

Overseas subscribers can also call any member of the H. W. Wilson team using a single central number and an extension, without other geographical information, no matter where their chosen representative is based.

You will find the numbers you need for Sales Representatives,  Customer Services, and Technical Support here.

(You'll also find this picture of Elizabeth Taylor in Cinema Image Gallery.)

Friday May 6 birthday quiz with Biography Reference Bank on WilsonWeb

We haven't had a birthday quiz for a while, so let's have one today. Happy birthday if you were born on May 6. You'll find all the answers to today's quiz in Biography Reference Bank, or you can wait till later today when we will tweet them.

1) Which Italian-born silent film star known for their brooding good looks was born on this day in 1895?
a) Rudolph Valentino
b) Greta Garbo
c) Frederick March

2) Which Arctic explorer, born on this day in 1856, became the first person to reach the North Pole on April 6, 1909?
a) Edmund Hillary
b) Robert Peary
c) Ernest Shackleton

3) Which baseball player, born on May 6, 1931, became the highest-paid player in the history of major league baseball in 1966 when he signed with the San Francisco Giants for an estimated $130,000 a year?
a) Willie Mays
b) Mel Ott
c) Mickey Mantle

4) Which former British prime minister, born on May 6 1953, won his third term on his birthday in 2005?
a) John Major
b) Gordon Brown
c) Tony Blair

5) Which American actor, nominated for both acting and writing awards for the movie Good Night and Good Luck, was born on this day in 1961?
a) Robert Downey Jr.
b) George Clooney
c) Brad Pitt

Eighty years of the Empire State Building

Opened on May 1, 1931, the Empire State Building was the tallest building in New York between 1931 and 1972 (and has been again since 2001), and has become an icon of the New York skyline. It is the site of an invitation-only race, the Empire State Building Run-Up--an event that draws world-class competitors from all over the world, including, in 2010, the blind runner Suleiman Rifai.

The building is also an important site for broadcasting antennas: it was the site of the first high-definition telecast in 1936, and the first mobile telvision unit for broadcasting outdoor events relayed its broadcasts from here in December 1937. According to articles in Omnifile, the Empire State is also an unusual spot to view migrating birds, and a commercial building that comes with a set of challenges and opportunities unique to the world's most iconic buildings.

How, for example, can millions of tourists be safely guided around the building with the minimum of disruption to the tenants? Who needs to be consulted when restoration work is undertaken? Articles discussing all these issues and more can be found in Omnifile Full Text Mega, with citations to many more articles available in Avery Index to Architectural Periodicals.


The image of men working on the building comes from Art Museum Image Gallery, and some of the other information in this post comes from Famous First Facts.

There's always a wedding happening on Cinema Image Gallery

To mark the occasion of the British royal wedding, today's quiz is all about movies with wedding in the title. To make it even more apt, we've even included a movie called A Royal Wedding (there, that's one answer given away).

You'll find images from all these movies, and more wedding-themed films too, in Cinema Image Gallery.  We will tweet the answers later today.

Read a Wilson programmer's experience of implementing the server side of SUSHI

Brinda Shah, one of Wilson's web programmers, is featured in the Winter 2011 issue of Information Standards Quarterly, the quarterly magazine of the National Information Standards Organization (NISO).

In her article, Brinda describes her experience of implementing the server side of the Standardized Usage Statistics Harvesting Initiative (SUSHI) Protocol here at H. W. Wilson, an experience that took her from "total confusion with endless terms and technologies" all the way to a "pretty neat and straightforward service" that ended up being "one of the most interesting projects I have worked on."

You can download a PDF of Brinda's article from the NISO website. 

The Bay of Pigs operation, with Omnifile Full Text

April 17-19, 2011, marks the 50th anniversary of the Bay of Pigs invasion, in which 1,500 exiled Cubans landed on the south coast of their country in an attempt to free Cuba from Fidel Castro's Communist rule.  These invaders were left on the beach without the supplies, protection, and support that had been promised them by their sponsor, the U.S. government, and most of them were killed or captured.

So says a very interesting account of the Bay of Pigs invasion, written by Jack Hawkins, a former colonel in the United States Marine Corps and one-time chief of the paramilitary staff at the CIA's Cuba Project. Published in the National Review in December 1996, this article follows the declassification of many of the documents surrounding the events of 1961 and is prompted by Hawkins's stated belief that "the facts should be reported." His article criticizes the invasion from a military and logistical perspective,  pointing out that if the Cubans had been trained in the U.S. rather than in Guatemala and Nicaragua, they would have been in a better position to carry out their mission. He is also critical of the failure to destroy Castro's air force before the invasion was attempted. Indeed, Hawkins concludes that if the landing had been made at Trinidad and had received adequate air support, it might have succeeded in overthrowing the Cuban government.


Omnifile also features an article from the May/June 1998 issue  of The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, which reviews the findings of the recently-released CIA review of the Bay of Pigs invasion. This document, "The Inspector General's Survey of the Cuban Operation," deflects blame from President John F. Kennedy's decision to cancel the air strikes that had been intended to coincide with the invasion and instead concludes that the "fundamental cause of the disaster was the agency's failure to give the project... appropriate organization, staffing throughout by highly qualified personnel, and a full-time firection and control of the highest quality." The report, written by then-CIA Inspector General Lyman Kirkpatrick six months after the operation, does concur with Hawkins in some respects, however: it finds fault with agency's handling of nearly every aspect of the operation.

To find either of these articles, or other material on the operation, search Bay of Pigs in Omnifile.