Waking the unread

While looking at Google Book Search the other day I was intrigued to discover that parts of my early oeuvre, such as it is, have been digitized from the University of Michigan collections.
I was particularly struck by the word clouds. Here is a word cloud from a 1991 work on libraries and networks with special reference to the now long forgotten OSI suite of protocols.

Here is the word cloud to a 1988 collection of conference papers on library automation, mostly with a UK focus.

In each case, I think the cloud does a reasonable job of reminding you of topics of interest at the time. Here are a couple of other volumes. Here is the cloud from Charles Hildreth’s influential earlier work (1982) on online catalogs:

And here is the cloud from the first edition (1992) of Ed Krol’s very influential The whole Internet: user’s guide & catalog ..

They have a nice quality of ‘glancability’ … not a definitive guide but useful hints and hooks.