If you like to read and find yourself captured by the worlds in the stories you read, Small Demons is a website worth investigating. Small Demons lets you discover how books are connected to each other through their people, places, and things and how specific people, places, and things are connected through books. The site requires creating an account (free) and logging in.
Search for Bob Dylan, Wonder Woman, New York, France, Phuket, WWI, Coca Cola, and songs or albums to find out in which books they appear. Which books include Charlie Chaplin? Which ones include motorcycles? Which ones mention Alberta, Canada?
Small Demons is being developed by people who love a good story and the settings and
characters that enrich the narrative. You can learn about the development of the site and what motivates its co-founder and CEO Valla Vakili in the video "Exaggerations and Perversions," his talk at the O'Reilly Media Tools of Change in Publishing conference in February 2012. It's a wide-ranging talk that starts with a quote from William James and covers entrepreneurship, narrative, cartoons, and more as Vakili describes the development of Small Demons. Small Demons is new and in beta, so be patient if it's slow or you experience some page load failure. According to the website, "Small Demons is a Los Angeles based company that believes powerful and interesting things can happen when you connect all the details of books. This site is the first step in showing what happens when you do just that."
To find books in DSU's Mundt Library or in all or one of the over 70 libraries in the South Dakota Library Network, search the Library Catalog by title, author, or subject. To find items in libraries across the U.S. and the world, use WorldCat. Remember, the Mundt Library can borrow items from other libraries for you through "Interlibrary Loan." It's free!
