Tom Roper's Weblog

Charting the future

I found this, from Resourceshelf, too late for me to listen to it before a meeting this afternoon for which it would have been very useful.

Cliff Lynch on Libraries and Library Systems in the New Information Landscape: "
Audio: Libraries and Library Systems in the New Information Landscape
A presentation (two MP3 files) by Cliff Lynch's at the LITA National Forum. Lynch talks about, preservation, personalization, education delivery and learning management systems, and consumer marketplace developments.'

(Via ResourceShelf.)

Things we have read in preparation:
OCLC's 2003 Environmental Scan
Future proofing the profession: final report of the CILIP Health Executive Advisory Group
and AAHSL's Charting the Future project

 

Librarians in Who's Who 2005

Sheila Cannell and David Pearson make it this year in the Times listings of new entries in Who's Who

Once again on the decline of the press

When the Independent started, one of their founding principles was that they would not cover the royal stories on which nearly every other newspaper wasted ink by the gallon (apart from the Morning Star who reported one of the royal weddings of that era with a one-line item saying that "traffic in central London was disrupted yesterday").

I was dismayed to see in Saturday's copy that the Prince Harry story, which could also be reported in one line, "Frivolous young man of Hanoverian descent wears swastika armband at fancy dress party", seemed to their editor to be worth three whole pages. I'd expect this from the Times, who left their sense of proportion behind along with several thousand employees when they moved to Wapping, but thought the Independent might still remember its origins.

Warwick and Kempton

Warwick 235: No Refuge
Warwick 310: D'Argent
Kempton 325: Goblet of Fire

Classical blogs

I've discovered classical blogs, chiefly rogueclassisism, blogographos and one from Leicester, the Undoctored Past

Music shuffle game

I found this first at Unfogged.
One sets iTunes to shuffle and posts the first ten tunes listed, no matter how odd or embarrassing they may be. Here's my contribution:
1. Aria Detta La Frescobalda  Frescobaldi
2. Venus In Furs   The Velvet Underground
3. Prelude and Fugue in C Sharp Major Bwv 872 J S Bach
4. Cannibal's Hymn Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds
5. Monkey Wash Donkey Rinse  David Lindley And Ry Cooder   
6. The keel row Kathleen Ferrier 
7. A fuego lento Horacio Salgán
8. The Lamentation of a sinner John Dowland 
9. Meet Me In The Indian Summer Van Morrison
10. Easy To Love Hank Mobley

Not bad, fairly representative and a bit could almost be entered in the Late Junction playlist thing. Compare with my Audioscrobbler page. It does expose the limitations of the CDDB metadata which iTunes uses by default. I had to edit several of these before posting: composers and perfomers are confused and in the worst example, a CD of Busoni's transcriptions of Bach for piano played by Nikolai Demidenko, I was offered a track listing in Japanese or Korean.

The British Press

John Lloyd in Saturday's Financial Times magazine (online to subscribers only I'm afraid) writes on the state of the British press and believes that the Guardian is now the paper of the British establishment. He may have a point (actually one could argue this is the case under Labour governments) but it raises the question, what newspaper can one read nowadays and stay sane?
Lloyd rightly points to the degeneration of the Times under Murdoch; it's vulgar and sensationalist. I read the Times, in the unsupported belief that the crossword at least is better than those in rival titles. But even if it ever was the newspaper of record, it certainly isn't now. When my father died in 1997, I placed an announcement in the births, marriages and deaths columns, but I think the days are long gone when that was an effective way of telling people in one's circle of such events.
I was brought up on the Guardian, which my parents read and stuck with it for most of the 1970s and the early 1980s; I switched to the Independent when it started, because I'm a neophiliac, but in the early 1990s grew fed up with it, not least with the sixth-form essay tone of its leaders, which in those days must have been written by Andrew Marr. These days I read the Times during the week, the Independent and Financial Times on a Saturday and the Observer on a Sunday. I think the best English language newspaper I've ever read is the Irish Times, though I quite liked both the Washington Post and New York Times when visiting the USA last year. I can have as much of the world's press as I want, more or less, through the web and RSS feeds but I still need something on wood pulp, preferably in broadsheet format.
In the final analysis, I should start my own. In a democracy, any billionaire can.

Julian Maclaren-Ross

I now have Seaford library's copy of Willetts, Paul  Fear and Loathing in Fitzrovia: The Strange Lives of Julian Maclaren-Ross Dewi Lewis 2003 1899235698.
He gives the following bibliography:
The Stuff to Give the Troops Jonathan Cape 1944
Better than a Kick in the Pants Lawson & Dunn, jointly with the Hyperion Press, 1945
Bitten by the Tarantula Allan Wingate, 1946
The Nine Men of Soho Allan Wingate, 1946
Of Love and Hunger Allan Wingate, 1947
The Weeping and the Laughter Rupert Hart-Davis, 1953
The Funny Bone Elek Books, 1956
Until the Day She Dies Hamish Hamilton. 1960
The Doomsday Book Hamish Hamilton, 1961
My Name is Love the Times Press, 1964
Memoirs of the Forties Alan Ross, 1965

" She knows, you know...."

Little Britain is funny but those who voted "I'm the only gay in the village" the funniest catch phrase of all time should be locked in a room with Partridge until they know better.

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