Tom Roper's Weblog

P D Q Bach

I heard a Radio 4 programme, All the Right Notes Not Necessarily in the Right Order, about humour in music, The first programme discussed the work of Peter Schickele. Schickele's stuff is very funny, but I remember Gabor Cossa, an antique dealer in Trumpington Street in Cambridge, who also organised performances of works by the mythical P D Q in the 60s. I think Schickele is not the first.
Postscript: no I was mistaken. I'm not sure where this came from but my memory is clearly wrong. It must have been Schickele.

Punchestown

Punchestown 110: Contact Dancer
Punchestown 140: Iktitaf
Punchestown 240: Central House
Punchestown 310: Rare Ouzel

NHS research strategy

The BMJ summarises the strategy as "making the NHS an internationally recognised centre of excellence for research and development with stronger and more streamlined governance and developing the clinical research work-force" and its two "most notable features[...as]the proposal to centralise funding and the plan to control research through the establishment of a National Institute for Health Research (NIHR) and a new clinical research network for England". For more details see:
BMJ article
Text of the strategy (PDF)

Goal 4 in the document is "to manage our knowledge resources" and sets as objectives to "create a unified knowledge management system to meet the needs of stakeholders; [to] use information systems to harmonise and simplify research processes; [to] ensure research knowledge is made readily available to professionals in the service, researchers and the public; [and to]facilitate the application of research outcomes to improve health and delivery of services".  The document says nothing explicitly about the role of libraries or other repositories of knowledge, but it implies to me that there's a great deal for us to do to support research.

Libraries surgeons and knowledge

A splendid article in a theme issue on evidence-based surgery or, as the editor, Ronald F. Martin puts it, what do we know and how do we know it?
Knight, Thalia, Brice, Anne
Librarians, Surgeons and Knowledge
Surgical Clinics of North America, Vol. 86, No. 1. (February 2006), pp. 71-90

A Library 2.0 OPAC

This, in ALA TechSource, makes Library 2.0 make much more sense. I maintain my criticism that it is too defensive, and emphasises  traditional technical and collection management aspects of our profession rather than some of the other more interesting parts.
But if every record has its own permanent link (is this sustainable?), if users can tag, comment on, or add trackbacks to a record or, even better groups of records,  and if anyone with the technical skills can build more plug-ins and library records can be reused all over the place,  then I can see how much it would transform services
My only question is will some of the more notoriously conservative library management system suppliers be happy with their customers doing this sort of thing?
ALA TechSource | Library 2.0 in the Real World.