Tom Roper's Weblog

Internet Librarian International 2006: first keynote, Danny Quah on the information glut

I arrived a little late for Danny Quah's presentation, so had to stand up, along with many others, which offered an interesting perspective on his orthodox economist's belief that supply and demand are useful mechanisms for regulating things, such as the number of chairs provided for conference delegates. Quah holds the chair of economics at LSE and an economists' perspective is always interesting when they turn their attention to information matters: I recall hearing a university, vice-chancellor, also an economist, express some trenchant views on the academic journals market at a publisher's presentation.
The heart of his talk was the paradox that we have simultaneously on the one hand a glut of information, released by technical developments, and on the other mark-ups in the journal publishing sector of 600%. The only other commodity he knew of with such high mark-ups is patented pharmaceuticals. The solution to this, he said, lies outside the market, in social action by authors, readers, librarians and publishers. The system of intellectual property rights was erected to manage these problems, but needs, he implied, at least to me, reform. He saw open access as a way forward.
That's a very truncated and caricatured view of his presentation, but the conditions were not ideal. I shall do better for the next speakers.
Here's a Technorati search for posts on ILI2006 and a search for Flickr photos.
Update: he has a blog, and here's a pdf of his talk

Technorati Tags: ILI2006, internetlibrarianinternational, dannyquah

Cesarewitch and Champion Stakes day

Newmarket 210: Jeremy
Newmarket 250: Detroit City
Newmarket 330: Pride
Newmarket 410: Holy Roman Emperor
Newmarket 445: Rabiyah

Technorati Tags: newmarket, cesarewitch

Internet Librarian International

I'm looking forward to Internet Librarian International, and I'm impressed with their arrangements for signing up to the networking dinners aka dine-arounds.
I shall be blogging the event; perhaps we need to standardise on some tags for blog posts, Flickr photos etc. I'm using internetlibrarianinternational and ILI2006.

Technorati Tags: ILI2006, internetlibrarianinternational

One day in history

From http://www.historymatters.org.uk:

"A MASS BLOG for the national record. The History Matters campaign has designated October 17 a day for the public to make historic. We have chosen 'an ordinary' weekday of no particular significance to ask you to write a one day on-line diary.

We want as many people as possible - tens of thousands of UK residents - to record a 'blog' diary of this one day to be [missing verb: kept? preserved?-TR] by the British Library and others as a record of our national life.

And we want to urge people to reflect in their diaries how history itself impacted on them - whether it be simply commuting through an historic environment, or how business history influenced their decision-making, or merely that they looked up some old sports statistics or listened to some pop music from the 1960s. It could be anything.

'Ordinary' day

October 17 has been chosen deliberately as 'an ordinary' weekday of no particular significance. We want to record the mundane and ordinary lives of citizens and by doing something contributing valuable to the historic record. Material that could be used by historians and researchers for time to come.

Mass Observation

The idea is inspired by similar experiments by Mass Observation, the social history resource, founded in 1937, and which still exists today - based at the University of Sussex.

How

On the 17 October and for a week after it will be possible to upload your on-line diary to www.historymatters.org.uk. The archive thereby created will be held by the British Library, Mass Observation, the National Trust and others."

I shall take part, both here and on the historymatters site. The Mass Observation archive is at the University of Sussex.

By the book

Today's Education Guardian contains an article contrasting two new university library developments, Aberdeen, whose £55m "library for our sixth century". due to open in 2010, and the University of Central Lancashire, who have no new building to boast of, but an e-brary, as they call it, of a rather modest 30,000 e-texts at a cost of £25,000. They quote a UCLan criminology lecturer, Nick Currie, who believes there should be more books. Currie does not help his argument by saying, "if you think Marx shouldn't have wasted his time writing 20 volumes of Capital when he only had two or three ideas that could be summarised in a paragraph, then the internet is fine". Unfortunately for Currie, as every schoolboy, at least of my generation, knows, Marx only wrote three volumes of Capital, or four if you count Theories of Surplus Value, to wit, volume 1, the Process of Production of Capital, volume 2, the Process of Circulation of Capital and volume 3, the Process of Capitalist Production as a Whole. Neither can his error be excused by supposing that he was meant the complete works, for they, in the Lawrence and Wishart English edition, run to 50 volumes.

Technorati Tags: marx

Seaford Web Awards

I'm not a Brighton and Hove resident, of course, but since we in Seaford have yet to organise our own web awards, I should note that the Brighton and Hove Web Awards are open, nominations closing next Monday. Readers need not be diffident about nominating me, if they wish.
The awards are part of the Brighton Digital Festival, which also includes some copulating robots. I mention the robots only because it should increase traffic to this blog a thousand-fold.

Technorati Tags: brighton, robots

Principia Dialectica on public libraries

I became excited when I saw that the second issue of Principia Dialectica included a piece on public libraries. The LRB Bookshop kindly and promptly posted me a copy. I'm afraid to say I was disappointed.
The piece, Blockbuster Libraries, is a review of Ruth Rikowski's Globalisation, Information and Libraries: The Implications of the World Trade Organisation's GATS and TRIPS Agreements with some reflections by the author, David Black, on Wood Green public library, part of the London Borough of Haringey, where I worked as a Senior Librarian from 1986-1990.
Black is correct to draw attention to the decline of the public library, and especially of its book stock, though he seems to come close to the Coatesian error of thinking that libraries should only contain one medium, the book, and should ignore other media. He describes the privatisation of Haringey's libraries, handed over to a company called Instant Library from 2001 till 2004 as a Public Private Partnership. Instant Library were, as an illustration of capitalism's tendency to monopoly, taken over by a company called Tribal Technology, whose website says proudly that among other things, they have been "upskilling [sic] McDonald's frontline employees". (Interest declared: I registered with them at the start of this bout of unemployment and I think I'm correct in saying that they have not sent me a single job in seven months).
Black incorrectly considers the introduction of charges for services other than book loans to be a new phenomenon. I am sorry to say that this commodification, as they describe it, of the public library has existed when I worked in them in the 1970s and 1980s. I could never see the justification for the reservation charge, for example. No one library will hold all the materials a user will need, so why charge for obtaining material from elsewhere, unless to penalise the more serious and purposive reader?
Black, or Rikowski, or both seem to draw an entirely unreal distinction between manual and intellectual labour, and claim that there has been a shift from the exploitation of one to the exploitation of the other. This is nonsense. There is no job, no matter how menial, which does not require intellectual effort, neither is there such a thing as entirely intellectual labour. And the long history of patents, developed side-by-side with capitalism itself, suggests that intellectual products were commodified a long time ago.
The rest of the journal is Trotskyite-cum-Situationist in tone, an approach that may have appealed to the modish some years ago but which has rather run its course.

Black, David
Blockbuster libraries
Principia Dialectica No 2, Autumn/Winter 2006 (they have no ISSN as far as I can see, naughty, but maybe Situationists despise such things)

Rikowski, Ruth
Globalisation, Information and Libraries: the implications of the World Trade Organisation’s GATS and TRIPS Agreements
Chandos, 2005 1843340844

Technorati Tags: haringey

Google again

I also discovered, through Ben Toth's Libraries in the NHS, an article by Jason Epstein on Google in the New York Review of Books. Epstein discusses the following:

Jeanneney , Jean-Noël
Google and the Myth of Universal Knowledge: A View from Europe
University of Chicago Press, December 2006, 0226395774

Battelle, John
The Search: How Google and Its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of Business and Transformed Our Culture
Nicholas Brealey, 2006 1857883624

Anderson, Chris
The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business Is Selling Less of More
Random House, 2006 184413850X

Millerand. William and Pellen, Rita M
Libraries and Google
Haworth, 2006 0789031256

Vise, David A and Malseed, Mark
The Google Story: Inside the Hottest Business, Media, and Technology Success of Our Time
Macmillan, 2005 1405053712

I shall certainly read Jeanneney, director of the Bibliothèque nationale  and the Miller and Pellen book. Of the others, Battelle and Anderson are both well known, and the title of Vise and Malseed suggests the book lacks a certain high seriousness.

From Epstein's review:

"The invention during World War II of electronic memory and of the World Wide Web a mere seventeen years ago originally as a way for scientists to communicate with distant colleagues is a further—perhaps the ultimate— evolution of the momentous transition from collective memory dependent largely on mnemonic verse to prosaic inscription on clay, stone, and paper. With these primitive tools human beings were at last able to record, in language of great beauty and profound understanding, the lore and wisdom accumulated during our long prehistory. What further triumphs of the human spirit may be shaped from the World Wide Web, should our species survive its current folly, are beyond imagining."

Technorati Tags: google

Do no evil? In Bournemouth?

Google's corporate motto is sometimes quoted as "do no evil". In fact, a look at http://www.google.com/corporate/tenthings.html shows that it is given more correctly as, "you can make money without doing evil", a curious and doomed attempt to combine ethics with capitalism
But I'm not sure how addressing the Tories in Bournemouth is compatible with not doing evil, or at least not consorting with evil-doers. What can Google be thinking?

Technorati Tags: google, politics

A funeral: Ubi Saeva Indignatio

I shall say no more after this, as public expressions of grief are embarrassing and unseemly, but I wanted to record Monday's proceedings here.
Below is the programme for my mother's funeral which took place in the East Chapel of Cambridge Crematorium on Monday 2 October at 315 pm. There is also the text of a tribute I prepared. In the delivery I deviated from the script, as I always do, and my brother's contribution is not recorded either.
I promise that I shall now return to normal blogging.