Tom Roper's Weblog

UCL Open Access...up to a point

The announcement by UCL that all the institution's research is to be freely available is good. Rapture! But I went to the repository at http://eprints.ucl.ac.uk/ and browsed the Greek and Latin area. The very first paper, Robinson, M. (2009) Ardua et Astra: on the calculation of the dates of the rising and setting of stars. Classical Philology, 104 (3), is 'restricted access'. Never mind I thought, it is marked as being in press. I tried another, on the Sappho poem discovered a few years ago:
Rawles, R. (2006) Notes on the interpretation of the 'new sappho'. Rawles, R. (2006) Zeitschrift für Papyrologie und Epigraphik, 157 . pp. 1-7
Again, no copy on the UCL site, only a link to the Zeitschrift für Papyrologie und Epigraphik site, and as far as I can see nothing later than 2004 is available. So, modified rapture.

See commentary on the Library and Information Update blog

'An indefinable hippy air...'

The recent pleasantly warm weather has resulted in some amusing exchanges on lis-link discussing whether it is possible or desirable to impose dress codes on library users.

For myself, I don't care what they wear so long as they use libraries. As for staff dress codes, though I like to think I am usually fairly well-turned out, years of having to obey an obsessively over-detailed uniform code at school make me resist any attempts to regulate other peoples's clothing. I remember in particular a prohibition on boots which, the headmaster decreed, had 'an indefinable hippy air' and debates about the precise meaning of subfusc. I and my peers were delighted when we discovered a shop selling kipper ties (this was 1970) in the school colours, which we wore to subvert the rules. Whoever had drafted them had not specified the tie width.