Tom Roper's Weblog

The second Brighton LibTeachMeet

There's to be a second Brighton LibTeachMeet! Melanie Davies and Joseph Norwood, aka @DreamingEntity, whose presentation at the first #btnlibtm is still talked about in the Sussex cafés and bars that the intelligensia of the profession frequent, have taken over the baton. CILIP Sussex has thrown its weight behind the venture.The TeachMeet will be on the theme of outreach, marketing and promotion, on Tuesday 20 March, at 5.30 p.m.

See the blog for more details, and sign up on Eventbrite.

On the buses

I am indebted to Karen Blakeman who discovered that Brighton and Hove bus information may now be had through an iPhone app. My iPhone having settled down after the excitement of the upgrade to 3.1, I downloaded the app. My first impressions: it's very good. It works on data from the GPS gadgets on each bus, information that feed the displays at bus stops and a web page that has existed for several years. The routes and stops lend themselves well to the iPhone's touch-scrolling lists. Above all, it's free. I don't use buses so frequently now, as Brighton and Hove offer no Seaford to Wandsworth service, but at weekends it will be invaluable. I used buses regularly when I worked at BSMS, but then the bus data was only available on the web. There was a considerable delay between checking the bus times on my desktop machine, and arriving at the bus-stop, involving shutting down the computer, packing my bag, shutting the office and walking to the stop, in which time the situation could easily change.

A nostalgic aside: Karen discovered this in the Local Government Chronicle. Long ago it was my job to scan the LGC, and its rival the Municipal Journal, for references to Barnet council, for whom I then worked in the Hendon reference library. How I enjoyed browsing countless pictures of identical men in identical suits, recently appointed Head of Sanitary Services for Loamshire County Council or Director of Photocopiers at Slagtown District.

Brighton Workers Bookshop

37 Gloucester Road is now a goldsmith's but I and others remember it as the Brighton Workers Bookshop.

World Beard & Moustache Championships

Alas, I do not have time to grow an entry for this.

On the quality of indexes

I have just started reading Julie Burchill and Daniel Raven's Made in Brighton, for its topographical interest and because an excerpt so outraged Guardian readers in that town.
First impressions are not good. I have skimmed some of the text, but went first to the index, complied, it seems, after a long gin-and-cocaine session in a louche Brighton pubs. The indexer or indexers have invented someone called Peter Hamilton, referring to page 141 where Patrick Hamilton is mentioned. Raven describes himself in the blurb as a proof-reader.
Burchill, Julie and Raven, Daniel
Made in Brighton: from the Grand to the gutter: modern Britain as seen from beside the sea
London: Virgin, 2007
9781852273958

Technorati Tags: patrickhamil

Patrick Hamilton event

There's to be a Patrick Hamilton week (or five days) at Brighton's Jubilee library from 17 to 21 March, with showings of Rope, Gaslight and a panel discussion with Laura Wilson, Peter Guttridge and Richard Crane, chaired by Faynia Williams
I've listed the panel discussion in Upcoming (see the sidebar).
The week is jointly organised by the word, Brighton library's events programme, not to be confused with the Radio 3 literature  and the Deckchair. The latter site was down at the time of writing.

The programme says, "despite being regarded as one of the best writers of his generation, and an important chronicler of life between the wars, few of Patrick Hamilton's works are still in print"; however the availability of two editions of Slaves of Solitude, one by Constable and one in the  New York Review of Books classics series, and Black Spring Press's announcement of an edition of the Gorse trilogy to appear in June suggest this may be changing. This latter publisher's agreeably diverse list also includes some Julian Mclaren-Ross, as well as Nick Cave, Charles Jackson's The Lost Weekend, a book I have been chasing for years, Lusts of a Moron by Momus and the complete lyrics of Howard Devoto.

Thanks to Magnificent Octopus for spotting the Gorse trilogy reissue.

Burning the clocks

I went to Burning the Clocks last night.

More photos here.

Technorati Tags: burningtheclocks

Brighton Nightwalk

This sounds interesting (from the SCIP list)

"The Brighton Nightwalk is a live audio journey through the heart of the city taking you, the listener, along Brighton seafront and through the city centre at night.

Anyone who walks the night knows that streets after dark have their own unique pulse, an atmosphere missing in the light of day.
The walkers outnumber the cars, playing out their own dramas in the public arena, in varying degrees of intoxication, excitement or distress.
Sirens punctuate the cries of the crowds, while the sea provides an eternal rhythmic backdrop to the evening’s amusements.". It will be live at 11 tonight. I'm not sure if it will be available after that:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/southerncounties/content/articles/2006/10/11/brighton_by_night_feature.shtml

Technorati Tags: brighton, soundscape

Brighton and Hove libraries in Update

The latest issue of Update is a theme issue on library architecture and includes (in dead tree only, I'm afraid) articles on the Brighton Jubilee library and the refurbishment of Hove library.

Flea pit

I tried to book some seats at the local branch of a chain of cinemas through their web site. It wouldn't work, at least not in Firefox. I tried Safari too, with no greater success.
I fired off an e-mail, and received the following reply about 24 hours later, the interpolated comments being mine:
"Please accept my apologies for any lack of functionality you have encountered whilst using the xxx Website. I can appreciate your frustration as an Internet user that you would like to use your browser of choice. However I'm sure you can appreciate from our point of view that we want to make our website as readily available to the general public as possible. [And we don't want the money or patronage of anti-social misfits who refuse to worship at Bill Gates' altar-TR]
As a result it made sense to invest heavily into our web site to ensure immediate functionality with the world's most popular and well used [they forgot to say most insecure-TR] Web Browser "Microsoft Internet Explorer" [why the quotation marks?-TR]. A significant majority of the world's internet users have IE installed on their machine even if it is not their first choice of browser so the option to access the xxx Website through this medium is always on offer to the customer. [Microsoft announced back in 2003 that they would no longer develop IE for the Mac, the page on their site now saying "....as of January 31st, 2006, Internet Explorer for the Mac is no longer available for download from Microsoft. It is recommended that Macintosh users migrate to more recent web browsing technologies such as Apple's Safari"-TR]
However I am happy to inform you that xxx is investing time and effort into ensuring functionality across the many Web Browsers available to
Internet Users, hopefully including Netscape Navigator and other Gecko based Web Browsers such as Opera and MoZilla. [Why the bizarre capitalisation of nouns...was this written by a German speaker? And the illiterate use of hopefully...?-TR]"

Technorati Tags: browsers, cinema, firefox