Tom Roper's Weblog

Smart lad wanted

I'm looking for a job. My current one comes to an end on 3 March. Some of the more interesting jobs I've done in the past have been found not by conventional means but par hasard.
So I'm posting my curriculum vitae here as a pdf. Do get in touch if you could use a highly experienced librarian, who's worked in most types of library and sectors, and who has a strong interest in technical things, classical Greek and more or less everything else. If you want to pay me handsomely to blog, so much the better, but, as they used to say in the personals in the good old days of the Times when they appeared on the front page rather than anything so vulgar as news, anything legal considered.

Download my cv.

Decennial issue of Ariadne

A happy tenth birthday to Ariadne. When the first issues appeared, I was employed at the North Thames Regional Library & Information Unit. Even now when I see the masthead (in those days it appeared both in print and online) I am taken back to my office in a basement in Millman Street, then still the headquarters of the British Postgraduate Medical Federation.
It is worth reading, especially for John Kirriemuir's reflections on Bright Young Things and cuckoos and monkeys. It was John who memorably introduced an audience of animal health information specialists to the pleasures of squirrel hazing. I think he was illustrating a point about search engines.

Leicester handhelds article in HILJ

Honeybourne Claire, Sutton Sarah, Ward, Linda Knowledge in the Palm of your hands: PDAs in the clinical setting Health Information & Libraries Journal 2006 23(1):51-59 doi:10.1111/j.1471-1842.2006.00621.x http://www.blackwell-synergy.com/doi/full/10.1111/j.1471-1842.2006.00621.x

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.

One Entry to Research

A group of Swedish librarians have set up a blog, One entry to research  for the critical evaluation of Google Scholar ,  Scopus and Web of Science 

Library 2.0

For weeks I have been wrestling with a post on Library 2.0. It's an interesting idea, and I thought I had something to say. I also was afraid that I might become a character in  a H M Bateman cartoon, the blogging librarian who has nothing to say on the subject. And then, blast him, T Scott Plutchak beats me to it and says nearly everything I wanted to say and far more eloquently and persuasively.
I may add a little bit in a day or two.

PubMeb breaks 16 million barrier

While the rest of the world dozed between Christmas and the New Year PubMed added its 16 millionth citation

No wireless at Online?

Quite extraordinary: there was no wireless at Online. I found several closed exhibitors  networks but no general wireless access. And this at an information networking conference in 2005?