Tom Roper's Weblog

Zounds

I hope this blog will not turn into an arts review. There are plenty of people better-qualified to hold forth on the latest plays, films, books and so on, and some of them can even claim salaries for doing so. That said, I cannot let last night's Radio 3 production of  Sheridan's the Rivals pass without comment, not least because the play provides the epigraph for this blog. It was beautifully done and I had forgotten how funny the play is. The phrase 'croaking like a frog in a quinsy' has stayed with me all day.

Will Self and Ralph Steadman in Lewes

I went to the last gasp of 2007's Lewes Live Literature festival, a reading by Will Self and Ralph Steadman discussing their new book, Psychogeography.. Psychogeorgraphy, according to Self is 'a means of dissolving the mechanised matrix which compresses the space-time continuum, and decouples human from physical geography'.
Based on their columns in the Independent, the very first one, from which Self read, concerns a walk from Lewes to Eastbourne, a route I know well, and bits of which I run. Is it possible to run psychogeographically, I wonder?  He also read his account of a visit to Varanasi.
Steadman, once artist in residence at Sussex University, meditated out loud on art, and seems to have a particular devotion to Marcel Duchamp. At question time, an unfortunate member of the audience muddled him with Gerald Scarfe.

Cheltenham and Lingfield

Cheltenham 1:30: Liberate
Lingfield 1:55: Russian Invader

Lingfield 2:30: Verasi
Cheltenham 2:40: New Little Bric
Cheltenham 3:10: Katchitt
Cheltenham 3:40: Souffleur

Brilliant ideas of the 21st century

At first I was nervous about this. Secret Santa arrangements are not my sort of thing. But the more I though about Librarything's Santathing, the better I thought the idea was.
It works thus: participants register and undertake to buy a book to the value of $20 (that is to say about £9.80) to another librarything user picked at random. Amazon take care of the distribution, which is guaranteed for Christmas, and privacy is maintained.
So I've signed up. Do so too, the deadline for registering is noon on Thursday Eastern time, that is to say 5 p.m. GMT

Update" I bought a present that I hoped would please my designated recipient and was delighted to receive from my anonymous benefactor Aelian's Historical Miscellany.

Technorati Tags: librarything, secretsanta

Tingle Creek day

A friend gave me a splendid lunch the other day in exchange for my views on today's Sandown meeting. Then Kauto Star was still in the entries. Without Kauto, majority opinion favors Voy Por Ustedes, I go for Monet's Garden.
All at Sandown:
205: Moon over Miami
235: Monet's Garden
310: European Dream
340: McEvoy

CILIP Sussex Christmas quiz

Cambridge may have beaten Oxford in yesterday's varsity match,  but my team in the CILIP Sussex Christmas Quiz fared less well. I was honoured to be allowed to compete with the University of Sussex team,  Adam, Chlöe, Ellie, Mell and Simon. We scored 100% in the first picture round, but were was less successful in a round which required knowledge of the price of everything and the value of nothing.  Knowing where  Neptune's Staircase is (a flight of locks on the Caledonian canal) would have done us no harm either.
Well done to the winners, the committee team, who triumphed after a tie break.

OCLC Symposium at Online

The only thing that interested me at Online this year, apart from a few encounters with old friends, and seeing Brian 'IWR Information Professional of the Year'  Kelly of UKWebFocus fame clutching his Oscar-like award, was the OCLC Symposium, Who’s watching your space?

Three speakers, John Naughton, journalist and academic at the Open University, Matt Brown of Nature Network and Cathy de Rosa, VP of Global Marketing for OCLC addressed us. John was keen to emphasise how much journalists have hyped the more well-known social networking sites, and how much they ignore anything outside  MySpace and Facebook. he identified the known business models as being advertising or monetising eyeballs as it is elegantly expressed, viral marketing, subscriptions, share-cropping and the walled garden approach. He thought that the growth of social networking had implications for privacy, for how were understand friendship, that they might challenge conventional authority structure's and might allow more efficient information sharing. But he thought that there would be a collision between the walled garden model and the open  nature of social networking sites, and he also cited the 'what next?' problem, where users, after the initial excitement of signing up to a network and discovering their friends, then wonder what to do next. He thought there might be possibilities for harnessing social networking in education, in corporate organisations and in libraries.

Matt demonstrated the Nature Network which was interesting, though I was left unclear about how hospitable it might be to other social networking tools. They have their open bookmarks and citations sharing tool, for example, Connotea, but I don't know how a Connotea user could share bookmarks with some who used del.icio.us or ma.gnolia, or citations with someone using citeulike.

Cathy highlighted some of the findings from  the report itself, Sharing, Privacy and Trust in our online world, downloadable from OCLC as a pdf. For librarians, one of the key findings is that there has been a considerable fall in the use of library websites since their last report two years ago. There's lots in the report, though the samples used seem a little small to me.

In questions, Brian Kelly asked if we were not in a very similar situation to that of the web in 1993, that that which was dismissed as hype then has now proved to be sustainable? John Naughton didn't answer the question, saying that he didn't think we could know what social networking might mean for serious applications. In response to another question, John compared the possible situation libraries might find themselves in to that of travel agents.

 

Varsity match

It's the Varsity match today, moved to 4 pm on a Thursday, rather than the usual 2 pm on a Tuesday  Therefore I won't be there, and I suspect that will be true of many others.
Paddy Power offer 8/11 on an Oxford win, 6/5 Cambridge and 12/1 a draw.

The curse of Roper

The dying Aleister Crowley is supposed to have cursed Hastings, or in some tellings of the story, Eastbourne, which explains a lot. A dreadful fate awaits any library that rejects a job application from me. Senate House , or to give it its more formal title, the University of London Research Library Services, were unwise enough to do this. They found themselves the subject of scathing letters in the Times Literary Supplement. This, on its own could have been coincidence. The national library, the British Library, whose unwritten rider on job advertisements seems to be 'librarians need not apply', also rejected my applications, and often come in for stick, but the BLis the library we all love to hate, so I have never read any great significance into it. Now, once more in the TLS, I see that the London Library, who also lacked the vision to employ me, are now being lambasted for an 80% subscription increase, presumably as their new extension has bled their reserves dry.
Future employers might like to think hard before rejecting me.

Technorati Tags: jobsearch, curse

CILIP Communities

A bizarre thing has happened over at CILIP Communities. CILIP, my professional association, ran an online hustings area for this year's elections. Voting has closed and I found yesterday afternoon that forum has been deleted.
We take professional pride in our commitment to open access to information. It seems we cannot offer this to our own members.

Technorati Tags: transparency