Tom Roper's Weblog

Après nous, le déluge, or e-commerce, Web 2.0 style

I send an official order to a institution for some goods they provide. They refuse it: they will only take orders with credit cards hand-written on a form one has to print from their website and then fax to them.
I have a telephone conversation with a pleasant woman. "Please tell me, why do you not accept official orders from a major university like us?" I ask. "Oh", she replies, "that would open the floodgates". I put the telephone down. What flood does she fear? A flood of customers wanting to spend money on buying her goods?

Librarian in the Guardian

The Guardian let Ian Snowley, CILIP's President-Elect, loose on Glen Berger's play Underneath the Lintel, showing at the Duchess Theatre. Ian writes in their Another View column; Lyn Gardner reviewed it for the paper proper, and started off with a wisecrack about the Dewey Decimal system.

The play's starting point is a librarian who finds a Baedeker returned, 113 years late. Ian seems to have enjoyed the play more than Lyn Gardner; "should be filed under G for guff", she says.

Links:
CILIP president elect's page
Ian's personal blog

Toytown democracy

Changes to the Radio 3 schedules have generated a predictable amount of heat. I can't say I'm that upset by any of them, though in order to do my ironing to the sound of Andy Kershaw, refreshed by a glass of gin, ironing night will have to move from Sunday to Monday.  I suppose it is liturgically more proper to have Choral Evensong on a Sunday, though, being an atheist, it matters little to me when I hear it. Listen again in any case diminishes the importance of scheduling. If only more programmes were offered as podcasts....
I am a veteran of Radio 3, and indeed Third Programme revamps . I can remember the dear dead days when This Week's Composer, as I think it was then called, could be heard at 9 in the morning.
What puzzles me though, is why the BBC did not take this chance to do away with their antiquated message boards, and replace them with something more Web 2.0-ish....a blog for each programme, with commenting enabled, as a very minimum; better still, linking outside the confines of the BBC website to what people saying about programmes elsewhere. The message boards are hideous, in appearance and functionality like nothing so much as an AOL chat room in the early 1990s, "toytown democracy," as Mark Ravenhill observes in this morning 's Guardian.

Patrick Hamilton: Slaves of Solitude

In keeping with this blog's reputation as a centre for Hamiltonia, which I'm not sure I deserve, I must note today's article in the Guardian by David Lodge on Slaves of Solitude.
I think the Slaves of Solitude is Hamilton's best novel, better even than Hangover Square. Lodge mentions a new NYRB Classics edition, out this month. There is also a Constable edition, published it last year, after too long a time out of print.

Technorati Tags: patrickhamil

Ascot, Haydock and Wincanton

Ascot 110: Nation State
Haydock 200: The Outlier
Ascot 220: Thisthatandtother
Wincanton 330: Straw Bear

A cretinous pastime

Out of the mouths of search engines: a Google search for the two words "cretinous" and "bingo", which I ran to check the provenance of a quotation in the weekend's Financial Times, found the Sun newspapers website as the fourth result. I wonder why?
The phrase is attributed to a Times leader in 1961 where they described the game of bingo as " a cretinous pastime".
Barker, Alex
Is bingo's number up?
Financial Times 9 February 2007

Bad Science, open access and the arms trade

This week's Bad Science column in the Guardian, whose author, Ben Goldacre, will be speaking at the Brighton Science Festival, discussed open access, in particular the news that some publishers, he doesn't say which, have hired Eric Dezenhall, the "pitbull of PR". I had not heard of Mr Dezenhall before I read the article. I look forward to Dezenhall's interventions in the open access debate. Neither did I know that Reed Elsevier include among their money making activities organising the DSEI arms fair.
I don't endorse the view that arms-dealing is abnormal. From a capitalist point of view, it is as reasonable to profit from of the labour of workers who make tanks and armoured cars as from those who create scientific research. But it does sit ill with publisher's rhetorical claims to be impartial and altruistic handmaidens of scientific communication.
Ben's blog is well worth a visit, not least for the sixteen (at the time of writing) posts tagged with the word "onanism".

Technorati Tags: reedelsevier

Newbury and Leopardstown

Leopardstown 220: Catch Me
Newbury 240: Kauto Star

Leopardstown 255: Chelsea Harbour

Newbury 315: Acambo
Newbury 350: Well Chief
Leopardstown 400: Forget the Past

A bumper press day for public libraries

The Independent runs an article and a leader:
Children's Laureate says libraries are guilty of letting down young readers
An enduring Victorian value
In the former, Jacqueline Wilson, once more the most-borrowed author in the Public Lending Right statistics, says,
"It just seems very sad that there isn't the tradition of having classic authors so that a browsing reader who doesn't know what they're doing can discover the great works of literature that I feel is the reason that libraries are there. When I was a child in the 1950s I went to the library as a matter of course because that was your only source of good reading matter."
From the latter: " So long as knowledge and stories are put into written form, the libraries will have a place. They're the last things that should be cut as the iron bonds of public expenditure are tightened."

And the Institute of Ideas have made the proposition,"books should remain the essence of public libraries" a topic in their Debating Matters competition they run jointly with Pfizer. There's a page full of resources for both sides at: http://www.debatingmatters.com/C2B/document_tree/ViewACategory.asp?CategoryID=173

Idox and TFPL

Idox, who bought TFPL recruitment a year ago, are to dispose of it, saying that it is, “just not a good fit", I read in Information World Review. The TFPL blog gives the official version.
When, exactly, did enlightenment strike in the Idox board room, I wonder? How did an information industry recruitment agency change from being an attractive proposition, to an unnecessary frippery? Surely the days of predatory asset stripping have not returned? I think this news will set off a shake up among recruitment agencies generally. They offer nothing to candidates, and precious little to employers. I have heard CILIP’s own agency INFOMatch defended on the grounds that it brings income into the organisation. So too would a chain of massage-parlours or betting-shops. However, CILIP’s recent financial difficulties were blamed, at least in part, on a downturn in the recruitment market and INFOMatch's consequent failure to bring in the expected money. Interest declared: I am a former, dissatisfied, client of TFPL, and other recruitment agencies.

PS. CILIP's Library and Information Gazette runs a front-page article on the library and information recruitment "industry", though the text is not online. Why ever not? It is symptomatic of my professional organisation's half-hearted approach to using the web. "Quality, experienced candidates are at a premium". says the spokesman for one agency, 'there are jobs available in fields such as executive search and professional services at junior level which we are struggling to fill".
The lesson of the past nine months is that I am clearly not a "quality experienced candidate". The article also suggests that jobs suitable for newly qualified staff are being outsourced to India, with a consequent effect on the supply of candidates for more senior posts.
The article fails to mention the sale of TFPL at all. I suppose it went to bed before the news was known.

Technorati Tags: idox, jobsearch, outsourcing, tfpl