Tom Roper's Weblog

Update on blogging

The new issue of CILIP Update has two articles on blogging. One is available online:
Winship, Ian
Weblogs and RSS in information work
http://www.cilip.org.uk/update/issues/may04/article2may.html
The other, by Paul Pedley, is only in the print version.

Libri report

Great excitement on the normally placid jiscmail library list lis-link, caused by the publication of a report by an organisation called Libri on the state of Britain's public libraries. Libri, hitherto unknown to many in the library world, were funded by the Laser Foundation to produce the report, which looks at the state of the public libraries in Hampshire.
The report's author, reputed to be a former Waterstones executive, concludes that public libraries should be more like bookshops and are grossly over-manned. This isn't necessarily so; while there's a lot that public libraries can learn from shops in general and booksellers in particular, there remain some important differences between a library and a bookshop. As for staffing, library staff do a lot more than stock work. The job is, in a hackneyed phrase, not about books but about people.
The bookshop boom of recent years has not entirely been a good thing. While it has made a number of people wealthy, the increasingly monopolistic grip of Waterstones and others have further threatened the already difficult position of independent bookshop. Buying a book now is more and more a homogenous and dull experience: a chain book shop in Brighton in no different from one in Penzance.
There's been a lot of press coverage:
See some of it:
The Guardian
The Independent
Daily Telegraph
and the BBC

Managing Knowledge in Health Services free online

Andrew Booth, Graham Walton and the former Library Association Publishing have generously made the text of their 2000 book Managing Knowledge in Health Services freely available to mark the launch of their new title, Exploiting Knowledge in Health Services, by Facet Publishing.
They're to be congratulated for doing this, and I shall buy a copy of the new book to show my appreciation.

Persian Punch

Alas, I didn't back the eleven-year old Persian Punch today, though he had obliged for me on more than one occasion in the past, his 20 wins from 63 starts. He died at Ascot today, pulled up 100 yards form the winning post, it seems of a ruptured aorta. There's a lot of sentiment about the death of racehorses about which I and others are justly sceptical, but I hope he died happy.

House of Commons Science and Technology Committee: next hearing on scientific publications

The House of Commons Science and Technology Committee has announced its next hearing in the Scientific Publications Inquiry. It's to be on 5th May and witnesses are:

Professor Sir Keith O'Nions, Director General of the Research Councils (on behalf of DTI and OST)

Rama Thirunamachandran, Director of Research and Knowledge Transfer, Higher Education Funding Council for England

A representative from Research Councils UK

A representative from Department for Education and Skills

And the evidence from the hearing of 21st April is now online, when Lynne Brindley, Peter Fox, Fred Friend and Di Martin appeared.

TypePad and type lists

TypePad allows the user to create Typelists and I've been puzzling over the advisability and usefulness of developing some for this blog.
There are some fairly compelling reasons not to, not least as in the TypePad manual the principle raison d'être of such things is to show the world what you consume, which strikes me as sitting firmly at the solipsistic and trivial end of blogging.
There are four types of Typelist, books, music, people and websites. Of these, the only one who's usefulness is beyond dispute is the last. The first could be quite useful, though at the moment it only works with Amazon; if it could be made to work with library catalogues (through Z39.50 perhaps), it would be much more useful, for example if I could send readers off to a Library of Congress or British Library record.
Music lists again also work with Amazon and nothing else.
Lists of people strike me, but maybe this is because I'm a middle-aged Englishman, as the worst thing of all. I should think that any friends of mine who suddenly found themselves listed as such on a blog would take prompt steps to end the friendship.

Today's Ascot selections

2-40 Sagaro Stakes: Supremacy
3-15 Swinley Stakes:Red Top
3-50 Paradise Stakes: Heretic
4-25 Pavilion Stakes: Mac Love

Observer Review on googling ex-lovers

An interesting piece in the Observer Review, as far as I can see only in the print edition and not on http://observer.guardian.co.uk/ by Katha Pollitt on how, when abandoned by her lover, she obsessively pursued references to him in Google. It struck me that she was in a good position to do this for her lover, a New York academic, must have left a rich spoor across the web. Had her lover been a dustman she might have found his life, both with her and afterwards, less well-represented electronically. He had taken up with another academic , and I admire Ms Polllit's restraint in not posting anonymous derogatory reviews of her rival's work on Amazon: indeed I wish she had, for the review she never published,: "writes like a baton twirler with a PhD," is simply marvellous.

Open access and the House of Commons Science and Technology Committee Enquiry

Peter Suber comments in Open Access News that the BioMedCentral list of online submissions to the Inquiry is the best. I humbly beg to differ.
They miss some that I have and link to an unauthorised version of the CILIP evidence which, CILIP say, should not be up until the committee has reported.
Of course the definitive list will be out when the Committee publishes its report: but exaggerated deference to British constitutional quirks by CILIP, SCONUL, and CURL means that the online view of the discussion at the moment lacks the contribution of some of the key participants

Blog status report

To avoid any confusion, this version of my blog will become the definitive one, but isn't yet. I was using iBlog and hosting my blog on my web site and am moving over to TypePad, but until I can fathom the Moveable Type Import Format, the version at http://www.roper.org.uk/blog/index.html is the authoritative one. In any case, if I can get the domain mapping feature to work, this shouldn't make any difference to anyone looking at this, but in the meantime go here for the full Roper blog experience