Tom Roper's Weblog

The death of the telephone enquiry

Today's Times Higher Education carries a report of a telephone survey of twenty university libraries' enquiry services. Repeating a survey carried out by the Polytechnic of North London in 1987, journalists rang up and asked four questions. Alarmingly, only two of the twenty could give the correct boiling point of ethanol, 78.32°C, the others using Wikipedia which at the time of the survey gave a wrong figure. But even worse, several libraries, six in the case of the ethanol question, refused to answer the enquiry at all.

Overheard in the public library

As I was writing a post on a computer in a public library, I heard the following exchange:

Reader: Have you got any books about talking to spirit cats?
Library assistant: Spirit cats?
Reader: Yeah, like, I mean cats that have passed over. To the other side. You know....

cats

Food at Sussex

Two Sussex students have made a film about food on campus, Food for UoS.(Google video link; I believe it's also up in YouTube and Facebook)
'Food for US is a student made investigative documentary, addressing food at Sussex University and asking how it could be improved ... nutritionally, ethically and environmentally.'
Good for them. I don't agree with everything they say, but when I arrived at the university in 2003 I was surprised to find the food served for the most part indistinguishable from that offered at university when I was an undergraduate in the mid-70s.
The university has just carried out a catering review, but it was merely an exercise in cost-cutting.

Plain English vs. HR-speak

I asked for feedback from a recent job application. I was not short-listed and wanted to know why. They gave me three reasons. Numbers one and three were, in the main, not unreasonable. Number two read as follows:
'The panel felt that...you did not show evidence of....securing, managing and implementing significant and effective change processes to ensure the delivery of effective policies and plans to achieve demonstrable continuous improvement'.
Where to start? The meaningless vogue modifiers, such as 'significant' or 'effective', the latter used twice? What subtle differences are there between securing, managing and implementing change processes? In any case. what's the difference between change and change processes? What fantasy world do they live in, where improvement is always continuous?  The possibility of  demonstrable continuous improvement suggests that there could also be continuous improvement that is not demonstrable.  Why would you deliver a policy? What monster of a candidate did they find who could produce evidence of this stuff?

Crimes against the travelling public

'We're not going to knee-jerk a reaction out of this because one element of one project of one big programme overran', Saturday's Financial Times, quotes the Chief Executive of Network Rail Iain Coucher as saying, apropos the West Coast line shambles. Do I lead a sheltered life? This is the first time I have heard the clichéd phrase 'knee-jerk' used as a verb. As fares rise again, trains run late, over-crowded or  not at all, they could at least show mercy to the language. If Stephenson, Brunel or Gresley were living, they would feed Coucher into the fire-box.

 

Simon Hoggart and Minerva's owl: '...die Eule der Minerva beginnt erst mit der einbrechenden Dämmerung ihren Flug'

Simon Hoggart, in a review of the year in parliament, finds John Reid's use of a quotation of Hegel, the owl of Minerva flies at dusk, weird. Reid was answering a question about when the 'war n terror' would be concluded. It's quite probable that a politician like Reid used the quotation to obscure his meaning, rather than clarify it, as a more elaborate way of confessing that he hadn't a clue.
But Hegel's meaning is not that hard to understand. I have always taken it to mean that Minerva's owl, that is to say philosophy, Minerva being the Roman goddess of wisdom and the owl her symbol, can only understand events at their end, that is in retrospect.

Technorati Tags: hegel, minerva, waronterror, hoggart, reid

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

Mrs Joyful Prize for Raffia Work

The library at the University of East Anglia has won the RFID (Radio-Frequency Identification) in Libraries Award. I intend no disrespect to UEA library or anyone who works there, but giving prizes for using RFID seems to me much the same as giving a prize for innovative uses of sellotape or post-it notes in libraries. In my will, if I have not spent my heirs' patrimony on gin, slow horses and fast women by then, I may leave a legacy for a pointless award to embarrass the profession. Suggestions in the comments box please.
Note: the Mrs Joyful Prize for Raffia Work was a prize at the fictional St Custards school in the Molesworth tetralogy. It was always won by Grabber,  head boy, captain of everything and son of nouveau-riche parents. Grabber could, the narrator-hero Molesworth says,  'win a brownies knitting badge for the ushual amount'.

How to get shot on the tube

Last Friday's Guardian reported that the police thought that Jean Charles de Menezes, the innocent Brazilian shot as a terrorist in 2005, was behaving suspiciously because he was 'nervous and agitated, texting, talking on a mobile phone and getting on and off a bus'. From my memory of twenty-five years of living and working in London, that sounds like entirely normal commuter behaviour to me.

Seaford Head Sixth Form closure

My son, due to sit GCSEs this year, and go into the sixth form next year, has just had a letter from the school saying that the governors have decided to 'suspend', that is to say close, the sixth form at his school, with no consultation with parents or students.
I'm at something of a loss for words, but if the governors, who have wasted their energies on uniform policies and special status bids, think they can get away with a fait accompli, they are mistaken.

Technorati Tags: seafordheadcommunitycollege