Tom Roper's Weblog

"Self-plagiarism is style": The Library 2.0 Idea Generator

Hilarious: "Self-plagiarism is style" The Library 2.0 Idea Generator.
With thanks to Alan Fricker for pointing it out

Ascot, York and Leopardstown on King George VI and Queen Elizabeth Diamond Stakes day

345 Ascot: Marching Song
350 York: Best Alibi
420 Ascot: Hurricane Run
650 Leopardstown: Gaudeamus

Work

I have some work! I started some consultancy in earnest this week, as RSS Directory Moderator for the National Library for Health. You can see the directory here. It's only the equivalent of one day a week, but fascinating.

More on Open Access: Key Strategic Technical and Economic Aspects

Further to my post on the Open Access book, it seems nearly all the contributions are now freely available.
Stevan Harnad writes on the Jisc-repositories list:
"Of the chapters in Jacobs, N., (Ed.) Open Access: Key Strategic,
Technical and Economic Aspects (Chandos Publishing: Oxford), published
17 July 2006, all but two chapters are known to have been made available
Open Access by being self-archived by their authors. Steve Hitchcock has
very helpfully listed all the URLs at:
http://www.eprints.org/community/blog/index.php?/archives/93-Open-Access-Key-Strategic-Technical-and-Economic-Aspects.html

(For the subtle sleuth, the identity of the two missing chapters will speak
volumes...)"

Technorati Tags: openaccess

A pedant writes

There's an awful howler in Sunday's Observer, in which Phil Hogan writes, though not online, of the Proms that they were founded "for the russet-cheeked Victorian masses. A grand evening of music at the Albert Hall for the price of a lump of coal and a quart of gin". [Verb missing, I think-TR]
It's a pity that Hogan's whimsy is spoilt by the fact that the Proms only moved to the Albert Hall in 1942 after the Queen's Hall was bombed the year before.

Technorati Tags: pedantry

LibraryThing in CILIP Gazette

There's a piece on LibraryThing in the new CILIP Gazette, not online though. It seems that awareness of LibraryThing and interest in how it might work with library catalogues is growing more and more in the world of institutional as well as personal collections, and exciting interest in this great profession of ours; witness this piece and the development of the Librarythingthing Firefox extension.
You can see my LibraryThing collection through the link in the sidebar, or here.

Technorati Tags: librarything

Brighton and Hove libraries in Update

The latest issue of Update is a theme issue on library architecture and includes (in dead tree only, I'm afraid) articles on the Brighton Jubilee library and the refurbishment of Hove library.

HLG: Tuesday afternoon

Tuesday afternoon opened with a plenary at which Peter Morgan gave a very clear summary of open access and institutional repositories. Peter runs Cambridge's DSpace repository when he's not being a medical librarian.
He made some interesting points about the differences between computing and library approaches to repositories, noting that librarians who run repositories think of different ways to use them, particularly to manage other digital resources in institutions. He also pointed out some of the growing tensions between archivangelists and librarians, and drew our attention to a new SHERPA resource, JULIET, which sets out for authors the open access requirements of each of the British research councils.
Then we heard from Danielle Worster on the Seniors Health Research Transfer Network (SHRTN) project in Ontario.

Technorati Tags: eastbourne, hlg, hlg2006, HLGEastbourne2006

Book on Open Access

From a post by Chris Awre on lis-ukeig. The post doesn't give the URL where the open access sections of the book may be seen:

"A new book, documenting the major strands and issues of open access, will be published 17th July. It covers the rationale, history, economics, technology and culture of open access, views from major stakeholders, updates from around the world, and visions of the future.

The book is:
Jacobs, N. (ed) (2006) Open Access: Key strategic, technical and economic aspects. Oxford: Chandos Publishing.

The following authors have contributed:

Alma Swan, Charles W. Bailey, Jr., Jean-Claude Guédon, Andrew Odlyzko, Michael Kurtz, Tim Brody, Chris Awre, Stevan Harnad, Arthur Sale, Robert Terry, Robert Kiley, Matthew Cockerill, Mary Waltham, Colin Steele, Leo Waaijers, Peter Suber, Frederick J. Friend, John Shipp, D. K. Sahu, Ramesh C. Parmar, Clifford Lynch, Nigel Shadbolt and Les Carr.

Many of the chapters are, of course, available open access on the web.

Further details of the book available at:
http://www.chandospublishing.com/catalogue/record_detail.php?recordID=103"

Update: Chris tells me the following: "Not surprisingly the publisher is being coy about availability through open access as it still wants to sell the book - an ongoing dilemma for books on this topic. It has been suggested that each author archive their own chapter in a place of their choice (which will be a mixture of institutional and subject repositories) - the whole will then be available through searching an aggregator such as OAIster (three of the chapters are available on a search of open access and jacobs so far) or, dare I say it, Google. Steve Hitchcock is also planning to blog the locations of the chapters he knows about in the eprints community blog at http://www.eprints.org/community/blog/ as soon as he has all the information. I am sure individual authors will also be happy to provide chapters on request."

Using OAIster, I could find Arthur Sale's contribution on the researcher's viewpoint and a piece by Shadbolt, Brody, Carr and Harnad on the Open Research Web: A Preview of the Optimal and the Inevitable which was listed twice, once in its Cogprints incarnation and once at Citebase. A search of Steve Hitchcock's's EPrints Insiders blog found one extra, Harnad, Stevan Opening Access by Overcoming Zeno's Paralysis

Technorati Tags: openaccess

HLG: Tuesday morning

The morning opened with another keynote speech, this time by Bernard Barrett of the Irish Health Sciences Libraries Group, who gave his confessions of an information scientist. Bernard spoke about his experiences working outside a library, in mental health in Ireland. , developing guidelines and policies, identifying areas where there might be a lack of evidence and on service development.
He picked up some of the themes about professions that Ian Snowley had mentioned the previous day. He felt that the vocabulary of "user" and "support" used in library and information service discourse holds us back, and that it was more helpful to speak of colleagues and fellow team members when H called on us to be precisionists and ended with his ten confessions of faith, which I'll link to when his presentation goes up.
Next, I attended the sessions on international collaboration, where Emma Farrow spoke of her experience in Sri Lanka, and the work that PHi is doing in Uganda and Sierra Leone, and Tony McSéan spoke on the HINARI project (and also told us of Mike and Bernie Winters' legendary p[performance in the same auditorium...at the start of the act the straight man of the two appeared and began a monologue; when the second poked his head through the curtains and grimaced at the audience, a member of the audience was heard to shout, "oh no, there's two of them".
After the break I went to a very comprehensive presentation by Ina Fourie of the Department of Information Science, University of Pretoria, on current awareness services.

Technorati Tags: eastbourne, hlg, hlg2006, HLGEastbourne2006