Tom Roper's Weblog

Composer(s) of the week

Too, too ecstatic-making. Richard Addinsell and Noel Coward: http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio3/cotw/pip/00ytk/

Sandown, Punchestown and betting slips

Today is what used to be Whitbread Cup day. Some tricky races but I go for the following

Sandown 240: Monet's Garden [will he like the shorter trip...I hope so]
Sandown 320: Lothian Falcon
Sandown 355: Major Cadeaux
Punchestown 455: Silver Jaro

Today's Guardian magazine carries a series of photographs of used betting slips by Stephen Gill, though they aren't on the Guardian website yet.

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.

St Pancras

I'm afraid I can't summon up much sympathy for Antonia Fraser and others who are complaining about undergraduates being let into the British Library reading rooms. I use the BL from time to time, but have never failed to find a seat. And some of the criticisms about frappuccinos in the reading rooms are incorrect: coffee is emphatically not allowed in the reading rooms, though anyone can use the cafés. Odd though, that the BL website makes no reference to the debate. I fear they don't understand the 21st century world

I think there is a fundamental principle here: should publicly-funded libraries exclude any citizens? It might help if applicants for readers passes were interviewed and referred elsewhere if the materials they needed to consult were easily available in public or university libraries.

Libraries unleashed in the Guardian

There's a supplement to Guardian education today, called Libraries unleashed. It's biased towards higher education, and features some of the usual suspects, but has some interesting articles. The supplement is part of JISC's Libraries of the future programme but, though JISC is usually careful to include the further education sector as well as the higher, this time they seem to have forgotten us.

Library management systems horizon scan

I'm indebted to Chris Keene for this, which he found in the slough of despond that is the JISC website.
"Dire need to embrace web 2.0 and to get OPACs out of the 90s". I should say so...

Library Management Systems Horizon Scan (pdf)

Metadata for digital libraries: state of the art and future directions

There's a JISC Techwatch report: Metadata for digital libraries: state of the art and future directions. From the summary:

' Whilst the richness and variety of information resources and digital collections that are made available on the Web have contributed enormously to the higher and further education community, for the average user, accessing information that spans multiple sources is increasingly a messy process involving a plethora of different systems, catalogues and interfaces. For those increasingly used to the ease-of-use of search tools such as Google and Yahoo this new and highly fluid environment can be a considerable barrier to accessing information from digital libraries and online collections.
This JISC TechWatch report argues that rectifying this problem requires above all the acceptance of the importance of metadata and the need for standardization and integration within the library community.'

Pigs in Scotland

Every librarian's favourite open access band are breaking new ground. Not only did a subset of the Bearded Pigs recently play London's famous Ridgmount Street, I now hear they have a date in Scotland planned, at the CILIP in Scotland conference in Peebles on the night of Tuesday 3 June. The moose or elk is to be reintroduced to Scotland: how will it coexist with Sus barbatus?

I cannot be there but should dearly love to hear them interpret my favourite Scottish song, Hamish Henderson's Freedom Come All Ye. I shall also miss their annual appearance at MLA, this year in Picago.

The author (right, with glass of malt) and Bruce the Almighty, HLG conference, Edinburgh, 2002

Indelicates: American Demo: Reverse Baldness, Change Your Life

I hesitate to review a CD. Like every other half-educated man of my age, I spent the early to mid 70s in thrall to the NME, believing that I too could write like Nick Kent or Charles Shaar Murray. Too many of us have fastened on the blog as a way to revive these ambitions in the evening of our lives. But I must say something about the brilliance of the Indelicates' American Demo. Milton is not often referred to in modern music; French symbolists are so much more en vogue. But American Demo proudly bears an epigraph from Satan's speech to the fallen angels:
'....Peace is despaired
For who can think submission? War then, war
Open or understood, must be resolved'
Paradise Lost Book 1 660-662

Epic is not a form often attempted by modern musicians, but the Indelicates' choice of Milton is significant. Martial, too, is present, in mordant satirical songs. I know many of these from the earlier downloadable versions and it is thrilling to hear them now in new, more polished arrangements; then there are also new pleasures: Unity Mitford, If Jeff Buckley had Lived, Heroin, America....
I wish I had seen them perform.

A footnote: a search for the passage from Paradise Lost found it on Google Books in a digitised volume Poetry from 1660 to 1780: Civil War, Restoration, Revolution, along with the sensitive and appropriate advertisement: Hair Restoration: Reverse Baldness. Change Your Life. Request a Free Quotation.

Doncaster and Newbury: Doncaster Mile

Newbury 225: Matuhi
Newbury 300: Mr Quasimodo
Doncaster 305: Chief Editor
Doncaster 335: Don't Panic