Tom Roper's Weblog

Travel in the 21st century

I read Simon Jenkins in the Guardian, Don't blame the system for winter travel chaos. Stay put, as I sat on a train hoping to get to work, and itemising the claims I need to make to Southern for disrupted journeys. I have stopped bothering to tweet the daily annoyances of my commute from Seaford to Wandsworth and back. On a good day I leave my house at 6.30 in the morning and return at about 7 at night. There have been few good days lately. As I leave, especially on fine days, I wonder what it would be like to stay put, to walk or run on the hills for the day, or watch the seascape from the beach. Jenkins starts from the premise that travel is undertaken frivolously, for pleasure. On the contrary. Modern capitalism is unable to offer work to many of the population. And for those of us who do have jobs, we cannot work where we live, but are required to make complex and lengthy journeys to workplaces far away. There are many organisations nearer home where I could use my skills and talents, universities, colleges, public libraries, government departments, cultural organisations of all sorts, but none of them are recruiting; indeed most have frozen recruitment, or are, like the University of Sussex, making people redundant. Yet, having required us to travel these long distance to work, capitalism is incapable of organising an efficient transport system to get us there.  When there is snow or ice, they pack up altogether. On the day I read Jenkins, with no snowfall, Southern offered only an emergency service.  The railway system is now largely foreign-owned and, as far as I can see, Southern does not give a fig whether I get to work in the morning or home in the evening. It has over £4,000 of my money for my season ticket and, for them, there the matter ends.

Kauto Star in the King George

No bracing Boxing Day family walk for me today. At 3.05 I'll be in front of the television hoping to watch Kauto Star win his fourth consecutive King George.
My selections, all at Kempton
1.55 Feltham Novices Chase 3m: Tazbar
2.30 Christmas Hurdle 2m: Starluck
3.05 King George VI Chase 3m: Kauto Star

Cheltenham: Boylesports Gold Cup

I don't think my selections today will surprise anyone. In the big race, I can't see anyone coming near the favourite Poquelin and I make up a patent with two odds-on favourites. All at Cheltenham:

225: Poquelin
305: Celestial Halo
340: Zaynar

'He was an energetic perfectionist with a relentless interest in detail'

The title is the description of Charles Wilfred Black from the New Munford, the wiki-based version of Munford's Who was Who in British Librarianship developed by John Bowman, formerly of UCL library school. It could apply to many I have met in my time in this great profession of ours. John spoke earlier this year at a CILIP in London meeting about Robert Proctor.

Introduced by Edward Dudley, who cited a recent definition of a wiki heard on Radio 4 , John started by warning us that dead librarians might not be everyone's cup of tea. Munford's original work was published in print by the Library Association, in a cloth binding of the sort that one could not now imagine Facet producing. Munford tried to cover chief librarians and their deputies, though he was sometimes inconsistent. As well as public libraries, his coverage of the British Museum Library and government libraries was good, though he was weaker on university and college librarians

John first conceived of a digital version of Munford some years ago. To create this version he had Munford's text scanned and checked by a UCL student. Local authority boundaries, names and responsibilities have changed considerably, both in the period covered by Munford , and since.

John explored various possibilities. To build a database would have been an expensive solution and then he hit on the idea of a wiki. Equipped with a copy of Wikis for dummies, he set out to create the wiki, hosted on wikipages, deciding on a page per person. He was nervous about depending on a site which could disappear, or hold him to ransom, so he makes frequent back-ups.

From each page, back links allows the user to see related pages: thus, from a place-name or library authority page, one can find everyone who has been associated with that place or authority. John has added to Munford's information in several ways: where possible he has added to library authority pages the date of adoption of the library acts, taken from Kelly, and has also incorporated information from Greenwood's Library Yearbook and from the British Library Yearbook. He has made links out to Oxford DNB entries, and to the BL catalogue for those who were authors. In the case of modern public library authorities he has links out to their websites, when possible.

Tasks awaiting attention include tidying up the names of library authorities and university libraries, adding links to university histories where these exist, and incorporating some of the local government changes since 1974, such as unitary authorities, including information not in Kelly, such as Robin Alston's database, adding information from Library Association obituaries, and, at the suggestion of Kate Wood in the audience, adding information from LA membership records, now kept in the UCL archives.

John showed an interesting use of the wiki. In James Duff Brown's famous article, Where do we get our librarians? in Library World 3 1900/01, Duff Brown analysed the patterns of training and influence in the public library world of the time, but without naming names. Using the wiki, it is possible, by searching for combinations of authority names, to find out which individuals Duff Brown meant.

John is keen for more volunteers to join the wiki, but made a plea for people to accompany their request to join with some explanatory material. He has had a lot of spam requests.

Pears, lumpfish caviar and treacle

I came home last night and took my first glass of sherry. As it was only my first, when I looked at the wall to see that the cupboard was no longer horizontal, but hanging at an angle of 30°, I trusted my sense perceptions and knew I had to empty it. As I did so I discovered a lot of the jars, cans and bottles were long past their use-by dates.

Archaeologists learn much about the past from the things people throw away. To spare the time of the archaeologists of millennia hence, this is what I threw away. I must reassure those who know me as a gourmand, and know my table as to the Sussex coast what elBulli is to the Costa Brava, that many of the things in this list were bought not by me but by the Burra Mem for herself and the children. This is what I threw away:

Item, a jar of lumpfish caviar, become oddly fizzy
Item, a tin of Tate & Lyle Golden Syrup
Item, a jar of Waitrose mincemeat
Item, a bottle of Reggae Reggae sauce
Item a bottle of Watkins' mushroom ketchup
Item, a bottle of Watkins' anchovy sauce
Item, a jar of melon jam bought from a stall at the French market in Newhaven
Item, a jar of Sainsburys green Thai curry paste
Item, a jar of Sizzle n' Stir tikka masala sauce
Item, a tin of pears in syrup, inherited from my late mother's kitchen cupboard. She died in 2007.
Item, a tin of John West tinned red salmon, of the same provenance
Item, a jar of Morrison's cool tomato salsa. Why 'cool', for heaven's sake? Is this a statement of its desirability, or does it mean it is not very hot?
Item, a jar of Old El Paso enchilada sauce
Item, a tin of Colman's mustard powder

I had to do something with the contents so I found a large plastic bag and poured everything in. The mixture looked quite appetising. I wondered if I might use it as a marinade, or perhaps offer it to the womenfolk as a face-pack. I wondered what dishes could be made with these ingredients: a salad of tinned pears with lumpfish caviar and treacle, for example.

I suggest those who dismiss blogs as solipsistic revise their opinions in the light of the clear usefulness of this post to social historians of the future.

Now we are six

I started this blog six years ago, with a post about Alan Davidson, who had died, followed by a post about Reed Elsevier and academic publishing, an account of the Varsity match, a diatribe against Southern Railways and a selection at the December Cheltenham meeting. Plus ça change, except this week I cursed Southern on Twitter, instead of in a blog post. In 2005 I established the running blog, which has never been as popular. The statistics below are solely for this blog.

Here I am, 1430 posts later. I can't offer as rigorous an analysis as Brian Kelly did on the third anniversary of his UK Web Focus blog, but there've been 118,080 unique page views and 556 of you have been provoked into commenting.

Tempus fugit. I am older. My son is now old enough to buy me beer. Thank you for your attention.

Sandown: Tingle Creek day

The big race today is hard to fathom. The soft ground, I think close to heavy, is going to test the small field. In the end, I've gone for Well Chief.
Sandown 155: Somersby
225: Well Chief
300: Overstrand
330: Rambling Minster

DCMS review of public libraries: Empower, Inform, Enrich

Margaret Hodge made a speech at an unnamed Southwark public library this morning announcing Empower, Inform, Enrich, the DCMS review of public libraries. The press release is on the DCMS website but, the document is nowhere to be found, a poor omen for the consultation, which closes on 26 January 2010.

Reduced to searching for it, I came across the telling coincidence that the same slogan, though with the words in a slightly different order, is the name of an annual conference held by the Equifax credit reference agency. Or it was. This year, the website says, 'given the current economic pressures that are broadly curtailing travel and conference budgets ...we have decided to cancel the conference for this year'. 

Auspicious.

Update: the consultation document is now available on the DCMS website as a 2.8 MB pdf

The Wirral

The report of the inquiry into Wirral council's plan to close eleven public libraries is out, and is a precise and scathing analysis. It lists a series of failures by the politicians in charge, failures to take account of the library needs of those who elected them, to devise a strategy for library services, and to attend to the needs of groups of adults and of all children in the borough.

Wirral caved in before the results were published, withdrawing the proposals.

I'm not sure it's possible to overstate how significant this is. This victory won by a local and national campaign, including CILIP, will make every town hall philistine think twice before cutting libraries.

For more, see Laura Swaffield and Bob McKee