Tom Roper's Weblog

Les apéros géants

I buy Le Monde on Fridays, ostensibly for the book reviews, but something else often catches my eye. Today it was a story entitled Facebook saoule la préfectorale, about the trend for French young people to organise street parties on Facebook at which they get drunk in a manner Le Monde haughtily describes as plutôt anglo-saxonne.

Thousands have attended such parties in Nantes, Rennes, Caen, Brest and last night in the main square of Clermont-Ferrand. In some of these cities, the police have tried to ban the public consumption of alcohol, in others they have been more tolerant. The next city for one of these parties is Paris herself, on 23 May.

When British licensing laws were changed in 2003 politicians expressed the pious hope that the British would import the more leisurely and civilised attitude to alcohol of southern Europe. Alas,  British binge drinking seems to be our chief export.

Conference going

Henry Green's remarkable trilogy of novels, Living, Loving and Party Going, could have been followed by a fourth on conferences. This thought was prompted by a post on the excellent American team blog, In the Library with the Lead Pipe, on the matter of library conferences. They discuss the various conferences American librarians attend; I wonder if we should not record the British experience too.

My conference going hey-day was in the late years of the last centruty and the early years of this. It was a heroic era. Tony McSéan, then Librarian at the British Medical Association, even proposed a journal, the Journal of Airport Librarianship, for those who spent more time in airports than in the libraries they were supposed to run. The joke was told of Derek Law, then at Kings College London,
Q: what's the difference between Derek Law and God?
A: God is everywhere; Derek Law is everywhere but Kings

See also Joeyanne Libraryanne's post, Conference Advice

Poetry London

I rarely sing the praises of iPhone apps, but City Poems is well worth the money will cost you in the apps store. Compiled by Victor Keegan, it mashes-up a map of London with poems about different parts of the city. There is nothing for Wandsworth, nor for much of the suburbs, but very rich links to poems about the City, Westminster and other parts of central London. Richard Ames' A Farther Search for Claret provides many of the extracts, the story of a drunken pub crawl round late seventeenth century London.

I particularly enjoyed some lines about bankers and their capacious beavers, which I can't find at this moment.

Ayr and Newbury

It's the Scottish Grand National today and a good flat meeting at Newbury, a fine example of the mixed flat and jumps economy that pertains at this time of year. So I choose:
200 Newbury: Buxted
245 Ayr: Arcalis
305 Newbury: Misheer
320 Ayr: Theatrical Moment

France and the Bibliotheca Alexandria

Le Monde des Livres, which comes out on a Friday, is much better than the British press at covering library stories. I've made this point before about their articles on Google, and in today's there's a front-page article on the Bibliothèque Nationale de France's (BNF) donation of half a million books to the Bibliotheca Alexandria. The Bibliotheca Alexandria's Director, Ismail Serageldin, describes this as the largest donation of books in history. Le Monde says that the donation consists of second copies of everything recevied on legal deposit by the BNF between 1996 and 2006. However, the article notes notes that 250 'livres ouvertement pornographiques' were excluded from the donation.

The story is also on the BNF's site

UKSG

'So what was the most interesting issue that came up at the [UKSG] conference?' asked an e-mail that arrived this afternoon, as I hurtled south on the train to King's Cross. I was stuck for a reply. It's hard to process three days of rich ideas about more or less everything that librarians and publishers have to deal with in the modern world.

A frivolous answer would be 'tartan'. I don't believe Edinburgh has seem quite so much checked woollen cloth since George IV's visit in 1822. This was the theme of the conference dinner and, to my considerable surprise, I won the prize for its best interpretation. I wore evening dress, but substituted a pair of trousers in the Rothesay tartan for my usual midnight blue ones. I have no photograph to prove this, though some do exist, I believe; but I do have a handsome bottle of champagne, beautifully presented in a tartan cloth bag

So would the most interesting issue be homosexual necrophilia in mallards? Open access? The changing OPAC? The big deal? How to measure the return on investment and impact of library services? New ways of finding and presenting information and data, as shown by Conrad Wolfram? The basic human need to make lists, something that cropped up in more than one presentation? Social media, as used by researchers? The uses and abuses of bibliometrics? Statistical fetishism?

I'll write up my notes over the next few days, but I'll be hard-pressed to offer as good an account as the official bloggers already have, led by Charlie Rapple, @charlierapple on Twitter, at http://liveserials.blogspot.com/

  

En route to UKSG

I haven't been to a conference for a very long time, but UKSG very kindly asked me to lead a work-out session at their conference in Edinburgh which starts tomorrow. How could I refuse? Once one of the globe-trotting conference going jet-set of the library world, I haven;t been to one for too long. And Edinburgh is one of my favourite cities in the whole world. I look forward to a run round or possibly even up Arthur's Seat. I type this on a train with German wifi—it defaults to German Google and invites me to Melden Sie sich in Ihrem Google-Konto an.

It's a beautiful afternoon and I shall not moan about the troubles I've had with trains; that's what Twitter is for. I've taken a quick break from preparing my presentation on the Economics of Information Supply – is free information good enough? to reflect briefly on the conference ahead. I'll blog, of course.

There are some fascinating plenaries with an impressive range of international speakers:

• the technology of information consumption, with Adam Bly on Rearchitecting science: a vision for STM in the 21st century, Richard Wallis on Technology and change and Conrad Wolfram on Computation, communication and the new era of knowledge
• economics of scholarly information, with Ted Bergstrom on librarians and the terrible fix: economics of the Big Deal, Marybeth Manning on Reset – a publisher’s response to the changing economy and Carol Tenopir on University investments in the library: measuring the return
• rights and licensing, with Dorothea Salo on Who owns our work?, Eelco Ferwerda on New models for monographs – open books and Jill Russell on paved with gold: an institutional case study on supporting open access publishing
• researcher behaviour, with two speakers I've long wanted to hear, Tony Hirst on network ecology and the knowledge economy: why researchers need to get online and social and Lucy Power on life scientists go online – collaboration, communication and credit
• research quality assessment – controversies and challenges, with Hugh Look on the raw and the cooked: bibliometrics and the flight from judgment, Alain Peyraube on research assessment in the humanities and the ERIH project (European Reference Index for the Humanities), Peter Shepherd on PIRUS 2: developing a standard for individual article usage statistics and James Pringle on citation impact and research evaluation: current trends
• the intriguingly named Light Programme, with Brendan Dawes on stop making sense: human approaches to exploring information and Marc Abrahams of the Annals of Improbable Research on Improbable research and the Ig Nobel Prize

I look forward to the break-out sessions too, in particular Anna Vernon's, who will be bringing the latest news from the JISC e-books for FE project.

Vic Venturi for the Grand National

What a glorious day for the Grand National. See previous years' posts for discussions of the democratic nature of the day, the race as a betting opportunity, diatribes against the crowds of people clogging up the bookies having each-way bets explained to them, and so on.

For today, I go for one of Dessie Hughes's two entries in the big race, Vic Venturi, who comes to the race from a nice victory at Fairyhouse, beating his stablemate Black Apalachi. He should have no trouble with the fences. Will he last four miles and four furlongs?

As for the rest of the Aintree card, I suggest
145: Peddler's Cross
215: Osana
250: Zaynar
325: Seven is My Number
500: Ghizao
535: Whispering Hills

In the great traditions of this day, the whole family will be betting. As I write, I can only tell you the Burra Mem's selection, My Will, chosen as the horse bears the same name as our first-born. As for the first-born himself, and his sister, their selections will be posted later, when they have woken up from that deep sleep so characteristic of teenagers on a sunny morning.

Update: daughter goes for Cloudy Lane, son for Irish Raptor

Boat Race day

It's a pleasant coincidence that this year the Oxford and Cambridge boat race should fall on my father's birthday. He would have been ninety-eight, but he died thirteen years ago. It was an event he enjoyed immensely, for he was part of that peculiarly Cambridge medico-athletic milieu; it is also frequently referred to in the work of his favourite author, P.G.Wodehouse. He ran for his college, played hockey and swam, and had the distinction of being the oldest contestant in the swim through Cambridge, an event that died out, partly because of irrational fears about the cleanliness of the Cam, partly because a new generation of feebler swimmers, used to the artificially high temperatures of indoor pools, could not be persuaded to take part.

Today there is not a great deal of interesting racing. I go for:

Haydock 330: Salut Flo
Haydock 435: Llama Farmer