Tom Roper's Weblog

On the effects of canine saliva on running watches

My Forerunner 405 is only just back from the menders, when I went on an uneventful and unadventurous trot over Seaford Head. All was well, apart from some stiffness in the legs induced by sitting on cramped trains all week, and breathlessness because I forgot to use my inhaler before the start.

Then I reached the top of the hill by South Barn and set off along the track to the Head itself. Dog walkers often park in the car park here and walk their dogs over the Head. Today I ran past a setter-type animal. Ever since I was bitten a couple of years ago, I approach dogs with circumspection. This one pursued me, and for some reason wanted to lick my wrist, where I wear the Forerunner. Mildly annoyed,  I ran on, but the dog kept pace. The owner called to it ineffectually, "Milly [or was it Molly or Mandy-TR], come back'. The dog ignored her owner, and the Forerunner, covered with dog saliva, began to beep constantly. I outpaced the dog eventually, and ran on. Throughout this little comedy this was no word of apology from the dog's owner. Tant pis.

Hurrah for the jumps!

The jumping season is upon us, the very best months of the racing year. I have argued before, and often, that this is the purest form of the sport. Is it the oldest?
I don't know the historical evidence, but is it not likely that the idea of racing two or more horses against one another on a flat surface preceded the idea of racing over obstacles? I shall investigate.
Meanwhile, today's selections:
250 Wetherby: Tidal Bay
325 Wetherby: The Tother One
340 Ascot: Carruthers

LIKE 19 Health - making the leap to Open Source

Another delegate asked me how I found out about LIKE, and I had to confess I couldn't remember. It might have been through LinkedIn, it might have been on an e-mail list. it might have been through a tweet. Whatever the means, I found myself at the Crown on Clerkenwell Green, where Lenin would nip in for an Imperial Russian stout in between writing Iskra editorials in the building nearby that is now the Marx Memorial library.

Marx House, 37a Clerkenwell Green The Crown

The format of LIKE meetings is original and fun. One arrives, pays £15 for drinks and food and networks for half an hour. I found myself talking to a man who ran a print company, someone who worked for the British Red Cross and Ben demonstrated OneIS to me.

At 6.30 we ere called to order and sat. The seating plan works by menu choice so I found myself on the meat table, with, among others, Suzanne Burge and Noeleen Schenk, who later told me about another informal community they're involved with, NetIKX.

Then Ray Phillips, supported by Matthew Hale, both from the King's Fund, took the floor to tell us about their transition to open source with Koha. The Fund, Ray told us, under Margaret Haines, was the first UK library customer for what used to be Sirsi's Unicorn system. When he arrived in 2007, his brief was to decrease the size of the physical collections, but to increase the digital. Moving to open source was remarkably quickly. The discussion was taken in October 2009 and went live in January 2010. Ray quoted Pasteur, 'chance favours the prepared mind". He told us of earlier unhappy experiences dealing with system vendors, the endless cycle of upgrades and the bad faith with which they treat their customers. He cited a case when a rep, after discussions about an upgrade that would allow their catalogue to be, mirabile dictu, networked, demanded four times the amount Ray thought he had to pay, remarking, 'we've got you by the balls'.

Unicorn was no longer fit for purpose: it was 'pre-web', it had limited capacity to talk to other Fund systems and relied on a number of unsupported hacks to make it work. The Fund was implementing a new website, with more integration of products and services. Depending as it does on endowments, money was tight. Ray's library strategy emphasised innovation.They also wanted to move away from an in-house server, to implement a modern functionality and user interface. move away from MARC and to make their collections more discoverable. In 2008 the Fund changed its charter to recognise the reality that, although it formally offered advice on London's health economy, in practice its influence was much wider, and this heightened national role was an additional argument for a modern library system. Ray and Matthew were also dissatisfied with the perfunctory level of technical support they received from Unicorn.

At the crucial moment, when Ray was about to ask for approval for his and Matthew's proposal, Ray's manager and the Fund's Chief Executive both left the organisation, leaving him to reconstruct a detailed business case for new managers. But it succeeded and they were able to give notice to Sirsi-Dynix, not without some legal wrangles over who owned the catalogue data. Never again could a systems supplier 'have them by the balls'. Between December and January they transferred thirty years of data, 90,000 records in all. Their support bill has been cut by more than half, and will not increase next year. Their system is more efficient, they have cleaner data and better integration with the website and the Fund's e-learning platform.

Though not the first Koha installation in the country, the Royal Homeopathic Hospital having that honour, they were among the first and now there is a growing customer base. The fact they knew Nick Dimantt of PTFS who used to work for Sirsi-Dynix, helped too. Ray and Matthew paid tribute to the creativity of their library team.

.In questions, someone asked why it was that library management systems suppliers, once in the front line of innovation, are now so conservative and fossilised. Ray and Matthew thought it had to do with the business model, where support is charged for at a premium. No one mentioned, as they might have done, the hold that private equity now has on the LMS market. Matthew described the mainstream suppliers as outmoded and arc iac and, and, after a painful systems migration in my last post, I have to agree.

Try the catalogue at: http://kingsfund.koha-ptfs.eu/

And then we ate and talked of the Hittites, ley-lines and the pleasures of long train commutes. I'll be back.

'Some librarians are pretty weird'

 

To some extent, a blog post on Tuesday's Times Higher Education and British Library Growing Knowledge project's debate, Growing Knowledge: is the physical library a redundant resource for 21st century academic, is itself redundant. Matt Shaw, who introduced the evening, has written a post on the Growing Knowledge blog, and promises a podcast; I and others tweeted the event and there's a TwapperKeeper archive of #blphys; doubtless the Times Higher will report it, and I spotted the editor of CILIP Update in the audience, so I expect we can look forward to accounts from them.

For me, Mary Beard was the star of the debate. After her candid statement that she had broken every rule laid down for the conduct of library readers, having eaten, smoked and got drunk in libraries, she could do no wrong for me and I think most of the audience. Her statement that few academics had not, at some time in their careers, had sex in a library will make every academic librarian look at their users with new eyes. She felt that physical and digital collections require entirely different methods of organisation and management; in my first week of managing an entirely digital library, I'm not sure I agree.  She drew attention to the physical pleasures of books, and told of her delight at discovering J G Fraser's annotations in his personal collection. She also won the librarians in the audience over with her statement that we beat virtual help-desks hands down and she delighted in the weirdness of librarians and libraries, citing the Warburg as an example. She felt that 'totalising completeness' in fact inhibits academic creativity and that the destabilising effect of the physical library is important to acknowledge and preserve.

Clive Bloom, after giving fresh currency to the story of the secret collection of pornography at the BL, (see Peter Fryer's Private Case, Public Scandal, Secker & Warburg, 1966), took us through the history of documents from clay tablet to e-book. He felt no more nostalgia for the book than he did for sundials, and shocked me by saying that he had bought some items from Christopher Hill's collection and found their provenance of no interest whatsoever. His important point, I think, was that we can now find knowledge we would not have dared to at one time, and that digital libraries are an important force for democratisation.

Martin Lewis, Director of at Sheffield, after referring to the Times Higher as our 'inflight magazine' and mentioning the National Fairground Archive at Sheffield, said that we had been running digital and print services in tandem for some time. The physical library is still important for undergraduates, hence Sheffield's Learning Commons project, but researchers, particularly in the sciences, were rare visitors to collections. The academic library is in fact a great success at supporting learning and teaching, and loans and visits are up. It will take a very long time to digitise everything, and the book will be with us for a long time yet. He drew attention to the many special collections in university libraries, unique holdings in many media. He cited the Research Information Network's work on researcher's use of collections, and pointed out that print collections can no longer grow endlessly, referring to the UK Research Reserve, managing print collections nationally.

Sarah Porter had the unenviable position of speaking last, and talked about JISC's work, looking to the future, and new ways in which teaching, learning and research might take place in a digital world.

In the discussion a wide range of people contributed: academics, librarians, a sixth-former, a publisher, and an accountant, to list those who identified themselves. At one point discussion strayed to the public library, and I was dismayed to hear Clive Bloom peddle the line, that there's no money for public libraries and that they should be shut or 'reinvented'.

If there was a fault, and if I had not been so busy tweeting I might have said this, the debate lacked context. No one mentioned what is happening to universities, and how this will affect libraries. So much of what librarians have achieved has been based on collaboration and cooperation, but as universities are set at each other's throats, will our natural impulses to work with one another be stifled by the new breed of corporate drones who are taking over senior management in universities?

 

Racing Post Trophy

The leaves turn, the first frost has ravaged the vegetable patch, so it must be time for the flat season to wind down with the Racing Post Trophy at Doncaster.
Doncaster 155: Harry Patch
Newbury 240: Poet
Doncaster 255: Titus Mills
Aintree 325: Monet's Garden

Agamemnon

The 2010 Cambridge Greek play was Aeschylus' Agamemnon, and was a triumph. Since I am neither an accomplished Greek scholar, nor skilled in drama criticism, I'll refer you to the Guardian review by Padraig Belton and the one in Varsity by Xavier Buxton. I suggest you don't bother with this one, which complains about it being performed in Greek. As was pointed out at the academic symposium the next day, the intention behind the tradition is not archaeological, but to create a piece of modern theatre.

I set off on the train, catching one from King's Cross that might have been named the Agamemnon Special, packed as it was to the gunwales with school classics students bound for Cambridge. School parties make up a considerable part of the audience and In the symposium the director, Helen Eastman, on Twitter as HelenEastman, said that she had had them in mind when developing the play; it had to hold their attention, and she was gratified to find two fifteen year-olds close to blows over Cassandra outside after one performance.

All the performances were splendid, but the chorus, on stage throughout, were the finest, and one only has to hear them to understand the point of presenting the play in its original language, and remarkably, they were by no means all classicists. The watchman, who later joined the chorus, gripped us as he described how he scanned for the beacon lights, the women, Katherine Jack as a beautiful Clytemnestra and Phoebe Haines as an eerie operatic Cassandra, which leads me to the adventurous music, by Alex Silverman, which matched the rhythms of the verse perfectly. The design was simple but subtle; the lights wielded by the chorus as the news of the fall of Troy spread gave a sense of speed and distance, while a shrine for Clytemnestra's sacrificed daughter had as its centrepiece Iphigenia's yellow dress, the chorus knelt in front of boxes holding lights, knives, water and earth and brought onto stage jars containing the ashes of the dead.

In spite of preparation with the Loeb translation, the old 1926 edition whose archaisms kept me amused, I had to have recourse to the surtitles which used a forthcoming translation by Edith Hall.

The following day was the symposium and, though I have many pages of notes, I shan't inflict them all on readers. In the first session, on the text, chaired by Paul Cartledge whom I recently heard lecture on the battle of Marathon and expound oracles to Melvyn Bragg (link opens BBC iPlayer),  Simon Goldhill, who I'd heard introduce the Kings College London production of the Persians earlier this year, exhorted us to ignore Aristotle and German idealist philosophers, Emmanuela Bakola talked about the language of wealth and earth in the play and Renaud Gagné talked about past and future.

After lunch, in a session on the reception of Agamemnon, Edith Hall, also fresh from explaining oracles on Radio 4 talked about Clytemnestra's afterlives, she being, for Professor Hall, the most extraordinary heroine of tragedy, womb-driven par excellence, but traduced by later versions, Seneca's, and those who followed him. The play is a revenge tragedy, revenge for Iphigenia. She didn't have much time for Eugene O'Neill. Fiona Macintosh discussed European performances and Lorna Hardwick, using the watchman's phrase A great ox stands upon my tongue discussed Seamus Heaney's poem Mycenae Lookout together with a South African version, Yael Farber's Molora, which sets it before the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.

Finally, in a panel on the performance itself, Helen Eastman, Barrie Rutter, who had been in the chorus of Peter Hall's 1981 production, Struan Leslie, Movement Director for the RSC, Alex Silverman, the composer and Thalia Valeta, an actress who uses Greek tragedy in therapeutic work, discussed the performance. I remember chiefly Barrie's description of wearing masks, and how it affects the way the chorus works, Thalia's mention of Engels' interest in the play as marking the transition from matriarchy to patriarchy (which I must confess I had forgotten), Struan's description of the chorus working like a flock of birds that decides collectively where to go, Alex's description of studying classics as involving, 'a green book, a big dictionary and a headache'.

 

 

On Trafalgar Day

Sixty years ago my parents were married, on Trafalgar Day. I never asked them why they chose this day, if indeed they did have any choice, or if my grandparents had proposed it as being an auspicious day for an admiral's daughter's wedding However it was arrived at, it cleverly rendered the date unforgettable.
The cult of Nelson was still honoured in my family. My mother claimed some distant kinship with him, and I have somewhere parts of a dinner service supposed to have belonged to the hero of the Nile. I have doubts as to the authenticity of this claim. In early nineteenth century England, items from Nelson's dinner service would be as common as fragments of the true cross in the early church.
After last night's frost the leaves on the mulberry tree have suddenly fallen and the courgette plants have collapsed into mush.
I shall honour today's memories with a swim in the sea before dusk.

Re-creating the past - digitising your collection and dealing with metadata

CILIP Sussex held an afternoon school, re-creating the past - digitising your collection and dealing with metadata; being of the leisured classes I thought I would attend. The absence of a wifi network made live tweeting impossible, but perhaps a retrospective blog post will do, and I have left it so long that Jill Duffin beat me to it: http://communities.cilip.org.uk/blogs/informationadvice/archive/2010/10/12/digitising-stuff.aspx. So I'll add a little here.

Martin Hayes, West Sussex Local Studies Library, spoke first, acknowledging he was no expert on the technical aspects of digitisation. Nevertheless, West Sussex had run a number of digitisation projects in the past six years, all Lottery funded:

• West Sussex Past Pictures
• Victorian West Sussex
• West Sussex Seaside Holidays
• The Walter Gardiner Photography Collection (part of West Sussex Past Pictures), more than 100,000 images from the1880s to the 1980s. A six week exhibition of pictures from the collection had just ended.
• Crawley Digital Heritage project (based on the Roger Bastable collection of c. 10,000 originals), the best being online on Flickr in Crawley library's photostream
• Edwardian Crawley, shown on a nine-screen video wall at the new library in Crawley, and local groups are also digitising material to be displayed on the screens.
• The Young Ones: education and childhood on the West Sussex coast, with five partner schools

Some of their collection can also be seen in the West Sussex Libraries Local Studies' photostream on Flickr.

Martin told us how local residents came forward with material to be digitised for the collections, and of collaborations with local businesses. Some of the uses made of digitised material may be unpredictable. Digitising has had some considerable advantages, especially for the preservation of delicate or rare materials. POstcard collectors seem to be a dishonest bunch, and prone to theft. West Sussex has archived all this on a shoestring: the budget for each library for digitising is around £1,000, and it only cost £8-9,000 to set up the in-house digitisation unit, based at Worthing, though for Crawley they set up a mobile unit, consisting of a laptop loaded with Photoshop Elements and a scanner. In the unit they have flatbed and overhead scanners, and a tripod camera. Martin mentioned robotic scanners. His experiences of microfilm scanners has not been good. To scan, they group like items together, use meaningful filenames, and de-screen printed images. Resolutions used vary from 300 dpi for 10" x 8" prints to 4000 dpi for 35 mm transparencies, They have made heavy use of the advice services offered by JISC Digital Media. Print materials digitised included newspapers, directories and sale catalogues. They save images as tiffs or RAW files, not jpegs. They use Silverfast  as well, and find Photoshop useful for batch conversion.

Elaine Sheppard, of Screen Archive South East, one of the twelve regional film archives, after outlining what metadata is, told us about their choices of metadata for the archive. There are at least five different standards for moving image metadata, and in 2005  Screen Archive South East decided to develop  their own schema, which, after some debate, is now being taken up by the other regional archives

Newmarket Champion's Day

For the modern world the big races are the Dewhurst or the Champion Stakes though, as I probably point out every year, the more interesting one, both historically and as an intellectual challenge, is the Cesarewitch, in which thirty-two runners compete. This race requires a stayer, and I can think of none better than Dayia, fourth last year. The Campion Stakes looks to be a French internecine affair between Fuisse and Vision D'Etat, and I choose the former. As for the Dewhurst, though Henry Cecil's Frankel has attracted much hype, I think Dream Ahead has the better chance. So, all at Newmarket:
150: Red Jazz
225: Dream Ahead
300: Fuisse
340: Dayia
415: Abtasaamah
450: High Heeled
525: Patkai

The Racing Post is on form today. Alastair Down quotes Psalm 118, admitting that it is not often one can read extracts from the psalms in the paper. And, in the advertisements, always an intriguing read on a Saturday, a request for people to translate racing terms into Greek and Polish caught my eye. What an interesting task. When I find out the Greek for 'not fluent, pulled up', I may offer my services.

Error, ignorance and want of education

I've been browsing Robert Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy and was amused to come across this typically Burtonian statement on those who do not value libraries. It could well apply to our modern ruder gentry in councils and parliament.

'I am not ignorant in the meantime (notwithstanding this which I have said) how barbarously and basely, for the most part, our ruder gentry esteem of libraries and books, how they neglect and contemn so great a treasure, so inestimable a benefit, as Aesop's cock did the jewel he found in the dunghill; and all through error, ignorance, and want of education.'