Tom Roper's Weblog

Eleven years a-blogging

I’ve now been running this blog for eleven years. When it started my hair was mostly dark, and I could run a half marathon in under an hour and forty five minutes. Now my hair is grey and same distance takes me two and a half hours.

Time to take stock — posts have been infrequent, latterly, and mostly concerned with the tedious and difficult internal affairs of my professional association, CILIP. Much of the online effort that used to go into the blog now goes into Twitter; I also find myself contributing to more institutional online thingies of one sort or another. But I still think there’s a point to this blog.

It was a good moment, therefore, to attend a UKEIG course on Digital Communications, led by Ned Potter. While I took away many ideas on how to improve and focus what Brighton and Sussex NHS Library and Knowledge Service does online, it was not without relevance to the tools I use personally.

UKEIG courses, and their predecessor organisation, UKOLUG, have probably influenced my professional life more than any others.  I well remember a searching Medline course I attended way back when, taught by Lindsay Curtis, then of the Royal Postgraduate Medical School, just before someone had the bright idea of putting databases onto CD-Roms. 

I’ve also been thinking about podcasts, whose star rose, then fell and now seems to be rising again. I listen to a number, though I find many ill-disciplined and over-long. If I were to podcast, it would be terse, succinct. There is something of a gap in the market — there are few library podcasts, and the British one I listened to most, Talking with Talis,sank without trace, when that organisation, once a co-operative of libraries run by its members, wound up run by private equity and taken over by Capita. Perhaps there is room for regular recorded conversations on subjects of interest to this great profession of ours. 

 

Eight years

I started this blog on this day, eight years ago, with a post on the death of Alan Davidson. I wrote it, I think, on a train, on a newly acquired G4 PowerBook, using the now defunct program iBlog, and publishing straight to my website at http://www.roper.org.uk. These days the website is the blog.

Over eight years, what has changed?

• Then I worked for Brighton and Sussex Medical School (BSMS); now I work for Western Sussex Knowledge & Libraries
• Then  I lived in London and commuted to Sussex; now I live in Sussex
• Then blogging was new and exciting, and if you'd told me that soon everyone would be using a form that restricted you to 140 characters, I'd have said you were touched; now we're all on Twitter and I don't blog nearly as often
• There was optimism in the air, or so it seemed to me. At BSMS our very first students were finishing their first term. The new medical school had been established to provide more doctors to meet the country's needs. Now we are sacking NHS staff and closing hospitals.
• Then I had just started learning classical Greek; now I am not much further forward
• Then I couldn't touch-type; now I still can't
• Then, I'd never run a marathon; now I've run eleven
• Then I still had all my teeth…

Some statistics may add corroborative detail to an otherwise bald and unconvincing narrative:

• 157252 page views
• 56.48 page views per day
• 1664 posts
• 860 comments

Mass Observation One Day Diary Day, 12 May

The Mass Observation archive are holding another one-day-diary day. The first one was in 1937, and they repeated the exercise last year. I shall certainly take part, and may blog an edited version here, with anything that might offend or incriminate redacted. For reasons I shall not reveal, it's a great pity it's not today.

There are details of how to participate here: http://www.massobs.org.uk/12may2011.html

Seven fat years

'And, behold, there came up out of the river seven kine, fat-fleshed and well favoured; and they fed in a meadow'
Genesis 41:18

I wrote my first blog post seven years ago today, on the death of Alan Davidson, followed closely by a piece on Reed Elsevier and scholarly publishing and capitalism's tendency to monopoly, an account of the Varsity Match ( an 11-11 draw), and a rant about the train service. Plus ça change, except that these days my philippics against Southern Rail are more often found on Twitter. Since then I have written 1545 posts, and readers have been kind enough to comment on them 744 times. The blog has recorded 137,504 pages views, an average of  56.84 page views a day.

As for the title of today's post, I remember asking an RE master at school why everything in the bible seemed to happen in either seven or forty units of time. He was wary; our questions about the bible did not often come from piety, or from a wish to understand the text better—thus typical questions might be, in relation to St Paul's baptism of the Ethiopian eunuch, 'Sir, Sir, what's a eunuch, Sir?'. But, doubtless thinking that I deserved an answer, he told us that the ancient Hebrews lacked the arithmetic and linguistic ability to express large numbers, so forty was used to convey the meaning of a lot. I accepted this, but if I'd given it a moment's thought, I'd have realised that this was an inadequate explanation. After all, the Babylonians seemed to have no difficulty with complex calculations involving large numbers.

Thank you for your attention. I shall press on, even if the next seven years are lean and ill-favoured.

Inadequate, pimpled and single

It would be easy to join the chorus of outrage at Andrew Marr's remarks at the Cheltenham Festival. He was reported in the Guardian to have remarked that, 'a lot of bloggers seem to be socially inadequate, pimpled, single, slightly seedy, bald, cauliflower-nosed young men sitting in their mother's basements and ranting. They are very angry people.' Unfortunately, the brief to put the case for bloggers was given to someone from a Tory blog, who is probably guilty as charged. Marr is making a fetish of the medium; bloggers are exactly like journalists or any other writers, that is to say usually mediocre, sometimes moronic and very occasionally interesting. When he edited the Independent I had to stop buying it, so inane were the leaders he wrote. They read like a poor sixth-former's essay.

'A librarian of some kind'

I was amused to be described by he-who-must-not -be-named as 'a librarian of some kind' in an e-mail h-w-m-n-b-n wrote to an (ex-) employer asking him to stop me making comments on the internet. I rather like this designation. If I were not so attached to the Sheridan quotation I use in the strap-line of this blog, with its notes of wickedness and subversion, I might even replace it with these words. It will certainly serve as a strap-line for my curriculum vitae, and, when the time comes, an epitaph.

Desk diaries

I have become involved in a collaborative blog, Desk Diaries, the brain-child of the multi-talented Alexandra Loske, who may also be found discussing colour theory at The Morning after the Deluge.

The idea is that each participant posts pictures of their desk, as frequently or infrequently as they wish. We believe that the desk is the window to the soul.

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.

Five years hard labour

Alas, I missed my fifth anniversary. My first ever post, an obituary of Alan Davidson, appeared on 5 December 2003.

I stole this idea shamelessly from Owen Stephens, a cloud generated by Wordle of the past five years of posts

Light blogging

The small matter of moving house, and a wait of eighteen working days for broadband to be transferred to the new house mean that my updates have been sporadic. I rely on wifi in cafés in London, the over-subscribed and under-powered computers in Seaford library and the iPhone; Seaford is without public wifi, just as, when I tried to buy the London Review of Books in the new W H Smith, I was brusquely told that it is not 'on the list' .

Normal service will return soon but why does it take eighteen working days? I cannot imagine, as I am keeping the same telephone number, on the same exchange. Perhaps the new line will be gilded with several layers of gold leaf by highly-skilled painstaking craftsmen, and wrapped in rare and costly silks brought by camel train from the mystic Orient.