Extraordinary and Interesting Activities at the Library

There’s a lot happening right now at work – a lot more than should be happening in an academic library right before exams.

We have known for a couple of years now that some major building changes were likely, sometime in the near future. So we have been working on a plan to prepare for that, thinning the collection and improving the layout of the collection We also worked on improving health and safety in the stacks, by adjusting shelves to allow better lighting and also reduce the top shelf height. Last year we removed over 100,000 print volumes from our main collection, some discarded, most shipped out to our Store. Around the middle of this year we finished re-spacing the main collection on Level 2 of the Library. It’s now a pleasure to work in. The next step was to do the same on Level 1, which is the largest part of the collection, with over 400,000 volumes. Unfortunately, our Store is full, so that was to wait until we could build an extension.

Meanwhile, the University has rather suddenly resurrected plans for those building changes. Essentially, they will convert a rather exposed and dysfunctional open-air plaza into a “Learning Hub”, by putting a roof over it. All good. But beneath that plaza is the main entry level of the Library, which will become part of the Hub. And adjacent to the plaza is our Special Collections, which must move very soon. After looking at options, we have chosen to relocate Special Collections to Level 1. Ahem.

So we now find ourselves in the seemingly impossible situation of having to weed something of the order of 70,000 volumes from Level 1 in order to make space for Special Collections, and moreover having just a few weeks in which to do it! With no space in the Store to take those volumes.

Well, we can do the impossible; miracles take a little longer.

We have come up with a scheme which I personally think is sensible (although it was not my idea), but will, I’m sure, be shocking to some. All bound journals published before 2001, and – radically – regardless of whether they are available to us online or not – are being packed into crates and shipped to a warehouse, where they will remain until such time as the Store extension is built. If anyone wants an article from one of these volumes, we will get it by Inter-Library Loan. Which costs us money, but will be much cheaper than retrieving a crate from the warehouse. Crating and storage is being done by a commercial operator.

At the same time as crating of journals is going on, staff are also re-spacing the books which are to stay. So book trolleys are going back and forth all day, moving books and trying to avoid the crates, which I’m told weigh up to a tonne each when full.

The crating is a radical departure from the position of the librarians just 2 years ago, when I suggested that rule as a blanket rule for sending journals to Store. But radical times call for radical solutions, I guess. And we have no choice. So, in an amazingly short space of time we will have weeded and completed re-spacing of the entire Main collection, and moved or re-moved around 900,000 volumes.

Once Level 1 is finished, we’ll then need to relocate everything on Level 3, probably by the end of this year. But that’s another story.

King Lear

To a play last night at the State Theatre, Shakespeare’s King Lear.

While not among the most jolly of Shakespeare’s Comedies (a few good laughs, quite a few deaths), this was nonetheless a very enjoyable production. If I may be permitted to summarise the Bard, the play concerns an aged parent who signs over his property to his offspring, who then proceed to evict him. Hey, wait, didn’t I see that story on A Current Affair last week? Anyway, the aged parent is Lear, the King, and his offspring are his daughters Goneril and Regan. His youngest daughter, Cordelia, he disowns for getting an ‘F’ in Diplomacy, and as a King, who can blame him really. Well, of course, the youngest daughter is the one who truly loves him, while the other two turn out to be grasping bitches.

Cordelia is not seen again until the last Act, although her place as truth-teller is taken by the King’s Fool (brilliantly played by Sarah Snook). Since both roles are given to the same actor, at this point I became a little confused, having not seen Lear in a long, long while. Since the Duke of Kent (likewise banished) reappears disguised as a common man (Michael Habib, likewise brilliant), I assumed that Cordelia had also returned in disguise as Fool, both to look out for the King’s welfare. It seemed a fair assumption, given the number of characters who assume disguises in Shakespeare’s plays. (And is it amazing that they are never recognised? Or shall we blame the poor lighting in the Middle Ages?) Well, apparently my assumption is wrong. But would it not be an improvement to the play were it true?*

Meanwhile, a parallel subplot unfolds, involving the Duke of Gloucester and his two sons, the nice Edgar and the illegitimate (and therefore wicked) and extremely handsome Edmund (played by .. well, I wish I could say, but the STC page gives no details. Renato Fabretti?). Edmund is scheming to discredit his brother and thereby gain position for himself. This of course in some way mirrors the scheming of the evil sisters. Both the King and the Duke are elderly and therefore presumably, a bit silly and easily manipulated. Edgar runs away and pretends madness. Lear is cast out and becomes mad. See the parallels?

In short, a fine Shakespearian drama, full of scheming, back-stabbing (literally), storms and tempests, sword fights, madness, murder and mayhem. All wonderfully played by the cast, with great gusto. John Gaden’s Lear is superb, as are Victoria Longley and Martha Lott as Goneril and Regan. As are, indeed all the main players.

And the set! The set is a masterpiece itself, and worth the price of a ticket.

A must see production.

* My memory also supplied the Hollywood version of the ending, wherein Cordelia and Edgar lived happily ever after. Alas, my memory was wrong. She dies, quickly followed by Lear. Perhaps it was a Tragedy after all?

Awesome Add-ons for Firefox : FlashGot

Ever wish you could save that Youtube video for later? Or some audio file you’ve stumbled on and loved? Well, you can*. Just install this brilliant little Firefox† extension, and any page with a flash video, mp3 or similar will cause a little icon to show in the status bar. Click on this icon and the video etc. will be automagically downloaded while you continue browsing. Awesome, huh?

FlashGot :: Add-ons for Firefox.

* Not guaranteed to work on all sites. But does work on Youtube, among others.

† What do you mean, you don’t have Firefox? Get it now. It won’t take more than a few minutes, and your life will be better.

Ubuntu 9.04 Install Process

I was just poking around Youtube to see what video tutorials there might be, especially directed at getting more people onto Linux. If you know me, you’ll know already that I am a fan of Ubuntu Linux, and that I love to see other people converted to linux from Windows.

Anyway, there are (of course) quite a few videos. Some are old, and some are very badly done (but Gob bless the amateurs for sharing!) Some suffer from getting into technicalities that the newbie doesn’t need to know. (Please, people! Watch the jargon!)

This one is a standout, and one I’ll happily recommend:

YouTube – Ubuntu 9.04 Jaunty Jackalope RC Install Process.

The video is 9:55 long and shows the entire install process (after inserting and booting from the install CD). Maybe not quite real time, but close. And there’s some nice music to listen to while you watch. No awful dialogue.

What’s excellent about this video is that it demonstrates how simple — and fast — the installation process can be.

Of course, it doesn’t deal with dual boot. And it doesn’t show you how to get the installation CD. But in terms of encouraging someone to try, it’s excellent. I’ll look  around some more for videos that fill in the gaps.

Charlie says…: so i unearthed a new trend today. can facebook help?

Charlie says…: so i unearthed a new trend today. can facebook help?.

Interesting question here. In summary, Charlie asks whether parents should surrender to pressure from their under-13’s and let them have a Facebook account.Kids see their parents doing something, and they hear — relentlessly — about said something in the media, and so they want in. It’s only natural. But, without being a parent, I can easily see that this is a minefield of potential issues, from the propensity of people on social networks to post all manner of “mature” audience material, to the potential for stalking by pedophiles.

I should add too, for those who don’t know, that (a) Facebook has a policy requiring the user to be 13+ before they join; and (b) this is trivially circumvented by lying about your date of birth. I don’t think this is Facebook’s fault. I see no easy way that anyone could effectively prevent this.

So. Interesting question indeed. And something I’d need to ponder at greater length before I have an answer. But it is possible that FB is already “there” at least in terms of capability.

One thing Facebook does is require additional “authentication” when friending or becoming a fan, in the form of captcha if a user doesn’t have a mobile phone number. This is no doubt directed at preventing spammers. But it does show that Facebook is able to place additional constraints on user behaviour based on specific criteria (in this case not having a mobile phone number).

So, in theory, Facebook could establish “child” accounts which could have an additional layer of controls requiring parental intervention. That would then allow the platform to be used by children to interact with their peers, play games, create Farms etc., while still providing a degree of parental control over specific actions, like accepting a friend request.

Ideally, such an account would be linked to the parent’s account, so that most of the “administration” would be automatically directed to the parent. As in “your daughter has 1 friend request awaiting your approval”.

Such a system would surely be preferable to a 10 year old lying about their age and having no parental guidance at all.

Lady in the Water

Finally just got around to seeing M. Night Shyamalan’s “Lady in the Water”, a self-described fairy story, and generally panned by the critics on its release. Which is a shame because there’s much to like in this gentle and thoughtful film. While I would agree that it could, probably, have been better in several respects — specifically in pace and dialogue, which at times left me floundering (and not helped by the whispering from the central  character) — the story still has a great charm which I found fully developed and realised by the end.

I could have wished for a little more magic — the scene where the hero dives into the pool to discover a hidden grotto beneath was about all for most of the film’s length. But I see that to add more would have been too easy and risk turning the film into something else entirely. As it stands, the story is really less about a water spirit come to aid mankind, than it is about ordinary people discovering their ability to do extraordinary things, which makes this inspirational rather than merely diverting.

Worth seeing, whatever the reviewers thought.

Lady in the Water Movie Reviews, Pictures – Rotten Tomatoes.

Health for humans!: Go small and save the world- and yourself!!

Health for humans!: Go small and save the world- and yourself!!.

Excellent post here about health and personal responsibility. Bursting with ideas. I love the idea of “personal trainers” for communities, which she could expand on, I think. A community trainer, to get people out and moving a few times a week, that would be hugely beneficial to community health and well-being, and would not cost as much as a new hospital wing.

Why does Apple have to make it so hard?

After using the iPhone for a while, I now want an mp3 player! Preferably one that does not require iTunes. Apple have simply left me feeling frustrated and p’d off with their restrictive and badly designed system.

Part of the problem of course is that I choose to use Ubuntu (linux) for my desktop. And Apple have elected not to provide a Linux version of iTunes. Since Mac OSX actually has unix at its core, it should be easy for them to port iTunes to Linux. So why not? I would guess that they see no money in it. Obviously they needed a Windows port, because 80% of the world still uses Windows. But only a few sensible people have a linux desktop, so there’s no need to bother, right?

In a sense, Linux is actually the major competitor to Apple, not Windows. Windows is so dominant, that it turns everything else into a niche product, and the niche products compete with one another for the scraps of market share that remain. I hate this situation as much as anyone, and I could actually mount an argument for Windows as a contributing factor to global misery, but we have to accept what we cannot change.

So anyway, here I am, with around $20,000 worth of music purchased over the years on CD. And now I would like to transfer that music — that I have paid for — to new technology. My CD player/Hi-Fi is on its last legs; I can see the way the world is going, and the future is in micro-format speakers and mp3 players. I don’t want to pay for a new CD player, because it’s old tech.

Now, I can do this if I boot up Vista instead of Ubuntu, and use iTunes. But that’s a pain. It’s a disruption to my normal workflow. With Ubuntu I can copy a CD to hard disk and write a report while that happens.  Not to mention that every time I use Vista/iTunes I usually end up seething with rage. Both products seem designed to irritate with barriers and restrictions.

(I also think the iTunes interface is a travesty of design, especially coming from a company that prides itself on design.)

So, anyway, to get my music — which I have already paid for — from the CD to disk is easy, but then to get it onto the iPhone, I must: copy the mp3 files to a stick; shut down; boot up Vista; wait 5 minutes for Vista to do whatever it does (?) before I can use it; copy the mp3 files from the stick to the Vista partition; start iTunes; import the mp3 files into iTunes; copy them to the iPhone.

I could  short-circuit all of that if the iPhone could be used like a USB stick. I should be able to simply plug in the iPhone with Ubuntu, and upload the mp3s to it just like copying files to a stick. No. Why not? Because Apple are bigger arseholes than Microsoft, that’s why. The iPhone software does not allow you to use it as a stick, even though technologically it is prefectly possible. Basically, Apple want to control every aspect of your iPhone use. If you could just upload stuff willy-nilly, then where would their crappy iTunes store be? How would they sell you stuff? So they blocked all these perfectly reasonable, legitimate and useful uses of the iPhone. Bastards.

Don’t get me wrong. I love the iPhone, it’s a great little device, and all respects the most useful multi-function personal device I’ve ever owned. I would just love it more if it were less restricted.

Meanwhile, I still have all these CDs to deal with.

Any recommendations for a non-Apple USB mp3 player that hooks up with a hi-fi?

Web Faceoff: Twitter vs. Facebook

Web Faceoff: Twitter vs. Facebook.

Mashable keeps putting up these surveys, and mostly I find them pointless. Every platform/application/soccer team has its fans, and trying to separate them is rather futile. And my immediate reaction to this one was that it was even more pointless than usual. After all, Facebook and Twitter are two different animals, right?

Facebook is a social networking platform — it’s social and it allows networking. You can post your status — what are you doing right now — just like Twitter, but you can also share stuff — photos and videos and links — and you can have conversations with your friends, by commenting on their stuff. And you can play games, from Tetris to FarmVille, and, more, you can play games with your friends.

By comparison, Twitter allows you to post your status. And that’s about it really. It’s micro-blogging, not social networking.

Ok, to be fair, with Twitter you can also share stuff — but only the link. You can’t embed the photo/video in your stream. Twitter is not visually rich. It’s text or nothing.

And, ok, you can reply to a fellow’s tweet, but it’s not exactly a conversation, is it?

So comparing Twitter and Facebook is rather like comparing, oh, I don’t know, sitting on your front porch shouting at passers-by, with going out on the town with a group of friends. I know which I prefer. (And in fact I have pretty much abandoned Twitter as of a month ago.)

Reading some of the comments on Mashable, some people are suggesting a major difference is that Facebook is personal/social, while Twitter is now “all” about businesses tweeting their wares. There’s some truth in that, possibly, although that depends very much on who you are following. (E.g. you would need to be following Dyson to hear about their latest breathtaking invention. But who is so interested in vacuuming that they’d bother following Dyson?) Fundamentally, I’m not really interested in going to Twitter to receive a bunch of 140-character press releases. Doubtless when Dyson releases its next really cool product, I’ll hear about it on Facebook, probably via a share from Gizmodo.

So, that may become Twitter’s niche, tweeting about products to followers who care. But it strikes me as a rather small niche to justify their  recent $1bn “valuation”.

But even here, Facebook is better. Because Facebook has Pages, which are designed to provide a richer environment for companies to market their stuff. Pages have Fans (like Twitter has followers), and when a Page owner posts a message, it gets broadcast on the Wall of all its Fans. And not just 140 characters of text, but more text plus picture or video. Suck on that, Twitter.

But really, Mashable, you’re setting them up to fail. The stats from Alexa show that on all measures Facebook is way bigger than Twitter. Facebook is now ranked #2 globally, and Twitter #13. More people visit Facebook — about six times as many — and stay longer.

Prediction for the next six months: we see Twitter slide into obscurity and then disappear when its backers realize they’re never going to get their money back.

Jonathan Creek “The Grinning Man”

Tonight I watched a new “special feature length” episode of Jonathan Creek, the BBC series about unwilling paranormal investigator Jonathan Creek. This episode, “The Grinning Man”, concerning the disappearance of people who sleep in a locked room, is presumably the prelude to a new series — I hope so, because there’s a lot to like about this series.

But this was a disappointment on many levels, but mainly due to some very clumsy editing and/or scripting. Scene changes are unexplained and confusing, and character behaviours are unlikely — one minute our hero is meeting an old friend who thought he was dead, a few scenes later and they are sleeping together like a long-married couple.

The program also suffers from too many sub-plots, some of  which have nothing to do with the main story at all. I really wish they would drop the Adam Klaus character — the idiot magician for whom Jonathan works. He adds nothing to the plot and his embarrassing and ridiculous sub-plots serve only to intrude and break the mood.

What saves this series is the performance from Alan Davies as Jonathan Creek. Dead pan, world weary and long-suffering but tolerant of the fools that surround him. Enjoyable fare, but could be oh so better.