Build your own search engine.

Here's a bit of Friday fun. It may have taken many years, big brains and much cash to develop Google but in moments the whole search engine could be yours. You can change it so the Google banner is replaced with your name. Go here to give it a go.

How to become a librarian.

The Times have produced a short article on how to become a librarian. It will be news to some journalists and lawyers that I've worked for that not only do you have to "have a degree to be a librarian!?!?" you also need a masters as well(?!!!).

Are you reading the news?

Apparently news stories on the web are barely read by anyone 36 hours after they were posted. That's the message from a team of statistical physicists at the University of Notre Dame in the US and colleagues in Hungary who have analysed how people access information online. The short life of a news item implies that people could miss significant news by not visiting the site when a new document is first displayed, which is a good reason for publishers providing e-mail news alerts. The full story on physicsweb.

Washington Post News Research Center

Deborah Howell, The Washington Post's Ombudsman, has written a great column on the Washington Post News Research Center. I don't thnk you could better the quote (from the Center director) that research staff are "news junkies, who see themselves not just as librarians but journalists finding and analyzing original documents, tracking people down, finding leads, using obscure databases."

man bites dog

Looking for reviews of film Shoot the Messenger I came across a lovely headline from the LA Times: Top cop tried to shoot messenger (June 25, 2006). Sadly the online headline is less interesting but here's the story. If you think you can do better check out Man Bites Dog, for budding Sun reporters everywhere.

Vive, vive, Cote d'Ivoire!

To highlight global poverty during the World Cup, the World Development Movement has come up with Who Should I Cheer For?, a handy guide to which countries are most supportable in terms of, among other factors, poverty, aid, military spending and human rights. The site also lists separate rankings for each category. Statistics are sourced from the
UN Development Report, OECD, World Bank, Transparency International and the FT, so it's a great shortcut for those niggly country comparison questions. Ghana to win!

The Guardian is, like, sooo gay

Last week the BBC complaints committee ruled in favour of Chris Moyles, deciding that the word gay was acceptable yoof speak for "lame or rubbish" (Evening Standard). It seems unfortunate then that Stuart Jeffries of the Guardian should choose to describe the Canadian marriage of Sue Wilkinson and Celia Kitzinger as "gay in every sense of the word". Or is the paper not as liberal as it makes out?

The Diana Express

Scanning the tabloids recently it struck me that the Express seems to know something the rest of us don't about the death of Princess Diana. I conducted a vaguely scientific experiment to see how often the Express carried stories on the People's Princess. Over a period of five weeks, it gave six front pages to Diana, and mentioned her in 36 separate articles (aside from front page stories on the Queen's 80th birthday, Princess Michael's indiscretions and Camilla's unsuitability as Diana's replacement). Charles must be jubilant.

Here's how the other big nationals fared:

Times/Sunday Times: 7 mentions
Telegraph/Sunday Telegraph: 3
Independent/Independent on Sunday: 5
Guardian/Observer: 15
Daily Mail/Mail on Sunday: 31
Mirror/Sunday Mirror: 14
Sun/News of the World: 20

The Guardian's G2 beat me to this story, but I'm not bitter, oh no...

Hosting the front page.

The British Library is hosting an exhibition of memorable front pages from the past 100 years, to celebrate the centenary of the Newspaper Publishers Association. No doubt some poor librarian had to go scrabbling through the cuttings files to find them. Newsnight is running a poll to find the best one - three of the top ten are from the Sun, but then tabloids always have more dramatic front pages, so this is probably reflected in the exhibition (especially as I hear Associated Newspapers had a veto on what went into the exhibition). If "Freddie Starr ate my hamster" wins it'll be a sad day for journalism. Exhibition opens May 25.

Free Maps at the Indy

I really like the Indy's recent set of free maps. The US map is full of statistics no doubt compiled by a harrassed researcher. The only disappointment is the breakdown in ethnic groups - I can only assume that America's hispanic population of 40 million has been lumped in to the 'white' sector, which makes up 75.6%, according to the chart. I can't imagine the immigrants who have been protesting this week would be happy to be ignored by the British press as well as the White House. For more detailed population figures, see the US Census Bureau.

F****** Blogs!!!

This week's Press Gazette features comments from Observer editor, Roger Alton. On blogs, he suggests that blogs will never replace newspapers. He says, "Blogs are basically comment on stories that have been broken by other media most of the time."

I'm not even going to comment on that.

Ha Ha Headlines

There's an email doing the rounds detailing the most bizarre headlines from newspapers in 2005. Like the good little researchers we are we ran a few checks and some actually date back to 1990. Even so they are still a bit of a larf:

Crack Found on Governor's Daughter

Something Went Wrong in Jet Crash, Expert Says

Police Begin Campaign to Run Down Jaywalkers

Panda Mating Fails; Veterinarian Takes Over

Miners Refuse to Work after Death

Juvenile Court to Try Shooting Defendant

War Dims Hope for Peace

If Strike Isn't Settled Quickly, It May Last Awhile

Cold Wave Linked to Temperatures

Enfield (London) Couple Slain; Police Suspect Homicide

Red Tape Holds Up New Bridges

Man Struck By Lightning: Faces Battery Charge

New Study of Obesity Looks for Larger Test Group

Astronaut Takes Blame for Gas In Spacecraft

Kids Make Nutritious Snacks

Local High School Dropouts Cut in Half

Hospitals are Sued by 7 Foot Doctors

And the winner is....

Typhoon Rips Through Cemetery; Hundreds Dead

Enquiry of the week

Can you find me an academic paper on the rise of women taxi drivers reportedly being asked for sex by their male customers?

Shoot the text messengers.

Read here why shooting library users who use mobile phones in the library is a good thing.

Librarians forever!!

The lastest issue of AUKML's newsletter, Deadline (sadly not online yet), includes an excellent explanation of why information professionals are still far better than Google. Omer Ali, Time Out's listings editor, is obviously a fan of the librarian, and this quote deserves to be repeated in dissertations across the land.

"It would be a very sad indication of our arrogance and the decline in our estimation of knowledge if we thought that the superficial research the internet affords can in any way beat a well-trained librarian."

For those of you from foreign climes, AUKML is the Association of UK Media Librarians, and here'stheir site - well worth a look.

Loss of Mirror library

The Daily Mirror no longer has a library. Or rather, as reported in the Press Gazette's Axegrinder column, it does but from now on all cuttings are compiled electronically by cheap labour in Delhi. I'm sure they're doing a fine job although there are worrying stories about the Horse Racing cuts becoming' 'Orse Racing' and, er, the 'S' being missed off Scunthorpe. Of course this could be sabotage but I suspect the mistakes are real...

Can't see the map for the trees.

I'm not sure why, but a journalist who is lost in a park phones up the department and asks us to locate a certain tree for her. Needless to say the web isn't crawling with park maps that identify every tree contained therein.

And talking of trees: I found this tale of woe on a favourite blog of mine, newsarama. The writer's house had been damaged in a tornado. It encapsulates the attitude of some of my esteemed colleagues rather well.

The reporter showed up with a cameraman and I began to explain how the Insurance Company had ignored my little baby son, how his health had been jeopardized, how we had been misled intentionally on five or six separate occasions.

The reporter lady looked genuinely dismayed: “I thought the tree was still stuck in the back of your house,” she said.

“No, it slid down to the ground. The story is about the Insurance Company. I have a little premature baby with underdeveloped lungs and there is a huge hole in the roof. There’s fiberglass insulation everywhere. They keep ignoring us.”

The Television reporter looked pained. “We can’t do that story,” she said. “They advertise with us.”

The seldom visited fourth page.

An survey by iProspect has found what most internet users already suspect - that most people only bother to look at the first few results of a web search. It found that 62% of search engine users click on a site on the first page of results, with 90% clicking on a site within the first three pages (up from 48% & 81% in 2002).

This confirms either:

a) Search engines are amazing at doing their job
b) Searchers are amazing at doing their job
c) Searchers are lazy

I suspect that c) is the correct answer. And hope that professional searchers are digging deeper into the results pages . . .

What's the point?

A recent poll by British Market Research Bureau found that the proportion of internet users in Britain who have never heard of a blog, or blogging, fell from 45% to 30% over the last three months. It also found that just 2% of UK internet users publish blogs with only 10% - around 2.8 million people - of internet users view a weblog once a month or more.

With such a low audience, I don't know why I even bother.

Ignore it and it might just go away.

We've all done it, that's right at some point we've spotted a bit of librarian bashing in the national media then almost tripped over our corduroy pants, so eager are we to stick the offending cutting on departmental noticeboards or broadcast it to next to no one on blog sites. Librarians have always been an easy target for the media, too easy some might say.

Back in 1995 I remember telling someone I had successfully landed a job in an academic library, she told me about her friend who appaered on a Richard and Judy makeover for Librarians. When the feature went live Judy was muscled out of shot as Richard with his well trained sartorial eye delivered a pronouncement on the inevitable transformation, it was that good. I later found out the "girls from Manchester Libraries" were told to ditch what they wore to the studio that day and instead rummage through a box of tatty clothes which they had to wear for the broadcast. The point being it would make good T.V. Another friend applied for Channel 4's Faking It only to be rejected for not fitting the stereotype.

Faced with such cynicism by those running the media, how are we as ninja like trained assasins in librarianship suppossed to react?.

I suggest not retaliating with nunchucks or throwing stars but, maybe simply ignoring it?...how absurd you might think, but surely flagging up such stories (like I'm doing here) we only draw attention to the issue and make the 'cool' people who shape the news agenda think we really are insecure about our image.

Dave's new friend

The Guardian's April Fools about Coldplay's Chris Martin joining the Tories and writing a song for them made for very jolly reading on Saturday morning. Even better though was the news in the Observer that the Labour Party's media monitoring unit fell for the tale and distributed it to most of the government. Maybe they we seduced into thinking it was the real thing by the impeccably researched (and genuine) box of facts that accompanied the story. Listen to the song here

Biscuit Friday

In years to come you'll remember that it all started here! It is biscuit Friday – officially the best library day of the week! Hooray! Brownies and peanut cookies. We love Holly and all christmas decorations. A recommendation to all libraries, lots of tea and biscuits make very happy librarians!

Why won't William Hague leave me alone?

We're one of the few places that librarians/researchers actually manage to get bylined in the paper for sidebars and other contributions. It's great to be immortalised in print and on the web but it has its perils. For example, nobody in our department will ever kick up a fuss if their name has fallen off the bottom of a sidebar on Israel/Palestine. Mail boxes aren't big enough to cope with the amount of "fan-mail" this area of world politics normally attracts. Another peril I hadn't foreseen was being invited for an off-camera briefing by former Tory leader, William Hague, on the crisis in western Sudan. Apparently I'm now somewhat of an expert ever since 83 of my words on the subject were printed in the paper. I'm sure Mr Hague won't have missed my presence . . .

Can you digg it?

Obvious headline aside, digg.com is a technology news website where the users decide which stories go on the homepage - do you digg it man? Don't be put off as it's full of all sorts of useful stuff such as this autistic or just geek test. Apparently a much higher than average percentage of computer workers are diagnosed with a mild form of autism called "Asperger's Syndrome". This test allow you to filter yourself out as just Geeky or maybe having something to actually worry about. Maybe, but I was more worried by question 13 which asks whether you agree/disagree with the statement, 'I would rather go to a library than to a party'. Mmmmm - I'm sure I read something about people meeting their perfect partners in libraries and doesn't the British Library do some sort of mingle with singles night?

Enquiry of the week

"Can you find out how many B&Bs in the UK are owned by christians?"

From poor library to law library

On the 21st of March 2 trainee librarians made the trip to an extremely affluent legal law firm's library. The flowers cost more than us (and were almost as beautiful). And they just have to sit in a vase all day. The librarians get free Diet Coke! and the largest indoor sculpture in Europe! And the restaurant looked a bit like Wagamamas (but without the riff-raff). The library was very impressive and extensive, and a nice shade of purple, located in a prominent position and overflowing with fascinating corporate, legal books and journals. Compared to the suited-booted types wafting around we felt very scruffy in our jeans and trainers. But what can you expect when you get paid less than flowers. However the actual information they were working with was pretty dry and dull, and although the girl who showed us around was lovely . . . she'll never get her name in the Press Gazette!

We win!

Why write?

Why do people write for library journals if they don't pay? So asked a budding scribe on the Managing Information forum and it's something I've often muttered to myself as I filed my copy - minus an invoice. There are scores of information management publications out there in libraryland, all full of worthy articles by people who do it purely for the joy of seeing their name in print. Pathetic really, but we keep on writing. Two schools of thought exist about this:

1- These magazines are usually run on a shoestring and so can only exist by concerned individual writing for nothing. Better to exchange ideas rather than not have a forum to do so. Sharing information is what librarians do.
2- Librarianship is a service industry and the people who go into it enjoy being used and abused. They just can't say no and so happily bend over and take it.

As ever, the truth is probably somewhere in-between. I can't help thinking, though, that someone out there is having a laugh. Surely it devalues a product if the contributors are writing for nothing, merely out of a weary sense of duty. Which brings me nicely to the point of why am I wasting my time writing this blog for nowt?

Britannica strikes back: the response

Further to the Britannica strikes back posting, Tim 'avatar' Bartel has written to say that there is now an article about the issue on Wikipedia.

Nexis Nonsense

More Lexis bitching (yawn) but I'm sure I read a piece in the Indy this week about Victoria Beckham endorsing the supermarket Iceland and one of her spokespeople vigorously denying it, ("Posh people don't go to Iceland" or something like that). Anyway, it was in the paper and now it's not on Lexis. Humbug!

MSM again

To briefly revisit the MSM post below, it also strikes me as odd when only last week Rupert Murdoch was singing the praises of online content, telling the Worshipful Company of Stationers and Newspaper Makers that "newspapers will have to adapt as their readers demand news and sport on a variety of platforms: websites, ipods, mobile phones or laptops...I think in the future that newsprint and ink will be just one of many channels to our readers." Murdoch bought up myspace.com as part of a $330m deal last year. Seems like editors are panicking and trying to move into online media while everyone else is still struggling to get into the mainstream.

End of Producer Choice

Producer Choice, the controversial BBC internal market introduced by former director general Lord John Birt 13 years ago is coming to an end. According to Ariel, the BBC's in-house magazine, a new "common sense" system will be introduced in which different BBC departments will no longer charge each other for goods and services. More details on the Media Guardian site.

Lord Birt claimed that Producer Choice freed up tens of millions of pounds to be ploughed into new programming, by making BBC staff aware for the first time about the true cost of internal products and services. Maybe it did but it also led to lots of stories about researchers finding it cheaper to buy a CD rather than borrow it from the library. At a cost of £10 a query, fact-checking was also prohibitively expensive. Researchers rang up bookshops rather than using the in-house library, because of the cost of borrowing books. There was a time in the 1990s when not a day seemed to go by without me having to fend off some BBC person or other trying to get cuttings or information for free.

It will be interesting to see though whether the new system leads to a resurgence in use of the BBC information department.

Things I should know already . . .

Feel a bit embarrassed that I've never come across SourceWatch before. It's a good source for checking the worthiness of sources. Essential in the age of googling and especially as news desks expect you to have checked the veracity of your sources before the readers do it for you the next day . . .

And while I'm in the fessing up to all the holes in my researching capabilities, I came across an interesting feature on google. If you put a website in the search (complete with site suffix, eg .com etc) you get an option to either go to:

1) sites referring to the site you're searching (good to see if you're checking out the reliability of the site)
2) sites that the site refers to (good to see if you're checking out if the website has bonkers friends)
3) sites that are similar to the site you've searched (not sure how it does that)
4) and finally sites that contain the actual url.

Books v Bytes

So much of what we do these days is electronic that it's easy to dismiss the rapidly-decreasing number of reference books lining the shelves. In some cases, though, you can spend hours searching the web for information, getting more and more frustrated with badly structured sites, when a quick check in a book would do the job.
My latest book discovery is our copy of British Parliamentary Election Results 1950-1973, edited by FWS Craig - it took me two minutes to copy out the result of the 1959 general election in Dumfriesshire, when I would have been lost on the parliamentary website. Sometimes the internet is quicker - Hansardis a good example (I don't know anyone who consults the paper version any more). But get to know your reference section too, books sometimes are better. And still on the subject, I noticed yesterday that the hardcopy of the 2006 Guinness Book of Records had a few entries that were more up-to-date than the website.

Britannica strikes back

Encylopaedia Britannica has hit back at claims that its articles are only slightly more accurate that Wikipedia's. In December 2005, the science journal Nature , published an article in which they compared the reference sources, concluding that in some subjects there wasn't much to distinguish the two. Obviously this caused much rejoicing amongst the Wiki community as it seemed to validate all those claims that the database was just a gimmick. Not surprisingly, Britannica was furious and they commissioned a study of the Nature investigation, the findings of which have just been published. According to them,

"Dozens of inaccuracies attributed to the Britannica were not inaccuracies at all, and a number of the articles Nature examined were not even in the Encyclopædia Britannica. The study was so poorly carried out and its findings so error-laden that it was completely without merit... Their numerous errors and spurious procedures included the following:

- Rearranging, reediting, and excerpting Britannica articles.
- Several of the "articles" Nature sent its outside reviewers were only sections of,
or excerpts from Britannica entries. Some were cut and pasted together from more
than one Britannica article. As a result, Britannica's coverage of certain
subjects was represented in the study by texts that our editors never created,
approved or even saw.
- Mistakenly identifying inaccuracies. The journal claimed to have found dozens of
inaccuracies in Britannica that didn't exist.
- Reviewing the wrong texts. They reviewed a number of texts that were not even in
the encyclopedia.
- Failing to check facts. Nature falsely attributed inaccuracies to Britannica based
on statements from its reviewers that were themselves inaccurate and which
Nature's editors failed to verify.
- Misrepresenting its findings. Even according to Nature's own figures, (which
grossly exaggerated the number of inaccuracies in Britannica) Wikipedia had a
third more inaccuracies than Britannica. Yet the headline of the journal's
report concealed this fact and implied something very different. "

I can't wait to hear Nature's reply or what Jimmy Wales, Wikipedia head honcho, has to say. There again, there's probably an entry in Wikipedia already."

Our great leaders

According to Craydon Carter in April's issue of Vanity Fair,

If you type in incompetent into the search field in google the first three hits are about George W Bush. Type in liar and the first hit is Tony Blair.

I tried it myself and I can't vouch for his first conclusion but there might be a discrepancy between Google USA and the UK version I was searching. However I can reassure everybody that the first hit on the liar search is Tony Blair's offical 10 Downing Street site.

Other developments...
Laura Bush, possibly the most powerful librarian in the world has slipped off the Forbes 100 most powerful women in the world in 2005. She was ranked number 4 in 2004. What has caused her apparent demise? I blame the husband.

MSM

Until I got into this blogging lark, I'd always been under the impression that MSM stood for Men who have Sex with Men. Apparently another meaning is Mainstream Media, (OK, it's been around for a while) and according to a feature in Newsday, every blogger's secret dream is to escape cyberspace and get into print. Seems a bit odd when, according to Technorati , there are 31 million blogs in the world representing just about every area of life. One of the main reasons given by Aileen Jacobson is that at the moment it's hard to make money on the internet. People are using their blogs as way of advertising their skills - whether it be writing, pictures, film etc.

Cliche of the month award goes to . . .

Last month's cliche comes courtesy of Mil Millington, in the Guardian's Saturday magazine, but as we like him (and as we've been in this position on more than one occasion) I think we'll let him off.

"...its smallness means that typing without a table leaves you looking like a romantically doomed librarian sitting in the park eating her sandwich lunch off her lap."

Punditry

It's always good to see news researchers showing off their skills in public but when did they start teaching football punditry in library schools? Alan 'The Power' Power is quoted in today's Guardian pontificating about the next manager of the England team. Of the contenders, he said "Their only qualification for the job is that they are English". Very astute. This diversification lark reminded me of Tim Buckley Owen's talk at last week's Corporate Management Conference. His shopping list of skills that the 21st century information professional can't afford to do without includes: coaching skills (ah, football again..), report writing, design and lay-out abilitiy, multimedia skills and the need to be good at marketing. It's a theme that he develops in the January/February issue of Managing Information. Perhaps the most important point made is that in the face of everyone believing that everything can be answered by Google, it is the information professional's job to, "do what all professionals do: the same as the amateurs, but much, much better. This means providing not raw answers but finished solutions...we have the courage to reject data that doesn't come up to scratch, and repackage the information that we do decide to offer, in ways that our customers will find useful."

Fact checking

The lack of fact checking in independent online journalism is a problem that needs to be addressed, the founder of Craigslist, Craig Newmark, warned at SXSW, the interactive music and film festival. He said, "The mainstream models fact check - in theory - but in citizen media, it's publish first and then hope that people fact check. This doesn't happen much and it's a problem...people should remember that [facts] need to be checked and need scepticism." Newmark also argued that newspapers need to spend more on investigative journalism if they are to reverse declining circulations.

Film studies

Just to return to the LexisNexis/Exorcist debate, younger readers who are unaware of what the Exorcist is might like to take a look at this. There's a fine rendition of Mike Oldfield's Tubular Bells too.

Wanted: an expert on experts

A request I get occasionally (and don't really know how to deal with) is for experts to provide journalists with soundbites on a specific subject. This week's request was for telecommunications experts, or people who know about phone tapping, to talk about Sir Ian Blair's taping of a conversation (see here) with the attorney general. I resorted to a Google* search for telecommunications experts, which surprisingly did the trick. With a bit of tweaking I found Expertsearch, which lists expert witnesses for use in legal cases. It seems reliable but does anyone know of a better site or service?

(*Other search engines are available - but we get paid £100,000 every time we mention google, google, google, google, google in our google, er, I mean blog)

What links Brokeback Mountain and libraries?

Trying desperately to link this precis of Brokeback Mountain to the world of media libraries but have failed . . .

Born to be . . . a librarian

It's refreshing to see the old stereotype of the librarian getting an overhaul. Bill Wyman, former Rolling Stones bassist, says in a Guardian interview how he "was born to be a librarian". It's all down to his tendency to store a superabundance of information - apparently he has a record of all the three thousand or so women he has shagged. Sounds more like an archivist than a librarian to me . . .

Don't give up the job just yet.

Being down High Street Kensington way on Tuesday, I popped into the Thistle Hotel for the Corporate Information Management 2006 - a conference focusing on challenges and concerns facing information professionals. To cut a long story short, it was the usual spiel about librarians still being around in the future but we'll all be doing different jobs and won't be called librarians. Yes, very reassuring and just what I wanted to hear. Still, there were some persuasive talks to back this up and a lively roundtable session. Actually there were four discussion groups although they all seemed to have same topic to work with. Good to meet others from greater world of corporate info - engineers, insurance etc.

As I walked back to tube I couldn't help but sneak a wistful glance up at the Kensington roof gardens, venue for that wonderful night around Christmas time when a danced the night away with my information chums. A review is available from the Dec 05 edition of Deadline from the AUKML

Librarians: Know your place.

Here we go again with yet another case of newspaper librarians banging on about their bleedin' status. This time it's all those wonderful people (actually it looks like the entire SLA news division membership) on Newslib talking about where they are in their organisation's hierachy. Whole range of responses although the guy who says he's somewhere near the janitor is probably the only one telling the truth. After spending the past decade or so discussing/writing/shouting about this sort of thing, I thought I'd moved on. That is, until I picked up the latest of copy of The Journalist, the NUJ's magazine, and a read a report in which librarians were described as clerical workers (along with messengers and scanners). We all know it's not exactly a cutting edge publication, but surely even The Journalist should be aware that newspaper librarians have moved on a bit from the old scissor and glue days.

Why are we waiting?

When I called the LexisNexis helpline the other day the hold music sounded distinctly like the theme from the Exorcist. Maybe they're trying to scare customers away. Listen to it here (or call the number and hope they don't answer).

Why has George Michael got chocolate on his face?

Because he got careless with his whisper and might just end up on this site I overheard someone talking about. Sounded good and suppose it's vaguely funny. I suppose I was expecting an upmarket Pop Bitch - thought it might have had some meatier overheard conversations though. You know, the sort business discussions or telephone conversations you hear on the train where the people involved are oblivious to who's listening. I recommend the (very) packed Thameslink heading south from Kings Cross around 7pm time for this.

Grey matters (2)

In a previous blogpost we brought up the subject of grey literature. Since then I've come across this ACRL article. It lists a few links to greylit solutions.

Fancy a new job?

Cunard's newest luxury ocean liner, "Queen Victoria" will be making its maiden voyage in December 2007. It boasts: a Royal Court Theatre, a floating museum , a grand conservatory, a 270 degree lounge called the Hemispheres and a wood-panelled library containing 6000 books. They also reckon the library will have two full-time librarians. I wonder if they've recruited them yet . . .

4 Extra Pages!

I'm so excited I have to blog it. Managing Information has four extra pages this month!!!!

Love in the library

You've had speed dating, internet dating, lock and key parties and dating in the dark, well now there's Bib-dating. It's from Belgium and involves books, Belgians and body fluid. Reading this you'd think it was a novel idea, but the British Library have been holding so-called Mingle Nights since 2004.

Don't you just hate it when . . .

Users phone you up and ask you to do a Lexis search and then they tell you exactly what search terms to put in? It goes something like this:

USER: I'm looking for articles from the American press on reparations and slavery.

ME: Going how far back?

USER: The last couple of years should be fine.

ME: No problem.

USER: It might help if you use the search terms "reparations" and "slavery".

ME: !

USER: And it would probably also help if you just looked in the American press.

ME: !!!!!

I may adopt a similarly patronising approach the next time I'm a customer. I can't wait to see the reaction of the bus driver when I start telling him at what point along the route it would be helpful to open and shut the doors . . .

Blogging a dead Morse

Was trying to find a blog on the late, great TV detective Inspector Morse and got slightly side tracked with this. Nothing could have prepared me for the Sumyung librarian blog.This chappie promises to, "tell the absolute, unwashed truth about public librarianship and ...no updates on the latest nerdy web shit either, although I reserve the right to briefly explain something in the process of its denigration". Just check out the 'Gugel' post. I feel a kindred spirit here.

PS: I'm still looking for that Morse blog . . .

Perfect pictures?

The new Internet Resources Newsletter has just dropped into my inbox and it's as good as ever. Too much important stuff to mention here so I'll skip all the Web 2.0 links and go straight to the, er, pictures. Yotophoto is a useful search engine for finding free-to use stock pictures while the Wilfred Thesiger gallery has some brilliant images from the great explorer.

Liking the ladies' library lots

On Wednesday 1st February we got yet another opportunity to sample some of the varied delights the world of information has to offer. This time it came in the form of a tour of the Women's Library, just a short walk from Aldgate East tube.

This proved to be an interesting and enjoyable afternoon (even for our vastly outnumbered token boy). On arrival, we discovered the library was in fact an archive and a museum as well, and so we started with a guided trip around their current exhibition "What Women Want: stories from the Women's Library". This gave us a fascinating taster of their 5000 object strong museum collection, with exhibits ranging from sufragettes' banners to plastic surgeons' brochures. The exhibition's artwork also provided a means for local women's groups to express themselves, including HEBA - Brick Lane's skills and training agency for women.

The museum's all embracing representation of women's experiences proved in turn funny, tragic, educational and thought-provoking (although this was possibly lost on the school boy who suggested on the comment boards at the end of the exhibition that what made women beautiful was make up!)

After the museum tour we continued upstairs to the reading rooms where we were given a brief introduction to the library's collection of 60,000 books and pamphlets and 2,500 periodical titles (I was particularly excited to note this included the entire back catalogue of J17!)

All in all a great tour, our only regret being that we missed out on a snoop around the library's 400 archive collections.

Cartoons 101

Cartoons have never been so popular (or should that be unpopular??) If you want to get hold of political cartoons from UK publications vist the Political Cartoon Society or Cartoon Hub.

Oh and if you want to have a look at "those" cartoons they're here

Can you always count on articles? (pt 2)

Seems like the GHB is setting the news agenda. The Guardian's getting in on the word count act too - see what the paper's readers' editor, Ian Mayes, has to say in today's edition, here.

Can you always count on articles?

Word counts are increasingly used instead of column inch measurements. They might seem simple but there are a number of pitfalls. From painful experience, here are a few tips:

If you're comparing coverage between papers, use the same search parameters or the results won't be comparable.
If you're looking for stories about a subject, and time constraints mean you can't read through every article, restrict the search to articles with the key phrase in the headline/lead paragraph, as results will be more reliable
Skim through results to remove any articles that aren't strictly about the topic
Remove database headers and footers, such as the Lexis Nexis section and load-date fields, before you count.
Instead of using a calculator, paste the text into Word and use the word count facility - much quicker and more reliable!
Record the number of articles along with the word count - this gives a clearer picture as broadsheets tend to print fewer articles with more words, whereas tabloids print more, but shorter, stories.
Word counts by their very nature don't take into account accompanying photographs, which may skew the results, as tabloids use more pictures and less text
Explain your methodology when you submit your results - if anyone queries the figures this will help prove your point.
Remember that word counts aren't an exact science, but simply a snapshot of what is available on a database on a given day - and make sure your editor knows this


For recent examples of newspaper word counts seeThe Times and washingtonpost.com. Even blogs are getting in on the act, here and here. And there's a non-fan here.

Sound library

It's Friday afternoon so it's time for a pointless-post. Just in case you haven't bought it yet, the final track on Snow Borne Sorrow, David Sylvian's latest offering, is called The Librarian. Nine minutes of Beckenham's greatest son warbling on about something or other that includes these lovely lines:

So to the library
With your new card
Grab your favorite books
Look for blueprints
To the strains of Allah
Here we go….

Couldn't have put it better myself. Not a bad album though.

Buy the album from our sponsors here

Where were they then?

Browsing through this week's Time Out I came across a feature about bands that didn't quite make it. Interesting enough, but was taken by picture of country rock combo, The Possums (no, me neither) and their Ian Brown lookalike bass player. Further inspection revealed that it was in fact the Time Out librarian in a previous incarnation. That's the entertainment for the next AUKML conference sorted then.

Are Librarians cool?

Here's a little something for the wackier wing of the librarian community. Check out the Are Librarians Cool? question on Lin's Bin from Lin Brehmer at Chicago's XRT. It's an an mp3 audio file but I'm sure you know all about that sort of techie thing . . .

Google v Librarians

The Guardian's security affairs editor Richard Norton-Taylor was on the radio today discussing why journalistic standards have dropped: He says journalists just google things instead of using their libraries.

Listen to him here

Shades of grey

Whilst trying to track down a copy of a 23 year-old byelection pamphlet I was reminded of the problems of "grey literature". The leaflet I was looking for was from Simon Hughes, who was presenting the election as "A Straight Choice". The problem is that material that is published in an unconventional way (i.e. not a book, newspaper, periodical etc.) is often never kept, catalogued or archived. It usually means approaching the original source, which can be at best time consuming and at worst totally futile (in this case the party Hughes was a candidate for - The SDP Liberal Alliance - no longer exists).

The British Library has a host of grey literature on its catalogue (conference notes, theses etc), but I'm not sure if I would have found something like this there. The panic ended as I tracked down an image of the leaflet from this blog. (Aren't blogs great!?). And coincidently, the dates for Eighth International Conference on Grey Literature have just been announced as the 4-5 December 2006 at the University of New Orleans, USA. Not sure my new found interest in the subject will see me attending though . . .

Anyway, a backgrounder to the news story: Hughes, now a contender for the leadership of the LibDems (read here), was up against the openly gay Labour candidate, Peter Tatchell in the 1983 Bermondsey byelection, which Hughes went on to win . The story has resurfaced in recent days as Hughes has apologised for the homophobia the campaign may have stirred up (read here). Hughes has also taken the time to remind us that he himself is definitely not gay (read here).

Google's Newsletter for Librarians

Read it here

One more question: Are you a terrorist?

The Lords yesterday voted to reject a clause in the Government's Terrorism Bill which could have seen the humble librarian penalised for doing their job. The clause would have made it an offence to directly or indirectly encourage terrorist acts by virtue of supplying someone (who could turn out to be a terrorist) with certain books or information. The clause appeared to put an undue onus on librarians to screen its readers.

As Lord Butler argued ". . .the task of a librarian is to make the books in the library available to students or others who want to use them. It should not be, as I think this amendment implies, the task or duty of librarians to have to discriminate between borrowers in order to satisfy themselves that those borrowers do not include people who might be moved to terrorism or use the book for the purposes of terrorism. "

Read the full debate here and a newspiece here.

Review of Alice Hoffman's "The Ice Queen"

Fond as I am of portrayals of librarians in popular culture, I was delighted to find a copy of Alice Hoffman's new novel The Ice Queen under the Christmas tree. Hoffman's story has the feel of an old fairytale, the ice maiden planted in a Florida local library, the victim of a lightning strike with a dark secret to boot. The story is a good one, if not truly gripping - for most of the book I felt no real empathy for the heroine, but then as she's the ice queen maybe that's the point.

Hoffman's use of the library as "a career where silence would be an asset" is a little cliched, but it's interesting that she explores the darker side of library life. The unnamed protagonist is obsessed with death, and researches it fanatically. I'm not saying all librarians are secret goths but when part of every day is spent updating the intranet with Iraq casualties and Middle East suicide bombs it's sometimes hard to stay chirpy. And of course it's not often we see a librarian as the central character in a novel (as the Guardian's reviewer points out, ours is an "honourable occupation which in fiction indicates a less than successful existence"). Worth sticking with to the heartbreaking end - buy it here.

Read Hans Christian Andersen's The Snow Queen to see how it compares, or rediscover the more sinister fairytales of the Brothers Grimm.

Librarian cliche quote of the month

"Is it like that undressing the librarian kind of thing? I think maybe the British appreciate Bree's covered sexuality. I should wear glasses next year and really drive them crazy."
Actress Marcia Cross on the effect her straight-laced Desperate Housewives character has on men, Sunday Times, Jan 15 2005

More sexy librarians (don't worry, it's not a XXX site) here. Also, check out the Flickr group Librarians in Glasses for some, er, librarians in glasses.

It's a hard life.

Working in libraries has been commonly thought a stress-free job, but as the bbc has discovered, librarians are the most unhappy with their workplace, often finding their job repetitive and unchallenging, according to psychologist Saqib Saddiq.

Another source to librarian's stress (not mentioned in the bbc article) is constantly being likened by the media to a bunch of square dweebs who wear Nana Mouskouri glasses and autumnal woolly cardigans. People like Sam Wollaston, the TV critic from the "enlightened" theguardian should know better. In today's TV review he is suggesting that being fashionable and 'librarian' are apparently incompatible. Perhaps he would like to visit the guardian's library and give all their librarians a Trinny & Susannah makeover.

Size matters

Came across a fact while reading Tim Moore's "Do Not Pass Go" (a travel ponderment on London) - apparently more people visit Selfridges every year than live in Australia. Unfortunately Tim supplies neither a population figure for Australia nor the amount of Selfridges visitors, so you are left thinking "erm, that must be a lot" and (if you're (sadly) like me) trot off to do some research. Thanks to World Bank Statistics I've now discovered that the population of Australia is just over 20 million. Which actually leaves me thinking, "wow, so few people in such a big country", rather than "cor, don't a lot of people shop at Selfridges " - is this what Tim intended?

Journalists are very good at this kind of thing, for example they always seem to relate just about every land mass to the size of Wales. Recent examples here, here and here.

WHO KNOWS WHAT THE SIZE OF WALES IS ANYWAY?!?

One last thing for you ponder (and complete the research to) is: more people visit the British Library every year than live in New Zealand .

(And if you too want to compare all land masses to the size of Wales this clever website does it for you)

Word of the year 2005

The American Dialect Society has voted "Truthiness" as the word of the year 2005. It means "the quality of stating concepts or facts one wishes or believes to be true, rather than concepts or facts known to be true."

Other winning words include:

muffin top: "the bulge of flesh hanging over the top of low-rider jeans" (we call those "love handles" in Britain).

whale tail: "the visible appearance of thong or g-string above the waistband".

The age of celebrity

Celebrity joggers and dieters; famous fans of The Archers; star gum-chewers; just a few of the queries I've been asked for over the past few months. Why does every news story have to have a celebrity angle these days? I'm enjoying Celebrity Big Brother as much as anyone but now that being regularly photographed falling out of nightclubs is enough to make you a celebrity, why do editors still insist on getting endorsements for their stories? Is it simply a case of "Look, these famous people are all doing it, so it must be cool"?

More on celebrity endorsement here and here

What will libraries be banning in 2006?

Last month the British library banned pens (recap here). This was closely followed by the announcement that libraries in Dallas will be permitted to remove readers considered too smelly under new guidelines. The rules prohibit visitors from “emitting odours (including bodily odours or perfumes), which interfere with the use of services by others”. A number of other activities deemed inappropriate will also be banned, including fighting, walking barefoot, eating, sleeping, sexual intercourse and using your mobile phone. Proponents say the move, which is supported by the American Libraries Association (ALA), will help make libraries more welcoming. However, homeless groups have responded angrily, suggesting the rule purposefully targets some of the most vulnerable members of society (and students). ( Read more here.)

Watch this space for the first library ban of 2006 . . . .

Anyone fancy getting more than capernoited?

In a desire to improve my vocabulary I shall now attempt to describe librarians via the aid of the list of words as published in today's G2 section of the Guardian:

While often misrepresented as agelasts and obnubilate, many librarians are in fact eximious, not only in veriloquency but also several times a week at becoming capernoited. They very rarely suffer from lethologica and can often pack a stunning verbal recumbentibus. Although few that I have encountered seem to be blatteroons, when several get together it often sounds a lot like drintling. It has to be said though, that in many organizations, librarians are in fact the very pintle.

You too can become skilled in the art of lexiphanicism, here

Judging books by their covers . . .

A story in the Boston Globe reports how some of America's libraries contain books that are bound with human skin. Apparently it's not an uncommon practice - with anthropodermic bound books often reflecting their content - such as biographies and medical texts. The story was taken up by Harvard Law School journal, The Record a month before and seems to be causing a stir on the blogs.

Wikipedia nearly as good as Britannica

This one really isn't going to go away, but thought it might be worth noting that the scientific journal, Nature has carried out an "expert-led investigation" into the reliabilty of Wikipedia. It found that the average Wikipedia entry contained four errors while Britannica contained three. Considering Britannica is meant to be a the Dom Perignon of reference works, Wikipedia's not doing that badly.

Read more here.

Lost for works

The Times reports that a poem by Lord Byron has been discovered in a 19th-century book within the archives of University College London. It turns out that it was stumbled upon by a librarian whilst doing some routine cataloguing.

Libraries seem to have a knack of uncovering "lost" works. Here's a list of other recently unearthed works:

December 2005: A 17th century painted female figure was discovered under 20 layers of paint in the in the King's Library at Kew Palace, London.

April 2005: 28 lost omnibus recordings of The Archers from 1977 were discovered in the archives of the gramophone library at BBC Radio Wiltshire.

August 2004: A "lost" essay by Virginia Woolf about London life in the 1930 was discovered in the archives of University of Sussex's library.

September 2003: A "lost" play by Agatha Christie was discovered by her grandson more than 70 years after it was written in the vaults of the British Library.

July 2003: Lost songs of Piaf were discovered in archives of the national library in Paris.

December 2002: A manuscript by JRR Tolkien, thought to be his last work, was discovered in an Oxford library.

Flogging blogging

A few weeks ago I went along to hear Phil Bradley talk about blogs at an Association of UK Media Librarians talk. Yes, I've ignored one of his main points that blog entries should be as current as possible. Christmas got in the way. A good, inspirational talk, and interesting people to chat to afterwards.

The last days of plagiarism?

There seems to be a bit of a buzz about the new LexisNexis CopyGuard plagiarism detection software. Sounds very impressive as you simply chuck in a bit of copy and it shows you exactly where certain phrases originated (yeah, nicked). Certainly there is a use for this but I'm not so sure it's going to work for the British press, or anywhere else in world for that matter. I predict a riot on the newsfloor of the first paper to introduce it. And what will the NUJ have to say about it? I suggest singing the following:

Plagiarize!
Let no one else's work evade your eyes!
Remember why the good Lord made your eyes!
So don't shade your eyes
But plagiarize, plagiarize, plagiarize!
Only be sure always to call it, please, "research"!

Tom Lehrer's 1953 song Lobachevsky

Tales from the morgue

I see that a new Morgue Mama mystery is out. The Mama in question is Maddy Sprowls, an old-school newspaper librarian who gets up to all sorts of adventures whilst searching through old newspaper files (media libraries in the US are sometimes known as 'the morgue'). All very amusing and this review and this one seem to think it worth checking old Maddy out if only for novelty value.

Talk about reinforcing newspaper librarian stereotypes though...

Any suggestions for what to call UK media libraries?

Knowhow

There's an interesting article in theguardian, The sparring and spin of the Google dance", which is trying to highlight the unscrupulous art of artificially enhancing your website's ranking on Google searches. However, the dilemma news organisations always face is that this kind of expose' often ends up providing the world with a "how to guide". And with the current popularity of Guardian Unlimited, it will give webmasters the knowhow that will surely exacerbate the problem.

Anyway here's the "Five ways to get to the top" as advised in the article:

Status on Google is determined by a number of factors, all of which can be faked

Key words

Good practitioners will make sure sites contain clear information that is relevant to a user search. Others will use misleading but popular keywords - such as "Britney Spears" - to try to capitalise on somebody else's fame. Some even attempt to hide fake keywords on a page so that they can be read by search engines but not by people

Popularity

The more people that link to a site, the more popular it is in Google's mind. By carefully choosing who to link to and where to place those links, SEOs can push a target website up the rankings. Some shady operators even create a fake ecology of websites which all point at each other

Spam

Spamming is a tactic employed by unscrupulous SEOs, and attempts to raise profile and popularity by leaving fake messages pointing towards the target across thousands of other sites and weblogs. While unpopular with surfers, it often boosts the ranking of the site in question

Regular updates

Sites which seem new are often considered more important, because they are more likely to contain relevant information. Unscrupulous operators will often steal content from other pages to create the appearance of movement

Metadata

Each web page carries a selection of unseen information that tells other programs what its contents are. While most SEOs simply include correct information about a given page, crooked operators will use unrelated terms to try to direct unwitting surfers

Word police.

Great to see that the word Blog appears in the Lake Superior University 2005 list of Banished Words. How else though are we supposed to describe 'erectile dysfunction'? Floppy penis? Dear me, the things they get up to in Universities these days. Haven't they got better things to do like going on dates ( I think that's how they put it in the States).

Read more here

New kid on the blog.

Tim Berners Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web, has finally gotten round to starting his very own blog. So far it is pretty rubbish, but it's bound to get better.

TBL once said, ""The internet is certainly not mature, because so many things are missing. It's adolescent, because it thinks it's the bee's knees and can do so much. Whereas, in fact, it has just started."

Well at least one thing that was missing, isn't anymore . . .

Read a TBL profile here

Why mince words

Doing a review of the year and came across a story that reminded me of how subtle tabloid headlines can be.

In the Guardian (22/04/2005)

Mother stabbed on walk with young son: Teacher may be paralysed after daytime attack in quiet village

And same story in the Daily Star (22/04/2005)
Nutter stabs mum in neck

Is theguardian trying to tell us something?

On a recent search for Tony Blair articles on Guardian Unlimited, I started to see a pattern forming.

Defeat at home for Blair
Guardian, Friday November 9 2001

Blair devastated' by England defeat
Guardian, Friday June 21 2002

Election defeat piles pressure on Blair
Guardian, Saturday September 20 2003

Defeat for Blair on foundation hospitals
Guardian, Wednesday October 1 2003

Defeat for Blair over compulsory pensions
Guardian, Thursday October 2 2003

Sharon's triumph is Blair's defeat
Guardian, Friday April 16 2004

Blair suffers first Europe defeat
Guardian, Tuesday April 20 2004

Get real, says Blair after NHS defeat
Guardian, Thursday September 29 2005

And then…...

After eight years in power Tony Blair hears a new word: Defeat
Guardian, Thursday November 10 2005

Librarians have still got the look

This week, I was glad to see that the Mirror agreed with my earlier heralding of the Librarian Look:

"Feel the tweed: Once the preserve of librarians, tweed has been given a new lease of life and is the look every smart girl is wearing this winter"
Didi Danso, The Mirror, Dec 5 2005

Sadly no mention of tweed here, but you can learn how to dress in the "sexy librarian look" here.

Over on the Indy, the sexual appetite of their librarians was called into question:

"Would Philip Larkin have had sex at all if he hadn't been a poet? Fat, balding librarians tied to their mum's apron strings don't usually run three lovers."
Rowan Pelling, So poets and artists have more sex. Tell me something I didn't know..., Independent on Sunday, Dec 4 2005

Evidently Rowan Pelling in the Indy hadn't read the Express list of famous librarians (I guess their readers don't know librarians can be interesting)

More famous librarians here

"Philip Larkin died 20 years ago on Friday. As well as being a poet, he was also a librarian. Here are some other former librarians...

Lynne Truss, Mao Tse-Tung, Sir Ludovic Kennedy, Casanova, Laurie Taylor, Anthea Turner, August Strindberg, John Braine, David Hockney, J Edgar Hoover, Laura Bush."

Mitchell Symons, Things you didn't know you didn't know!, Sunday Express, Nov 27 2005

Weekly cliche count: a healthy 3

Wikifatigue

Now that Jimbo, as I believe we are to call Jimmy Wales, has decided to tighten Wikipedia's submission rules, according to the BBC, librarians can now get all hot and bothered about Uncylopedia

Can't wait for some newspaper to lift an entry and print the info. Just wait for the, 'they should employ comedians' rants on the newslists.

Top of the blogs

Here's a list of the most influential librarian blogs based on LinkRank. Very good, apart from the accidental omission of gaolhouseblog . . .

Online greenhorns

As trainees who claim to know very little about the information world the online exhibition served as an overwhelming introduction into the world of technological data management. Taking advantage of the fantastic jellybeans available and the free postcards from the British Library we attempted to gain some understanding of the mindboogling number of information services that seem to be available to the humble librarian. However, our foray into alternative careers showed us that we are no longer 'humble librarians', but 'instead information brokers' or indeed 'digital assets managers'. This was a far cry from Holly's expectation of joss sticks and yoghurt weaving. The speaker failed to encourage us in our hunt for the glamourous side of records management - but we believe, we really do. Our belief was overwhelmingly restored by Sue Hill's pink champagne driven recruitment fest. In conclusion, although as beginners in this world the technological side was a bit of a bafflement it was an interesting introduction and encouraged us to develop a better understanding of the tools of our trade.

And they're already advertising for Online 2006 . . .

More on the Wikipedia debate

This is getting interesting. In response to all the Wikipedia themed stuff on NewsLib, co-founder, Jimmy Wales, has replied to Newslib.
Not really surprising when confronted with this sort of comment:

> I think if you held a gun to Jimmy Wales and demanded that he choose
> either community or accuracy, he'd opt for the former, not the latter.
> And therein lies the issue.

Jimmy replied

Absolutely not. I'll choose accuracy every single time. Period.
Although, I don't really relish the thought of being held at gunpoint by
anyone, thanks. :-)

The mission I have set for myself in life is to give a freely licensed
high quality encyclopedia to every single person on the planet in their
own language. The core community shares with me this value, and indeed
this is ultimately the definition of what it means to be a part of the
core community. Therefore in a very real sense the supposed choice between "community"
and "accuracy" is a bit premature: since the community is incredibly
passionate about accuracy, getting rid of them isn't going to help at all.

It was this figure though that really caught my eye:

"I have reason to think that our error rate as
judged by experts is in some domains now only about 30% worse than
Britannica's. With the forthcoming review process and the ongoing
improvements in quality that we're seeing across the board, I think in a
year or two we'll be able to come "out of alpha" into "beta" stage at a
level where our quality essentially matches them (but unevenly, i.e.
we'll be better than them in some clearly definable areas and worse than
them in other clearly definable areas)."

But will the "beta" stage be achieved with the help of librarians? Had to chuckle at Jimmy's reply

"I would encourage library administrators to view occassional staff time
spent working on Wikipedia as being a part of the general culture of
public service that libraries embody."

Taking the Wiki . . .

Newslib has been buzzing the past few days with postings about a false Wikipedia entry. Last Tuesday in the USA Today, John Seigenthaler Sr. discussed his experiences of being the subject of a false biography on Wikipedia, which was copied also to reference.com and answers.com. For four months he was depicted as a suspected assassin of President Kennedy. Much comment from the Newslib crew ranging from outrage to the general view that you should never take anything for granted from Wikipedia without checking against conventional sources as well. Sounds obvious to me, but Gary Price (a man worth listening to) makes the point that while Info pros know this, ordinary punters, "take what they can get and move on". One suggestion was that Wikipedia might like to start hiring librarians to weed out misinformation. Yeah, right, and who's going to pay for it and doesn't this go against the whole Wiki concept?

Anyway, plenty of discussion out there. In October, theguardian asked: "Can you trust Wikipedia?" The article had "experts" rate Wikipedia entries on subjects within their fields. Perhaps it would have been more productive, and in the spirit of the whole thing, if the "experts" just logged onto Wikipedia and corrected the articles rather than sneering at the whole concept of an open source encyclopedia in the national press.

More info here, here and here.

This one will go and on . . .

. . . and all I got from it was a green pen.

Went to a work training session today hosted by The Mind Gym. I'm not usually into this sort of thing but have to say I enjoyed myself. Not sure if I learnt much on "Managing Expectations" though, but at least I got a great green pen as a souvenir. And is there possibly a better slogan to put on a pen than "mind gym - putting the ink into think".

(Trying to find a good list of other corporate slogans, I came across
this - I mean, would you buy a corporate Latin motto from these people??)

Anyway, here's a hall of fame of popular advertising slogans from recent years.

City Information Group (Christmas) Hug

I popped into the Kensington Roof Gardens on Monday night for the 2005 Information Christmas Party the place to be for the creme de la creme of the UK information world.

OK, it was a load of librarians drinking and jiving with their information vendors but I didn't let that put me off. Everyone looked very nice in their smartest clothes and to begin with there was a real buzz about the place as we chatted with ex-bosses and business card-toting salesmen. A slightly shambolic raffle (gallon bottle of Baileys anyone?) added some excitement although it was a bit of a mystery as to who was actually allowed to enter. The drink flowed and the food - well it occasionaly appeared. The rumour was that the catering cost £12,000 so they must have been the most expensive ham butties in history, even if they were made with focaccia. As the night wore on though, the event began to feel like a certain kind of office party with some inventive movements on the dancefloor and the weary loitering around the edges. It's a shame that more didn't venture into the actual gardens as they were the true star of the party. One party veteran suggested that this year's wan't as raucous as 2004 although that may have been due to the fact that many people were heading to Online the next day.

Online Information 2005

And so to Online information 2005at the cavernous Olympia Grand Hall. I went along on Tuesday, the first day of the event, so at least the exhibitors still had a bit of enthusiasm. That is apart from the people on the Information Today stand who seemed a bit jaded even by lunchtime. Or perhaps it was just me not looking like a potential customer. Anyway, there are two ways to approach the whole thing. You either select one or two vendors that you're interested in, speak to them and hopefully do the business, shake hands - then clear off asap. Or, you wander around aimlessly only visiting stands that grab your attention - you know, pretty colours, ladies dressed as fairies/men not wearing suits etc, tasteful bags full to tat. Ah yes, the giveaways. As far as I could see (and I may have missed something) the LexisNexis USB and the John Wiley bags were the best gifts on offer. Lots of useful magazines available.

The seminars are always worth checking out and I sat in on one about Succesful contract negotiation. One of the points made though was that you shouldn't waste vendors' time by showing an interest in a product that you've got no intention of getting. Well, hang on a minute. Surely you need to try and test something before making a decision and what about all the hours wasted by vendors hassling you to 'talk business'? I clapped at end of the talk anyway.

Librarians: all books and no looks?

Love it or hate it (and I'm all for embracing it - tweed is very in this season), the cliched image of librarians is still alive and kicking. As well as Sharon Osbourne's (admittedly amusing) rant at Madonna (repeated below for those of you who missed it), I've spotted these librarian references in the press over the last month:

"Her outfit (another disappointment) is more librarian than vampire: a sharp white collar poking out of a neat blue tank top. I glimpse a striped purple cuff. The look is completed with a large, oval brooch, worn in the centre of her neck. I wonder if it is pinned directly into her flesh. She smiles. I think I see blood."
Anne Rice: Interview with the former vampire, Chris Ayres, The Times, Nov 5 2005

"It used to be the preserve of stuffy librarians but, thanks to a Marks & Sparks ad starring Twiggy, the humble cardie is back."
Amber Morales, The Mirror, Oct 28 2005

"Take away the ovation for Dado Prso and this Saturday afternoon Ibrox gathering could have been mistaken for a particularly quiet convention of librarians . Sshh..."
Rangers v Motherwell: Prso presence lifts the blues, John Greechan, Daily Mail, Oct 24 2005

"It's like dressing up with her. One day you're in fucking gun gear, then you're in horsing gear, then you dress like a fucking dyke, then you dress like a hooker, then you're in a flowery dress reading kids' poetry looking like a fucking librarian - then you're back looking like an old hooker again. For fuck's sake, who are you?"
Sharon Osborne, Word, Nov 10 2005

Of course, if you want to know what real librarians look like, then go here

Drink? How about a deer? (or even an elk).

Forget about the gross misrepresentation of women as binge drinking jezebels, what about the poor elk?

Recently reported in the binge-watch section of The Guardian a drunken party of elks surrounded an old people's home in the town of Ostra Goinge, near Malmo, after devouring high numbers of fermented apples, Swedish paper Dagens Nyheter reports. Police with dogs had failed to scare them off, and the animals only ran away after hunters with guns arrived on the scene.
"It's not unusual for elks to get drunk," forester Fredrik Jonsson told the newspaper. "They don't recognise the difference between fermented and not fermented and stuff themselves down to the last apple."
There have been previous problems with elks: a female elk recently attacked three joggers in Norway. Last year another elk in Sweden stole a bicycle from a garden, which it regularly visited to eat the roses. An elderly couple had used the bike to fence off their garden; the elk disappeared with the bike hanging round its neck. The bike was later found bent and damaged beyond repair.

Incidently please note that the only elk referred to by gender was a female.

Patrol music . . .

A shop in South Wales, reports icwales, is using a new alarm system called Mosquito, “which is only clearly audible to under 20s”. It emits a noise that annoys the kids so much that they stop hanging around the shop. Fantastic news! Unless of course you’re an innocent youngster who’s been sent round the shop for milk by your parents, because then it'll just piss you off.

It’s only a matter of time before the technology is usurped by a bored, computer-adept, Spar employee. Then the kids will have a way to communicate at frequencies that the elderly can’t hear. Then they can cause some real trouble...

Reminds me of a story on the bbc back in January. Tyne and Wear Public Transport installed speakers in their bus stops and train stations to belt out classical music. However, not just for the overall enjoyment of their passengers –but to stop young hoodie wearing hoodlums from hanging about and intimidating people. And guess what? It worked.

Studies proved that trying to show off you latest Jamster ring-tone to your mates, and generally acting like an arse just isn’t cool when accompanied by Mozart or Beethoven. So the kids left, deciding to intimidate people in the park instead.

Warning: Smoking can cause lack of cabin pressure.

With the government considering a total smoking ban across Britain, it’s interesting to note how Australia deals the problem of people smoking on public transport.

A BBC news story tells how a French tourist recently admitted that she tried to open an aeroplane door during her flight to Brisbane, to have a cigarette. The 34 year-old woman, who suffers fear of flying, had drank alcohol with sleeping pills to cope, and could not remember the incident.

Fortunately, the memory was still fresh in the minds of her fellow passengers (who I suspect now also have a fear of flying ) leading the Brisbane Magistrates Court to issue her with a £429 good behaviour bond - which she will only have to pay if she commits another offence. I wonder what the penalty would have been if she had actually lit the cigarette.

It seems that on a holiday to Australia you can be drugged up to the eyeballs and endanger the lives of a plane full of people and pretty much get away scott free. If anyone can find the name of the tour operator she was using, I’d love to give them a go.

The story finishes off by saying that the woman was travelling with her husband, who was obviously too busy reading the instructions on the vomit bag to keep an eye on what she was doing.

So nearly a candidate for an esteemed Darwin Award - where the most stupid smoking-related death seems to be when a group of soldiers in the Ukraine decided to take a fag break while guarding a, wait for it, ammunition dump. The result was a series of explosions that lasted a week, debris tossed 25 miles away and amazingly only one fatality. Read more here.

I drink therefore I am . . . a woman.

Over the past few weeks we've noticed a real misogyny attached to the reporting on extended drinking hours. Almost every article you see, even in the more liberal press, is accompanied by a photograph of a woman lying down in the street, looking the worse for wear. Pretty lazy journalism, aside from anything else.

I picked up the Standard on the tube last week and spotted another little trick - juxtaposition. An article on licensing hours was placed next to a small piece about an elderly man killed by a "drunken yob" who had drunk "at least seven pints of lager". The suggestion presumably being that if pubs are allowed to serve alcohol 24 hours a day, lots of little old ladies will be stabbed to death. Not very subtle but can be effective.

Here's some examples from The bbc, The Mail on Sunday and The Daily Mail.

Women are criticised in the press for their drinking habits much more often than men. Recent stories have included health warnings "Epidemic of liver disease hits women drinkers", and suggestions that women are to blame for being sexually assaulted "Third of young women assaulted while drunk". And true to form, The Sun stated its position clearly on October 3 with the headline 'Women drink hell'. And finally, an article in the Observer "Bingeing women fuel crime" even suggested that women were to blame for male violence: "The days of women exerting a civilising influence in pubs may be fading...".

Here's a bit of analysis:

Number of articles about alcohol and women in the UK nationals (not FT) over the past year: 162
Number of articles about alcohol and men in the UK nationals (not FT) over the past year: 102

World's most visited blog site

Modestly described as a "directory of wonderful things." - boingboing.net has become the
world's most visited blog site - it get's more hits than whitehouse.gov - below, an entry from today's front page:

.......The Fretboard Journal: debut issue
I just received issue no. 1 of The Fretboard Journal, "A magazine for musical instrument players, collectors, and builders." It's lavishly produced with full color photos throughout

The crazy frog and the crazy 80s

During the Falklands conflict, Mrs 'bonkers' T coerces Mr Mitterand to give him secret codes of French made missiles sold to Argentinians, by threatening to drop an atomic bomb on Argentina. Mr ' bonkers' Mitterand comforts himself with the thought that he will get his revenge by building a tunnel under the Channel which will destroy Britain's island status.

Fuller blog treatment here.

If you hate the French, find friends here.

If you hate Thatcher, find solidarity here.