bits and bobs

Interesting article in LJ on federated search…short list announced for PM’s Literary Awards…the SLNSW has digitised some early accounts of Australian settlement including stuff by Tench…lifehacker mentioned cygwin, which I think I’d sort of heard of before but never tried. I’ve now installed it and it effectively gives me a unix shell in windows so I can access all my windows stuff with unix tools such as grep and vim. That will keep me happy mostly…until my work VPN s/w is compatible with firefox 3 at least.

ida

Was reading the SMH on the weekend and noticed that the Biography of Ida Leeson, first female Mitchell Librarian, by Sylvia Martin, has picked up the Magarey Prize for Biography. Needless to say, despite buying it a couple of months ago, I haven’t quite got round to reading it. Regardless, this sort of recognition suggests that it was a good buy and most importantly I really should get round to reading it one of these days. Looking back at why I bought it serves as a reminder that I was going to put together a paper on some point on Library 2.0. Stalled but not forgotten; or perhaps stewing at least.

measures of popularity

Okey doke, the site for the Codex Sianaiticus is now live…sort of. Looks like it’s being hammered as I got an error when trying to view the manuscript:

“Too many concurrent connections (> 100.000). The manuscript page is temporarily unavailable. Please try again later.”

That’s pretty impressive in its first 24 hours. All is not lost. That error message only occurs on the English version of the site; when I loaded the German version, I was able to view the manuscript. I can’t read German myself but figure just looking at the scanned pages will suffice for now.

i’m so vain

It has been reported in the press on many occasions that politicians have been rather enthusiastic in their participation with the likes of wikipedia, or rather they’ve been very keen to remove unfavourable comment. One of the more classic instances was the Bush vs Kerry edit war. These days there are even tools for tracing anonymous edits. In today’s SMH comes news, that the Commonwealth Parliamentary Library has sent out instructions to its patron base on how to edit wikipedia.

This is mostly a “yeah, yeah, whatever” as far as I’m concerned as the librarians are doing as all librarians do, providing instruction and information literacy to their patrons. As Roxanne Missingham, the Parliamentary Librarian comments,

She said the Parliamentary Library was justified in advising MPs how to edit the site because part of its role was to help them “use new technologies effectively”.

The amusing bit here is how their patrons have so quickly taken the instructions on board. In any other situation, the patron response would have been laudable. Teaching people how to edit a wiki is a fundamental part of any LIbrary 2.0 training. I suppose an important aspect of any literacy training is focussing on the interests of the trainees and politicians particularly, seem very concerned with keeping up appearances.

communities

Facebook et al are not my cup of tea. I’ve played with it, given it a go and so on. For most of these sorts of things, I’ll give it a go and move on if it doesn’t suit. However my concerns regarding facebook go a little deeper and it represents an itch I’ve been trying to get at. I s’pose the biggest problem I have with it is that it reminds me a little of a gated community and harkens back to the days when Compuserve, and others of that ilk, tried to create restricted communities, protecting their users from the big, bad Internet.

Though it seemed to be more about creating a community they could market to and that seems to be the case with facebook. I’m seeing ads targeted to me eg an upcoming birthday; I turn 40 this year and I’m seeing ads for booking venues to host 40th birthday parties. A bit of me goes hmmm that’s sorta nice but really this strikes me as what facebook seems to be about, creating demographic information that marketers can use to target me. This is at least in part my own fault, as it’s based on information I have chosen to provide. Similarly in the real world, I have long been reluctant to participate in programmes (eg flybuys) that can be used to track my purchasing behaviour. Yeah, I’m a wee bit paranoid but I really detest being marketed to.

I’m still developing my thinking in this regard though news of other features on Facebook does not bode well. I access it rarely these days, except to play the odd game of vampires or scrabble, or respond to an email someone has sent me. I’m not keen on having everything in one place ie in a situation where I never have to venture anywhere else to see what’s happening. Facebook is not as enclosed as the compuserve of old seemed to be, afterall I can just open another tab in my browser; there’s still a sense to it that it’s keen to keep you there and not have you wander off.

I suppose I’m something of a curmudgeonly ol’ bastard liking different things in different places, email vs usenet vs blogging vs whatever and not keen on hiding behind a unified interface. It would make some things easier certainly, to use something like facebook, and I know some folk who have moved everything over to it. For me, I shall move on. Afterall, if I need to express myself, or interact with folk, I still have email and blogging, nevermind the occasional forum.

Hot on the heels of pope week, comes news of the first edition of the New Testament about to go online.  Well perhaps not the first edition, but the oldest surviving, complete edition (dating back to the 4th century AD). A website has been put up to eventually display the full digitised version of the Codex Sinaiticus with the first chunk going online in a few days time.

Meanwhile elsewhere, the Productivity Commission is looking at changing the rules for importing books from overseas. Currently there seems to be a month’s delay on International titles appearing locally. Needless to say some folk are looking forward to a relaxation of the rules and some are aghast. I know from my own experience that the price of books locally is way high. For example, one of the books that arrived from Amazon last week was “The Raven King“. It would have cost me about AUD$30 (including delivery from the US) for this hardcover edition, whereas to purchase it from my local bookshop, it would have cost twice that. Interestingly the catalogue record for the edition at Gleebooks says paperback but I can verify that it’s actually a hardcover.

oops

Gleebooks is having a sale and members got access the night before. I bought several books. Very bad. I think it’s because almost all by books are in boxes. I suspect it wouldn’t feel quite so bad except that I’d have 5 books arrive from Amazon the day before. So that’s double figures in less than 2 days. I think I managed to avoid buying dictionaries though I did manage to pick up Barber’s Trials of the Templars for $18. An updated edition (2006) published by Cambridge. Alas a friend noted that it finished halfway through L in the index. The missing pages hadn’t been ripped out ie it had been properly bound at that point. Oops. Very unlike Cambridge Uni Press and no doubt a vagary of the printing process. That would explain why I got it for such a good price.

roundup

…of another sort. One of the NZ library blogs I keep an eye on, librarytechnz, occasionally publishes a roundup of interesting papers regarding librarianship. This is one of the blogs that was started up by folk at the National Library of NZ and it continues to be a good read.

this n that

Been a hectic few weeks, just realised I have yet to post a best of filmfest list, organising trips and generally working hard…honest. It was with some concern I read recently of helicopters being required for a snail muster; that is until I realised there are some rather large ancestors in the closet. I’ve recently finished Gingerich’s “The Book That Nobody Read” and thought it was pretty good, will try and will write a paragraph or two eventually. Similarly I have a post in my head on why I don’t feel at home on facebook, admittedly this is from one of the ideas for my 2.0 paper…should I ever get round to writing it. One of the fascinating things about the Gingerich book is that reveals a sense of how libraries and academics can interact. More on that in another post. The Bob Carr book is going well and I’ve started “People of the Book”. Just arrived are a few more books from Amazon including a couple on libraries and library history…well ok, of the 5 that probably sums up 4 of them.

looking for a book

As mentioned a day or two back, I recently bought “The Book Nobody Read” by Owen Gingerich. I’m finding it an easy read that really sucks me as he retells some of the highlights and anecdotes of his quest to inspect all the first and second editions of Copernicus’ de Revolutionibus. I’m plowing through it and approaching the halfway mark; it’s a sort of a quest for marginalia I suppose and examines some of the interesting annotations of folk who have owned the books over the centuries. Similarly such annotations have been useful tracking the development of theories of other greats of the time such as Tycho Brahe. I did briefly maintain a desire to own a copy of it, but even the second edition fetches a pretty penny. Perhaps I should settle for a nice leatherbound edition instead, or perhaps the CDROM. Though there is a cheap hardcover (US$40) that looks potentially interesting too. I’m fairly sure I have a cheap paperback edition tucked away in a box somewhere at least.

Looking around online has revealed several editions available in scanned form including a first edition from Nuremberg, and an autograph edition held by Copernicus himself in Poland. PDFs of the first edition are also available and this edition was made available by the NASA Astrophysics Data System. There’s even an english translation online. Should I decide I want to have a look at the book itself, it turns out (according to the appendix in Gingerich’s book, that the Uni of Sydney has a copy of the second edition in their rare books collection…but a 10-15 walk away. The State Library of Victoria also has a copy of the second edition.

Been a fun little exploration and I’ve come across an image of the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale which I hope to visit one day as that’s the resting place for the Voynich Manuscript.