Dumpling in a Hanky

"Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters" (pre-ordered), and "Mr Darcy, Vamprye" (currently en route). These are the only way I'm ever going to be able to cope with these type of classic books! Monsters! Vampires! Yay! I shall post a review once I've read 'em :)

Information Overlord kindly pointed me towards Wests reply to the staggeringly badly thought out "Librarian name" marketing email. Wisely, they've put their hands up and confessed to being *rses, and apologised. A good response, but why did a massive (I believe, I'm not overinformed on the US legal information suppliers marekt) company whose focus is on supplying information to legal and information professionals, ever think that it would be ok to insult the best informed sector of their users? And who authorised that email going out? Did they look at it and go "Yup, that's just the tone we want to set!" Apparently, it "won't happen again". I'm just surprised that it happened at all.

Well, West (the American parent of our UK Westlaw) seem just about ready to start giving classes in "simultaneously patronising and insulting some of your core users". Sarah Glassmeyer posted this screenshot to Twitpic of a West email to its users. Shall I explain why I find this to be hugely insulting? Well.... do West understand who the biggest users / on site trainers / troubleshooters / BUYERS of its products are? Have they ever actually met a librarian, or do they still think all librarians wear half-moon glasses / twinsets / pearls / sensible shoes / their hair in buns? I suppose we should be grateful they didn't throw in a clipart library matron, or something about keeping te noise down too. And do they really think it's a good idea to imply that knowing a colleagues name in another department, who's there to do expert research work to save that fee earner valuable time, is beneath the dignity of a fee earner? Sigh. *Written by the librarian who has sho...

I was pointed a while ago to this discussion on JISCmail a while ago, which I'm not a member of, so I couldn't respond to the discussion about library blogs (and to be honest, I couldn't be bothered joining to explain why the UK Library Bloggers wiki came from, and why it is as it is -it's all done in my free time). The point I took from it was that the UK Library Bloggers wiki wasn't regarded as comprehensive, and was seen to be inconsistent. As it's always a work in progress, I took that on board...and spent 30+ hours over the last few months going through each of the 800+ liblogs listed on the Hotstuff 2.0 list discussed in the JISCmail thread, and determining which were in the UK, and if they were missing from the liblogger list. From that, I found 37 new liblogs (and a lot which I would classify as dead, as they haven't had any posts in 2009, so I ignored), some of which were debateable whether they fell into the liblog definition (automated library...