Dumpling in a Hanky

5 candles on my blog birthday cake, on its fifth anniversary*! I've done quite a bit since I started this blog up: Chartered, (hopefully) Revalidated, been a Committee member, been a Convenor, organised training events, gone to training events, formally and informally mentored other information professionals (and been mentored by them in return), set up the UK Library Bloggers wiki, pottered about the edges of interesting projects like the Library Routes and Build India A Library initiatives, been involved in the setting up of various wikis for various purposes, taken part in a course of online study, attended formal conferences and informal unconferences (that is such  a horrible word!), and along the way, found a ton of entertaining book-related gifts on Etsy. In other words - good lord, I got professional! And it didn't even hurt! Keeping the blog going (despite long periods where I've thought "I really have nothing to talk about", or "I have loads to ...

I've been blog hopping! Using the cpd23 Delicious bookmarks , I've been having a wander around some participants blogs. I feel I already know certain bloggers reasonably well, so after a wander round their blogs, and some commenting, I branched out into other blogs....the blogs of STRANGERS!  I joined in on an interesting discussion in the comments of Libraries, the Universe and Everything , about what number of RSS feeds people feel is reasonable. Some people are certainly able to deal with a lot more feeds than me, although I suppose it's also not just the number of feeds, but the activity levels of each of those feeds that may be a factor in how many is "too many".  I have to admit though, I kind of lost track of where I had been, as I would click on the link of a blog commenter, then comment and follow a link to another comment on their blog...and forget to click the "send emails of following comments" option. D'oh! I also learned that find...

So, week one of cpd23 begins, and participants are asked to set up a blog, if they don't already have one. Well, I've had this blog (in it's previous incarnation as "Jennie Law" for four years, so I think I'm good for the "setting up and getting used to blogging" part of Thing One :) I set this blog up originally as just somewhere to share the interesting things I found around the internet, with no real expectation of many others finding or reading it (and hence very little thought about a good name). At the time, there were only one or two other law librarians that I knew of blogging, so it didn't seem like it would be something long term, but for that moment, it felt good to be able to share some random thoughts with other law librarians, and to be able to learn from their blogs. I've stuck with it, despite a few periods of thinking "I've got nothing to say!" (and then finding a month or so later that I suddenly had a flood ...

So, for various reasons stated previously , I decided to shoogle the blog about a bit, and I finally decided on what I think you can agree is perhaps a somewhat random name. It doesn't have a hint of law or libraries in it, but then, quite often, neither do my posts! The name does have some little bit of reason behind it: it's part of the lyrics to a Jimmy Logan song my Mum used to sing to me as a child...and I'm pretty childish myself ;) So, this is my first post as a Dumpling! :D My previous contact email address will still work if you have that, but old blog links won't, so feel free to update your bookmarks if you have any :) *waddles off in a dumpy, dumplingy manner*

No, this doesn’t relate to a tragic and unlikely accident involving damage to a nuns wimple (although that sounds like it would make a most excellent story).  It’s about me being blank.  Vacant.  Uninspired. I have lost my mojo. I am without the wherewithal for blogging. This may, or may not, be a tragic state of affairs, depending on how much or little joy my erratic posts bring into your life. I have also yet to finalise a blog name change. It’s all gone a bit Pete Tong. Meh. Bear with me, while I try and gather my meandering thoughts again on an occasional basis, and throw them into a blog post.

Yes, I feel all proud, because it's coming up to birthday-time for the UK Library Bloggers Wiki. ..it's toddling along nicely all by itself (with just the occasional spammer attack - it's really quite satisfying to get to ban and block people!), with people generally seeming quite happy with the process of adding their blogs themselves. Since I last looked in July 2010, there have continued to be additions in various categories.                                           July 2010                                        March 2011 Institutional bloggers              135                                                   ...

In the case of this blog, it's a name that had no particular thought or planning behind it - I had no idea whether I would actually want to keep it going, what I would blog about, or that anyone would ever read it. Well, it's almost 4 years later (17th June 2007 is blog birthday, if we're counting), and the blog's still here, so I think we can now safely assume that it's probably going to be sticking around. And the name's been getting on my nerves a bit...you have no idea the amount of people who have found this blog looking for ladies called Jennie Law or Jenny Law. Personally, I'm not actually called Jennie Law, so I'm no help to these poor searchers, although for the right fee I could maybe consider pretending to be... I also don't blog a huge amount about law: I'm not a lawyer, I just have the job of finding stuff for lawyers. Sometimes that process amuses me, sometimes it annoys me, and I blog about it. Sometimes I write about library is...

It's called "A Big Boy did it, and ran away", aka "It wisnae us, Guv" This is the text of the (to give them credit, admittedly fast) response I got from the website that was using my blog post, as mentioned previously : Dear Sir, Apologies for the issue. Thanks for your information. we will remove the same. It was happened by our operators who has posted about long back. We got permissions from the authors that time. Some of the posts they have put like this. Best Regards Venkat Sure So, according to them, it was posted on their site a while ago (I'm assuming in 2008, as that's when the posts lifted from me and others were created), and they got permission from the authors at that time? Well, unless I have changed personality since 2008*, I never gave that permission, so that's no real excuse. And...as of now, my content is still there. How long exactly should it take to remove my content? How long should I give them, before moving from S...

And, as many of my posts can prove, I'm no insightful writer, or awesome, world-shaking thinker. I know my level, and it's kinda low :) But I do write this blog, and it is all the product of my own, random mind. I don't blog on legalish/bookish/techiesh stuff anywhere else, and I've never done a guest blog post elsewhere either: anything I write as "Jennie Law" is here, and only here. It may not be of any great intellectual value, I get no financial benefit from it, but it is mine, all mine. So when I found that someone had come to my blog recently via a link on another site, to an old post from 2008 about ebooks, I wondered why they were looking at such old stuff, and who was referring to it. I followed the link back, and I found that the entirety of the 2008 post on ebooks is available on the site where the visitor originated from, with a link at the bottom to my blog post . The company is SGD Networks , which appears to be based in India, and has nothing ...

So, we unleashed the UK Library Bloggers wiki into the wild back in March, and crossed our fingers that it would be ok, out there in the Scary World, all on its own. And so far, it seems to be doing just fine, yay! There are of course the regular spammer attempts to "subtly" insert adverts for dissertation work, and all sorts of less...erm...wholesome products within the entries, but the email alerts about text amendments that go to the administrators of the wiki (Phil, Jo and I) means that the first person online and able to, goes in and removes that material and blocks the creator. This has worked really well so far, and unwanted content doesn't stay on the wiki for any real length of time. And the best bit is the librarians and info professionals who've been adding themselves to the wiki! I created a backup in March before we "unlocked" the wiki, and at that point there were 115 institutional / professional group blogs, 83 librarian blogs, 5 Chartership...

So, The Improvement Service (which sounds faintly menacing, and makes me imagine the staff all walk around the office with straight backs, books balanced on their heads and have perfect pronunciation) have issued a guide for Scottish Councillors about blogging and tweeting. Now, is it just me, or is this a bit silly? If you're tweeting or blogging, then you're at least mildly tech savvy. And if you're a Councillor, then you're probably pretty smart, and also reasonably aware about confidentiality, public image etc. You know what people will be interested in hearing about from you, what your constituents concerns are. So, does it really need an 11 page guide to tell you how to do that? I think that 3 sentences on page 7 about what not to do should perhaps be given a bit more prominence, else Councillors are going to blunder into trouble.... So, some top tips for Councillors on blogging and tweeting, from moi: Don't talk about confidential stuff. Don't be abusiv...

It's a busy time for Rabbie Burns. As the National Year of Homecoming is centred around the 250th anniversary of his birth, he's got a lot of people looking closely at him and his work. So, he's been reanimated, and popped up on Twitter , tweeting poems, line by line. After the initial news reports, NTS actually posted the essential information needed for following him on Twitter: his username - ayrshirebard. They might however want to note that Twitter updates to your phone haven't been possible in the UK for many months. And now, the revived poet has also taken to blogging! Robert Burns' Letters will be posting the letters of the bard, on the anniversary of the day they were actually written. He's currently in full love-letter flow, writing to his 'Clarinda'. The content of 91 letters will be being posted, concluding in 2010, when it is hoped the National Trust for Scotland will be able to open the doors of the Robert Burns Birthplace Museum. Funds ...

I'm continuing to add to this list, as and when I can, and trawl through those already on the list to check for changes since the last visit / my mistakes in the collection of the initial list (my apologies to Neil Infield for accidentally renaming him to Ian!) Also, I received an email telling me to look at FADE Library 's great work on collecting UK health library blogs, which I will(with their kind permission) also add in to the overall list (and blog about in a later post) to try and make it as comprehensive as possible. Unfortunately, my email provider went squiffy and deleted the original email before I could reply, so I don't know who to credit for alerting me to this massive piece of work by the FADE staff, and also means their own blog details were zapped! If this was you, please can you get back in touch so I can add your blog, and say thank you personally!

A legal librarian friend forwarded me this event notification today from SIN, the Scottish Information Network . Unfortunately, I didn't get the notification myself (nor did at least one other member that I know of), despite having joined SIN back in April. I think they may need to look at their email /contact list management! Scottish Information Networking event - First steps in blogging Dear colleague Do you blog or are you thinking about blogging? The Scottish Information Network is running an evening event entitled “First steps in blogging” on Tuesday November 4th. Come along and hear advice from some real bloggers or perhaps even plug your own blog! The event will also be an opportunity to meet with other members of the network and find out more about what’s happening in the information world. See below for more details and let me know ASAP if you would like to attend John Coll Business Information Services Manager Scottish Business Information Service National Library of Sco...

Well, apparently, according to the recent Times article. The only problem is, Alex Wade doesn't seem to have bothered actually doing any proper research. They've decided that only staff at law firms are likely to blog, or have any knowledge of the law, thereby ruling out advocates / barristers, academic law professionals, support staff / librarians, students.... There are lots of law blogs out there, by all sorts of people working in the law, all it takes to find them is a few minutes! I randomly selected one of the blawgs listed in the article, and a quick look at some of Geeklawyers blawgroll lists the following: Bar Council Blogs Batgirl was a librarian Binary Law CharonQC Conflict of Laws Corporate Blawg Current Awareness Family Law Free Movement Head of Legal Human Law Impact IPKat Law Outsider Lawclanger Legal Beagle Legal Spy lo-fi librarian Martin George Open Content Lawyer Pink Tape PJH Law Publawyer Pupillage and How to Get It Ruthieslaw ...

As pointed out a few weeks ago by lo-fi , there's a new Scottish legal blogger...and he's actually a proper, qualified grown-up who knows what he's talking about, unlike me and my random mutterings... Jonathan Mitchell QC , member of the Murray Stable , has revived his online presence with a blog on Scots law and legal practice, with regular informative and helpful posts.

I do get hits on here from some very odd search terms (which has actually prodded me about another point, to be blogged on later), but I have to say, todays is probably a winner, just for the disturbing thoughts about the searcher that it brings to mind: "ruminants and librarians" Is there someone out there looking for librarians that chew the cud? Or do they think that somewhere, there's a librarian in charge of a library of ruminants, all peacefully grazing in fields according to their classification? Enquiring minds want to know....

In response to my original post about needing help to double check entries and add last visit dates for the UK Library BLoggers wiki, the lovely Jo and Christine have kindly volunteered to help out, yay!!! So, over the next wee while, we'll be revisiting all the blogs already on there, and checking the original quick synopsis is accurate, and adding in a date of last visit. In my meanderings last night I found that already, in the month since I'd first visited, one blog had shut down and moved to another address with a new focus, and a new university departmental blog had started...it's all go with us library bloggers! So thanks again to Christine and Jo for giving their spare time to help with this task!

...and I'm getting daily addition request emails (which is lovely!), I realise that there's a flaw in the data I originally collected. There's no "visit date", and for something as rapidly changing as blogs, that's not good - things may change quickly, and without a visit date, it'll be hard to know when things happened. So....anybody want to volunteer to take a trip around the blogs, check what I've written about them for accuracy, and email me with the date of visit / revised synopsis? No, thought not...guess what I'll be doing this weekend? Also, the line between "librarian" blogs, and "information professional" blogs is getting harder to draw. The list was set up to pull together all the UK library / librarian bloggers I could find. If people didn't say in their "About" section that they were a librarian, or worked in a library, or the blog was run by a library, they were excluded. So yes, this has ruled out gr...

There have been quite a few peeps whose blogs I read who’ve been attending various conferences over the past few months. Quite a few of them seem to ‘liveblog’ the events they go to, which seems like a good idea in concept – you get the ideas and discussions from the event, as they happen, without having to go, very useful if you’re not funded to attend events, or time / location prevent you from being there. But for me, the reality of reading these posts, just seems like looking at the PowerPoint slides of a seminar you’ve not been to – there’s probably some good points in there, but without attending the associated presentation, it can be hard to make sense of. Very often there’s just random statements or key phrases bullet pointed, like: “user interaction” “funding” “databases” Probably good topics, but lists like these are impossible to extrapolate a thread of discussion from. Posts like these that bounce through a presentation and try and condense it into snap...