Dumpling in a Hanky

Oh, it’s all go on the jury front at the moment! First, I’m called up to be a juror, then the Lord Chief Justice of England and Wales decides to d iscuss the topic of tweeting and doing online research while acting as a juror . In terms of my own experience in a Scottish court, I have to say, there weren’t any warnings about tweeting or going online via our phones by anyone official while I was in the public area of the court, or the jury room. I think there may have been a comment by the Clerk to turn phones to silent while we waited to be selected, but that may be a figment of my imagination, as I was reminding myself to make sure my phone was on silent while sitting there. Once selected and led to the jury room we were told by the court officer that we had to turn our phones off, and we were to be allowed one phone call to a relevant person who needed to know we’d been selected and therefore unavailable until 4pm (childminders etc) on the landline in the room, but other than ...

So, I'm following some of the "New Professionals Conference 2010" online and one of the tools referred to was Personas , to see what your online presence is like. Or, how references by to and about you online appear visually. I used my normal online username (it's more distinctive than my "proper" name), and was pretty amused by the results. It seems that the thing that I'm least of all, is "professional", closely followed by "committees". Whoops! Mainly, I'm either aggressive, or I provoke aggression, and sports and fashion feature highly. Hmmmm, I'm thinking that there's maybe something REALLY ODD about this. Wanna fight about it? Huh? DO YA?!?! ;) Edited to add: OK, so it does a different thing every time then?!? This is what I got when I redid it again, for the same single word username (so it's not getting confused by two words, misspellings etc). Perhaps this is the truer one? More online, and social, MUCH less a...

So, I bought a can of Coke. It had a code under the ring pull, that advised you to either text (for a cost), or visit the Coke Zone website, to see if you'd won a prize. So, I toddled off to the website, entered the code, and hit return. Oh. I got a pop-up, telling me to log in if I was a member, or register if I was a new user. It wouldn't tell me if I'd won anything without me being a member. Which is annoying - I don't mind giving my details in exchange for certain things, but in order to find out if I'd maybe won a prize? No ta. So I decided to look at the Coke Zone privacy policy (which you must agree to in order to register with the site). I ran into a problem here - when I clicked on the link, I got nothing. Well, I got a page, with a big expanse of white where the content should be. I was using Chrome, so I decided to try Internet Explorer....yay! The content was all there! So I wondered if it was just me and Chrome that had issues viewing the content...nop...

Back in 2008 I blogged about some of the materials being made available online at State Papers Online. At that stage, only Part I was accessible, with plans for Part II to be available in 2009. Well, they've got part II on the site now, and have announced plans for 2010 and 2011: Coming soon in 2010 State Papers Online Part III: The Stuarts, James I to Anne, 1603-1713, State Papers Domestic Coming in 2011 State Papers Online Part IV:The Stuarts, James I to Anne, 1603-1713, State Papers Foreign, Ireland and Acts of Privy Council Might be of interest to any Tudor-loving historians out there, although the Stuart-loving ones will have to wait a wee bit yet :) Although I have to admit to being somewhat stumped as to what it costs...no option for individual subscriptions, and you have to contact them to request pricing as an institution, or a trial...

Well, according to this BBC survey on their Lab UK site anyway (found via Shiny Forager ) You are a Web Elephant Slow-moving - Web Elephants like you browse the internet at a stately, methodical pace - just like real-world elephants who rarely see a reason to rush things. Social - Real-world elephants and Web Elephants are both highly social. Real elephants are able to keep track of their own extended family trees and may even mourn love ones. As a Web Elephant, you often use social networking sites to keep track of your friends of family and are happy to rely on information from sites whose content is created by its users. Adaptable - Real-world elephants owe their adaptability to their large brains and versatile trunks. As a Web Elephant you are similarly adaptable and are well-suited to carrying out several different tasks at the same time. P.S. I am not afraid of mice.

I contemplated going along to this talk by the controversial academic Prof. Tara Brabazon (she "bans" first year students from using the internet as a source when doing coursework for her), but in the end I decided that it just wasn't work-relevant enough to justify the outing (interesting as it would be to hear her). So, I thought I'd post the info on here in case anyone was interested: book your ticket by 19th March, kids!

As mentioned in CILIP Gazette...or Update (my memory sucks!) the Open University has launched a new course for "information professionals": "The Evolving Information Professional: challenges in a digital world" is an online course,. available to begin studying at any time. The blurb says: This course is for information professionals – librarians, archivists, information and knowledge managers – looking to keep up to date with modern technologies, sources of information and today’s users. It is for those in the profession who wish to stay relevant in this fast-changing world of information, find out how other information services are facing the challenge and consider ways of proving their worth in the Google age. Among all the issues that the course covers, you will be given the opportunity to reflect on the possible consequences for your service of a new generation of ‘Homo zappien’ users, try out games developed for library users and archivists and consider t...

The State Papers Domestic of Henry VIII to Elizabeth I, covering the period from 1509 to 1603 are now available online for anyone who's interested to rummage though, at State Papers Online. The papers cover a vast range of issues from the time: Containing 380,000 facsimile manuscript documents linked to fully-searchable Calendar entries, Part I delivers the complete collection of State Papers Domestic for this era. Every facet of early modern Government is detailed including social and economic affairs. Key themes of Part I include: Henry VIII’s relations with Europe The Reformation The Dissolution of Monasteries Elizabeth I: Marriage and the Succession Voyages of Discovery of Drake, Gilbert, Hawkins and Frobisher Relations between the Crown and the nobility The rise and fall of the Earl of Essex The diplomacy of William Cecil and Francis Walsingham Includes: From the National Archives, London: SP 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 10, 11, 12, 13, 15 From the British Libra...

From the Edinburgh City Libraries website comes news of Capital Collections , "an exciting website giving online access to some of the amazing and unique prints including photographs, engravings and drawings held by Edinburgh City Libraries." As a resident of Leith, which has been undergoing insane roadworks to install an unwanted tram network for 2 years now, and facing another 3 years of them before completion in 2011, this photo is pretty topical right now. It certainly feels like they've been messing with the roads non-stop since this photo was taken in 1904!

The current Big Idea in the legal / library blog world is the Free Legal Web (FLW). Originally mooted by Nick Holmes, the idea is to pull all of the content currently floating about the ether (legal professionals blog posts, Government information etc) into one portal. That in itself is a big enough task, but what doesn't seem to be clear yet is...who is this Free Legal Web for? The people involved so far seem to be legal professionals and IT specialists. The legal professionals will be working out some way of getting the useful materials together, and persuading other legal professionals that giving up their valuable time and work (such as blog postings) for this enterprise will be a worthwhile investment, and will reap them rewards in the end. The IT professionals job will be to write the scripts and programmes that will get everything together in the one place, and working well with all the other bits and pieces. That's all lovely (although it's hard to tell what's...

I love my social media: blog-hopping, forum-chatting, IM-ing…yet there’s a large number of my friends who don’t feature on any of these. They’re not technologically averse, these technologies just don’t fit easily into their lives. Take one friend for example: she works part-time, has two small children, and a busy family life. She’s got no spare time to spend on forums and blogs…she’d rather just pick up the phone and call me, or send a text! She misses out on little bits of my life that others don’t…my random thoughts and recent events are often posted on my personal blog, and online friends read that, so when I actually talk to them in person, they’re often quite aware of what’s going on in my life. Non-online friends aren’t, and sometimes I almost resent having to tell them about my life, as I feel I’ve already done that ‘work’ on my blog. I wonder if, as I get more web-based in my social interactions, these friends will continue to be close friends, or whether somet...

So, the WEEE (the prime contender for the title of "Most Ridiculously Named Regulations EVER"...seriously, have you been able to read about "separating different types of WEEE", and types of containers for different types of WEEE without sniggering?) Regulations came into force on the 1st of July 2007. So, that should mean that when you buy a new appliance, the very least the provider must do would be to advise you about how and where to dispose of the appliance you’re probably replacing. They should be a member of the Distributor Take-back Scheme, or allow in-store take-back. At least, that’s what this document from the Environment Agency tells me. So, why is it that, after buying a TV from Dixons online, we’ve received precisely NO information on the WEEE Regulations, our duty of responsible disposal, or where / how to do it? Our old TV is now being rehomed by Freecycle , but what if I didn’t know about this, and if I didn’t know that I had new duties un...

Links to some documents from 2007 and 2006 on the old DTI site still work, so at least we can still access them (for now). Links to some pages from 2006 and 2007 actually have a redirect…which is an advance. Apart from the fact that the redirect takes me to a page that I’m ‘not authorised to view’ 1. You are not authorized to view this page You might not have permission to view this directory or page using the credentials you supplied. If you believe you should be able to view this directory or page, please try to contact the Web site by using any e-mail address or phone number that may be listed on the www.dti.gov.uk home page. You can click Search to look for information on the Internet. 2. HTTP Error 403 - Forbidden Internet Explorer I think it’s an advance, but I’m not altogether sure….although the fact that a redirect from a DTI page to a BERR page ...

Ok, so as well as deciding to suddenly change departments / name with no notice (in itself enough to make me scream with frustration), those clever chaps and chapesses at the ex-DTI have gone one step further…and shifted most of the materials onto the new www.berr.gov.uk web address. With no redirects. Wonderful. Here comes a good few weeks of altering every single damn link to their materials that we’ve ever posted to our current awareness service. Even changing the ‘dti’ part of the web address to ‘berr’ doesn’t work. They helpfully tell me this when I click on a link: “ The DTI web page or document you are looking for has not been found. Administration The DTI web page or document you are looking for has not been found. We have restructured our website, and the information you are looking for has been moved, or you have clicked on an inaccurate link. If you are looking for a specific piece of information, you may find it easier to use the ...

As posted on OUT-LAW yesterday , the Article 29 Working Party is expanding the scope of its investigation of search engine privacy practices beyond Google to ALL search engine companies, and their data retention practices. Will be interesting to see what the other, smaller (and less media-targeted) companies policies are…

I just worry about my online privacy and security, hence why this information makes me glad not to be a FaceBooker… admittedly, they’ve now updated the settings to prevent those searches from working now, but seriously, why was it ever possible in the first place?

So, I followed the link posted by lo-fi librarian a few days ago, and looking at that chart, at first I was surprised by the low takeup of my generation (yup, I'm a Gen Xer too, though I've yet to read the book ), and then, thinking about my own experiences, began to think that perhaps it's not so surprising really. After all, who's teaching us? I feel like the generation that was overlooked. For example, typing skills when I was at school were something you learned if you weren't going to go to University, and instead were going to have to go out and get a 'proper' job when you left school. So I was never taught to type, as it was regarded as a 'menial' skill, not for us Uni-destined types. Yet within the timescale I was at Uni, it went from being acceptable to submit handwritten work, to it only being acceptable to submit in 12 point type, with 1.5 line spacing to allow space for comments! When was I meant to have learned how to wordprocess? As a...

I use it every day, for work and for pleasure, it's become an essential part of my daily life ....but what does it look like? Well, according to researchers at Tel-Aviv University in Israel, it looks like...that. Prettier than I expected, it looks like the first seconds after the Big Bang! Wonder which dot is Earth... ;-) Link from Popular Science Blog , the link to the original research paper it's taken from isn't working just now.