LibraryThing

I, er, already catalogue my books, largely because I want to be able to see them as an ordered whole and, until I moved to a new flat with Margot last week, they were stacked vertically in no order in a cupboard. I have a master catalogue, ordered alphabetically by author, and a few subject catalogues, following the Chicago Manual of Style bibliography rules. They're just Word documents for now, although I intend to convert them into XML.

I like the idea of sharing my collection with other people in LibraryThing, but not enough to add all my books (about 500 volumes) to my account. Instead I've started to transfer my biggest subject catalogue (150 volumes). It's quite good fun, although searches in a collection seem slow and unreliable, and the data is terrible.

Social bookmarking

I think Delicious is absolutely great. I wrote my library school dissertation on social bookmarking, where I considered the usefulness of tagging for academic information seeking, although I made my experiments in another system, Connotea. It's convenient to be able to reach your bookmarks from any web computer; it's interesting to view the data organised by tag or username (pivot browsing).

As I mentioned before, I've lost the habit of keeping my Delicious account current. But I've now tried for the first time importing, then 'bulk editing' one of the bookmarks folders from my browser, and it worked well. That could be a way to bring my Delicious account up to date.

Reflection on 23 Things

The Things I've continued to use after my first try are my blog and—mainly as a reader—Twitter. I'm certain I'll use Doodle again, probably Google Docs, possibly Evernote. I will make another effort to get into the habit of checking a feed reader: that must be the most painless way to top up your library current awareness. I've not used iGoogle since my Oscar Wilde quote gadget broke down.

This blog, though, has borrowed most of its momentum from the 23 Things programme. Will I keep it going after 23 Things ends? Yes, I think so. Having this platform's already invited odd items like 'Professionalism' and 'Unusual punishments', and I expect it will again.

Or as Wilde put it: 'Unable to retrieve: http://googlewidgets.net/gadgets/quotes/g/owilde.xml.php.'

Pushnote and Evernote

On first sight I thought Pushnote didn't do much that was new; that it was another social bookmarking system like Delicious. I do like those systems: pivot browsing on tags and—better—usernames can sometimes introduce you to worthwhile new sites. I've long lost the habit of keeping a social bookmarking account current, though.

Reading the Pushnote FAQ, I realised what it's for and why it's so called. The Pushnote toolbar button 'turns green when you visit a page where people have left comments', and you can click on it to read them and add your own. I've tried to install the Firefox browser extension that would add the button, but although I'm told 'Pushnote will be installed when you restart Firefox', nothing happens and I can't find a way to make it. Having read Gareth's sample of comments on the BBC website, I don't think I'm missing much.

Evernote seems more attractive. (Again the toolbar button didn't appear when I expected it, but this one I could eventually coax out.) It's not difficult to clip and save web material using Windows functions alone, but Evernote perhaps makes it more inviting: quicker, and easier to organise and reorganise. Being able to reach your notebooks from any web computer, and to share them, are great advantages.

Google Docs

This is brilliant. I quite often work on a document between different computers, and it's a pain keeping track of which version's the most recent: much better to have a single document I can reach from any web computer. I can also envisage using it to collaborate. It's reassuring to see full revision histories are kept.

Google Calendar

I created a Google Calendar a month ago, entered a few looming arrangements, and thought I'd report on the tool here when I'd used it a bit more. In fact I haven't used it or looked at it since.

Arrangements at my library, we enter in a shared file in Microsoft Schedule+. It's antique (preserved from Windows 95), but well adequate. For me as a single user, there's no reason to enter events a second time in my Google Calendar. The reasons to start using a Google Calendar at work would be that it can be shared more widely (that is, among readers), and remotely: at present, we put any arrangements we think readers need to know about in a notice, and stick it to the door. I accept they might prefer to find out the library's closed before they get there.

Arrangements at home, I enter on the nearest scrap of paper or—if I'm less concerned to remember them—just leave to my memory. I'm coming to agree with my dentist that this isn't a good system. A diary would obviously help, but I don't think it will be electronic (Google Calendar or another) until I have a suitable mobile phone. Stationery will suit me for now.

Unusual punishments

I'm not going to sign that petition, and thought I'd write down three reasons why. First, to deliver criminal sanctions through our welfare system would weaken our criminal justice system. We want judges to award, and criminals to suffer, just punishments. However the petitioned sanctions undermine this ideal. If a judge awarded a just punishment, the addition of the sanctions would make the punishment suffered excessive (unjust). That is, for justice to be done, we'd have to ask judges to treat rioters who claim benefits leniently: not quite what the petition intends.

Second, the petitioned sanctions victimise poorer people. I don't choose the comparative out of delicacy: the poorer you are, the worse you're to be punished. If I stole a pair of trainers in the riots, but earn a living wage so that the only welfare payment I regularly claim is child benefit, my punishment diverges wildly from that of my unemployed neighbour, who committed the same crime but regularly claims housing benefit and jobseeker's allowance. (To be clear: he is reduced to a homeless beggar.) Why? Is this enlightenment? Is this justice?

My neighbour's fate suggests a third, practical reason. After punishment, another general goal of criminal sanctions is the deterrence of future crime, but those petitioned seem in effect to promote it. We should remember they're meant to apply to rioters who aren't sent to prison, who remain at liberty. This must be so or the petition would be pointless: prisoners obviously can't claim many benefits (jobseeker's allowance, housing benefit, cold weather payments and so on).

And the petition certainly has people like my neighbour in mind: its sanctions apply to 'those who have ... shown a disregard for the country that provides for them.' This is a rhetorical way of talking about people who depend on welfare. To get to the point: if a rioter who depends on benefits has them withdrawn, he has to get the things he needs to live in ways other than paying for them. A few obvious ones apart from begging are theft, robbery, and burglary.

I feel like a lot could be said about the mindset that, confronted with last week's appalling riots, conceives this petition as a relevant answer. (I don't mean all the signatories too. It's an angry, urgent time.) But this won't be the place.

I'll just add that I'm not going to sign the other petition either. As a political move, I think it harms its cause. Never mind that it starts off like a landlord's notice ('Tenants MUST keep a DEAD BADGER in the sink at all times').*


* Notice borrowed from Alexei Sayle.

Doodle

I've taken part in Doodle polls before, with workmates and with friends, but not set up one. I was pleased to find there's no requirement to register: I have enough passwords to remember. In a few minutes I'd successfully arranged a meeting with a humouring Margot.

A good idea well realised. What more to say?

Screencasting

I was defeated by Thing 6. I tried to make a screencast to demonstrate how to reach and search LISA, the bibliographic database for library and information science, starting from the University Library’s home page. It took several takes to get a convincing performance out of myself, with decisive mouse sweeps and accurate typing. (Even then, I found the result almost too boring to watch through.) I spent more minutes fiddling with the timing of some simple captions, then by accident closed the Screencast-O-Matic window.

I decided my film wasn’t worth remaking. Anyway, the grapes were sour: screencasting hadn’t excited me. For what’s at bottom a series of menu choices, I wondered if the putative puzzled person would find it quicker to take in written instructions, and easier to refer back to them. But really, this only shows that I couldn’t think of a truly visual library computer task (the LibrarySearch word cloud is disqualified). If I needed to know how to design a bridge in TurboCAD, visualise experimental data in Matlab, or complete Quake in twelve minutes, I’d look for a screencast first.

Marker

To mark those killed
in Oslo and on Utøya,
on 22 July, 2011.

Professionalism

In an earlier post here, I said that I wanted to think about the relation between professionalism and a political commitment. Having since read two essays that deal with the matter and express ideas basically similar to each other, I thought I should at least go into more detail.

John Pilger's essay 'Brainwashing the Polite, Professional and British Way', printed by the New Statesman and the Morning Star, is inspired by Jeff Schmidt's book Disciplined Minds. 'Schmidt argues,' says Pilger, 'that what makes the modern professional is not technical knowledge but "ideological discipline" ... "Taking sides" is anathema; and yet the modern professional knows never to challenge the "built-in ideology of the status quo".' Barclays Bank, the Labour Party, and the BBC ('Listen to a senior BBC person sincerely describe the nirvana of neutrality to which he or she has risen') are Pilger's cautionary examples.

The essay by J. H. Prynne, possibly titled 'On the Current Conjuncture' and published on the web by the students of Cambridge Defend Education, is firstly a response to the higher education White Paper and only deals with professionalism in passing. Still, it mentions 'the noble restlessness of spirit shut up in a cage of professionalism'; the diversion of 'intellectual freedom ("enlightenment") ... into professional careerism, hedged in by caution and hesitation and loneliness'; and, the 'professionalism that immobilises the drive to understand and to act on the consequences of understanding'.

Somewhere, I'd myself formed the idea that an aspect of professionalism was political neutrality: of course I don't mean as between different coloured rosettes, but neutrality as to our social arrangements, neutrality in the struggles over them. I must have formed it by the time I saw a newspaper photograph of Pakistani lawyers in the street, throwing stones with their suit jackets still on, after President Musharraf had suspended the constitution in 2007. The contrast with my ideas of British professional culture left a lasting impression.

This sort of neutrality would seem a bit like the liberal principle of 'neutrality as to the good', and maybe that would fit. There are other intersections: liberalism, too, separates work from a private life in the first place; in liberalism as in the professions, merit is the desired principle of distribution (meritocracy); the ethic of service that motivates many professionals, in the public and private sectors, is recognisably liberal. (Raymond Williams memorably challenges that ethic in the conclusion of Culture and Society. John Berger's book A Fortunate Man, his study of a country doctor, is another approach.)

In Britain, liberalism is the national philosophy, corresponding to the dominance of the higher-educated middle class; the same class, in Britain and worldwide, is home to the professionals. (Professionalism must be one of the most frank class virtues.) But in Pakistan liberalism is fighting for survival, and the country's professionals join that fight. Is it that professional neutrality holds while satisfactory liberal institutions are secure? Would our lawyers, say, have observed 'ideological discipline' if Tony Blair had managed to introduce ninety-day detention without trial? I don't think it's certain that they would.

If my suggestion's right then professional neutrality wouldn't be a function of brainwashing or careerism, but a principled position for liberals (and professionalism a kind of ideal). They'd insist that political expression uses the channels their forerunners opened in private life. So professionalism seems to fit neatly with a commitment to liberalism. What about—what I first had in mind—a commitment against it?

Screenshots

I felt quite happy with this Thing. I don't intend to use many pictures on my blog, but it's good to have the technique to hand. I installed Lightshot as Ange suggested in her introduction, then went to Flickr and tried to think of something good that people might like to look at for three seconds. Got it: Aneurin Bevan!

Searching for photographs with Creative Commons licences, I found one of his statue in Cardiff. I cropped it with Lightshot, then (for reasons of style) converted the colour photograph to greyscale with a basic photo editor before uploading it to Blogger and posting it.

My first screenshot





Original photograph by Rhisiart Hincks

(Creative Commons)

Birds do it,
To-ries do it,
And just occasionally G-Ps do it:
Don't do it!
Don't— [That's enough. Margot.]

Twitter

Before 23 Things I held the sort of boring prejudices about Twitter that Annie sends up in her introduction: that it was about Stephen Fry and Sarah Brown telling each other and an awed retinue what they had for lunch. Clearly that's not it at all. Twitter people look outward, and share the things they find.

I have found it difficult to get into, though. I'm a slow writer and—might as well confess now—I don't read as much library commentary as I should. It's helped to look instead to what I'm doing at work for tweet inspiration.

I tweet as neil_bc.

Strike rally and march

I estimated seven or eight hundred people at the strike rally yesterday; the Cambridge News put the number at one thousand. I set off back to work as the march began at 12.45. Half an hour later I watched from a window as it passed my library, behind the graduation celebrations on Senate House lawn.

Google Reader

There's too much happening! Of course in the world, which has consequences in Reader if you subscribe to any kind of news feed, but also on screen.

The lefthand bar I find a bit confusing. Wouldn't 'Browse for stuff' fit better under 'Explore'? Why is 'Starred items' not part of 'Your stuff'? Why 'Your stuff' when it's 'Blogs I'm following'? And I can't work out how to create subfolders under 'Subscriptions'.

I've subscribed to other 23 Things blogs, a few journalists, and a few library writers. I think I should experiment with similar subscriptions in Thunderbird, my email client, and see whether I prefer it.

Blogger, continued

It's certainly easy to open a blog with Blogger, but I had some trouble making mine look the way I wanted. Too many things, I found, were locked down behind the Template Designer interface. For example, I didn't want the background gradients at the edge of the text area that came with the first 'Simple' template, and it took several minutes to realise I was supposed to express this by choosing a different template.

Neither did Template Designer give me control over the text size, or font properties other than colour, to apply to the blog description. It didn't give me control over the text size to apply to date headers. And I couldn't have my blog title appear in capitals (which seemed important). On the other hand, you're free to edit the HTML template, where I could do these things.

Blogger

I think my blog has found its final shape, so it's time to post my thoughts on making it, along with what I hope to get out of 23 Things and my previous experience of social software. My only experience is of bookmarking sites like Delicious and Connotea, which I used around 2006: I wrote my library school dissertation on indexing in these systems. I'm not sure message boards count, but in my teens (the late 1990s) I followed one dedicated to the cinema of the nouvelle vague. Oh all right—Nintendo games.

What I hope to get out of 23 Things is a better awareness of the variety and possibilities of social software, through a weekly prod into trying out different systems. My blog, where I'll report what I've done, I also wanted to be anchored in living and working in Cambridge, which I hope explains the bulletins from civil society. Something I've realised this week I should think about is how professionalism sits with a political commitment. Perhaps I could start by looking into the work of the Haldane Society, for lawyers.

I'll post later on making my blog.

Against the EDL

The English Defence League, the racist street movement now two years old, will rally in Cambridge on 9 July. Its stated aim is to counter Islamic extremism: wearing a veil, opening a mosque, shunning lager and so on. On a named day, supporters gather in a town with a big ethnic minority population and do their best to frighten it. They march, they chant division and hatred, and sometimes they riot—as in Luton on 24 May 2009 (the movement before it was named and organised), and Stoke on 23 January 2010.

Many EDL supporters are recruited from football firms, and must come out for some of the same things they find there: a feeling of collective identity and power, the excitement of street violence. They don't sign up to a political programme. However, members of the fascist BNP were quick to take organising roles in the movement, and seem to be shaping it to their purposes. Since 2010, the EDL and its sister Welsh Defence League have targeted a May Day trade union demonstration and a socialist party meeting: a move towards classic fascist tactics.

Last night I went to the first meeting to organise a counterdemonstration in support of our city's diversity: twenty or more people crowded around tables in Jaffa Net Cafe, Mill Road. I won't be in Cambridge on the day (Margot is reading at a poetry festival) but I think the event will be great. Librarians should support it. Our profession's values—I'm thinking of intellectual freedom, rationalism, common property—place us in total opposition to fascism.

From eleven o'clock this Saturday, 25 June, I'll be on a Unite Against Fascism stall outside the Guildhall in case any one would like to say hello.

Promise

I promise to post something directly to do with library work before the end of the 23 Things programme!

30 June strikes

Some good speeches at the public meeting in the Guildhall last night, called to build support for the joint strikes on 30 June. There was a speaker from each union involved: ATL, NUT (school teachers), PCS (civil servants), and UCU (university and college staff: members in post-'92 universities will strike).

The government's line on pensions is that public sector workers need to retire later, pay more, and get less because 'we're living longer'. What—since 2006? All the speakers last night reminded us that we sorted this one out, in reforms in 2006 (for teachers) and 2007 (civil servants). The myth of the gold-plated pension was also hounded through the evening.

The ATL and NUT speakers, Martin Johnson and Kevin Courtney, complained about the government's negotiating incompetence (on public display last week, with Danny Alexander's clumsy intervention). Kevin, Jill Eastland from UCU, and Mike Black from PCS, were all keen—as I am—to put the pensions raid in the context of the wider attack on workers and public services. ATL's position is different, with its concerns narrower.

Platform and floor, we all deplored the government and rightwing media's attempt to set private and public sector workers against each other; most memorably an NUJ member, whose union had to fight to defend journalists' pensions last year.

I'll be sure to join the lunchtime strike rally on Parker's Piece on 30 June.

iGoogle

I set up my iGoogle start page yesterday. I have news feeds from two papers, the weather report, and a daily Oscar Wilde epigram. And briefly a copy of Space Invaders. I was happy with the 'Classic' theme, but Margot told me I was boring and made me look for one more distinctive. I ended up with a photograph of boats moored at Port Said.

I understand what iGoogle is now. I'd expected to be able to add any site with an RSS feed to my page. In fact, you assemble your page from purpose-built applications: gadgets. It's another Google product, Reader, that works with feeds.

Playing Space Invaders at work reminded me that the PC games I played as a boy sometimes had boss keys. The boss key would pause the game and display a spreadsheet (that is, while your boss walked past). Of course on a modern windowing machine you just hit Alt, Tab. I would imagine.