Lunch hour location appreciation

One of the many advantages of the London Centre's location is that I can nip out to go to a 50 minute long tour at the National Gallery, pop across the road for a sandwich and be back at my desk inside an hour.

Which is what I just did - thank you to Alan Crookham, National Gallery Archivist, for a fantastic architectural tour, delivered as part of the London Festival of Architecture. I wish we could have been allowed downstairs to peek at the 70s rooms in their 70s splendour, but that's absolutely the only thing I could criticise about it.)

Likewise, yesterday I popped over to the Mall Galleries for their 50 years of London architecture exhibition in my lunch break, which was fascinating. Not so much for the big public projects, many of which were fairly familiar, but for the domestic ones. Who would have thought that the much maligned late seventies would have produced so many beautiful, functional homes!

Interesting for me, to, seeing so many local things - there's a strong showing from east London, including two schools that I'm more familiar with from hearing about the Building Schools for the Future project, my local cinema, the station I go through and the bridge I cross over to get to my *other* local cinema... Plus all the Olympic Park plans, of course.

Stunning photography two, to showcase the work, including this one for the footbridge joining the Royal Ballet School with the Royal Opera House, which I have long admired, but never knew was called the 'Bridge of Aspiration', which is just so perfect for it.

The exhibition closes on Sunday, so if you get a chance, do drop in soon.

An entirely internal milestone

AKA, the power of round numbers on the human psyche - it's fairly meaningless in reality, but it feels significant enough that I want to mark it: I just added item record ten thousand to the library catalogue.

(That's 10000 bibliographic items, not 10000 copies - the copy IDs are currently in the 14000's)

The item in question? Capital affairs : London and the making of the permissive society by Frank Mort.

(Why meaningless? We hold just under half that number of items in reality - the extra record IDs being a mix of deleted records, lost and removed stock, and the artefacts of the last two data conversions, both of which introduced gaps into the sequence.)

Possibly more significantly, the record does seem to function - I wasn't quite sure if it would, or if the change in number length would break something! (Plans are afoot to make questions like that a thing of the past, but said plans have not yet come to fruition.)

removable notes

I don't think these transparent tabbed sticky notes are on sale in the UK, unfortunately, but I wish all our students came equipped with them.

Writing in borrowed books is a huge bugbear for me - one person's highlighter and annotation makes life so much harder for all the readers who come after. Something like this would be perfect - perfect for the current student who learns best by getting hands-on with the text, and perfect for preserving library and textbook books for the future student to use.

way more than 140 characters...

Some of Don Schindler's tweets from a conference jumped out at me yesterday, this pair especially.

"Where to put money/time? 1. scanable text 2. mobile 3. facebook 4. photography 5. student comment 6. sharing ability 7. blogs #bigtenplus"

"Spend less time on 1. podcasts 2. twitter/linkedin 3. chats 4. online video (unless music, sports, instruct) 5. click thru news #bigtenplus"

The priority given to text is particularly nice to hear: I never feel like I can quite trust my own judgement on the issue, because I have a very strong preference for text over video which I suspect is a-typical. Or maybe not. There's work to be done re-writing and updating copy for our sites, though, to make them more web friendly, and scan-able.

It's easy to see the rise of mobile amongst our students in London - we issue them with very basic UK mobiles as emergency contact points, but in the last 18 months, maybe 2 years, I've started to see more and more students who bring their US smart phone with them, using them on an international data plans.

(I think it would be fascinating to be able to issue our students with UK smart phones and encourage faculty to develop their courses and assignments knowing that all their students would have a camera / video / online collaboration tool, modelling some of the research that's being done on using twitter and wikis and so on in teaching. I suspect we're not so many years away from effective smart phone ubiquity, but it'll be much longer before we reach a stage where we can assume/require that everyone has one.)

Relative order of Facebook / blogs / twitter is interesting, too - I'd have guessed blogs / Facebook/ twitter based on our experience, both metrics, formal feedback, and verbal impressions.

We haven't had as high a take up of our fb page as we'd initially expected - although far higher than the last time we experimented with it - but judging from the student feedback, that's at least partially an advertising / awareness issue: we could definitely promote it more. The blog is, so far, our most successful online experiment, but essentially we're only still using Twitter because a couple of us staff use it and find it useful.

On facebook I think it's that a lot of students use the service, but either don't know about or don't want to follow our page - Twitter is just a much smaller constituency of students using the service. ( Podcasts and video are both things that have come up as something we might want to introduce, but - maybe it's ok that we haven't got to them yet.)

Photography - plenty of room for us to improve here - and maybe linked to student comment, as I know we've had some truly superb photographers coming through the program, although I'm less sure what we might do to encourage them to share their images with us.

Plenty to think on...

* Photos by Timmy Toucan (RAF Eagle) and mrwilleeumm (G1 demo), used under Creative Commons, with thanks.