Just got home after a very interesting RSA lecture by and discussion about Jaron Lanier and his new book 'You are not a gadget' - he's speaking again tomorrow evening at LSE, also for free, but on a first-come first served basis, or, if you wait a few days, the RSA will have audio and video up on their site.

Some very interesting stuff, but I need to read the book to really get into the meat of the matter.

You spent the evening unpacking books from boxes

I spent a fair amount of time last week, and the whole of yesterday morning, updating and correcting condition records for books borrowed through our Textbook Loan Scheme. (The Spring semester always has more corrections, simply because I have less time to check the books myself over the Christmas break than I do between May and September) I really appreciate the students' assistance in keeping our records accurate - I'd much rather be correcting condition records now, that billing people for damage at the end of the semester.

I am very much looking forward, though, to this being either the last or the penultimate time I need to do this task with the current computer system.

Updating - and creating - copy condition records is one of the many bits of back end work where the user interface never got properly finished in our current LMS, so I'm making corrections in the raw database, and it's a fairly fiddly process. There are 782 textbooks currently on loan, and more than twice that in the system, so the prospect of being able to streamline this part of my workload is tempting indeed!

(We're meeting tomorrow with one of our shortlisted LMS suppliers, so prospects for the future are very much on my mind.)

* Photo by rnav, used under Creative Commons, with thanks.

Time for tea

I've just hosted the first Library Tea of the semester, and I want to take five minutes to reflect on why I do them.

It's not a huge event, just tea and biscuits, in the Library, over the lunch break once a week. It is something I think is important, though, which is why I've negotiated for the budget for it, the support from our facilities team, and why I don't mind spending my break time loading the dishwasher!

It isn't about the numbers, but the number of people involved does affect both the feel and the purpose. Some semesters, tea has averaged maybe 20 students each week, last semester was nearer to 70, with an all time high of 86! Today was about 45, almost 1/3 of the student body.

When it's a small group of students attending, it does mean that the teas tend more towards being about the students talking with me, which is an opportunity to spread information about London and about the Program in an informal setting, as well as a chance for me to get to know some of the students.

When it's a very big group, the teas are much more about providing a venue for students to talk with each other, to build a community and make - or catch up with - friends, and for a program like ours, that matters too.

Either way, it encourages students into the library, and makes it very easy for them to ask me questions, academic or otherwise.

Today's tea was a really nice mix of the two things, where it developed it's own social momentum, but I also had the chance to sit down and join the conversation, to start getting to know some of the students a little.

Also, it never fails to impress me that I've almost never had to announce that tea is over, or ask people to quiet down when the end of the lunch break comes around.

One of the concerns about my hosting the teas was that it would encourage people to use the Library as a purely social space, and I'm pleased that the students recognise that, when it's time for their friends to go to class, it's also time for the Library to switch back to being primarily a study space. (I say primarily, because the boundaries between 'studying' and 'socialising' are much less defined that some people think.)

Here's hoping that continues as the semester goes on.

* Photo by me.

No it's time for change

So - new year, and as you may have noticed, not that much in the way of new posts.

That's mostly been because I've been super busy, not just with new students arriving, but also with my new niece arriving. It's also been because I've been thinking about how I want to use this blog, and how that's changed.

When I started this, I basically wanted a way to tell students about some of the nifty stuff going on in London.

We don't want to flood people's email with a thousand and one messages, so email is reserved for the official stuff. There wasn't anywhere to put the more general stuff, so I started blogging here, in the hope that the folks who were interested enough to follow a link in my sig file might find out about something they wouldn't otherwise have done.

And that worked - I've had a few students tell me that they did such-and-such because they saw it here.

It worked well enough that, at the start of last semester, we launched the LUP blog. That gets more regular updates than this blog ever did, because it's a team blog, and because we've made a commitment to daily posts. The rectors also decided to experiment with twitter, tweeting about once a day with links to interesting stuff going on in London - another opt-in offering, which wouldn't swamp the official lines of communication.

That also worked pretty well, but looking at the feedback we got last semester, we've made some changes for the new year.

We're going to continue with the LUP blog, but we've just, today, launched a Facebook page, which also crossposts to a new Twitter account.

The rectors will be retiring their old Twitter account, and I'll be retiring the LUP Library Twitter, and we'll all be using these new accounts instead, to see how that works out. As always, it's an experiment, and a lot will depend on how - and if - our students use the resources.

As well as library related updates, I'm planning to use the facebook / twitter pair for more of the 'nifty thing that's happening in London' content I might once have posted here, and the LUP group blog will absorb a lot of the rest.

So what's left for this blog?

I'm not going to stop loving London, or writing about London, but I think I am also going to post more of this kind of thing: the more reflective, process-oriented, library and librarianship posts that I've not really shared here before, and just - see how that works.

* Photo by David Reece, used under Creative Commons, with thanks.

Planning ahead - short term

There are two things on the immediate horizon that I need to fix plans for:

- at least one night of the Resolution! dance festival at The Place

- the Walk London Winter Wander Weekend

* Photo by Luis Barreto, used under Creative Commons.

Like a flashmob, but - more subtle.

For any of our students looking to squeeze one more London-ish thing into their final week, there will be a subtlemob event on Wednesday, near the London Centre - check this page for your instructions.

I am an agent

This past Thursday I was over at the Wellcome for another of their 'Exchanges at the Frontier' series. (They're being broadcast on the World Service on Wednesdays through December & available on iplayer).

This time was Seth Shostak, Senior Astronomer of the SETI institute, who was a very entertaining speaker indeed, and he and A.C. Grayling get a great many points for their very gracious handling of the crazier audience questions. Their events are always interesting, and this was no exception.

I also managed to get there in time to take a look around their new Identity exhibition. In brief: highly recommended - go if you can.

I keep thinking I'll have time to write an actual review, but reality suggests that I won't, so here's the Londonist one, which I think covers the ground well. It's impressing me with how different they make the usual exhibition space feel from theme to theme. As an ex classicist and ex lit student, one of my favourite touches were the ancient mirrors from Freud's collection that were tucked into corners outside the eight 'rooms' - something so evocative about them and their provenance.

* Photo by lady Vic, used under Creative Commons, with thanks.

Ghost Forest

As I was coming across Trafalgar Square this morning, I was stopped in my tracks be Ghost Forest, by Angela Palmer - there's something very powerful about this assembly of downed trees - their sheer scale, for one thing. (There's a handful of my photos here)

It's in place until Friday, and well worth a side trip to see in person.

life takes turns like fiery shadows

Last night I had the privilege of going with a friend to the award ceremony for the first Welcome Trust Book Prize - a new and extremely generous prize, intended to stimulate interest and debate about medicine and literature.

You might think that with medicine and illness being such a central common experience in human life, such a prize would be redundant, so I was most surprised that the winner - Andrea Gillies - mentioned during her speech that the Guardian had declined to publish a review of her book because it wouldn't have suitably general appeal. Keeper is a story about living with someone who's living with Alzheimer's, and it's startling to think that that's considered a niche thing - I know so many people who's lives have been touched both by the disease itself, and by how that illness has changed people they love. It's certainly a book that's now on my reading list, along with several others from the short list.

since they took down your name

Foyles have posted their events listings for the run from tomorrow (Martin Bell with his new book on the MP's expenses scandal) through to December (Redefining a Classic - Making Classics Relevant in the Modern Age) - there's a rich vein of free events, with a sprinkling of paid ones, all brought to you by one of my favourite London bookshops.

Check them out, and email your reservations soon before they run out of tickets.

(Unrelated: post title comes from '95 Charing Cross Road', by The Penny Black Remedy, and is relevant only by accident of address.)

* Photo by Adam Greenfield, used under Creative Commons, with thanks.

Feed your mind

Can you get to Gower Street at lunchtime? If so, check out these free lunchtime lectures - what a wonderful richness of subjects: today, Vampires, new week the interaction of courts and hospitals in the nation's health, and the list goes on.

(Unfortunately, I can't get to Gower Street in my lunch break, so I'll have to settle for watching the video versions they provide.)

So, the Spear-Danes in days gone by...

Free tonight? There are still a handful of tickets available to see/hear Benjamin Bagby giving a performance of Beowulf in Old English, at the British Museum, in honour of the one thousandth anniversary of the epic.

If you're not free tonight, the performance goes with a free exhibition, where the original manuscript will be on display until January. (The Heaney translation is in our library, too, if any of my students are reading this)

* Photo by dunechaser, used under Creative Commons, with thanks. (Check out his gallery of Literary Minifigs!)

But summer`s gotten away from us

So, One and the Other ended yesterday, and I must admit as I came into work this morning, the plinth looked not just empty but somehow bleak and bereft. I'd gotten used to the always looking up as I cross the square to check who was there and what they were doing.

It's been grand - not just the plinthers themselves, but the wider conversations, especially as it seems to have outlasted the 'modern art is rubbish' knee-jerk. As I was walking home the other day, I saw a policeman explaining what was going on, and talking about some of the other plinthers who he'd seen to a little girl, about 6 or 7 years old, while her mum was taking photos of the square. How often do you get policemen talking to kids, at length, about modern art? Not often enough, I'd guess.

In totally unrelated news: Angels - costumiers for film and tv and fancy-dress suppliers to the stars - are holding a uniform sale next month. 250,000 items, almost all genuine issue, dating from 1900 onwards. I predict that the queue will be huge, and entirely worth it.

* Photo by chrisjohnbeckett, used under Creative Commons.

runs on without you

Today is National Poetry Day, and I'm just squeaking in before midnight...

~~

I keep coming back to this as a favourite London poem, and this is both a fabulous reading, and a fabulous presentation of it : Benjamin Zephaniah reading The London Breed

~~


For a total change of pace, here's some John Burnside: a contemporary Scottish poet whose work has a way of winding its way into my memory and my heart.

Dark Green
(From Myth of the Twin)

There is always a place on the way
where the path curls in the dark,

into the smell of dust
and the stillness of nettles.

There is always a litter of stones
or a broken roof

a few steps into the shade;
an empty skull, a ribcage stitched with grass,

barely a trace of vapour that had lived
before you came:

a remnant of mucus and water, hatched on a bone,
like the silver-and-eggshell perfume after a birth,

or the whisper that swells and recedes in the quick of your mind
when you wake in the day, and the bright dream runs on without you.

********

Or something more traditional? Maybe Christina Rossetti?

This section of Goblin Market, for example:

Morning and evening
Maids heard the goblins cry:
"Come buy our orchard fruits,
Come buy, come buy:
Apples and quinces,
Lemons and oranges,
Plump unpecked cherries-
Melons and raspberries,
Bloom-down-cheeked peaches,
Swart-headed mulberries,
Wild free-born cranberries,
Crab-apples, dewberries,
Pine-apples, blackberries,
Apricots, strawberries--
All ripe together
In summer weather--
Morns that pass by,
Fair eves that fly;
Come buy, come buy;
Our grapes fresh from the vine,
Pomegranates full and fine,
Dates and sharp bullaces,
Rare pears and greengages,
Damsons and bilberries,
Taste them and try:
Currants and gooseberries,
Bright-fire-like barberries,
Figs to fill your mouth,
Citrons from the South,
Sweet to tongue and sound to eye,
Come buy, come buy."

~~~~~~~

* Newspaper blackout poem 'All In A Night's Work' by Austin Kleon, used under Creative Commons.

Like the ribs of a broken umbrella

London, like many big cities, is already made up of many overlapping versions of itself, so the idea of one more, just a slip-though-the-cracks away, is fertile ground for fiction.

A while back, I picked up Black Tattoo, by Sam Enthoven , which is a YA fantasy book, set not just in London, but in parts of London I'm very familiar with. (The author used to work at a bookshop just up the road.) While talking about it with a friend, they were started to discover I'd not read Un Lun Dun, by China Miéville. I hadn't even heard of it; had no idea he'd ever written a YA book, but I'm really glad I tracked it down. I haven't been so charmed or entranced with a London story since Neil Gaiman's Neverwhere.

Gaiman's London Below is quite different to Miéville's Ab-Cities (London is not alone in having an alter-ego - there's also mention of No York, Parisn't, Lost Angeles, Sans Francisco, Helsunki, Hong Gone, Romeless ...) but they share that same kernel of one more 'other London' which is so terribly tempting. After all, the London experienced by premiership footballers is just as unfamiliar and impenetrable to me as Un Lun Dun, and rather less interesting to me!

Not only does Un Lun Dun touch on many of my favourite fantasy elements, subverting the standard 'prophesy and the chosen one' line, for example, it's also alive with Miéville's love of language. This is a space where the puns can run wild (quite literally) - 'un-brellas' and the very word 'binja' amuse me far more than I should probably admit in public.

I wish I could buy all of these books for work's collection, but leisure reading isn't our focus, so, instead, if there are any of my students reading this: Westminster Libraries have multiples of all three.

* Photo by m.by, used under Creative Commons.