In early January, I was
transcribing a supplementary document for court proceedings. It was a simply
awful time for someone who was an English grammar teacher in a past life. (I
nearly got a English literature scholarship for my first university degr…
Author: Gifad
Everyone needs a librarian
We
think about librarianship being primarily about cataloguing and
inventory; knowing which books are in stock and exactly where they
all are. The profession itself regards its work as being about
precise service; matching what a customer wants …
Goat stories and globalised IP
Because I’ve been writing and thinking a lot about historical fiction in medieval Bohemia, YouTube recommended to me the “Old Goat Stories”, animated movies based on central-European fairy tales. At a point in the second one, I imagined myself as a wr…
Anglotech
After first reading about geocaches, it seems to be a nearly inevitable application of data storage and communication technology. A network of thirty satellites in near Earth orbit (Neo) form the global positioning system (GPS). Originally intended for…
Information farming
During research about different publishing models I came across this graph about the cost breakdowns (focusing on published academic journals, unsurprisingly). The section which intrigued me most was the calculation of added cost, if proofreaders and p…
Quickly on wikis
This is one of the #23things which links today’s internet with its historical origins. It is based on:”collaborative websites which can be directly edited merely by using a web browser…by anyone with access to it”. That quote comes from Wiktionar…
Hanging out+
Google’s hangouts feature is good value (especially since it’s free). I used it quite often a few years ago, when friends in my gaming group started moving interstate/overseas. Once we discovered that we all had g-mail addresses, this seemed a logical…
F/b groups
Like many aspiring people aged <35, I use Facebook most days. My use even increased after an evaluation of the 2010 State Election in Victoria found that Facebook posts were the quickest way of disseminating information and receiving responses.They…
Digipubs
What is an e-publication?My first reaction to this question was a few simple criteria: 1. Any published material available in digital form, incl. books, articles, etc. 2. Any published materi…
Rare find
I started volunteering in a collection at the Queensland Museum last week. Specifically, I’m in the Science Centre, which was merged with the museum years ago. This was the highlight of my day: a nearly ancient book, still intact, resting comfortably i…
Heroic Librarianship
We don’t often associate the work of librarians, archivists, or curators as being particularly heroic. Frequently though, they have been, and I’ve been giving a lot of thought to this in the past few weeks. Most recently, this piece alerted me to the “…
Diversity and Self-Representation
The question of how people represent themselves online has been fraught with complexity since the earliest days of social media. I have been intrigued by this for a long time, especially after living in parts of the world which use modified versions o…