So I’m reinventing this as more of a personal blog, though maybe focusing on music and books and travel more than the day-to-day minutae of my life. I’ll still be mentioning library-related news that interests me, but it won’t be the main focus of the blog.

With that, I thought I’d post a few pictures from the Library of Alexandria, which I visited last month while holidaying in Egypt.

The library from Fort Qaitbey across the harbour.

Front of the library

Three NZ librarians outside the library

The library (known as the Bibliotheca Alexandrina) is fascinating, a very impressive architectural project that is clearly intended to evoke the original Library – “dedicated to recapture the spirit of openness and scholarship of the original”, as the website says. As well as a large multi-lingual book collection, it contains museums with impressive collections of Egyptian antiquities (not as large or impressive as the huge museum in Cairo, but nonetheless very interesting). There are also art galleries/exhibitions, research centres, and even a copy of the entire internet. Yes, the Bibliotheca contains a mirror of the Internet Archive – apparently the only one in any library, worldwide.

The Internet. The whole thing.

The library collection itself is housed over multiple staired floors, each without a ceiling, so that one can stand on the highest floor and look down to the bottom, like standing on the top of a pyramid.

Interior view looking upwards

The books are shelved by Dewey, which leads to some interesting problems. One of the more well-known flaws of DDC is in the 200s (Religion) class, where Christianity takes up almost the entirety of the class. As the Bibliotheca is in a Muslim country, it shouldn’t be a great surprise that books on Islam, which is allocated a solitary number in DDC,  predominate (to the point that 297 takes up probably 90% of the space allocated to the 200s).

A fraction of the shelves devoted to ‘Koranic interpretation’ (Dewey 297.1226).

The collection itself is also interesting, being multi-lingual but mainly Arabic and English. I can’t speak for the Arabic books, but the English collection left me curious about the collection development policies. Under the American literature section there are the usual suspects that one would expect in a research library – but also several shelves worth of Sweet Valley High books.

I got the impression that the collection had been built by donations as much as by a serious collection policy; a shame considering that a lot of money and design expertise had gone into the building itself.

I was pleased to see New Zealand represented, even if only a little – the NZ history section contained Michael King’s popular and acclaimed Penguin history of NZ; and a Claudia Orange book on the Treaty of Waitangi – both of which would be among my first choices for a NZ history collection. The only other book was a biography of [former Prime Minister] Helen Clark. I found a few examples of New Zealand literature – Patricia Grace seemed popular.
 

 Study section, with computers 

I have no idea how I took this picture, there aren’t really florescent lights in the sides of the shelves. This another part of the 297s.

All in all it was quite fascinating to see inside this brand new, internationally-focused library. It’s definitely one of the highlights of a visit to Alexandria. Unfortunately the entry fee (yes, really) means that poorer Alexandrians might find it difficult to access their own library. (4 Egyptian pounds is about £0.50/£.075; a significant sum where average wages are around $10/day).

We have a thriving web of free-access legislation, judgments and other materials on OPSI, the Statute Law Database, BAILII and government websites, and thousands of useful free guides, articles and updaters published by solicitors, barristers, law firms and private and third sector law publishers. But it is incomplete and unreliable and it is not joined up – it is not practically accessible.

FreeLegalWeb is a project designed to deliver a web service that joins up and makes sense of the law and legal commentary and analysis on the web, providing a substantially more reliable, useful and efficient service to both lawyers and the community at large than is currently available.

Via Law Librarian Blog.

As you might expect, Pew is somewhat negative about those of us in the non-mobile-ICT group. But from my perspective, not having this technology isn’t a great loss: I’m very rarely mobile for very long. I’m either at home, or at work – both with good desktop access. My commute is 30 minutes, but most of that is spent walking (the rest by Tube). There isn’t a lot that I can do in 10 minutes or so on the train that can’t wait until I get to the office.

Mobile access would be good for navigating London, maybe, or for checking movie times/restaurant reviews, that sort of thing, or the odd bit of fact-checking that occurs when you’re sitting in the pub and a question comes up. But there’s no killer app for me, yet. My £10 phone lets me text and call my friends, and listen to the radio. For now, that will do.

Press release; Report.

Walt Crawford finds them “A little extreme” and links to John Dupois, who finds them “unsupported and unsupportable”, and offers a detail critique.  Meredith Farkas isn’t impressed either. Dorothea Salo went looking “for antidotes to Taiga poison” – and found some, if you’re interested.

The Darien Statements on the Library and Librarians are getting a more positive reaction, though not from everyone. Me, I’m not a huge fan of manifestos (they always seem vague, I like/need to have things a bit more concrete) but mostly this is good stuff – I want to engage and debate with it rather than trash it (go read the comments; there’s a nice discussion about the Platonic ideal of the Library…).

I would agree with Annoyed Librarian that these sorts of statements and manifestos tend to focus on public libraries first; maybe include academic libraries, and pretty much ignore corporate, government and other special libraries.  One could also argue with “continual change”, perhaps changing it to a willingness to be prepared for change, and to advocate for, or be willing to accept, change when necessary. Then there’s the problem that the Statements talk about users engagement with the Library (not individual libaries)…well, if the Library is an ideal, how do users engage with it?

But like I say, it’s mostly good stuff… go read.

Paul Reynolds reports that the very wonderful Powerhouse Museum in Sydney is releasing all its collection data under Creative Commons.

Law Librarian Blog on a guide to social media for law students.

Reaching users through Facebook applications – an article from Code4Lib by Wayne Graham at Swem Library, William and Mary University.

Dynamically generated library course pages – again from Code4Lib, this article is by Jason Casden, Kim Duckett, Tito Sierra and Joseph Ryan of NCSU Libraries.

ReadWriteWeb asks: Is Facebook a cult? but defends the site from accusations on Fox News that Facebook will spoil your grades.

ReadWriteWeb lists occasions when you should NOT use social media.

What I Learned Today has a history of the open-source ILS software Koha (developed just up the road from my hometown).

The UK has the worst record of balancing consumer and producer rights in terms of copyright (Techdirt).

Homo Britannicus by Professor Chris Stringer, a groundbreaking historical biological work about the origin of humans in Britain, was met with confusion at Manchester University, where librarians have filed all their copies in the “gay and lesbian” section.

Source.

Not sure where they get ‘all their copies’ from as the catalogue shows one holding only, and it seems to be shelved in 913 (Ancient World)….presumably the power of the Observer’s scorn has corrected any classification errors [Still, one wonders where the error could come from; either the cataloguers are copy-cataloguing from an authoritative source, or they’re doing it themselves by carefully cataloguing from the item; either way they should see what it’s actually about….)

However, there it is, in print. Go take a look, I’m sure something in it will be of interest. You can purchase a copy from the link at the start of this post, or download it for free (PDF, 211 pages).  Kudos to Christian, Nadine and Sarah for making this happen, it must have taken a lot of effort to coordinate with all the authors.

I’ve been using Twitter casually for a year or two, but purely as a way of keeping up an ongoing, semi-random conversation with a group of friends, almost all in the USA, some of whom I’ve met, some I haven’t. I was most definitely not using it for anything professional. But now that I’m trying to get back into blogging and professional reading and all that good stuff, I thought I’d better look at whether Twitter would be of any use to me.

So, I leave the old account for my personal conversations (and switch emails so that the random librarians who were finding me via my email address now get my professional account instead) and start up a new account. Slight annoyance: I can’t use my full name (the curse of the 11-letter surname). SChamberlain and S_Chamberlain are taken so I have to default to the clumsy use of both initials. My fault for not being an early adopter.

Finding people to subscribe to was a lot easier than I thought. Twitter suggested I follow some librarians that were in my email contacts list, and from looking at their followed list I could easily identify another 50 to follow (either because I recognised the names or because they had ‘librarian’ somewhere in their user name, or because they represented a blog or company like Read Write Web or Yahoo).

I’ve been on less than a day and I can already see how compelling and how useful this is. I’m picking up blog posts from sites that I wouldn’t bother to subscribe to in Google Reader, but that I’m happy to read tweets from (figuring that tweets are easier to skim over; the transaction cost of following on Twitter is less than the cost of subscribing to hundreds of blogs and having to read through thousands of posts if I miss a few days).

Will have to lurk a while and watch the back and forth of conversation before leaping in. But so far, I’m liking this.

Some interesting posts on Twitter from the last few months, some of which were influential in me signing up:

• Twitter: Your First 24 Hours (Phil Bradley)

• Twitter on ALA, and Some Advice (The Shifted Librarian)
• WeFollow – user powered Twitter Directory (Phil Bradley)
• Netvibes and Twitter and Multiple Accounts (Phil Bradley again) – I’m definitely going to need this – logging in and out of Twitter accounts is annoying
• TTwitter – Zero to Amazing in 30 days (Chris Oien, guest post at Tame The Web) – a great post that was instrumental in inspiring me
• Four Ways Companies Use Twitter for Business (Read Write Web). In another article on RWW, the author says that he would pay at least $50/month for his Twitter account.
• What Does that Hashtag Mean? (RWW again, explaining how to find out what different # (hashtags) stand for)
• Finally, a poll from Law Librarian Blog which shows that the majority of law librarians do not use Twitter

Comments should be turned back on now, as well.

Interesting article from Read Write Web, noting that search queries are getting longer, or, at least, that the number of 7 word or 8+ word search queries has increased. Worth pointing out that though the increases are reasonably large in percentage terms (12% and 22% respectively) they are small in real terms – only around 6% of all queries are 7 words or longer. A case of increasing sophistication among search users, or the opposite – users typing in long and unformed questions? One commenter suggests autocomplete could be the reason, noting that typing curi in Google will give you the option of ‘curious case of Benjamin Button’. This makes sense – pre autocomplete, I’d bet a number of searches would type curious case button or some similar combination of words from the title, knowing that such a search would be ‘good enough’.

The article also points to an increase in the use of Google, from 66% market share to 72% between Jan 2008 and Jan 2009.

RWW also reports that citation manager Zotero is embracing cloud features, enabling users to sync between machines and backup their databases automatically online. More interestingly, it’s enabling social networking so you can connect with other users.

A poll on Law Librarian Blog indicates, unsurprisingly, that most law libraries are expecting budget cuts over one or both of the next two years, and most expect to manage this by cutting collections.

Techdirt has an article arguing that social pressure can solve the problems of copying/copyright infringement, even without the existence of formal copyright measures. I’m not sure that I totally agree, though they use an interesting example of online copying of content from Metafilter to another website. It’s mainly of interest to me because I’ve met the Metafilter member whose work was copied.

Techdirt also argues that the Google Books settlement was a bad move, because it has priced other players out of the market for scanning and indexing books. The argument being that prior to the settlement, there was at least an argument that such scanning could be fair use. Now that Google has set a price, it indicates that any other market entrant would have to pay a similar price. The result is an effective monopoly for Google.

Another Techdirt article discusses the Wall Street Journal getting rid of its research librarian. I won’t preach to the choir here, but note that the comments are (a) mostly supportive of the work that special librarians do and/or (b) posted by librarians [depending on how cynical you feel].

Interesting article on copyright in the age of YouTube, from the ABA Journal, via Law Librarian Blog. The article discusses fair use considerations in relation to YouTube takedown notices, safe harbour provisions under the DMCA, and discusses various recent cases.