The Serpentine Sessions are becoming one of my favourite London gigs; interesting bands in a pleasant environment in Hyde Park, with an outdoor stage allowing relaxed drinking in the sun before the main acts go on.

I’m embarrassed to see that Fionn Regan is a man; for some reason I’ve always read his name as a variant of Fiona. His folky stylings are perfectly fine, and I applauded at the time, but I’m really struggling to remember anything about what he sounded like. Given that the last three bands I saw in this tent were Mumford & Sons (a second-stage support for Neil Young), Big Star (RIP Alex) and Tindersticks, this is a bit of a disappointment.

But of course this time we’re there to see the headliner: crossing another one off my list of ‘great artists who I never thought I’d get to see live’. Patti doesn’t disappoint; after a slightly rocky start she’s soon playing with maximum energy. In a short, sharp set she plays most of my favourites: I would have loved to have heard Kimberley, off Horses, but I suspect she doesn’t play that much. And I’m going to take a wild guess that Rock ‘n’ Roll N****r doesn’t get any live airings these days (which is a pity because it’s such a great song, but it’s fairly obvious why). [Edit: setlist.fm has some recent sets which show that song, seemingly played as an encore instead of Land - I want both of 'em dammit!]

You get what you’d expect/hope for really – Redondo Beach, great versions of Free Money and Till Victory, plus Because the Night, Pissing in a River – only Redondo Beach was a bit shaky; plus a handful of covers: the Stones, Jim Carroll’s new-to-me People Who Died (a defiant punk blast through a list of, well, people who died (“they were all my friends”) with added namechecks for Fred Sonic Smith, the Ramones, and Robert Mapplethorpe) and a joyous singalong Perfect Day. The main set ends with a blast through People Have the Power that made me want to quit my job and find some barricades to man, and the encore is a frantic rush that begins with Patti’s beat poetry, continues through Land, and then melts into Gloria.

Only 15 songs, but at least 7 or 8 of them were quite wonderful, a good mix of the expected and the unexpected. Definitely a good fun night.

The articles cover a range of topics, from applying Peter Drucker’s theories to Twitter, professional organisations to roving reference, and with (naturally) a fair bit of focus on the publisher’s products.

I’ve only started looking through it, but found the article about digitization efforts at the Combined Arms Research Library, and the subsequent involvement of the wargaming community, interesting.

Via Law Librarian Blog, who notes the brevity of the articles.

Sometimes the internet is pretty great: a few days ago, I finally met an old friend for the first time [a concept that is really only possible in the internet age].

And sometimes the internet is truly great. A few days ago a thread was posted on Ask Metafilter* by a concerned member, fake. Acquaintances of his had arrived in the US on a temporary working visa, but the promised job in Washington had fallen through, and their contact wasn’t responding to their calls. Instead, they were told to meet another man, at midnight, in a bar in New York. The women wouldn’t heed fake’s warnings, and got on a bus to New York.

This rang obvious alarm bells with many site members, so they jumped to help. Within a few hours, a member who worked in trafficking prevention had become involved. Others offered advice and provided information on anti-trafficking resources in New York. (All this while fake was driving across the south-west of America, updating the thread by phone).

I’d been following the thread from the start; I went to bed with things looking pretty bad, but by the time I woke up things were mostly solved: someone had phoned the women on the bus and convinced them not to go to the meeting, and another Metafilter member had met them at the station:

Knowing what I do about 20-ish women who are in NYC for the first time (been there, drank that) my strategy was not to try to convince them of anything. Instead, I provided them a fun third alternative to Sketchy Boss and Nagging Dad-type (no offense, Fake, you were incredible throughout). I emphasized that I didn’t care what they did, or who they met, I just wanted to hang with them and have fun and go out. Sheesh!

Right now, these women are staying with this Metafilter member, internet fraud detective squad, station number 9, who canceled a job interview to spend time with the women. Metafilter members have been sending her money to help the women. A quite extraordinary example of how people who have never met can come together to help each other. Makes me proud to be on the same forum as these people.

Links: Original thread; Discussion thread (because Ask Metafilter threads must be specifically focused on a particular question, discussion has moved there); Newsweek article.

*The Q&A section of the website Metafilter. I’ve been a member for years; Jessamyn is one of the admins.

That said, there were positives: we got to spend time travelling round NZ, catching up with all our friends and family (Rhonda hadn’t been home since we’d been away, so it was obviously great for her to see her family). And Nelson in summer is a lot more appealing than London in the middle of winter.

As an experiment, I tried to see if I could work 3 days/week remotely. And it worked out pretty well. Most places we stayed at had wireless internet, so it was trivial to get online and login via our remote Citrix connection. If not, I could head to cybercafes. I got something of a shock when I checked internet access at Wellington Public Library – not only is it not free, it’s more expensive than most cybercafes; not to mention that most actual cafes have free wireless these days.  Is that a gap in WPL’s service, or is something that the private sector is providing adequately?

The only problem with remote access was with some applications that didn’t work with Vista, but in general it was easy enough to run a current awareness service, write newsletters, and update intranet pages and Knowhow from New Zealand. I managed to answer a few reference questions as well, though not as many as I expected (our London office is the main information service for the firm’s European and Asian offices, so we often get inquiries outside of UK office hours).

The visa renewal itself, though stressful (a minor error can lead to your application being refused, with no refund) went quickly and smoothly enough, and I give credit to the British High Commission in Canberra, whose staff processed the application very quickly, and updated me via email so I knew my passport was on its way back to me [meaning I didn't have to rebook my flight back to London out of fear that the passport wouldn't turn up in time].

So we’re back in London for the foreseeable future. It’s a three year visa, we’re looking at staying here until at least after the Olympics, and probably making our way back south at the end of the northern summer in 2012. We have a nice flat in a fairly quiet side street between Brixton and Clapham (Google Maps view below; for fairly obvious privacy reasons I haven’t used my own house number; this isn’t the exact house). And we’re only minutes walk from the White Horse and the wonderful Windmill, a fine live venue.

View Larger Map

The usual weekend upgrade work meant the Jubilee Line was closed. A 20 minute walk in the rain from Kilburn Park wasn’t ideal, but hey – it’s for Dick Dale, right?

The tiny Lumi was full of a mixed, excited crowd – old rockers, metalheads, 20 and 30 something indie kids - by the time Rhonda, Matt, Alex and I got there, just before the main support act. SmallGang were an interesting choice to support Dick Dale; being more of an indie-rock outfit. Opinion was wildly divided: Alex couldn’t stand them, Matt thought they were great, and I was somewhere in-between. Given the right kind of luck, I could see them being big – there’s definitely an audience for their Snow Patrol/Bloc Party/Interpol style tunes. That stuff doesn’t really grab me, but I can’t deny that they did it well. What might lift them above the mundane is the presence of two singer-guitarists. I’m guessing each singer sings his own compositions. Those sung by the second singer have more to them, a sort of edgy, angular sound that reminds me of Pavement. They’re on Youtube (Wrong Side; Cockpit) and MySpace (listing Will Oldham, the Smiths, Smog, Beefheart, Wilco and others as influences, which I couldn’t really hear, but whatdoiknow?).

A short wait spent arguing the merits of SmallGang was followed by a burst of distorted lead guitar from offstage, and a drummer and bassist took their places on stage, before DD himself strode through the curtain. The crowd went mental and DD launched into his set. He kicked off with some of the old style surf guitar instrumentals, before switching to covers of classic tunes, twisted up and spat out with his signature tremolo picking. He ranged over the whole range of 20th century American popular music: Fever, Smoke on the Water, House of the Rising Sun, and, gloriously, California Sun, heavier even than the Ramones version, which had me jumping around with a huge grin on my face. He bantered with the crowd, he improvised constantly (the drummer and bassist were basically following along with his shouted directions, as he played) and he finished 90 minutes later with a version of Amazing Grace that nearly had me in tears. Breathtaking.

One of the obvious features of attending a quiet gig is that, if people in the audience start talking, the rest of us really notice it. I’ve seen the Fleet Foxes three times, and each time audience noise has detracted from the performance. When they supported Neil Young, there was nearly a fight in the audience between someone who insisted on talking loudly, and another fan who was telling him to shut up.

On the other hand, some venues attract crowds who respect the band, and each other: the San Francisco Bath House in Wellington is excellent in this respect – thinking of gigs by Andrew Bird and (again) the Fleet Foxes where the crowd is quiet (but equally I’ve seen the Black Lips and Broken Social Scene at the same venue, and people have no problems making some noise). I’ve seen Jeff Tweedy from Wilco perform unplugged (completely without amplification) and the entire audience stand silently, so that everyone could hear.

Some venues like to encourage the crowd towards silence, notably the Luminaire in North London, which takes a fairly extreme approach:

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.