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May 2019

Today, I am in Gatehouse of Fleet, reading A. R. Luria's /The Man with a Shattered World: A history of a brain wound/. It is quite a remarkable book thus far.

Thinking re edited collections thanks to @pj_webster. Often thought un-REFable/bad for careers: a thought experiment… If candidate for job had no chapters in collections, this would look weird. Something at once normative and expected while simultaneously devalued about the EC.

And yes, I know, 9000 or so were submitted to REF and REF doesn't judge venue etc. etc.

"On the face of it, she is the worst prime minister of our lifetime. She has no achievements, she conducted herself without grace or principle, and she governed the country as it was humiliated on the world stage."

"In actual fact, that's not quite right. David Cameron, her predecessor, takes the top spot. He made his errors for entirely self-serving reasons, in a benign political environment."

"He created Brexit by calling a referendum, in order to minimise losses in a local election no-one even remembers anymore."

Reading @kfitz on the "just are"-ness of for-pleasure readings is making me think recurrently of @sadiseshiah's brilliant practice-based work on book groups for older readers. Such a complex set of authority dynamics to negotiate.

@kfitz @sadiseshiah And the space constraint on this tweet has made the description of the book and of the practice seem much reduced, obv.

Today's sick leave garden reading is @kfitz's /Generous Thinking/. I read the draft of this and greatly enjoyed it so looking forward to going through the final version.

It's day one of sick leave and I'm bored already. Going to read @timmaughan's /Infinite Detail/ in the garden but concerned, as a Literature Prof, that this might be work...

Thank you all for the kind words. My hypertensive crisis has now been stabilised and I am home with drugs to control this pending further investigations. I am, though, going to take a proper period of sick leave to recover from this, which is something I rarely do but now need.

Not a great day. Taken to hospital by ambulance with heart abnormalities. Now on a drip and drugs to stabilise. Feel utterly rough. I know my autoimmune conditions are systemic but it feels as though it never rains but it pours. Yesterday was so good, too.

David Maguire bears more than a passing resemblance to Malcolm Tucker, seen here advising the HE minister. Expecting some top media relations in the near future.

Given the topic of today's conversation, someone really should tell Cambridge UL that this isn't best practice for book preservation

Majority of members of Joint Committee on Legal Deposit are lawyers. This explains some things. #diglibfutures

Publications from @openlibhums are in the non-print legal deposit system. But despite being open access and openly licensed, the NPLD copy is only available on-site, for one user at a time, on a specific designated terminal. :( #diglibfutures

My other half was incredulous that there would be enough to speak about on digital preservation for a day-long conference. She is no longer incredulous about this after my outburst but she also did not think that it sounded exciting.

Looks to me as though the National Library of Scotland the University of Cambridge Library are responsible for most non-print legal deposit accesses. #diglibfutures

60k ebook requests for non-print legal deposit over two-year period among six deposit libraries. Or: an average of 416 accesses per library per month (though not likely to be smoothed like this). Libraries reported that this seems low. #diglibfutures

"Absence of page numbers as a barrier to citation of digital material" is the kind of rationale that makes me want to smash my head into a wall. Other locators are available. #diglibfutures

I do find the notion of intrinsic value difficult to wrap my head around. Because even these intrinsic values are culturally relative... So not intrinsic even though not instrumental? #diglibfutures

It is very frustrating that the legislative side of non-print legal deposit mechanisms in the UK does not dynamically incorporate other laws, such as the 2014 copyright exceptions for text and data mining. #diglibfutures

Spent much of today in A&E and various cardiology follow ups. However, I now have new drugs & am looking forward to tomorrow's symposium on non-print legal deposit at the University of Cambridge. A good chunk of my keynote is written + I'll tweet link to the text tomorrow AM.

Trying a new accessibility tactic for my keynote at @ELegalDeposit next week. I've written most of this talk, although there will be off-the-cuff bits, and I'll make the text available beforehand and publicise the link.

I have to write some US tenure recommendation reports but have never done this before and don't know the form. How long is such a report expected to be, for instance, to convey enthusiasm? How ramped up/hyperbolic does it need to be (don't want to be understated English etc.)?

I know what these things should look like over here but am unclear whether there's a whole heap of other assumptions/cultural codes for these arcane documents stateside.

The other thing I like about this book -- on close reading and digital methods -- is that it's dedicated to a woman who has never used a computer.

I'm going to give her her copy on Saturday.

This morning's research task was more book editing. I have now manually checked 456 footnotes from contributors to the volume. 15 chapters are fully integrated. There are a few more to go, but last hurdles!

from now until 6.30pm, though, it's more back-to-back meetings.

Hey! I've got some funding from Jisc to build something cool. We're working on an experimental tool that will tell you what's cited in common between various OA books. For example: "tell me what papers these 5 books all cite in common". https://openmetrics.jiscinvolve.org/wp/2019/05/open-access-monographs-and-metrics-more-than-counting-beans/

I suspect that a major output of this project is going to be: this is a REALLY hard task, but it works well with <these publishers> because they <did this>. That is: we'll have a set of recommendations for what could make this kind of work possible.

One week today I'll be speaking at the Digital Library Futures: Symposium on Non-Print Legal Deposit. Going wide & considering issues of access, digital scarcity functions, the digital imaginary of abundance, the preservation of computer viruses and more.
https://www.eventbrite.com/e/digital-library-futures-symposium-on-non-print-legal-deposit-tickets-56402359977

The keynote is currently titled "The Sacred Unreadable Artefact: Digital Preservation, Computational Abundance, and Scarce Access". I hope to have a copy of the text available here on the day of the event http://eprints.bbk.ac.uk/id/eprint/27525

You know what would be really good? If @CrossrefOrg had a way for users to report metadata inaccuracies. (Perhaps via an API with which @zotero could integrate.) This could then be bounced back to the publisher to update. @CrossrefSupport

I've been time tracking over the past few weeks. I spend an average of 10 hours per week answering emails. I suppose you could go for more granularity and say that, e.g. replying re. teaching is actually part of "teaching" rather than "email and comms", but this seems a lot.

Over a full working day's worth of time per week is spent in an email client.

Thanks all for your kind messages. I am out of hospital and we have a plan. This may just take time to see whether it works, though.

Have been trying to post cheerful updates on here, but things are pretty tough at the moment. I am having some better days, healthwise, but in general this front is worsening and most days are not the good ones about which I post. Im back in hospital today.

Preparing my keynote for the Digital Library Futures event + thinking re access/disability aspects of non-print legal deposit quite seriously. So many embedded assumptions about how supposedly easy it is for everyone to "go to a library" rather than having digital offsite access.

see also open access. Do you know how many people have told me: "it's all fine, because you can get access to these books at the British Library"? Lots. You can't get access to books at the British Library if you are stuck in bloody hospital, though.

One of the best sentences on the information leaflet for one of my drugs: "you may experience unpleasant side effects including... death". Yes, that's pretty high on my list of "unpleasant side effects".

There's a café near to us that does really nice coffee (I'm told) and ace fruit smoothies (can vouch). However, its sole music selection consists of terrible muzak covers of 90s pop hits (from Britney to Oasis) and today we just had to say something to the management.

Really impressed with @PolarGlobal. Almost sold my Polar heart-rate strap that I use during bike rides a while back because I wanted ant+ compatibility. They issued a firmware update this week that turns it into an ant+ device.

It's rare that a company builds in standards-based compatibility to its products after launch; they usually prefer to lock you into their ecosystem.

Went for a drink (for the first time in a fair while) with a nice chap with good musical taste. Ended up with a signed Tici Taci #001. Good outcome. Great also to be well enough to do this.

'The report’s section on Prevent compliance also reveals that 17 institutions “had rejected external speakers and events at the point of submission”—all incidents which, in the wrong hands, could be spun as examples of where freedom of speech had been repressed, Playbook fears.'

Classic 8am Playbook note from @ResearchRes