Open Access to Australia's researchLast week I spoke at the major Open Access conference in Brisbane at the Stamford Plaza Hotel, which attracted over 200 attendees from Australia and overseas.
The OAR foreword reflected "In the last ten years the way knowledge is created and disseminated has undergone significant change. The capacity of ICT and the rise of a rich text, highly interactive, user generated and socially active Internet (Web 2.0) have seen linear models of knowledge production replaced by more diffuse open ended and serendipitous knowledge processes. As a result there has been a worldwide move towards establishing frameworks which can optimise access to research as well as the reuse of research, especially that which is publicly funded. This has been supported by the development of open access repositories, new publishing tools, new publishing models and a more strategic management of copyright at the individual and institutional level".
Minister Kim Carr opened the proceedings with a video presentation from Canberra, highlighting the relevant sections of the recent Cutler report on innovation, 'Venturous Australia'. Carr's statement on open access, highlighting public funding, public access, public good was reinforced by a number of speakers including Professor Warwick Anderson, Director of the National Health and Medical Research Council and John Wilbanks, Science Commons, USA.
While the previous Howard government had an Information Accessibility statement relatively little effort was made to implement it, compared to technological infrastuctures, yet the costs of the former in cultural change practice were/are relatively low.
The establishment of an "Australian Information Commons" through Open Access to research will provide immeasurable benefit not only for Australian society but also for the dissemination of Australian research globally. It is also clear from the Cutler Innovation and other reports,such as the Productivity Commision report in 2007, that freeing Australian knowledge is a greater aid to productivity returns than locking it away knowledge in patents and IP protection.Carr's statement, plus the whole of government approach on public funding ,public good, public access should provide the final impetus for change.
The conference concluded that a major step forward would be for all of Australia's universities to make their annual research publications available in open access in full text, wherever possible.
Jill Abramson, The New York Times’s Managing Editor for News reviews Bob Woodward's latest book, 'The War Within'
She states "In this last installment of his four-volume series on the Bush administration, Bob Woodward renders a harsh final appraisal of the president. This time, with the arrival of “The War Within,” the final volume in his four-part Bush oeuvre, the script is the same, but the headlines mask what is really newsworthy about the book. The reported bombshells - that the Bush administration has secretly monitored nearly every move and word of the Iraqi prime minister, Nuri al-Maliki, and that American military and intelligence officials have used top-secret spying methods to zap foreign terrorists in Iraq - are hardly shocking.
What is most consequential about “The War Within” is the evolutionary shift it marks for the author. Woodward is famous for his flat, just-the-facts-ma’am style, if one can call it that. It is the old-fashioned newspaperman’s credo of show, don’t tell. He rarely pauses in his narratives to synthesize or analyze, let alone to judge his powerful subjects, especially those who have been his sources. He has only one angle, the close-up. The striking lack of contextual analysis in all his books about presidents going back to Richard Nixon has angered some readers and critics, most famously Joan Didion, who in an appraisal of six Woodward volumes (from the 1980s and ’90s) wrote, “These are books in which measurable cerebral activity is virtually absent.”
In contrast to his other Bush volumes, “The War Within” does provide interstitial analysis and judgments throughout. It also renders an extremely harsh final appraisal of President Bush. In a stinging epilogue, Woodward concludes: “For years, time and again, President Bush has displayed impatience, bravado and unsettling personal certainty about his decisions. The result has too often been impulsiveness and carelessness and, perhaps most troubling, a delayed reaction to realities and advice that run counter to his gut".
Newly published Philip Larkin sketches, indicate a refreshingly witty and more affectionate side to the poet reputed as a misanthrope.
Philip Larkin, the English poet, is regarded as one of the significant literary voices of the twentieth century. Rare Book Review recently cited a collection of Larkin's illustrated letters, addressed to friends and lovers. Larkin often depicts his long-term girlfriend Monica Jones as a rabbit. In such one letter, written in 1954, in which he depicts himself as a seal, Jones as a rabbit, the two are on soap boxes, arguing over their “political explosions.” Larkin describes himself as being on the left, and Jones on the right. Interestingly it was Larkin who became markedly right wing in later years".
Details of this and other publications can be found on the website of the Philip Larkin Society.
A don fronts the Emmys
Professor Mary Beard writes last week in her TLS Blog "This time last night I was at the Emmy’s. On the red carpet and at the Governor’s Ball, no less. Well yesterday I was eyeball to eyeball with Tom Hanks, Jon Stewart and (even) Mary Tyler-Moore - and hundreds of others who, much to my children’s annoyance, I didn’t recognise. It’s a lesson in how glamour comes when you least expect it.
The truth is, of course, a little more complicated. For a year or so now I have been in email contact with the Senior Vice President of the Emmy's, that is the US Television Academy (such are the surprises of electronic communication). He had read my Triumph book and thought that there was a ot of overlap between the Roman Triumph and the Emmy’s - and thought I might like to come and take a look.So off we went to LA, me and the husband, and were quite enthralled. We didn’t just sit in the auditorium, but we went to the Green Room (with its 10 million dollar chandelier) and even onto the stage for a quick peek. The funny thing was we were sitting just in front of the tele-prompter. So, if we turned around, we could see the messages displayed to the winners as the made their acceptance speeches. Usually “Please wrap it up now” in big letters.
And her authorial anxieties meet Top Gear
.....I am now, as I write, flying back to Berkeley from my 4 day British book launch. The vast pot of frequent flier miles I have recently acquired means that I am able to do this in unaccustomed luxury (I’ve cashed them in for an upgrade in other words). So in this quiet cabin of the plane (turning left as you go in) peace is reigning.
Behind me, Jeremy Clarkson and the rest of the Top Gear team are, uncharacteristically, slumbering or tapping in their lap-tops. To tell the truth, neither me nor the other middle-aged lady I got talking to were quite sure it was them - but we checked it out on my iPhone while we waited on the ground for the luggage of someone who hadn’t showed up to be found and removed. (How is it I wondered that this happens so often? How can so many people turn up at the airport, check their bags in, and then not actually make it to the plane? Or is it some ready-made airline excuse.)
Anyway, so far as the book goes, all I can now do is hope people buy it. Quite what ensures that they do is difficult to say. It would be naïve (and plain wrong) to think that it was simply quality. Some bad books sell millions, some really excellent ones don’t get into four figures. Some publishers put a lot of money into buying preferential space in bookshops. You may imagine, like I used to, that those books on the front tables of Borders or Waterstones are there because the staff in the shop think they are good. No, they are there because big publishing houses have paid for them to be put there.
Sir Walter Scott Digital Archive
The Walter Scott Digital Archive is an Edinburgh University Library online resource created in the Special Collections Division. It is designed around the extensive Corson Collection of Walter Scott material.
BASTARDS WITH BOOKSHOPS or Look Back in Anger
The UK blog Bookride has a recent entry as follows.
"Shopkeepers are an ill-tempered bunch and booksellers are no exception. Booksellers are often on a very short fuse and can become incandescent with rage, inconsolable and beyond the reach of practitioners of anger management, Buddhist monks and preachers of peace, love and understanding. Bernard Black in 'Black Books' is said to be based on an amalgamation of real life characters- mostly high handed, cranky booksellers.
A bookseller on Route 1 in Porstmouth NH recently got in the papers yet again - he makes Bernard look like John Inman ('Are you Being Served?')--he charges a $5 browsing fee and has been known to knock out customers who venture in his shop without permission. I had heard of him over the years as an example of a dealer who had seriously lost the plot and have always been amazed that he stays in business. He has just been busted for writing bad cheques and the local paper chronicles his misdemeanours thus:-
"Past police calls to the Antiquarian book store have involved weapons, assaults and arrests, including the following:
* On April 2, 2005, police were called to the bookstore by a man who reported he was assaulted. According to police records, the customer reported Wakefield "tried to hit him with the door to the store." Wakefield told the Herald in 2007 that he’s been the victim of numerous shoplifting incidents and 13 robberies and almost never calls police. Shoplifting incidents usually spark the trouble, Wakefield said, because he will confront attempted thieves."
It would be a foolhardy punter who having effected an entrance to the shop, paid the $5 browsing charge (only time I have ever heard of this in world bookselling) would then start stealing books under the eyes of an over vigilant man whose photo reveals him to be built like a brick shithouse.
These chaps are always frightened that their invariably mediocre stock is going to be plundered. At a shop in San Jose, CA which I shall refer to as R+W, and is happily no longer, the proprietor was so paranoid he would not allow men with untucked in shirts in the shop lest they conceal a book, had a notice saying "Don't read the magazines unless you're going to buy", followed people into the loo in case theye were going to stuff books in their clothes and priced many Book Club books as if they were true firsts at hundreds of dollars in a red angrily applied crayon. This shop with its enormous, overpriced, stinkingly bad condition books was by common consent 'the worst bookshop in the universe' and was discussed on Google Groups in the early 2000s"
The People’s English?
A new online multimedia dictionary site, called Wordia.com, was launched recently at the house of Dr Samuel Johnson, who compiled the world’s first authoritative English dictionary 253 years ago.
Johnson held the view that “in every new attempt there is a new hazard,” and there is little doubt that this new take on the concept of a “dictionary” would probably be greeted with disapproval from its original author. The team behind the new venture aim to engage young people from social networking and video-sharing websites who prefer to learn in a multimedia format. Edward Baker, the managing director of wordia.com, said that it “tapped into the Zeitgeist and a gap in the dictionary market”, which enables people to openly debate word definitions.
“When a word is personally defined, and put into video context,” he explained, “it acts as an aide-mémoire, a mnemonic - something instantly more memorable and useful than a textual dictionary definition alone.” The site has already asked numerous comedians, actors, sports stars, entertainers, and people from the streets of Edinburgh to define their word of choice on camera".
The 20 greatest movie partnerships, from the UK Times Online
From Tracy and Hepburn to Taylor and Lassie, film is stuffed with great double acts, remembered here by Kevin Maher.
Herewith some sample entries.
9 ROCK HUDSON AND DORIS DAY
The champions of squeaky-clean asexual screen romance, they made three movies together, Pillow Talk, Lover Come Back and Send Me No Flowers. The hook was the banter between the virginal Day and the privately homosexual Hudson. The two were friends and he was to appear, shockingly emaciated, in 1985 on her TV series The Doris Day Show three months before dying from an Aids-related illness.
7 HUMPHREY BOGART AND LAUREN BACALL
Bogart was 45 and Bacall 19 when they met on the set of To Have and Have Not (1944). Unlike Tracy and Hepburn, they represented the acceptable face of screen romance, complete with Beverly Hills mansion, luxury cars and famous friends. They made four movies together and boasted a simmering screen chemistry immortalised in Bacall’s seductive: “You know how to whistle, don’t you? Just put your lips together and blow.”
4 ROBERT REDFORD AND PAUL NEWMAN
“When we made the movies nobody used the word ‘chemistry’,” said Robert Redford recently, ruminating on his relationship with Paul Newman. “It was just: ‘Get up there and do your job!’ ” It’s nonetheless a testament to the snappy chemistry between the men in a mere two movies (The Sting and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid) that they cast such a long shadow over the buddy-movie genre.
1 SPENCER TRACY AND KATHARINE HEPBURN
He was a tough, barrel-chested blue-collar drinker of Irish descent. She was a slim, fine-boned Anglo-American debutante. But when they co-starred in Woman of the Year (1942, the first of nine movie collaborations), sparks flew. The pair would remain secret lovers for 20 years (the Roman Catholic Tracy stayed married to Louise Treadwell until his death in 1967) while, onscreen, they were the epitome of physical chemistry (the 1949 comedy Adam’s Rib is a litany of kicks, slaps and smacks).
How not to raise a child
Last week's issue of The Times Literary Supplement contains a lengthy review of Julia Blackburn's memoir of growing up with an alcoholic father and a sex-mad mother.
"It is said that happiness writes white. The Three of Us is an extraordinary memoir written in the sootiest of blacks, yet with a light touch and a beauty of line that lift it out of the mire of its raw material onto a more elevated plane. It is a survivor’s tale, and a miraculous one at that. For it would require an unusually lurid imagination to dream up two characters less equipped to be parents than Thomas and Rosalie Blackburn, into whose doomed and dysfunctional marriage Julia had the misfortune to be born. The fact that she emerges in the end not just with her sanity intact but able to love and make her peace with both parents is remarkable. Each chapter is sealed by a fragment describing the dying Rosalie’s last weeks in Julia’s house, during which the icy rage and rivalry between mother and daughter is finally resolved, and real pleasure in one another’s company is palpable at last".
The shape of things to come
This blog's home page at the Canberra Times has the belief that libraries and information provision are merging with science fiction. Some of the Semantic Web issues and intelligent knowledge access discussed at the Brisbane Open Access conference reinforce this belief.
Professor Tara Brabazon in last week's UK Higher Education Supplement pondered "a future bereft of the custodians of knowledge. Science fiction - or the all-too-probable result of the devaluation of librarians? ... We do not live in an information economy. We live in a time economy. There is plenty of information. Time is the valuable commodity. Unfortunately, information is increasingly locked in silos: restricted, chaotic and poorly categorised.
Sorting this low-quality, random and jumbled information wastes time. It is for this reason that Microsoft SharePoint has attained such popularity as the corporate world attempts to manage and integrate “collaborative media”. A physical “sharepoint” for information is the library. A virtual “sharepoint” is the library portal. The corporeal sharepoint is the librarian.
There is nothing more dangerous than having one idea. We have lived on that one idea for a while now: that technology will inevitably improve our lives. Certainly, we are more productive and efficient. Communication is instantaneous.Shopping is globally sourced. We have more “things” - food, clothing, opportunities for leisure and pleasure - than our grandparents could have ever imagined. But at some point, all of us will need another idea.
If the image and reality of librarianship can be reconciled with the image and reality of information, then we may find another idea. One of the most moving popular cultural interventions in this narrative of decline and disrespect for librarians was the 2002 film version H. G. Wells’ The Time Machine, which was directed by Simon Wells, the author’s great grandson.
The original novel featured only one mention of libraries. Seemingly, through time, books had turned to dust. But the film was different because of the expansive presence of Vox 114, a holographic librarian, which initially seems a slight on the profession, rendering corporeal librarians redundant. ...
As we think about the future during our own troubled times - scarred, like Wells’, by war and financial turmoil - we can campaign for new technology or older technology. We can Google more information. But there is another option: to support the one profession that can preserve and transform, structure and analyse, speak and remember".
Agatha Christie discovery
Rare Book Review reports that a collection of previously unheard recordings of Christie talking about her life and work have been unearthed after lying undiscovered for 40 years.
"The reels of tape, over 13 hours long were discovered by the author’s grandson, Matthew Pritchard, in a cardboard-box during a clean out at Christie’s home. The tapes date back to the 1960s, which reveal themselves as working notes for her autobiography, later published posthumously in 1977.
The recordings uncover descriptions of wartime Britain, her honeymoon with her second husband and the reason why she would never let her legendary sleuths Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple meet: ‘Hercule Poirot, a complete egoist, would not like being taught his business or having suggestions made to him by an elderly spinster lady.’
Very few recordings of her voice exist - only a 1955 interview for the BBC and a 1974 recording for the Imperial War Museum Sound Archive, this being chiefly due to her shy nature and dislike of being interviewed. This makes the 13-hour revelation somewhat rare and a delight for her fans and family, as her grandson recalls: ‘She has little mannerisms, like the minor cough in the middle of sentences, which I had forgotten about - and all this comes back to you.’
Unfortunately, the tapes fail to reveal any clues with regards to her mysterious disappearance in 1926, after her first husband Archie told her he wanted a divorce. Christie drove off alone from Sunningdale and then took a train to Harrogate in Yorkshire where she registered herself at the Hydro Hotel as Mrs. Neele (the name of her husband’s mistress)".
Which films are better than the books they are based on?
The New Zealand Herald recently asked its readers "Can a film be better than the book? It doesn't happen often - but there are some great examples. Many say that the Oscar-nominated film Brokeback Mountain was better than the Annie Proulx short-story it came from.
Amongst the suggestions the following:
Fed Up Taxpayer, H (Hamilton) Agree with Shawshank Redemption and Jaws but can anyone really think the movie Gone with the Wind (absolutely dreadful acting such a disappointment was better than the book)I wish they would remake Gone with the Wind then it would stack up.
My pick for worst adapation of a book series to movies would have to be The Bourne Trilogy - whatever books they were based on wasn't them - especially the Bourne Supremacy and Bourne Ultimatum they had absolutely nothing to do with the books at all. Loved the adapation of Jurassic Park felt it brought the book to life - sequels sucked".
A DIGITAL LIBRARY, FREE TO THE WORLD
More on the Open Access concept to conclude. Dr Brewster Kahle who made his first overseas trip to address a national scholarly communications forum meeting held at the Academy of Science in 1993, has just released a video on trying to build the world's largest free digital library.
Brewster Kahle's stated goal is "Universal access to all knowledge," and his catalog of inventions and institutions created for this purpose read like a Web's Greatest Hits list. In 1982 he helped start Thinking Machines, a supercomputer company specializing in text searching, and would go on to invent the Internet's first publishing and distributed search system, WAIS, whose customers included the New York Times and the United States Senate.
But most notably, perhaps, Kahle is founder and director of the Internet Archive, a free service which steadfastly archives World Wide Web documents, even as they are plowed over by breakneck trends in commerce, culture and politics.
Kahle is a key supporter of the Open Content Alliance and has been elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He and his wife operate a nonprofit organization, the Kahle/Austin Foundation, which funds the Internet Archive".
ODD BOOK TITLE
Old Tractors and the Men who love them. Mbi publishing, 1995. The National Library of Australia report a copy in the ACT Library Service. Go for it!
http://nla.gov.au/anbd.b ib-an11794925
QUOTE OF THE WEEK
"He immatures with age". UK Prime Minister Harold Wilson on his then Cabinet Minister Tony Benn.