Oracle: Librarian of Prey

From Jenenifer over at law.librarians, two more helpful twitters. The Chartered Institute of Taxation and Taxation Magazine are twittering away.

And DowningStreet kindly answered my query about why George Clooney was at No. 10 today. (Darfur talks, apparently!)

And unrelated tow law (but interesting!), Tower Bridge is twittering too and tells you when it’s opened to let ships through.

I logged into twitter this morning and discovered that No. 10 Downing Street is now cheerfully twittering away with links and info in regards to the PM and his upcoming events etc. They’ve also got a flickr page now too.

They’re in ur social networks, talking to ur citizens, eh?

I ain’t dead. ^[1]

[insert apology about time, the lack of; MSc. eating life, perils of working practically full-time while studying full-time as well]

• Lords of the Blog: Nine Peers of the House of Lords have joined the world of the legal blogs. Although the blog only officially opened this morning, there’s already plenty of content - inc. two interesting posts by Lord Norton on media representation of the HoL - and a survey they’d like you to take. No discussion as of yet but I am sure that will change shortly.
• Connie Crosby has collected the Library Journal’s Movers and Shakers for 2008 together into one handy (and readable!) list. Obviously US/Canada-centric but there’s some fascinating profiles and familiar names.

  But it does beg the question: who are the movers and shakers in UK librarianship? I read a lot of library blogs but with the exception of the legal librarians blogs, America and Canada outweigh the UK, so the news and advances and shiny things often come to me as either irreverent to my situation or are generally just inaccessible because they only apply to an entirely different place. Am I just not looking in the right places? Rec me some UK librarian blogs, please!

• And finally, on both a personal and a librarian note: Match it for Pratchett is a fan run attempt to match Terry Pratchett’s £500,000 donation to Alzheimer’s Research. This is a subject extremely close to my heart, both as a fan of Pterry and his world (if I hadn’t gone for Batgirl, the chance that this blog would have been called ‘Oook!’ is extremely high! I am rather fond of the librarian) and as someone who has lost members of my family to Alzheimer’s, so if you have some spare change, please consider throwing it their way.

1. Apologies to Pterry…

Facebook bows to user protest and allows full account deletion. Interesting, interesting. I’ve not looked into their new system yet but sufficient to say, it looks like it may be considerable easier to get out of Facebook’s clutches than previously.

Been somewhat silent here again, my apologies. I’ve been interviewing and plowing through the reading for my essays and the possible ideas for my thesis. The last taught semester of my MSc. is going faster than I expected it!

I am appearing every so often over at Law Librarians. The experiement is going quite well and we have quite a global community. Lo-fi librarian has an update on our progress and a small list of who is who.

We’re having a bit of a experiment in the law librarians circles with a WordPress theme that lets you post in a twitter-like manner to a blog. At the moment, it’s a mix of set up and links but we’re hoping to turn it into resource and information sharing.

Pop over and have a look: Law Librarians.

Semester has started again and I’m trying to recover from three hours of Law on a Monday morning (cruel and unusual punishment, I feel.) which is currently akin to being at work without being paid. Sigh.

I am attempting to lure my brain out from where ever it scuttled off when semester started.

• Why personal data is like nuclear waste Interesting article by Cory Doctorow on personal data and the storage thereof.
• The Concerns of Copyright Reform Michael Geist looks at the privacy implications of copyright reform and digital rights management technologies.
• What Our Top Spy Doesn’t Get: Security and Privacy Aren’t Opposites Bruce Schneier on why security and privacy are not opposite ends of a seesaw. US-centric but still applicable.
• Don’t expect privacy law overhaul in the wake of HMRC Out-law.com opinion piece on the government’s reaction to the recent data losses.
• Out-Law.com’s guide to Data Protection Does what it says on the tin, last updated August 2005 but still a good overview.
• Privacy chief wants new criminal offence Information Commissioner Richard Thomas has asked the Government to create a new offence of recklessly or knowing breaching data protection principles punishable by unlimited fines.

Hrrm. Facebook is currently being investigated by the Information Commissioner’s Office in regards to their data collection policies.

Turns out that even when you delete your profile (and no, I have not deleted mine yet), the data remains on their servers. Apparently, this is to aid you as the user should you ever want to reactivate your account but currently fails the general rule of Data Protection of not keeping information for longer than it is required.

It seems the only way to permanently delete your information is to clear out each individual section yourself before deactivating your account. Which puts the onus on the individual.

As I keep a fairly clean profile, that’s not the worst thing for me but it still rankles. And I’m still not entirely sure if that means that I have to trawl across my friends’ profiles removing any wall posts etc. I may have left on their profiles as well.

Not on, Facebook. Not on.

Picked this up from BoingBoing.net, an urban decay flickr set of an abandoned book depository in Detroit and its accompanying blog post.

I love Urban Decay photography - I almost did my final photography project at A-level on Urban Decay - and this set is both beautiful and horrifying with all those books!

They cite some stats re: literacy which sadly do not surprise me.

With Friends Like These…: Interesting article from the Guardian on the politics and philosophy behind Facebook and sufficient to say, the politics certainly do not match my own.

It’s certainly something to consider - I am not entirely happy with my Facebook use. It isn’t really doing a great deal for me but it’s certainly doing something for the people that benefit financially from my use of it. Plus, there isn’t actually anyone on my friends list (which v. small because I…have no interest in getting in contact with the people I barely knew at school.) that I don’t have contact with via other means so deleting my profile would not be the end of my world as I know it.

And I can still play Scrabble elsewhere.

And yes, I am well aware that the same people are behind Paypal but Paypal has an actual use for me and I am very aware of my shortcomings re: strictly following an ideology. Pros and cons are always something I consider and for the moment, I will continue to use Paypal.

Some links from the last week or so that have caught my eye:

• Do you need to read books to be clever?
  Mildly horrifying article about reading/the lack of in Britain. It is the national year of reading!
• Nature Journal digitalises archive
  The scientific journal Nature has digitalised its entire archive, from 1869 onwards.
• Bibliochaise
  This comes to my attention frequently because I waaaaant it. Oh, how I want it! You can even play around with the colours of the chair and cushion.
• US U-turn over Scottish authors
  The Library of Congress has reversed their decision to reclassify Scots authors as English. As is only correct!

Essays are all in, firm resolutions have been made about not slacking off this semester and a more frequent posting schedule should hopefully return!