Speculating on the future, and spotting trends, is always fun, and I indulge myself quite a lot in this blog in ruminating about these things from an information viewpoint.
I find myself quite outdone, however, by the Edge web forum, which examines new trends and concepts, particularly in science and technology . Each year, the [...]
Archive for the 'Uncategorized' Category
Canoeing fox, kayaking hedgehog
February 3, 2010Brian Vickery (and the uneasy information scientists)
January 28, 2010At the start of the 2010, we heard the sad news of the death of Brian Vickery in October last year. He was one of the leading lights of British information science over many years. This post is an expanded version of a short appreciation which I wrote as an editorial for Journal of Documentation. [...]
New year, old idea ?
January 28, 2010A new year always provokes thoughts of what has gone and what is to come. The news media, feeding our liking for the comfort of the repetition of the annual cycle, devote much space in January to this kind of reflection, which often seems not to change much from one year to the next. I [...]
Documenting Babel – languages in information science
November 28, 2009Musing on the continuing place of language issues in both research and practice in the information sciences, following my participation in the Zagreb InFuture meeting, I wrote an editorial on the topic for the Journal of Documentation. This post is an amended version.
Languages, in one guise or another, have been a constant feature of the [...]
INFuture2009, Zagreb
November 21, 2009I attended the second of the INFuture conferences, organised by the Department of Information Sciences at the University of Zagreb, Croatia, in early November. The general theme of the conference series is ‘The Future of Information Sciences’, and the focus for this conference was ‘Digital Resources and Knowledge Sharing’. By comparison with the first of [...]
The House of Wisdom
October 11, 2009A new book by Jonathan Lyons, The House of Wisdom: how the Arabs transformed Western civilisation, has a few surprising insights on developments in the recording and transmission of knowledge in the period.
Lyons focuses on the contribution of Abbasid rulers of Baghdad, from the founding of the dynasty in 762 to its overthrow by the [...]
English public libraries; needing new leadership ?
October 10, 2009A report on governance and leadership in the English public library service has been published, following an enquiry by the grandly-named All-Party Parliamentary Group on Libraries, Literacy and Information Management. Cynics have pointed out that this group is not quite the impartial assembly of the great and the good that its title might suggest; it [...]
Wirral public libraries saved ?
October 3, 2009In a previous post, I wrote about the plans by the local authority in Wirral, in the North West of England, to close half their public library branches, and turn the rest into multi-purpose community centres. A government enquiry into whether this action would break the law which requires the authority to provide an adequate [...]
Magic searching
August 26, 2009I have written a review of a new book Magic Search: getting the best results from your catalog and beyond, which will appear in due course in Journal of Documentation. Here’s a flavour of the review of what proved to be of much more interest than we have any right to expect from a book [...]
Are important years information years ?
August 26, 2009An article in Intelligent Life magazine for summer 2009 tried to decide which was ‘The most important year ever‘. The feature writer, Andrew Marr, argued for 1776, with the American Declaration of Independence, or 1945, with its world changing events; he was duly rebuked for US-centrism by website commentators. His five guests chose arguably [...]
