Edith Speller :: Blog

I have a new blog, Multi-faceted, over on Wordpress - if you're interested, please do subscribe to my feed!

http://www.jisclegal.ac.uk/

Lots of information about legal issues relating to e-learning etc, including copyright which is useful for librarians/info professionals advising colleagues.

http://www.vts.intute.ac.uk/he/tutorial/music

Fantastic tutorial about finding and using music resources online.

This video is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 License.

A work colleague forwarded me this excellent video, which I highly recommend watching (it's about 10 min long). It was made by Professor Eric Faden of Bucknell University to explain copyright law, but to do so he's cleverly spliced together clips from Disney films. In case you don't know, the main reason for the repeated lengthening of the copyright term (currently life + 70 years for creators) is lobbying by Disney, who can't stomach the idea of Mickey Mouse et al entering the public domain! Believe it or not the video is entertaining while getting an important message across, so do take a look.

Right, here's the exciting news I alluded to in my previous post: my article on distributed classification (a.k.a. folksonomies, tagging etc.) has been published in the Library Student Journal's February 2007 edition.

The bulk of the article was written as an assignment for the cat & class module of my MSc course. I'm grateful to Pauline Rafferty, the teacher of that module, for asking that it be submitted in the style of a journal article as that certainly made it easier to revise for submission to the journal! I'm also grateful to the (anonymous) peer reviewers who suggested several improvements to the article, and to Eli (the editor of the journal) who commented on this very blog to tell me of the journal's existence.

I'm really pleased to see some positive feedback already - Ben the washtublibrarian has started a topic on the LSJ forum about collaborative/distributed classification so feel free to contribute there if you're interested in the subject.

Anyway, if I can do it anyone can do it, so if you've written something you think would be useful for others to read, why not try submitting work yourself? For example, LSJ is actively seeking submissions and has submission guidelines online. Go on, get involved!

Oh dear. I've left this blog to die a horrible death over recent months. I'm now bringing it back to life as there are all sorts of exciting things happening for me research-wise: watch this space!

To bring things up-to-date: I completed and submitted my dissertation on time, and it was awarded a distinction mark, which means I now have an MSc. Hurrah! I will write a bit about the research and/or its findings in a future post, but I don't want to put the whole thing up here as I'm harbouring hopes (encouraged by my supervisor) of turning it into a journal article and getting published. The academic geek side of me finds this incredibly exciting; the procrastinating side shudders at the thought of editing down 17000 words into something pithy and insightful.

I'd had several unsuccessful job interviews while completing my dissertation, but very soon after handing it in I had a rather more successful one. As a result, since October I've been employed as an Assistant Librarian at the Royal College of Music (a conservatoire in central London). I'm currently finding it difficult to judge where professional boundaries lie in blogging about work, so am abstaining from it completely until I figure that out.

Finally, chartership. I've not registered for it yet, and I'm in two minds about doing it at the moment. Again, I'll leave this as subject matter for a future post, else I'll run out of material before I've restarted!

So, apologies for the hiatus, and I'll try to stop life getting in the way so much in future :)

Well, after spending around 40 days offline in the last couple of months, I'm delighted to finally have what seems to be a stable internet connection at home again!

Unfortunately, it did rather scupper my plans for this weblog over the period of completing my dissertation: I started out making occasional public posts on relevant topics I thought others might find interesting, with private posts covering to-do lists and reminding myself what I'd done for the purposes of writing-up. However, once my online time was limited these activites were dropped as I used the time to carry out the research instead and keep in touch with friends and family, which I do almost entirely online nowadays.

Now there's just over three weeks left until my deadline: I'll make an effort to revive this weblog, but of course my top priority has to be writing the dissertation itself, so posts may end up being delayed somewhat!

So, the future of online applications, like Writely and Google's new spreadsheet application, all sounds rather nifty doesn't it? Access your files wherever you are, don't worry too much about backup because the companies probably do it for you, no clunky programs slowing down your machine, just a compact little web browser.

I thought so too. However, the last couple of weeks has revealed to me a snag in the whole affair: internet connectivity. If you use desktop applications and save everything on your hard drive, losing your internet connection is a real pain but doesn't stop you working on your report or essay. However, if you're using Writely to do the work and saving it on their server and your connection goes down, you're stuck. The fact is that we're still a way away from having connections quite sturdy enough to rely on that heavily. I discovered this when a monumental screw-up by my home ISP resulted in us losing our connection for a week, and losing it again for another 36 hours (and counting) soon afterwards. [I'm writing this from my friendly local public library, which boasts both wi-fi and air conditioning, a relief considering current London temperatures!]

Basically, it comes down to back-ups. Fine, store everything online, but keep a local copy too just in case. Ditto, if you store everything locally you're told either to have a second local copy on another hard disk or back-up media, or to keep an online copy as a back-up. Thing is, what happens if all your programs rely on an internet connection? What if you're a home-worker (or distance-learning student) and don't have a convenient workplace to get online at? Is this really a sensible state of affairs? I remain to be convinced.

Hello faithful blog readers,

As you may know, I'm currently studying for a Masters (postgraduate) degree in Library and Information Studies at City University in London, UK. As part of this course I am carrying out research examining people's perceptions of pop music, particularly the moods and emotions music evokes, in order to write a dissertation on the subject.

As part of this research I am carrying out an online survey, in which participants are asked to listen to samples of five songs and enter the words they feel best describe each song, both emotionally and more generally. I will also ask for some basic information about each participant (including age, gender and nationality) to allow me to see if these characteristics alter people's descriptions of pop music. Information will be presented anonymously in the submitted research results, which means no-one other than me will be able to see individual responses linked to email addresses.

The survey is estimated to take between five and twenty minutes to complete, and is likely to be online between 24th July and 14th August. If you are interested in taking part in this survey, please email me at e.a.speller @ city.ac.uk (removing spaces from the address) using the email address you would prefer to be contacted with, and I will send you an invitation to take part as soon as the survey is online. If I am in the fortunate position of having more volunteers than are needed to carry out the research, I will pick respondents at random. Volunteers completing the survey will be given the option of receiving summary results of the research after its completion in mid to late September.

Thanks in advance!

Edited 23/7/2007: I no longer need volunteers as I completed my research last September - thank you to those who responded! The email address in this post is no longer valid as City Uni helpfully cut off students six months after they finish courses (with no email forwarding to soften the blow) - if you need to contact me, please either leave a comment on the blog or e-mail blogATedithspellerDOTcoDOTuk.

I'm sorry, it's an easy shot to take, but it's always fun to take the mick out of corporate-speak: CILIP's choosing a 'membership message'. Ok, this is something organisations seem to need to do to appear modern and relevant and all that, but market research always seems to lead to these bland-sounding, fairly meaningless messages. I mean, "CILIP: helping you be all you can"?! :)

How about "CILIP: showing librarians aren't mean, sad, peculiar or petty-minded"? (see yesterday's Notes and Queries in the Guardian's G2, which unfortunately aren't online yet.)