Cam23 2.0, Thing 23: Reflection

Things which made you smile

QR codes have become quite an enthusiasm of mine, and the mismatch between that and the dumbphone I stick with has generated some interesting conversations. I cried up QR codes in the Haddon's presentation to the Alumni Weekend, but didn't have an immediate answer to the alumnus who asked if I could recommend a QR reader app.

I was saddened by the recent Twitter spat

between Charlie Brooker and Phil Bradley. "Leave them to the competent" is no way to address a customer, or even a potential customer. I hope we can account it an appalling lapse on Phil's part, rather than a foretaste of his presidency. It's not the kind of thing I meant to support when I voted for him last year.

Gliffy I see myself using in connection with Haddon projects.

Things which have become a part of the way you live and work

This list has not changed much since 2010, when my list included Doodle, Google Docs, Google Calendar, RSS feeds, Twitter, and Google Reader. The applications I would add for 2011 are the ones named in the previous section. I'm making a bit more use of screenshots now that Lightshot has given me the power of editing them and pasting small, relevant sections of them into documents. And I am glad that the Haddon blog now tweets for itself.

Things which you'll never go near again

Pushnote, probably, for reason stated.

Web 2.0 and social media more generally - what role do they really play within libraries and information services?

I'm afraid I lack the resources to answer this question properly. Short of a proper survey of the library world, I am thrown back on my own observation and experience -- and they may be as unreliable now as in the diary entry of the white ten-year-old, after a car journey across London in August 1967: "I saw several coloured people but no prejudice."

My own experience is that social media in my library setting have been extremely useful to me, but have not wholly persuaded many other people of their effectiveness. It's rare that I get much response when I set up a Doodle poll for a meeting; the Haddon Library's Twitter presence has no more than 36 followers; not all readers possess the kit to use QR codes.

Against that is the fact that all the tricks named in this post were taught me by librarians. Librarians are evidently enthusiasts for these tricks. And the reports in other cam23 blog posts, even allowing for wishful thinking, do seem to indicate that the tricks are proving effective.

As a profession, we like to whinge about how we are perceived by our neighbours, by the media, and by the world in general. Here's a challenge. Let's listen out, instead, for people who mistake us for more able than we are. Let's try and get an idea of what drives any such welcome misperception -- is it linked to our bookish skills? is it linked to our skills with social media? is it linked to something else?

Maybe then we shall have some idea of what role social media are really playing....

Cam23 2.0: Week 4, Extra Thing: Using the Library Widget

Yes, I see I should have blogged about this, instead of airily dismissing it and turning my attention to a dark corridor of the Google Calendar.

Briefly, then: I once explained to a Haddon reader that non-delivery of our reminder notices did not excuse the late return of borrowed items, and told him, & then everyone else in an email circular, that I made a note of return dates in my filofax. The next person who tries on the undelivered-reminder ploy will be referred to the libraries widget, which takes the work of making such an entry.

And even more briefly: I wish I'd noticed, before the airy turn, the extra extra thing of the Libraries at Cambridge calendar. Now I don't need to go tramping through CamTools in search of journal discussion lunches.

Cam23 2.0: Week 13, Extra Thing: QR codes

Think about how QR codes could be used in your library. What are the benefits and the drawbacks?

The Haddon is already using QR codes on notices, generated from http://bit.ly . We put them on handouts for new users and visitors. The codes link to the library's web pages.



I have considered using QR codes in the paper version of our list of useful links. I might yet do that; at the moment, my feeling is that a code for each link would clutter the thing, and that a single QR from that paper list to the web version would avoid that problem.

Have a go at generating a code of your own. Unfortunately you will only be able to read it if you have a phone with a barcode reader (e.g. QR Code Reader and Scanner for the iPhone or QR Droid for Android), but try and get someone to read it and test it out.

As indicated above, I have already generated QR codes for the Haddon. I lack a smartphone to read them myself. When I first put them out into the world I feared I might be in the position of the 4-year-old who scribbled all over a piece of paper and then said, "Mummy, when I go to school I'll be able to read that!"

I was showing off about the codes to one library user, and noticed that her phone looked smart enough to read them. But she'd never heard of QR codes. I conducted her to the nearest notice of ours that sported one, and then neither of us quite knew what to do next. Which part of the mobile should be pointed at the code? The reason for this embarrassing glitch, as Andy Priestner explained when I asked him, will have been that the phone lacked a QR reader app. Apparently they don't come built in, and a person who'd not heard of QR codes would hardly have downloaded such a thing.

I tried the QR codes again on a group from a Sutton Trust summer school. One of them pointed a mobile phone at the code, and the code led the phone to our web page. Better still was the answer from the member of the Open Cambridge group whom I asked if the results were mobile friendly. On the other hand, a question in that context isn't exactly rigorous market research, and smartphone users' views on our pages are hereby sought.

If you're feeling fancy, try making a personalised code!

OK, here it comes. The text is a stage direction from a sitcom episode by the late lamented N.F. Simpson (1979:486), which has been a catchphrase of mine for over thirty years.


SIMPSON, N.F. 1979. The best I can do by way of a table-leg is a hundredweight of coal. In Paul Jennings (ed.), The book of nonsense: an anthology. London: Futura, pp. 460-487.

Blurts

This is the sequence of poems I mentioned back in February, the one about the "fragmentary vocalisations, unconnected with their immediate circumstances, that one utters in response to awkward memories." At that time, I made a link to another online manifestation of the work, but that manifestation seems to be not always there when wanted.

'Blurts' was not conceived as a sequence, but written as the individual parts suggested themselves to me in 2003-2004. It was published in the language quarterly Verbatim 30(i), Spring 2005, p. 17, following one of the fastest acceptances I've ever had. 2004 was like that.

Blurts turn out, or at any rate their driver, the sense of living in a perpetual jangle of remembered gaffes and peccadilloes, turns out, to be more widespread than I once thought. I have shown the below sequence to people and found, gratifyingly often, that the response is one of recognition. On the other hand, the counting of blurts, by means of a stopwatch, appears to be an idiosyncrasy of mine. I call it blurtmetry, and have used its name again for the present blog. For an account of the genesis of blurtmetry as a hobby, see the British Science Festival 2011 poetry competition, 15th post; however, it found no other enthusiasts, and my family were relieved when I abandoned it after three years.

Verbatim is in abeyance at the moment, and greatly missed.

BLURTS

(i)

Some gaffe has bubbled in my memory.
"You idiot!" I mutter, meaning me.
Somebody overhears me and feels meant.
Another bubble's on its long ascent.

(ii)

Whispering “DEATH!”
is a waste of breath.

(iii)

My rule -- Don't talk to someone you can't see --
may help me see that one or other hears.
It doesn't stop blurts of apology
to teachers I've not seen in thirty years.

(iv)

Solo,
I bark Sorry! staccato
for an old peccadillo –
a sort of self-vendetta.

Recalling what I can’t recall
finds cracks of resolution
in battering the party-wall
edgeways with noise-pollution.

(v)

A blurt of the usual sort,
in a prayer, would stick out like a wart.
So in church, when an old thing went off in my head,
I converted the blurt to a silent stop dead –
and “The man’s half-asleep,” people thought.

(vi)

Another wordless blurt's the thick-blink wince.
Perhaps it was your music that set ringing
the trigger memories, laid down long since;
I did not mean a slight upon your singing.

(vii)

Treading two steps in ten on words that trigger
the sort of memory that stops me dead,
I'm glad to find the English language bigger
than lists of what I wish I hadn't said.
Indeed, if I went through the dictionary
on purpose to stain every word with me
and PowerPointed® the resulting story
to seminars on lexicography
(“CLEUGH I illiterately mispronounced,
NOUP I wrote in exams, under-prepared,
PORRET accompanied a cheque that bounced,
DRAN and I've just now realised why she glared”),
the words I'd left unstained would make the thing
so gappy as to be embarrassing.

Imagined corners

This sequence appeared in Streetwise 54, Easter 2004, p. 20, and Streetwise 55, summer 2004, p. 9 & p. 14.


IMAGINED CORNERS

1. The world is fixed, and its fixity is a disaster

The chatterers (content to shake a tin,
donate blood, boycott Nestle, or pay taxes)
cannot conceive the work we’re buried in -
to turn the world once round upon its axis.

The chatterers presumably suppose
it turns already, of its own accord.
No one can warn them of the fate of those
trapped in the fixity they have ignored.

To turn the world – that is our party’s aim –
to turn it so it travels round the sun,
and never know the compromisers’ shame
of thinking that the turning has been done.

What if this does mean endless self-defeat?
The self-rewards are in their own way sweet.


2. The world is turning, and its turning is a disaster

The world is turning, and whoever saw
anything turn except against someone?
The world is turning against the law.

The proofs mount up. The turning floods the sea
across the boundaries it should not pass,
water where it ought not to be.

The days that in their pride and blindness will
inexorably pound twenty-four hours
leave no time for the sun’s standing still.

The vandalism. See the perfect fit,
Brazil-West Africa. Think what brute force
hammered the blow that made that split.

They tell us now that harnessing the action
of tides to generate electric power
slows the earth’s movement by a fraction.

Forget it. Fraction slower, fraction faster,
all the world offers us is yet more spin,
and no one’s there to challenge the disaster,
wheeling about the burnt black hole we’re in.


3. The world is fixed, and its fixity is a good thing

The baby moves less than the cry.
The cradle moves less than the baby.
The floor moves less than the cradle.
The world moves less than the floor.

People who say the world turns have projected
their own impermanence anxiety
on to the world. Their judgment is affected,
and I don’t trust the things they claim to see.


4. The world is turning, and its turning is a good thing

I gift-aid what I put in the collection,
shun cigarettes, cars, tropical hardwood,
reduce, reuse, recycle, compost, save.
I help the world keep turning. Aren’t I good?

I start each day by shelving journals, keep
records of targets not met as I should,
buy the Big issue, offer beggars vouchers.
I help the world keep turning. Aren’t I good?

I have rules for effective telephoning,
and interlocking protocols re food.
I change the heads of toothbrushes each quarter.
I help the world keep turning. Aren’t I good?

When I was twelve, I remained silent as
a punishment that should have come my way
went to another boy. I cannot turn
the world through space far enough from that day.

I’m OK you’re OK, a legal fiction,
lets us communicate more than we could
if we were rigorous. The world keeps turning.
Best isn’t best at the expense of good.