The joys of reference librarianship
As a student member of CILIP (the Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals), one of the benefits I receive is subscription to a handful of library-related publications. Upon joining, members are given several options of different publications in different areas. I selected CILIP’s own Gazette and Update, along with Refer.
While the Gazette provides the most up-to-date features on career advice and recent developments, Update is a bit more glossy and magazine-like, with more in-depth features on aspects of library and information services which are occasionally of interest.
Refer, however, published by the ISG (Information Services Group) – part of CILIP – often contains articles I find very interesting. The journal is published only 3 times a year, but focussing as it does on reference services, where other publications feature public/academic library and lending services, the articles are of particular interest to me.
I spent 8 months of 2008 in a new job on the reference desk at my library, and that was where I suddenly decided that reference/academic/local studies libraries and archives were what I wanted to become involved in. I love history, trivia and finding out answers to enquiries, and I love more than anything helping people get answers to their questions. So Refer is most definitely up my street.
In the current Summer 2009 issue, the best article covers a one day seminar held way back in November 2008 on the subject of genealogy and family history research. The article was packed so full of good advice and useful web links that I felt like I just had to pass it on. Thanks to some joined-up thinking, I can now simply link you to two brilliant documents – the essay from Refer itself, and the handout given out at the seminar. Both are small Word documents.
Don’t worry if you’re not a library geek such as myself – the documents contain simple, plain English information and web links to aid you in discovering who Great Aunt Jessie’s Dad was, or whether an ancestor of yours was sent to an Australian penal colony. Enjoy.
Calling all Spotify geeks – would this work?
tl;dr: Could you export your iTunes Library into a script which searches for the albums you own in Spotify, creating a Spotify playlist to mirror ‘your’ library?
*****
I’ve just realised I’ve been being a bit of an idiot when it comes to my use of Spotify.
Increasingly, I’ve been using it as a replacement for using iTunes on my MacBook at home due to me having my iTunes library on an external hard drive. At home I don’t have a desk per se, so carting an external drive around isn’t a good solution. So I’ve been using Spotify a lot to listen to music I already own – a scenario that might sound silly, but when you think about the logistics, it does kind of make sense.
Up till now, I had been saving playlists of every album I listen to in Spotify’s handy sidebar. I figure if I’m going to listen to one album, I’ll want to listen to it again later. I’m like that. So I’ll save it as a playlist. However, the space for such playlists in Spotify isn’t huge, and I’ve quickly wound up with a very long scrolly list of links. Worse than that, they aren’t in any order – apart from the order in which they were created, starting with a playlist John made in December, and a couple of Dylan and Young bootlegs.
Playlists are great for unique mixes of tracks I’ll admit, but I’ve never really made use of mixtapes and the like, so I’ve not been using Spotify for this function. I occasionally sample playlists made by others, but have never bothered making one myself.
Given that one can search for an album in Spotify in a second or two, it is perhaps pointless that I’ve been making playlists of plain vanilla albums, but somehow I find it useful to have them listed in some way. But as I said, having a list of albums in no real order is a bit of a nuisance. No way of sorting them.
But then it hit me – you can sort within a playlist. I know this – I just made a playlist of all the White Stripes albums available, in chronological order. And if you can sort a handful of albums in a playlist, surely you could sort a handful of artists, too? And then I suddenly thought, why have I been making individual playlists of albums and artists, when I could have been making one big playlist of all these things, sorted by artist – you know, kind of like in iTunes?
That way, a playlist – perhaps entitled ‘Library’, for instance – could contain as much as you like, sorted by artist, or available to listen using shuffle – you know… Kind of like in iTunes.
So there’s one question: is there a limit to the number of tracks one can put in a playlist (and if there isn’t a technical limit, is there any practical reason to limit the numbers)?
And then there’s another question – one for someone smarter than myself – would it be possible to automagically create a Spotify playlist made up of all the tracks from your own iTunes Library that are available? It seems simple to me: export your iTunes Library (as plain text, presumably), and then create a script that takes each album listing, searches for it on Spotify and, if found, adds it into a playlist. If it’s not found, no bother – there’s no way around that.
If Spotify playlists are unlimited, and the script works properly, you’d end up with a single Spotify playlist that – as much as is possible – mimics your iTunes Library. And then as you find new releases or old records you don’t own, it is simple to add them to your Spotify ‘library’ for next time. In future, when Spotify goes mobile, wouldn’t it be handy to have a live playlist of ‘your’ music, as well as having access to Spotify’s entire database?
My question to you, dear reader is: would this be possible? Would this work? Do you even get what I’m saying?
But I suppose most importantly: does anyone else see the point in this? Or am I approaching Spotify from completely the wrong angle, where the concept of a core library is irrelevant? Am I hypothesising a solution to a problem that doesn’t exist?
I’d be very interested in your thoughts on this…
edit #1: This post appears to confirm that “playlists have no limit (or at least a very high limit, not totally sure)”, which is promising.
edit #2: From trawling Spotify’s Get Satisfaction posts, it appears that I’m not the first person to have this idea, which makes me happy. Post #1; Post #2
Glen Christie is going to eat himself to death
I wouldn’t normally pimp another blog to you – not least one that is chronicling the awesome adventures of someone who isn’t myself, dammit – but this is a special case.
Sunburnt and cider drunk at Truck, July 2006
My good buddy Glen Christie is in the States as we speak, at the start of a huge journey all over the country with a few mates. They’re driving around most of the country, sampling America’s best (or worst) in fast food.
Much more than just a Brits abroad lads’ tour (”Rooney!”), the boys from Dundee and St Andrews have already made a brilliant job of documenting the trip in photographs, video and words. Not just that, but the breakdowns of the fast food joints they visit are often frighteningly detailed, and only stand to get more so.
The link to check out is http://fastfoodtour09.blogspot.com/ or you can follow them on Twitter: @fastfoodtour09
As I say – I wouldn’t normally feel compelled to shout about someone else’s project, but it’s being done so well that I do. And the other factor is that I’ve had the astonishing good fortune to spend many trips in Glen’s company, whether it’s been following the alt-country singer everyone loves to hate around the country, going to festivals, taking an impromptu trip to Switzerland, driving out to remote Scottish beaches and sitting astride dormant volcanoes, or barbecues and travelodges in the dead of night in Somerset. So I know what a fantastic travel buddy he is, and this only serves to make me feel even more jealous that I’m not on the journey with him.
Finally though, one particularly lovely memory, from the banks of Lake Geneva in October 2006, thankfully captured on video by our mutual friend (or enemy?!) John Tucker, is presented here for you with pleasure:
Now, that’s quite enough Glen-fawning for one lifetime, I need to spend more time with John I think…
Free by Chris Anderson
(originally posted on pulpmagazine.co.uk)
I had the pleasure today of spending three and a half hours of my precious time (ho ho ho) listening to Wired’s Chris Anderson reading his new book. Not to me personally of course, merely the audiobook of Free: The Future of a Radical Price. The book is along similar lines to his previous book The Long Tail, in which he described the concept which has rapidly become common parlance when talking about modern economics.
I must admit though, that I haven’t read The Long Tail, and I honestly wouldn’t have bothered with Free if it weren’t for one crucial fact: the audiobook was being offered up free, in its entirety via Spotify (to UK users only at this stage).
I like the idea of audiobooks. I love radio. Podcasts. The spoken word. Informative speeches and the like. But I rarely listen to audiobooks. On the odd occasions I have done, it’s been largely as a distraction from having hours to myself – usually when travelling, via train or plane, over long distances. Bill Bryson’s A Short History of Nearly Everything got a 13-hour flight last year off to a flying start (sorry). But aside from listening to whole chunks of audiobooks simply as a distraction, their practicality is lost on me. For the most part, I think I’d rather just read the thing.
But as I say: Free isn’t a book I would normally have read. A book which has its roots in web technology and global popular culture, fine – but served as side orders to the main theme of economics? No thanks. My attention span is short enough without bringing economics into it.
But Anderson’s book is far more accessible than that. He delves into the history of this concept of ‘free’, the development of it in relation to globalisation and mass culture, right up to the inevitable examples of Radiohead and Nine Inch Nails giving away their music and smashing paradigms like ants underfoot.
Of course, writing about an audiobook as I am, I can’t talk about the book as purely text on a page: what I experienced was three hours of a man telling me what he thinks about something. And Anderson’s pace is relentless at times. Granted I shouldn’t have listened to it in almost one go, but I felt like I wanted to, to see what conclusions would be drawn from real-world scenarios that I knew a bit about already. But I must admit to tuning out occasionally – like I say, it is ostensibly a book about world economics…
Overall though, the book is engaging and at times thought-provoking. The hoped-for conclusions aren’t as concrete as one may have hoped; Free is more of a brief history and state of the union than an earth-shattering statement of intent. Having Anderson narrate his own book is a good decision: his tone is fresh and he holds your attention most of the time. I was occasionally left wondering where the line is drawn between hearing a speech, having a (peculiarly one-sided) conversation, and the traditional model of an audiobook. As the delivery methods merge, the line begins to blur.
But I can’t talk about Free without making mention to the controversy surrounding some of Anderson’s sources – or rather, his failure to cite their authors. In the past week or two, literature journal the Virginia Quarterly Review picked up on and reported several cases of what it believed to be plagiarism in the book. In a blog entry, direct comparisons were shown between Anderson’s text and Wikipedia articles in what amounted to a fairly damning indictment. In Anderson’s defence, he was quick to answer these calls, and has subsequently given his side of the story, resulting in a PDF of citations and references being made available. These should arguably have been included in the original book, but they weren’t and Anderson has put forward a fair explanation.
Finally, the main crux of how I ended up listening to Free should be mentioned. Spotify is pretty well-known to anybody who gets their musical fix from the internet: it is software which acts like an iTunes library that includes the vast majority of music available to buy online through other services. You fire it up, search for an album, and within seconds the music is playing. Downsides include only having access to music while tethered to a broadband connection (natch, although this is set to change) and that, while free, Spotify pops audio adverts into the playback stream – a 30-second radio-style ad every six songs or so. A premium subscription is available for £10 a month which strips your listening of any such interruptions, but at this stage it seems that most users are happy to put up with them in exchange for free access to the music.
I’m a big fan of Spotify and have been using it for almost a year, but today’s addition of Anderson’s audiobook is a new innovation – audibooks have until now been absent from Spotify’s library. But it worked beautifully – dividing into chapters allows the listener to take breaks (or to share specific chapters with other users), and the audio quality matches up with Spotify’s free service – ~160kbps. And this is important: one of the negatives of audiobooks bought online (at least for me) is their audio quality. An audiobook bought from iTunes is far lower quality (32kbps I believe), and this really detracts from the experience. The reasoning behind this choice could be said to be down to the delivery – audiobooks can be huge, and downloading ‘CD-quality’ audio files that number many tens of hours could be off-putting, as could fitting the thing on a portable player. But given the Moore’s Law evolution of connection speeds and iPod capacity, surely these factors are now null and void. Heck, iTunes even sells movies and whole TV series in bandwidth-destroying HD now.
I digress. Spotify’s presentation of Free was very satisfying and was completely in line with its much-vaunted music service and if this is a sign of things to come, I expect my enjoyment of audiobooks to improve tenfold. It has my blessings and I look forward to more being added in the near future. And Free itself was an interesting book, continuing Chris Anderson’s mission of deconstructing world economics for the 21st century.
Of course, the irony of listening to book about free culture via a free service isn’t lost on me…
Result!
Well, I got my results through from the university. And I passed! I mean, I’ve said before that passing the Foundation Year was never really going to be too much of a challenge, but confirmation that I have passed and can therefore continue onto my proper degree – BSc (Hons) Information Management – is sweet.
Better than that, my grades are pretty satisfying too. The two compulsory units are my weakest – as I would have expected, given my enthusiasm – followed by a fair mark in French which I expected given the combination of enjoying it but struggling, having not studied it for seven years. But the main two units, along with my choice of Popular Culture, all ended up with marks of 70, 71 and 73.5. I’m really chuffed with those marks. Really chuffed indeed.
Onwards and upwards I guess…
