Author: Dave

“Oh-oh dedication’s what you need…

…if you wanna be a record break-er, oooooh!” (full lyrics)
I’m not sure if the University of Huddersfield has ever made an appearance in the Guinness book of World Records before, but it looks like we should be in the next edition!

Students from the University’s Department of Chemical & Biological Sciences teamed up with about 60 sixth-form students from local schools and colleges to beat the record in just under one hour, following a morning of intensive coaching and training. The record-breaking model measures 21.5 m (70 feet 6 inches) and exactly copies the genetic code for human insulin. It is the world’s largest model and consists of 1,118 ‘base pairs’, compared with the previous world record, which was a random sequence of about 300 base pairs.


Major kudos to everyone involved!!!

30 years young

Wow — this makes me feel old! Lego “minifigs” (specifically the ones with moveable arms and legs) are 30 years old this year…

Looking through the 1978 Lego releases, I’ve no problem at all in identifying exactly which ones I bought with my pocket money 😀
– Space Transport (918)
– Space Transporter (924)
– Space Scooter (885)
– Police car (621)
– Shell tanker (671)
The 1978 catalogues also bring back loads of memories.
A couple of years later, I was lucky enough to get one of these — the Expert Builder Auto Chassis (8860-1)…

…from memory, it took about 90 minutes to build from scratch 😀
So, many thanks to Ole Kirk Christiansen for the hundreds of hours of fun I had playing with my Lego collection as a child and many happy returns to all of the billions of minifigs out there!
p.s. drool

I am reliant on Bloglines

Well, it turns out I am reliant on Bloglines when it comes to finding out what’s going on 😀
Little did I know that my work colleagues have been busy uploading photos to Flickr behind my back! I’ll hopefully be bumping into a few of them at the Beer Festival in Holmfirth on Saturday, so I’ll be quizzing them about these images 🙂

Changes at SirsiDynix EMEA

Many thanks to Marshall Breeding for reporting the news about the change of management at SirsiDynix EMEA (who are responsible for the UK). I’m presuming that the company has remembered to email its customers to let them know? …I’d hate to think I’m relying on Bloglines to keep me up to speed with what’s happening at Chesham 😉
I’d like to wish Keith all the best in his new role and “yes” — what happened on the bus, stays on the bus! ***
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(Keith Sturges, refusing to stand still at the Southampton User Group Conference)
*** suffice it to say that it involved Talin Bingham and an inflatable sheep 😀

since when are librarians synonymous with paedophiles?

Working in a library, this BBC News headline was bound to catch my eye: “Paedophile ‘librarian’ is jailed“.
So, this would be a news item about a librarian who was discovered to be a paedophile, then? No.
Having read (and re-read the article), the paedophile never worked in a library nor was he a librarian. Apparently, the mere fact that he collected illegal images of children and shared them on a web site makes him a “librarian”.
So, librarians of the world, how does it feel to be branded as a bunch of dirty, kiddie-fiddling perverts?

Hey up — I’m in a national newspaper!

Wow… that was kinda surreal — I was catching up with the Google News RSS feed for Alfred Hitchcock (who was born on August 13th) and there was this headline from today’s Telegraph and an article that mentions me (well, mentions my nickname, anyway):
Did Alfred Hitchcock make a secret cameo appearance in drag?

Now, I’ll ‘fess up straight away — the answer is “no”, but the devil in me likes to say “maybe he did”. Anyway, you can find further details and the background to the story on the wiki.
I have to admit that it’s been fun to spread the rumour, especially when it really does look like Hitchcock, but I guess now might be the time to reveal who it really is… if you really, really, really do want to know, then click here.

what do bibliobloggers talk about?

As one final “hurrah” from the Hot Stuff service, I thought it would be fun to put all of the data into Wordle. Every day, for the last 2 years or so, my code has saved away the top 100 words from all of the new blog posts from around 500 librarian blogs…
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http://wordle.net/gallery/wrdl/109981/biblioblogosphere
…so, from all of this painstaking research we can clearly see that librarian bloggers love to talk about books! 😉

Reshelve all your books by the colour of their spine

Thanks to Iman for jogging my memory about this blog post which I’d been meaning to blog about for the last couple of weeks — in fact, I was chatting to someone after the ARCLib Conference in Liverpool last week about it, but couldn’t remember the name of the library for the life in me (it’s the Emily Carr University Library)…

The above was a senior grad project by Valérie Madill and you can find further details here: “Looking at Libraries: Defining Space Through Content“.
During my ARCLib presentation (which bizarrely ended up as a featured slideshow on the slideshare home page!?!), I mentioned the book shop in San Francisco that Chris Cobb famously rearranged by colour (see Flickr)…

I must briefly mention that the last session of the conference was given by Stephanie Davies of laughology.co.uk. I don’t think I’ve ever laughed so much at a library conference 😀
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Just in case anyone didn’t believe me that there’s a web page with a list of dirty library words, it’s here!
I’m itching to do something cool on one of our library’s plasma screens and I was wondering about hooking it up to a webcam and doing something like this, but using book cover thumbnails instead of the square blocks of colour?
me
I think I’ve still got the code I used to creating the “librarians as books” kicking around somewhere…
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