Britney, 2002

Lost but not forgotten

Big Mac and What

He caught me. I felt horrible and judgemental.
I am a bad person. Life bites.

The Children of Beatrice & Sidney Webb

Beatrice Webb reflecting on the London School of Economics (1895) and the New Statesman (1913), two British institutions that she and Sidney played the leading role in creating.

Beatrice and Sidney Webb, c1942

Webbs on the Webb 

September 14th 1936.

                          In old age it is one of the minor satisfactions of life to watch the success of your children, literal children or symbolic.  The London School of Economics is undoubtedly our most famous one; but the New Statesman is also creditable - it is the most successful of the general weeklies, actually making a profit on its 25000 readers, and has absorbed two of its rivals, The Nation and the Week-end Review.

The Children of Beatrice & Sidney Webb by Andy Jack is licensed under Creative Commons
Based on a work at digital.library.lse.ac.uk
Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at http://www2.lse.ac.uk/library/archive/services/publication.aspx.

An Israeli Dilemma

A cartoon by Ronny Gordon taken from the Jerusalem Post. source link

Rarely is life as straightforward as a cartoon like this might suggest; but they don't half help simplify things.

Escalating Middle East tensions are seriously bad for the whole world and the increasing complexity of this historical period is deeply concerning.

I realise that war is a great stimulus for change and makes people a lot of money, but if we end up with nuclear wastelands here and there we might as well all just give up. Bleeding egotistical folly. Plus, I've always wanted to go to Iran so if we could all just settle down and take a step back then I will get on with renewing my passport. 

Nothing Much Else To Say

Yellow Submarine lunch box

Yellow Submarine lunch box, a photo by Wired Photostream on Flickr.

Via Flickr:
From Hot Collectible Lunch Boxes Preserve the Past

Photo: Jim Merithew/Wired.com

Star Wars lunch box

Star Wars lunch box, a photo by Wired Photostream on Flickr.

The owner would of been the talk of the playground!

Via Flickr:
From Hot Collectible Lunch Boxes Preserve the Past

Photo: Jim Merithew/Wired.com

Via: OnlineEducation.net http://www.onlineeducation.net/digital-textbooks

http://headrush.typepad.com/creating_passionate_users/2006/03/how_to_be_an_ex.html

Source

Beatrice Potter (Webb) on Sidney Webb

Sidney Webb, 1930s

The LSE Digital Library is here and the Webb diaries open to all. Here's my, albeit anachronistic, re-use matching a diary extract and one of LSE's pictures on Flickr.

Beatrice Potter recorded in her diary her first meeting with Sidney Webb (14th February, 1890)

 "Sidney Webb the socialist dined here to meet the Booths. A remarkable little man with a huge head on a very tiny body: a breadth of forehead quite sufficient to account for the encyclopaedic character of his knowledge, a Jewish nose, prominent eyes and mouth, black hair, somewhat unkempt, spectacles and a most bourgeois black coat shiny with wear; regarded as a whole somewhat between a London card and a German Professor. To keep to externals: his pronunciation is cockney, his Hs are shaky, his attitudes by no means eloquent -  with his thumbs fixed pugnaciously in a far from immaculate waistcoat, with his bulky head thrown back and his little body forward he struts even when he stands, delivering himself with extraordinary rapidity of thought and utterance and with an expression of inexhaustible self-complacency. But I like the man. There is a directness of speech, an open-mindedness, an imaginative warm-heartedness which should carry him far. He has the self-complacency of one who is always thinking faster than his neighbours, who is untroubled by doubts, and to whom the acquisition of facts is as easy as the grasping of matter; but he has no vanity and is totally unself-conscious."

An interesting and beautiful description of another human being and, perhaps one of the best expressions of love at first sight that I have ever read.

You can read and compare the manuscript and typescript version of this extract on the LSE Digital Library. Trust me, there is a mountain of incredibly interesting text here that can be used to tell amazingly resonate stories.

Related sources: LSE News archive; New Statesman. 

In a digital world no book is an island

This is a derivative work based on content in the LSE Digital Library and on the LSE Library Flickr stream. The text is CC licensed and the image has 'No known copyright restrictions' 

LSE Library Political Posters

LSE Library Political Posters, a gallery on Flickr.

Via Flickr:
A selection of posters from the LSE Library Archives collection.

LSE Library Selection

LSE Library Selection, a gallery on Flickr.

Via Flickr:
A selection of some of the best photos on flickr by, or of, LSE Library.

Some work thing

i heart maps


View International Interlending and Document Delivery Networks in a larger map

Beatrice and Sidney Webb, c1942

Devoted to one another. Bring on the Webb diaries...

From the LSE Library Flickr collection

Talking to Machines

3 million people a month talk to Cleverbot!



Over 65 million conversations and some lasting as long as 11 hours!

Fascinating, funny and ever so slightly unsettling.

Filtering

Creating solutions is not the same as finding them

Another great SlideRocket. One for the teachers.

http://portal.sliderocket.com:80/app/FullPlayer.aspx?id=fcb63499-a733-4556-9a6c-5b7abc314e0b

Data failure

Where does all this library stuff come from? using MARC and Google to visualise

This is what happens when you take a large and generally representative sample of MARC records from your library, match up all the publication location codes with the Library of Congress MARC standards code list, put the numbers into a Google Doc, and run the 'Heatmap' gadget.

There was a reason to me having done this, but that reason no longer remains relevant. It was hard graft crunching data, so it would be a shame for me not to explain what it is and share. If you hover over the countries the numbers that you are faced with can be taken as the number of items from that country. Don't get hung up on them though, it's a sample and they would be better if they were percentages.

And what do I think of it? Well, clearly the US, UK, France and Germany are where most of the material comes from. Considering the history and background of the library which this data was sourced from I am not overly surprised that stuff published in Russia stands up quite well. Is that Soviet Russia though?

In isolation I guess the conclusions and comparisons that can be made are limited. In lieu of other libraries doing roughly similar things I'll never know the distinctiveness or uniqueness of this collection. One thing is sure though, that this collection is truly global in its coverage.