Let's be Open

Last month, just before I finally posted my second blog post (go me) I attended the Open Athens conference 2018. I wasn't bowling over with enthusiasm for the event because conferences are always that great blend of some very interesting and novel information plus lots of bumfy meh and sales pitches. However I went and actually had a good time and networked a bit so all in all a worthwhile and inexpensive event so thank you Open Athens for arranging. If you are interested in the content of the conference you can listen to the plenaries here . The last plenary was by Torsten Reimer from the British Library , on making 'everything available', e.g. trying to make British Library content more accessible to customers. That part was interesting, but I myself have been fixating on the words from the first 6 minutes of his plenary for the past 2 weeks. Start listing from about 3.40 in the YouTube recording to around 5.54, just over 2 minutes of you life, go on I think its worth i...

Like many poor people who wish they could get more enjoyment out of the summer, I suffer from hay fever. As a child I was constantly sneezing and had tissues permanently stuffed up my cardigan sleeve. It was a rather miserable experience not helped by endless family mockery; friends I don't remember being a problem. Seriously my family are a questionable bunch.  At some point when the symptoms were particularly bad my mother and I visited Boots and looked for an potential (affordable) solution; my family didn't tend to have much money to spare. We also didn't know much about medicine, and so when we  found on the shelves a small fairly inexpensive bottle of pills for the treatment of hay fever we purchased them. This was before generic hay fever tablets could be bought 14 for a £1. The pills we bought were homeopathic; I think we thought that meant they were a herbal remedy. I took them for a while, I think more than one season, so I clearly thought they were working b...

I had promised myself that I would start a blog in 2018 in order to start in some tiny way becoming more active in and around the topics I care about. I think other people care about them too and are probably already articulating them satisfactorily without my input, but like I said, this is about motivating me to become more engaged. Well we all have to start somewhere don't we? So what are the things that I would like to write about? Firstly, evidence based thinking and why we should all be doing it. Secondly Open Access literature and open culture, where we are and where we want to be. These are tangential connected, they're both about access to and exploitation of research evidence but they are different topics. I think the reason I care particularly about these topics is my job. As a government type Librarian my work is focused on encouraging not necessarily academically inclined professionals that Libraries are relevant to their work, promoting a 'what works' ac...