Jaf – Page 121 – Dumpling in a Hanky

DTI / BERR – I despair!!!

Ok, so as well as deciding to suddenly change departments / name with no notice (in itself enough to make me scream with frustration), those clever chaps and chapesses at the ex-DTI have gone one step further…and shifted most of the materials onto the new http://www.berr.gov.uk web address.

With no redirects.

Wonderful.

Here comes a good few weeks of altering every single damn link to their materials that we’ve ever posted to our current awareness service.

Even changing the ‘dti’ part of the web address to ‘berr’ doesn’t work.

They helpfully tell me this when I click on a link:

“The DTI web page or document you are looking for has not been found.

Administration

The DTI web page or document you are looking for has not been found.

We have restructured our website, and the information you are looking for has been moved, or you have clicked on an inaccurate link.

If you are looking for a specific piece of information, you may find it easier to use the search engine or our Site Map.

If you are looking for a particular document DTI has published, you can search our Reports & Publications site.

If you still cannot find what you are looking for, call our Ministerial Correspondence Unit on 020 7215 5000 or email us.

Please update your bookmarks with the new URL.

“

Really? You think I should update my bookmarks? Why, what a splendid idea, I couldn’t have thought of it myself! And now, despite the fact that using it makes me weep with frustration, I’m meant to use your internal search engine to try and discover where you’ve put all those lovely, useful documents that we’d linked to because they were, well, lovely and useful!

*sigh*

RFID item tracking

Now, I confess, it’s a longed-for dream to be able to instal RFID tracking for our books…I’m going to have a look at the video of this at home tonight, when I can actually hear what they’re saying!

I’ve got to say, being able to pinpoint exactly where specific items are would be a VERY good thing for me!

Losing information

I had a summer student come to me this week and ask me to fix back on the installation instructions for a CD that the sellotape holding them on had yellowed and fallen off from…a hint perhaps of its age! Although a 10 year old book isn’t that old in the grand scheme of things…

The CD itself was long gone, but the installation instructions remained.

They were for:

M.S. Word for Windows 2.0

Wordperfect 5.1 for MS-DOS

Wordperfect 6.1 for Windows

Unsurprisingly, I made an executive decision not to keep those instructions, but I thought about them when reading this story from the BBC.

How many people still have information stored on floppy discs (the ‘hard’ floppy discs, not the floppy-floppies, as I remember from my far-distant youth…) but don’t have a machine that can now read them? It’s one of the only good points about my creaky, 7 year old home pc, that I can actually put these things into it and access the information.

One of the things on my eternal to-do list is to save the data to my pc, then burn it onto a CC…but how long will a CD last me?

Should I actually really be uploading the data to a secure website?

What if that site dies, taking my info with it?

What format should it be in?

How long will it be safe / readable in that format?

Technology is changing so fast now. I know of someone who managed a while ago to pick up an interesting device: a microfilm reader built into a suitcase. Allegedly for reading schematics for military vehicles and fixing them in the field (my personal fantasy of it being a spy-case, for reading top-secret-type things was crushed), it was the height of innovative portable technology at the time, and now is just an interesting, outdated lump of metal, glass and plastic. Will the Blackberries (or Brambles, as I’ve heard them called) and iPhones of today be the car-boot hunters treasures of tomorrow?

You know, I really don’t envy the National Archives their task!

Turning the Pages for a treasure

IWR reports on the release of the British Library Turning the Pages software to a wider audience. I was lucky enough to be at a roadshow on British Library technical developments in March, held in the National Museum of Scotland. (As an aside – Boy, do those people know how to make a great goodie bag…messenger bag, notepad, funky folding cube of notable images from holdings, there was even a big bar of chocolate!).
I was practically drooling at the lovelyness of it all! I really wished that my former workplace would be able to afford the insane cost of digitising (and then the ongoing hosting of the digitised material) any of their historical collection, but it’s out of the reach of most libraries without a very wealthy patron…which is why when I read the IWR post I was reminded about the BL competition for public libraries, one from each area of Britain, to have a “hidden treasure” from their collection digitised.

The entries closed on the 29 June 2007….shortlisted entrants will be invited to an awards ceremony at the BL in early September. I’m dying to find out what amazing books will be made accessible through this!