Category: internet

Capital Collections

From the Edinburgh City Libraries website comes news of Capital Collections, “an exciting website giving online access to some of the amazing and unique prints including photographs, engravings and drawings held by Edinburgh City Libraries.”

As a resident of Leith, which has been undergoing insane roadworks to install an unwanted tram network for 2 years now, and facing another 3 years of them before completion in 2011, this photo is pretty topical right now. It certainly feels like they’ve been messing with the roads non-stop since this photo was taken in 1904!

The Free Legal Web – who for?

The current Big Idea in the legal / library blog world is the Free Legal Web (FLW). Originally mooted by Nick Holmes, the idea is to pull all of the content currently floating about the ether (legal professionals blog posts, Government information etc) into one portal. That in itself is a big enough task, but what doesn’t seem to be clear yet is…who is this Free Legal Web for?

The people involved so far seem to be legal professionals and IT specialists. The legal professionals will be working out some way of getting the useful materials together, and persuading other legal professionals that giving up their valuable time and work (such as blog postings) for this enterprise will be a worthwhile investment, and will reap them rewards in the end. The IT professionals job will be to write the scripts and programmes that will get everything together in the one place, and working well with all the other bits and pieces.

That’s all lovely (although it’s hard to tell what’s actually being done, as the discussions are going on behind an invite-only Google Group, which to me, kind of defeats the purpose of harnessing the collective intelligence of the legal and information professionals), but when this all singing, all dancing portal is up and running, who’s going to be using it? I would have thought this was a core question, to be settled right at the start, yet it doesn’t seem to have been discussed at any point.

If you’re designing a portal to work alongside the subscription legal databases like Westlaw and LexisNexis, then I assume it’s being aimed at people already working in the law, and therefore able to understand and interpret the information being presented to them there. The content will be academic / in depth, and of relevance to other members of the legal profession. Certain assumptions can be made about the level of knowledge and understanding of the user, and their grasp of the content. It also means it’s unlikely to be being used by members of the general public. Since legal professionals are likely to be persuaded into contributing to the FLW by the prospect of it eventually increasing their business through building of a reputation, this is not a good start.

If it’s designed for the general public, to allow them access to the elusive laws they’re meant to keep within, then good interpretation of the law is needed, not just access. People working in the law can forget just how difficult it is to find out what legislation means for people without access to subscription databases, information professionals to check for currency and further discussions of legal points…and even the language of legislation, while precise and succinct, can be incredibly confusing for someone with no experience of reading it, confronted with it for the first time. Content for this FLW would need a different focus – explaining the law and its impact on the general public, with references to the original case law rather than references to law reports inaccessible to the general public. Guides equivalent to first year law students introductions to the various aspects of the law would be needed. Clear signalling of whether legislation applies to all of the UK, or only the devolved areas would be essential. In other words, it would be a very different beast then the FLW designed for legal professionals.

So…is it a Professional Free Legal Web, or a Public Free Legal Web?

Different Worlds


I love my social media: blog-hopping, forum-chatting, IM-ing…yet there’s a large number of my friends who don’t feature on any of these. They’re not technologically averse, these technologies just don’t fit easily into their lives.

Take one friend for example: she works part-time, has two small children, and a busy family life. She’s got no spare time to spend on forums and blogs…she’d rather just pick up the phone and call me, or send a text! She misses out on little bits of my life that others don’t…my random thoughts and recent events are often posted on my personal blog, and online friends read that, so when I actually talk to them in person, they’re often quite aware of what’s going on in my life. Non-online friends aren’t, and sometimes I almost resent having to tell them about my life, as I feel I’ve already done that ‘work’ on my blog.

I wonder if, as I get more web-based in my social interactions, these friends will continue to be close friends, or whether something has to give? Will it be their lack of online presence, or will I be cutting my online activity down?

Actually, I think I’m already beginning to cut down my online activity: time with friends and family is beginning to win out against wandering the web…my time online’s becoming more focussed, and I’m becoming more disciplined about where I want to spend my time….MySpace is almost never visited, Bebo very infrequently…blog reading / posting time’s perhaps increasing, I think in response…if my friends blog, I’ll read it…but I don’t necessarily want to spend time reading the minutae of their recent activity on a social networking site, I just don’t feel it’s relevant any more.

Ohhh, I’m so backward!!!

Are we WEEEing properly yet?

So, the WEEE (the prime contender for the title of “Most Ridiculously Named Regulations EVER”…seriously, have you been able to read about “separating different types of WEEE”, and types of containers for different types of WEEE without sniggering?) Regulations came into force on the 1st of July 2007.

So, that should mean that when you buy a new appliance, the very least the provider must do would be to advise you about how and where to dispose of the appliance you’re probably replacing. They should be a member of the Distributor Take-back Scheme, or allow in-store take-back. At least, that’s what this document from the Environment Agency tells me.

So, why is it that, after buying a TV from Dixons online, we’ve received precisely NO information on the WEEE Regulations, our duty of responsible disposal, or where / how to do it?

Our old TV is now being rehomed by Freecycle, but what if I didn’t know about this, and if I didn’t know that I had new duties under WEEE? (sniggering at that phrase!!)

Dixons really haven’t come out of this with flying colours…wonder who’s going to be the first retailer officially spanked for failure to comply?