Derek's ALIA Blog

Word of the day

2012-01-25T08:14:00.008+11:00

Today's word is caveat, used as a verb. Used in a meeting right here, yesterday. But I loved it at first sight. In fact, this usage goes back some time. We all know what a caveat is in normal usage - it is used in the sense of a qualification or warning, a limitation to a statement's face value meaning. It is from Latin, and is used in Latin expressions such as caveat emptor (let the buyer

Word of the day

2011-12-27T09:49:00.004+11:00

Today's word is goat rodeo. According to the notes on my CD of The Goat Rodeo Sessions, quoting the Urban Dictionary, a goat rodeo is "A chaotic situation, often one that involves several people, each with a different agenda/vision/perception of what's going on; a situation that is very difficult, despite energy and efforts, to instill any sense or order into", or "A situation that order cannot

Word of the day

2011-10-20T18:48:00.001+11:00

Names are always a source of interest, and one of my favourite categories of names is people with two surnames - like Gordon Thomas, or Jackson Jackson. Unlike most names in English, they are also reversible. Today's word is Jay, a name and a letter. I have been reading about the tussle between Mike Rann, premier of South Australia, and Jay Weatherill (picture with family, and article about him

Word of the day

2011-10-20T08:42:00.000+11:00

Today's word is litotes, a word I cannot remember ever reading before. Off, because the meaning of the term is something we do every day. Well, I do. It means, according to the Wikipedia, "a figure of speech in which understatement is employed for rhetorical effect when an idea is expressed by a denial of its opposite . . ." For example, "not as young as he was", meaning "old". It is common in

Word of the day

2011-10-04T18:31:00.000+11:00

If you are a fan of Roddy Doyle - and who isn't? - then you will enjoy his column on Dublin in The Daily Beast, or Newsweek as it is also called. "Dublin city is the sound of people who love words, who love taking words and playing with them, twisting and bending them, making short ones longer and the long ones shorter, people who love inventing words and giving fresh meaning to old ones." His

Word of the day

2011-10-04T15:47:00.017+11:00

Today's word is mass personalisation - a clever formulation because it is apparently an oxymoron, but in fact not. It means that much in contemporary education, especially higher education, should be optional at the student's option. Such things as attendance, learning styles, scheduling, on/off campus learning, and so on. Along with this concept is the idea that content is ubiquitous, and

Word of the day

2011-09-01T08:07:00.004+10:00

Today's word is tickety boo. Going smoothly, doing alright, copacetic according to the Urban Dictionary. Copacetic?As an optimist, I like cheerful, upbeat expressions, and this is one of them, albeit one which has largely passed out of use. I had thought that this might be one of those expressions from my parents' times which had become quaintly archaic. In fact, if you use Google's Books

Best football team in the world

2011-08-25T08:14:00.002+10:00

Why is Barcelona (Barça) the best football team in the world? asks The Economist's management columnist Schumpeter. Part of the answer lies in an article written by my colleague Peter Gerrand and published in firstmonday five years ago - "Cultural diversity in cyberspace: the Catalan campaign to win the new .cat top level domain". It details the struggle to achieve a unique top level domain name

Thinking About Names

2011-08-19T13:15:00.003+10:00

Lorcan Dempsey has a wonderful post about names, concluding with some reflections on contemporary library cataloguing, and how we might handle things better in the future. He precedes his suggestions with the words "Authorities work - and think NACO here - is a professional activity, hedged around by rules and procedures; it is after all 'authorities' work." I did have to look up NACO - is is

Word of the day

2011-08-18T17:06:00.000+10:00

What is the opposite to "dumb down"? It needs an opposite. Dumbing down isn't a great concept, and we should be pushing the opposite, avoiding dumbing down where we can. The term is widely used, and even has a Wikipedia definition. Searching for antonyms doesn't work very well, since all of the sources of antonyms limit themselves to current English words or expressions, and I am mostly happy to

Word of the day

2011-08-10T08:28:00.001+10:00

Today's word is takestock, a noun, coined especially for Swinburne's senior management recently, when we all held a takestock. It is an illustration of something we all know - you can turn pretty much any part of speech into any other, and pretty much any two-word term into a runtogether. Needless to say, the neologist at our takestock day did not coin the word. Google claims to have found 7.8

République de Bananes

2011-08-09T17:44:00.002+10:00

This is a Quebec website and blog, apparently a conservative one - styled L'autre Québec. I was initially intrigued because I am sure that that isn't the right translation of banana republic - for example, Wikipedia uses république bananière, and the Wictionnaire has a nice definition of this term, as well as of the new verb, bananiser, or to transform into a banana republic. Definitely a cult

Word of the day

2011-08-07T19:52:00.003+10:00

Today's word is crowdfunding - thank you to Helen Reid for this one. It provides an opportunity to resume this blog, and the word of the day, after a gap of almost a year. Thanks is also due to Sherman Young, whose blog post on the matter in turn quotes The Economist, which says: "Enter Unbound, a British effort to “crowd-fund” books. Visitors to its website can pledge money for a book that is

Welcome to Wattle Day

2010-08-31T11:00:00.057+10:00

Today, as all Australians know, is Wattle Day. Unfortunately my Facebook group, Wattle Day Should Be Australia's National Day, peaked at 16 members last year. Never mind: what better action on Wattle Day than to join. Wattle Day is our ideal national day - its colours (green and gold) are our colours, and the flower is found in all parts of Australia. As a national day it unites us: OK with

Word of the day

2010-08-30T08:30:00.001+10:00

Today's word is mega-aggregate. As regular readers of this blog (not an oxymoron, I hope) know, I prefer runtogethers to hyphenated words, but in this case the conjunction of two as makes this confusing - megaaggregate. My thanks to Ex Libris, our library systems vendor, for this term. In fact they may have invented it when they developed Primo Central, a search / discovery product. I came

Word of the day

2010-08-13T10:46:00.000+10:00

Today's word is lawyer up, a verb, and thank you to Professor Rob Moodie, a health educationalist and chairman of Melbourne Storm, for the term. Rob was speaking (as a Surrey Hills resident) at a breakfast in aid of Foundation Boroondara, a charitable organisation in this area. The term lawyer up comes to us, like so many useful terms relating to the practice of law, from the United States.

Word of the day

2010-08-11T18:26:00.002+10:00

Today's word is cognitive surplus, and thank you to Nick Gruen for the word. Not totally new (from 2009?), but new to me. There's a great piece in Wired, for example, and a new book by Clay Shirky, Cognitive surplus: creativity and generository in a connected age, published in July and reviewed in many places, such as this one by Cory Doctorow in Boingboing. The basic idea is that there is a

Word of the day

2010-08-04T17:55:00.000+10:00

Today's word is sandpit as a verb, as in the expression "We are sandpitting a Facebook site for the library." It means trying something out - having a go, in the Australian idiom. Oddly, this extremely useful neologism is less used than one might have thought. Most of the uses relate to small holes in glass or other surfaces, caused by sand, or to rectangular constructions filled with sand for

Word of the day

2010-05-14T17:50:00.001+10:00

Today's word is the German word Verschlimmbesserung, which means an improvement which makes things worse. Thank you to Gary, and to the New Scientist, for the word. It is hard to see how we got along for so long without out, especially those of us working in higher education. The word is a combination of Verbessern (make better/improve) and Verschlimmern (make/become worse), and there is a nice

Google Book Settlement

2010-05-05T17:47:00.002+10:00

I am speaking on the Google Book Settlement next Tuesday for ten minutes without hestitation, repetition or deviation, and without Powerpoint. I am there because I am a librarian. Now read on . . . I am seeking your help, mainly because this once worked wonderfully well when I had a similar gig (but only 3 minutes) to speak, as the librarian, about the Wikipedia. Jimmy Wales was the featured

Word of the day

2010-02-15T17:23:00.005+11:00

Today's word is rissole, used as a verb. This wonderful Australian usage was unknown to me until I read it in Clive James's recent book, The Revolt of the Pendulum: essays 2005-2008. James describes (page 193) rissole as "the classic Australian term, drawn from the culinary arts, for something being reduced to a wreck. (Used as a noun, the word 'rissole' denotes a kind of proto-hamburger, but

Word of the day

2010-02-14T12:11:00.003+11:00

Thank you to Kim Tairi for technology petting zoo. Kim, as well as being a staff member here in the Swinburne University Library, is the Vice President of VALA. Last week was the biennial VALA Conference, a particularly important time for VALA, and for technological terms. A petting zoo, as most of us know, is a usually mobile collection of animals suitable for interaction with young children.

Civil liberties issue?

2010-02-08T09:55:00.000+11:00

There has been a great amount of discussion lately on the new MySchool website, and an interesting piece on it in The Australian of 30 January by Justine Ferrari. It is interesting that people have not often portrayed the issue as a civil liberties issue. On one hand, recent reports such as the excellent Gov 2.0 final report have recommended that government information should be made widely

Induction Processes

2010-02-01T18:39:00.002+11:00

in the Userslib web usability blog. A footer mullet is a website that has the business, the main content, at the top, and the news and "fun stuff" hanging down at the bottom - like a mullet. You can see an example at the site above. If you

Barry and Clarke

2008-05-13T17:28:00.001+10:00

The Future Australian Race is a wonderful play, currently being performed at the State Library of Victoria until 24 May. It has also had great write-ups in The Age and The Australian, among other places. Its authors, Sue Gore and Bill Garner, have a track record of dramatising libraries and librarians - something we do so poorly for ourselves - with their 1999 play The Terms and Grammar of

Cool librarian: where do you look?

2008-05-11T17:29:00.003+10:00

This was the heading on a recent article in The Age - a review of a show (Librarian Idol) by Andrew Finegan, a Darwin librarian."There are some professions which are quintessentially cool", the article (by Fiona Scott-Norman) begins, and even this early in the piece, we know where she is headed. "And then there are professions . . ." such as librarian, definitely uncool. I guess that there is

Word of the day

2008-05-11T11:46:00.006+10:00

One of the words which arose at the IATUL Conference was reverse mentoring. As many younger people look at me pityingly when I disclose ignorance of some absolutely fundamental, axiomatic, known-to-every-child-over two technological skill, the need for this expression becomes plain. Mentoring makes sense, but it works both ways, and isn't only an older to younger (or experienced to

Word of the day

2008-04-26T07:09:00.004+10:00

Today's word is linguistic whateverism, and thank you to The Economist for this word. The last issue of The Economist included a wonderful supplement, Nomads at last, on mobile telecoms, and it has lots of perceptive and valuable things to say. But its conclusion is uncharacteristically gloomy: As language goes, so does thought. The point being that mobile telecoms have led to a decline in

Word of the day

2008-04-16T08:14:00.004+10:00

Thank you to Rebecca, for wikidemia. This term is used to describe 'an academic work passed off as scholarly yet researched entirely on Wikipedia'. Brilliant, and another triumph for the Urban Dictionary, from which the definition comes.In the meantime, I'm afraid, the term appears also to have been coined to describe something else. Wikipedia now uses the word wikidemia to refer to a project

Word of the day

2008-04-15T16:47:00.006+10:00

Today's word is from Dana, who refers to Open Reading Frame, Bill Hooker's blog. Commenting on a blog post by Gavin Baker (to Open Access News), he says: "I realise that netonyms have been passé among the hipsterati for some time . . ." and makes some comments about the use of pseudonyms on the internet.But which is the word of the day? Definitely netonym I think. It is certainly a new coinage,

Copyright, CAUL, Cadets and Citations

2008-04-07T09:46:00.000+10:00

This has been a busy week.The ALIA Education and Workforce Summit was held on 28 March in Melbourne, and I'll provide more information next week. Some of the outcomes included the need to focus on strategies for recruiting to the library sector, the need for university educators to meet together and the need for employers and educators to meet together.The first post-Mullarvey Universities

Word of the day

2008-04-06T06:57:00.003+10:00

Today's word is point-virgule - OK, its really semicolon, but in deference to the efforts of the French to defend it, we have used their word. The Australian reported on April 4 on a campaign to save the semicolon from extinction "because the media, authors and the French people no longer understand its use." An April Fool's Day joke reported that President Nicolas Sarkozy had created a

ALIA Education and Workforce Summit

2008-03-20T17:50:00.002+11:00

As we approach the summit, and the excitement mounts, I thought that I would highlight a few of the issues. In fact, the excitement is not really palpable, I'm afraid. Those excited about attending are by definition limited to 50-60 people (it is a summit) and as for those not attending, no-one has yet attempted to bribe me in order to attend, and even the polite requests are limited to

Word of the day

2008-03-20T07:40:00.000+11:00

Today's word is churnalism, and thanks to Lorcan Dempsey and his blog for this one. The word comes from Nick Davies's book, Flat Earth News, about the state of British journalism; here is a review in the Guardian, and another in the London Review of Books. Davies says that churnalism has replaced journalism, and defines it as pseudo events manufactured by the PR industry and news stories

Unlocking IP

2008-03-18T11:29:00.005+11:00

One of the roles which I have taken on recently is chair of the board of the Australian Digital Alliance. The ADA is the Australian organisation which exists to lobby for a balanced copyright regime - balanced between the rights of copyright owners and copyright users.This wonderful image was developed for and used on a badge, I think distributed at a forum on technological protection measures

Mandated Filtering

2008-03-09T10:22:00.002+11:00

Lately there have been many ideas about what kinds of things might be screened from the Internet user by their ISP (internet service provider), or perhaps monitored. Suggestions include things that are illegal, content which infringes other people's rights, and things that others just don't like.Within Australia there has been recent discussion around the so-called "clean feed" has been based on

Boards, Ex-Boards and Copyright Again

2008-02-29T13:57:00.001+11:00

Well, there is a busy week coming up, coinciding with the end of summer today. The first meeting of the ALIA Board is on Monday, and we are all heading to Canberra on Sunday. There is lots going on, and the Board meets in the shadow of the current election campaign for new directors and a vice president. This is enlivened, more than ever before, by the adoption of the blog as the primary

Best of Careers - Librarian?

2008-02-28T08:56:00.001+11:00

The Annoyed Librarian has a recent post on libraries as a career, on the occasion of librarianship making the US News and World Report list of best careers. The list was compiled using these criteria - job satisfaction (high), training difficulty (not too long, not too much science/maths), prestige (based on a survey), job market outlook (government data plus likelihood of offshoring) and salary.

Word of the day

2008-02-27T08:05:00.002+11:00

Today's word is courtesy of the past, and is the term vanity network publishing. I used (invented) this term in a paper I gave at a national conference on web publishing and legal deposit in 1995. I pointed to the plenthora of published work that was possible in an open and networked environment. I unkindly described this as vanity network publishing. I see from my Google search on the term that

Word of the day

2008-02-20T13:04:00.003+11:00

Thank you to Gary for providing the term traffic shaping. This is now applied to the many ways in which ISPs, telecommunications carriers and corporate IT departments might manage Internet traffic - by filtering out things they don't want. In fact, traffic shaping is a term used for many years to refer to management of internet traffic to optimise performance. It has recently been extended to

International Year of Languages

2008-02-15T09:13:00.001+11:00

This year has been proclaimed the UNESCO International Year of Languages, and there is a wonderful piece by Michael Clyne in The Age recently to tell us why. Michael is the author of many books but, for libraries, most notably of Multilingual Australia (1982), which has a great coverage of the contribution of libraries to achieving a multilingual society.Another great contribution has been made

Word of the day

2008-02-15T08:28:00.001+11:00

Today's word is incent, used as a verb - thanks to Dilbert, where the verb is used as a synonym for motivate - ironically, needless to say. An interesting way of creating new words is to fill in gaps in forms of speech for existing words. A long-standing noun, like incentive, can also give rise to new (or rediscovered) verbs and participles, in multiple forms - incentivise, but also incent.

Word of the day

2008-02-01T17:40:00.000+11:00

Today's word is continuous partial attention, a term used by Courtney Gibson, from the ABC, at the National Library's Innovative Ideas thing last year. Courtney Gibson was then the head of Arts, Entertainment and Comedy at ABC TV and has since moved up. She was quoting Linda Stone a decade before (in 1997) and the term appears, from an online search, to have been heavily used since then. In fact,

Word of the day

2008-01-30T12:13:00.000+11:00

Today's word is knol, and thanks to the indefatigable Peter Suber for that. Knol is Google's answer to the Wikipedia, and Peter quotes a Google blog posting which describes knol, launched on 13 December, and standing for " a unit of knowledge." "Our goal" the blog goes on, " is to encourage people who know a particular subject to write an authoritative article about it. The tool is still in

Word of the Day

2008-01-23T17:41:00.000+11:00

Thank you to Sue for today's word, which is glitching. Glitch is a common word, especially used in relation to technology, but I haven't seen it as a verb before - although according to Wikipedia it is derived from a German adjective meaning "slippery", or I guess now "glitchy", which is also pretty widely used. The context is ". . . the list seems to be glitching today." Wikipedia defines it as

Word of the day

2008-01-15T15:39:00.000+11:00

Thank you to Julie for today's word, which is webinar, as featured recently in the comic strip, Unshelved. A webinar, according to the strip definition, is a seminar held on the web. Like electronic card last week, this is close to oxymoronic, like so many e-versions of analog nouns.The Wikipedia defines webinar in this way: "A webinar is a type of web conference, that tends to be mostly one-way,