Friday Book Review: The Ingenious Mr Fairchild: The Forgotten Father of the Flower Garden

The Ingenious Mr Fairchild: The Forgotten Father of the Flower Garden by Michael Leapman. Headline Book Publishing Ltd (2001), Paperback, 288 pages

Strangely enough Thomas Fairchild is perhaps one of the less vivid characters in this book. The author, Michael Leapman admits to the difficulty of finding any documentary information regarding Fairchild's life and the lack of any existing documents etc., so generally has to extrapolate from references from others, particularly from letters. Richard Bradley, the main source of the secondary , actually comes across as far more interesting - everyone's idea of the Eighteenth Century scientific buccaneer.
The debate between science and religion, was obviously significant to Fairchild, who left money for a sermon to given in his memory, a practice which continues to this day. Leapman writes with vigour about issues such as this not only in regard to the Eighteenth Century, but also relates it to the present day. The descriptions of London, and the scientific and social background of that time are vivid and illuminating.

SCA Home Nations Forum

The second of the Edinburgh fora had it's focus on standards (which I participated in), and another strand on licensing.

Their was an interesting viewpoint from Alastair Dunning based on experiences with the JISC digitisation projects, that standards could no longer be dictated, given the rate of change in the information environment. Although not exactly a riposte, I agreed more with the approach from Dennis Nicholson and Paul Ells and the CDDA, that standards have to built into the project, which includes training and maintenance costs.

Interestingly one of Paul's comments was about how difficult it was to recruit appropriatly trained people - as someone who has come to this more from the library and cataloguing standards perspective, I can empathise with this. Interviewing recent library school graduates over the past few years has been an illuminating experience in that regards. As well as the technical standards, metadata creation & analysis has to be considered e.g. I've seen digitised photograph collections where this was very much lacking.

There wil always be a pool of standards for projects to choose from but the important thing is for creators to be strictly consistent in their application - your original may be superseded but then you have a better chance of migrating without data loss. Additionally once you can map a standard you can create crosswalks and gateways for interoperability.

On the larger scale, there needs to be a framework for organisations who promote standards to better collaborate.

ETA: This meeting has been extensively blogged, complete with presentation at the SCA blog

Friday Book Review: The home front a mirror to life in England during the First World War

The home front a mirror to life in England during the First World War by E. Sylvia Pankhurst. London Cresset Library c1987 460p,[31]p of plates ill 22cm pbk

This is a fascinating book, exploding the facade of a united front during WWI. The situation of those left behind is less popularly documented than that of WWII, and here Sylvia Pankhurst uses examples from the East End of London in particular to highlight the attitudes of officialdom towards the working classes, particularly the women, and how they coped.

This is as much a book about class politics as it is about feninism.
For the casual reader, it does occasionaly get bogged down in the detail of prices, pay rates and the various regulations, but this must reflect the reality of those struggling to cope where even the law seemed to turned against them.

It's not entirely polemic; individuals are skilfully drawn, her strained relations with her mother and sister are sharply expressed, and her affection for and meetings with (the then dying) Kier Hardie is touching.

The Radiated Library

A recent NY Times article on Paul Otlet (one of the pioneers of UDC) has inspired me to begin blogging outwith MPOW, in order to spread my wings a bit further. So to begin with, I heartily commend the following article on Otlet by boxes and arrows. A timely reminder that there's nothing new under the Sun and though the tools may change our visions don't.