A Tiro's Blog

There are some interesting points (library/archive focused but mostly generalisable cross the cultural sector) in Roger C. Schonfeld's post on the JSTOR blog - The purpose of stewarding distinctive collections: discovery and impact and especially for the future of collections sites this paragraph is relevant:

Discovery deepens when secondary literature and primary sources are integrated. In the scientific and quantitative fields, there are growing efforts to link datasets with journal articles. For the humanities, arts, and social sciences (HASS), the parallel opportunity is bi-directional linking of archival and special collections materials with critical context and analysis in scholarly monographs and journal articles. This is more than “linking” in a simple sense: it enables context-driven discovery that supports deeper exploration and interpretation, rather than more atomized access to discrete items.

For museum object pages the idea they can become the hub for links to on-going work/literature in the wider world and across institutions seems a big step forward from the 90s object page paradigm we are still mostly stuck in. But it does require researchers and those in the cultural sector to align on goals and implementation (i.e. how to automatically find references to an object discussed in a journal article), which is often where GLAM/Academic collaboration plans fall apart.

I found this post from Filippo Valsorda interesting as it's increasingly seemed like what was originally something useful (finding out about security alerts for dependencies) has become a beast that must be fed everyday. The satisfaction of closing a few Dependabot PRs is swiftly followed by deflation as 2-3x that many new PRs are created the next day. One thing that would make it much more useful (and I'm baffled as to why it's not done by GitHub) is to have a clearer UI that splits out PRs into those from developers, security PRs (important!) and then the endless dependency update ones that can be considered as and when. Instead if you don't keep merging them, you end up with a open PR count in the hundreds and a feeling that you are not maintaining things.

• Cost: £4.10 (!)

• Chocolate Insets: 2

• Chocolate Quality: Good

• Chocolate Quantity: Good

• Chocolate Distribution: Good

• Lamination: Good

• Shape: Good

• Look: Good

• Taste: Good

A decent pain au chocolat from Heidi in Richmond Station, but the price is hard to get over. It was just less than some of the other baked items which looked to have more expensive fillings, so either the chocolate in this is very expensive or the markup is large.

It's like A.S. Byatt's Possession crossed with Waterworld. But not in a great way, nothing ever seemed to really get going. The references to (real) people around now was also a bit jarring. Interesting on what gets preserved or not in some semi-apocalyptic future though.