Apparently we (’we’ being the mightly and superior south of england, not to be confused with north of england backward types) have a regional assembly. When? why?

Actually I’m slightly interested in this idea. I believe that the English Counties are too small to have much power/responsibilities delegated to them from central govenment, and yet there are issues which are best addressed at a fairly local level (especially on issues where different parts of the country have different needs). Maybe these regional assemeblies are the answer, big enough to run complex public services but local enough to address different needs?

Wish you were all grown up and could play with stocks and shares? now you can (ish) with Yahoo’s buzz game. The value of ’stock’ (a tech keyword) goes up as more people search for it. I keep losing money, and while I’m no expect, from what I understand that is bad.

While I’m on this subject (which is a stupid thing to say as anyone reading this - ‘anyone’ = ‘me and only me’ - will be reading top down, ie newest first, ie will be unaware I was on the subject… what subject) ah yes, the subject of library catalogue searching.

Nothing too exciting really (this post has the word ‘library’ it in, so that was a pointless fact) but I’ve been reading with intrest how Talis - who supply the library management software for the Universit of Sussex - have been playing with A9, and how to get it to play nice with their web catalogue.

Basically A9 uses a technology called opensearch, which allows you to place a xml file based on this on your web server. This allows your catalogue (or search engine) to be searched via a9.

To try this out, do a search on a9.com, once on the results, click on ‘See more columns’, type ‘talis’ in to the search columns box, and then select add.

We’ll see if it is possible to add the University of Sussex to this search.

Another nice little thing is a utility called librarybooks for Apple’s OS X. It provides an item on the menu bar showing how many books you have on loan from your local library, opening this as a menu shows you what books you have out, and when they are due back. Again, Talis seem to be ahead of the game with this.

Final thing to mention: whichbook.net, might just point you towards your next read.

a million years a go (1999?) M25 came along with a union search for most academic libraries in my part of the world. which was good, especially when looking for something obscure.

At the time, I thought it was only a mater of counting to ten before a union catalogue of all uk libraries would turn up. Where is it? I want one.

In the mean time we have a number of other options which can help for looking for odd stuff that only one or two places might have.

First there’s redlightgreen.com, though once you have found the book you are looking for, you can only select one library to see if it has the book (typing in a post code and seeing what’s near by would be far more useful).

There’s worldcat from OCLC. I’m sure there must be a good reason but I can’t find a normal search screen for this, you seem to be required to install a plugin, which itself uses google or yahoo, to sarch it. But once on the site a search box appears at the top. I’ve linked to a record for a random book which has the search box at the top.