dcb@110:
We do a mixture of things with books we get rid of- a few are sent to specialist libraries or advertised on lists, a couple of dealers buy some, some are on sale in the library, and some end up as Books By The Yard.
Thus is going to be a bit whiny-sounding, I think, because the comments I'm responding to have made me feel defensive. So I'm sorry about that, I'll try to keep it to a minimum.
I'm currently weeding in a science section in a university library, and getting rid of all sorts of interesting old things. Oh noes! Evil!
I should first point out we don't have anybody studying history of science here, and we aren't a copyright deposit library, so anybody wanting old books for their own sake wouldn't come here in the first place. In some areas we have here, books don't really go out of date as such, and older material is valuable and not weeded harshly; but the users of this section want stuff about what's currently going on in the field.
The philosophical side apart, the practical side is that we are, as virtually all university libraries are, chronically short of money. Which means (as dcb points out) they can't afford to have me spend my time going through every book I throw away. I have a lot of other jobs to do. If an academic or our archivist tells me to keep something, I probably will, but otherwise, if it's outdated or not being used any more, it's gone.
The other thing about having no money is that space=money, as well. Our shelves are pretty much full. We could do a little bit of rejigging to put more shelves instead of reader seats (though more people want to come in every year) but we can't afford a new bigger building, and we can't afford to rent a store and run a fetching service. So an inch of space on the shelf is worth more to me than a book nobody's borrowed for thirty years.
Yeah, it'd be nice to work somewhere that did keep everything, but oh, the joy of respacing and actually being able to put new aquisitions on the shelf instead of piled on the floor! Pruning out dead wood and leaving light and air for new shoots really is the appropriate metaphor, sometimes.
Bill Higgins @ no. 27:
The accent sounds basically BBC English overlaid on faint traces of another language, rather than being a "foreign" accent (like Australian or whatever), if that makes sense? I can't make a guess at what the other language might be, though. Looking at the list of ITN newsreaders, there are quite a few women who it could be, and there aren't sound files there.
Kate @ #46: The first book I thought of was Steve Jones's Almost Like A Whale- the Amazon blurb says "Jones, himself a geneticist, assumes the mantle of Darwin and rewrites his masterpiece for the modern reader, borrowing the structure and thesis but writing with the benefit of 150 years' hindsight."- which sounds both presumptuous and dry, and it doesn't read like that at all!
Richard Fortey's books, Life: A Natural History and Dry Store Room No. 1 are both very enjoyable as well... (and Dry Store Room is brand new, so it's up to date on the classifications it talks about.) Douglas Adams' Last Chance To See, on the ecological side... Weiner's The Beak of the Finch... ooh, gosh, lots of lovely books.
UK additional: "batty boy"? TTBOMK it's always an insult, not a neutral term, but I could be wrong- anybody closer to Caribbean-derived slang know?
The Great Old Ones have come for four of us within twenty minutes... save yourselves... do not read the books...!
(fethera) Those which drive librarians mad. (As for example: Those that are a funny shape, apt to fall to bits, or exceedingly heavy; very expensive and have a new edition every two years, loopy but inexplicably popular, excellent but subject to frequent challenges by concerned parents...)
(yan)Those which drive the reader mad metaphorically, with anger.
(tan) Those which drive the reader mad actually,
(tan-i)by means of their rugose covers and italics of no earthly shape;
(tan-ii)by means of prions in the paper;
(tan-iii)by means of the Langford Visual hack;
(tan-iv)other.
(tethera) Soothing books.
Yeah, there's noisette (hazelnuts or hazelnut flavoured) and then there's buerre noisette- browned butter, where you've heated it so as to brown the solids; it's supposed to have a nutty flavour, which is presumably why it's called that.
I've never used buerre noisette in sweet cookery, but I can see it being nice. It's good poured on a fish. (Fish type= dead, cooked, preferably not an oily one)
Like legionseagle, who pointed me to it, I do think one good thing came of the Great Open Source Boobs Row, namely some Dorothy L Sayers fanfic where Sylvia and Eiluned find themselves at a party with some idiots.
503c- Gur Zna Jub Jnf Guhefqnl?
Young girl feels a deep bond with an exotic land; she is kidnapped by a a native prince with magic powers, and discovers her own as they fall in love and Fight Crime, I mean save the country.
Thread-crossing alert- A lullabye played on a ukelele.
(First verse:
Sleep you tight my darling
hope sweet dreams are on their way,
and the bedbugs keep at bay,
and you do not have to slay
any big ones who've mutated to the size of cats and dogs;
hope the bedbugs don't have talons and great teeth to bite your legs,
drain your marrow to the dregs-
but I'm sure they won't attack you if you lie here very still.)
One of my favourite lullabyes. And a nice tune, very suitable for babies who can't tell anybody what you're singing them...
Oh, darn, I can't remember the &code for showing the angle brackets... replace {} with proper html brackets.
{lj-cut}write interesting things here{/lj-cut}
Or if you want particular text for the cut instead of the standard "(More)",
{lj-cut text="fascinating summary"}write interesting things here{/lj-cut}
Thanks, Marilee and David!
David @25, where did you get the book by Graham Woodland? I've been wanting to read something of his since seeing some of his extracts-for-comments on rasfc, but I didn't realise he had anything out.
Richard Herring (British stand-up comedian) had a bit of a wonder about what makes words "bad" on his blog not long ago. (Warning: Bad words.)
(Also warning: some very unpleasant concepts, as he's thinking of things that would be worse to say than boring old swear-words.)
(Also warning: mention of jogging.)
It is possible to plagiarise your own work; a PhD is supposed to be an original bit of research, so if you don't bother do do any more research and fill it up with what you've done for your Masters, that's plagiarism. Drawing on stuff you've already done is absolutely fine if you make it clear that that's what you're doing, of course, quoting and referencing it in the normal way.
Heresiarch at #973: Yesnosorta. I don't think affection (in itself) for the old system is necessarily about nationalism; it can be nostalgia for a quirkier past. Having said that, there is a sort of person who fulminates at the introduction of nasty European measurements as a sign and symbol of loss of sovereignty- there was a lot of this when the legislation about selling foods in grammes came in, a few market traders got taken to court as "metric martyrs" for refusing to label with both systems.
Many people still use imperial measurements just because that's what they learnt at school and it makes intuitive sense to them, though. (I'm in the in-between age group who use feet and inches but mm for precision, stone and pounds but also kg and g, pints but also ml- I can't understand degrees F at all, though.)
joann at #948: Mincemeat bar cookies are very good, as well.
ajay@292:
I was reading your list and nodding until I got to Wadham- how else do you pronounce that but, well, Wadham, I thought? So the key was one of those real-world sensawunda moments. Wad-um? Yes, that's how you pronounce Wadham, (assuming the u is a schwa,) what could need pointing out there...
Oh! You mean there are places where -ham at the end of a placename is pronounced as in the food, and not as a a gulped "'m"??? Well well well.
(Other examples: Birmingham- Bermingum, Cheltenham- Chelt'num, Nottingham: Nottingum, or indeed Nott'n'm [for extra points, the T should be a glottal stop].)
Niall at 663: Uncle, which is the first of the Uncle books, is being reprinted in hardback in June (Red Fox brought it out in PB in the UK about five years ago, and I snapped a copy up).
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